Campaign story
Background on the Milk Mustache campaign — why it exists, who it was made for and how the ads were made — taken from two books, The Milk Mustache Book (1998) and Milk Mustache Mania (owner's copies), and written up in our own words. Each section says which page it comes from.
Why the campaign was started
The Milk Mustache Book, written from inside the ad agency, says milk drinking had been falling for about thirty years, and that by the 1990s the results were showing up as osteoporosis, bone density loss and fractures. It blames negative press about the fat and cholesterol in dairy products most of all, along with sodas, bottled iced teas and “designer” waters.
In 1994 the nation's milk processors decided a health message had to reach the public; Congress and the Secretary of Agriculture agreed, and the brief was an educational campaign about milk's place in the diet. The agency called in was Bozell Worldwide.
The agency's starting point was that telling people milk is good for them would not work, because their mothers had already tried that. The campaign had to tell people something they did not already know.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page vii.
“Milk. What a surprise!”
The facts the agency chose were ones most people had wrong: that fat-free and low-fat milk have all the calcium, vitamins and minerals of whole milk, and that women need milk's calcium to keep replacing bone mass or risk bone loss, fractures and osteoporosis later. The book calls these “surprising nuggets of new information about milk”, and they became the foundation of the campaign.
The first year's theme line was “Milk. What a Surprise!”. The book says the public gave the campaign its own name: the milk mustache campaign.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), pages vii–viii.
Designed as a poster, with four lines of copy
The agency deliberately designed the ads as a poster campaign: a strong, surprising picture that would stop a reader in a magazine full of clutter, ideally a face that made you smile.
The copy was limited to four lines. The opening and closing lines reflected the personality of the person shown, and a surprising fact about milk sat between them. The book's reasoning is that people accept a message more readily when it is engaging than when it lectures.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page viii.
Three weeks to find a campaign
The agency had about three weeks to come up with a campaign. Its creative director, who wrote the book's introduction, put several teams on it, including junior teams, because he wanted young people to get the chance to create a major campaign.
He was about to leave for the International Advertising Festival at Cannes, where Bozell Worldwide had won the 1994 Grand Prix for the Jeep commercial “Snow Covered”, and asked the teams to show him where their ideas stood before he went, since there would be little time afterwards before the client presentation. The section is headed with what he says a creative director sometimes has to say: “Democracy is over. This is what we're going to do!”
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), pages viii–ix.
How the milk mustache was chosen
When the teams showed their first ideas, the creative director was taken aback. They included an upside-down cow and the word “milk” embossed sideways on the page. There was also a milk mustache on a character, which did not jump out at him but was the only thing he thought had promise, if done in an entirely different way. He told the teams to spend their time on new ideas or the milk mustache.
On his first Monday back from Cannes the young teams presented the upside-down cow and the embossed lettering again, with nothing new and no work on the milk mustache. He brought in Bernie Hogya, then an associate creative director and one of the agency's best art directors, and Jennifer Mantz, one of the young copywriters who had originally had the idea for the milk mustache campaign.
Within forty-eight hours they had a full campaign ready for the client. At that stage it showed ordinary people wearing milk mustaches.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page x.
The client asks for celebrities
The client, Charlie Decker, a former agency account executive who had joined the National Fluid Milk Processors marketing staff a few months earlier, loved the milk mustache campaign and had one request: could the agency look at it using celebrities? The creative director admits he was not keen, having thought of celebrities as overused in advertising and often selling products they plainly never used, but agreed to try. The copywriter, Jennifer Mantz, knew film and television stars well enough to catch their personalities in a few funny lines.
His summary: a milk mustache was not a new idea, and a celebrity was not a new idea, but a celebrity with a milk mustache was.
E. Linwood “Tip” Tipton, chairman, chief executive and president of the Milk Industry Foundation and the agency's most senior client, backed the new material along with his staff, named as Connie Tipton, Dawn Sweeney, Amy Heinemann and Charlie Decker. The milk processors' board of directors signed on soon after, and eventually so did 72 percent of the milk processors in a nationwide referendum.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), pages x–xii.
Magazines only, plus public relations
Early on, Chuck Peebler, then chief executive of Bozell Worldwide, made two decisions. The first was to put the bulk of the money into magazines only, where most advertisers put nearly everything into television. The advertising budget was thirty-seven million dollars, large but not enough to compete with soft drinks on television; in magazines the campaign could in effect own the medium, with ads in every magazine its audience read.
Being one of the magazines' biggest advertisers also earned extras from publishers: special features on healthy living, cookbooks of recipes with milk, and calendars of celebrities with milk mustaches.
The second decision was to put part of the budget into public relations, run by Bozell Public Relations: educational videos, press kits and a medical advisory panel, to get the health facts to the public as news.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page xiii.
How the celebrities were signed
Every celebrity was offered the same fee, $25,000, to keep or to give to charity, which some did. The agency expected people to take part for the health message, not the money. The creative director wrote to the first people approached explaining the health need, and the book says the response was stunning: over the years more people wanted to be in the campaign than there was room for.
Pete Sampras sent in a photograph of himself with a milk mustache. Ron Howard wanted to take part because his daughter collected the ads.
Whoopi Goldberg, whose portrait in a bathtub of milk is one of Annie Leibovitz's best known, wanted to do it but asked whether being lactose intolerant was a problem. The agency had to decline, because everyone in the campaign had to be a milk drinker. (She later appeared in a 1999 ad for lactose-free milk.)
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), pages xiii–xiv.
Annie Leibovitz, the photographer
Bernie Hogya suggested using Annie Leibovitz, known for her portraits in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. The author had first worked with her ten years earlier on the American Express “Membership Has Its Privileges” portraits, when Parry Merkley and Gordon Bowen suggested her.
The book says she worked with the agency on choosing celebrities, contacting them and creating the settings, and that the campaign would not be what it is without her.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page xiv.
The launch
The first celebrities were chosen to appeal to particular groups within the target audience of women aged twenty-five to forty-four. The campaign launched with five celebrities in fifty-eight publications: Naomi Campbell, Christie Brinkley, Joan Rivers, Lauren Bacall and Isabella Rossellini.
Within twenty-four hours Naomi Campbell's milk mustache picture was being reported as news in newspapers, magazines and on television in the United States and abroad, which nobody at the agency had expected.
Toward the end of the first year the campaign began using men, still aiming the message at women. The first to run were Steve Young and Billy Ray Cyrus, and when people were asked to vote for the most popular milk mustache celebrity, Billy Ray won.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page xv.
How it was received
The book says the campaign caught on faster than any other its creative director had worked on. Stuart Elliott, advertising columnist of The New York Times, picked it as one of the ten best campaigns of the year. Video Storyboard Tests named it the most popular print campaign of the year with the American public, the first time in that firm's history a campaign had reached number one so quickly. USA Today put it in its top ten campaigns of the year, the only print campaign on the list, and its reporters Dottie Enrico and Melanie Wells wrote about it, as did Sally Goll Beatty of The Wall Street Journal.
By 1998 tens of thousands of kids were collecting the ads, thousands of teenagers a week visited www.whymilk.com, and more than forty thousand kids had joined Club Milk. The campaign was spoofed by sitcoms, movies and other advertisers, and by Jay Leno in particular.
Most important to the agency, it says the campaign helped reverse the thirty-year decline: milk sales were trending upward.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page xii.
Year two: new audiences, posters and a new slogan
After the launch year the budget doubled for years two and three, which the book credits partly to Kurt Graetzer, who joined the milk team as Executive Director in the second year, and his staff. The first year had been aimed at women aged twenty-five to forty-four; the campaign now added teenagers, college students and men, each with different reasons to drink milk.
Celebrities and health messages were matched to each group in the magazines they read: a teenage girl reading Seventeen saw a different celebrity and message from her brother reading Rolling Stone or her sister reading Cosmopolitan. The bigger budget also paid for posters, which the agency had wanted from the start.
The biggest change was what the agency called “moments of opportunity”: ads tied to a sports event, an election or a news story. The first, with Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, was a huge success. The theme line also changed at the start of the second year, to “Milk. Where's your mustache?”, since everyone was already calling it the milk mustache campaign.
Source: The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page xvi.
How it began, and who it is for
The Milk Mustache campaign launched in January 1995. The book says it has stayed one of the most popular advertising campaigns ever, and that teenagers and kids like to collect the ads, hang them on their walls, trade them and even sell them on eBay. The book was written for those collectors.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 5.
Why milk?
The book argues that milk faced far more competition than it once did: sports drinks, bottled iced tea, bottled water, diet soda, juice drinks and calcium-fortified juices all appeared, and until recently they had more exciting advertising than milk.
It points out that milk is recommended by health and medical groups as a great source of calcium, and that every glass has nine essential nutrients people need every day at any age.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 5.
Why teenagers?
The book says teens are the age when people start drinking less milk, partly because milk starts to feel like something you are told to do. It describes a “calcium crisis” that develops in the teen years when soft drinks with no nutritional value replace milk, leaving bones short of calcium just when they need it to grow, and it says a shortfall then can't be made up later.
It adds that about fifteen percent of adult height is added during the teen years, and that the nutrients in milk help with work, play and sports. Its message is that people should drink milk all through life, not just as kids.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 5.
Why kids?
The book says the campaign has shifted over the years toward more ads aimed at kids. Kids already drink a lot of milk, mostly because they are told to — by parents and by school — so the campaign wants them to have their own reasons: that milk helps them grow, makes them strong, helps them play harder, and tastes good.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 7.
Why the milk mustache?
The book gives the campaign's goals as making sure people of every age know milk is important, changing how people think about milk, and giving it a contemporary image so it stays competitive in a crowded beverage category. It says the ads do this in three steps: they show popular, healthy, “cool” celebrities who drink milk; the mustache reminds people that milk tastes great and is fun to drink; and the ad copy says why you should drink it.
It says a new milk mustache ad was launched every month, which kept the campaign fresh, and that people were more likely to remember seeing milk ads than ads for Coke and Pepsi. It credits the campaign, together with dairy-industry efforts such as new packaging, flavors and distribution channels, with changing how people drink milk, and says celebrities from television, sports, music and movies jump at the chance to be in it.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 7.
How the mustaches are made
The book says the mustaches, white and chocolate, are not painted on or added afterwards by computer. Just about every celebrity since Naomi Campbell, the first, got the mustache by drinking from a glass held in his or her own hand.
The glass is sometimes small and sometimes big, and the milk is sometimes straight from the carton and sometimes thickened with other dairy products so that it shows up, for instance over a man's real mustache.
The earlier Milk Mustache Book adds that the first five celebrities all wore mustaches of 100 percent milk, but it dried too quickly under the lights, so the crew switched to milk mixed with other dairy products, including a little vanilla ice cream. It says every mustache comes out differently, depending on the shape of the head, the lips, the complexion and any facial hair, and that women have the best ones.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 20; The Milk Mustache Book (1998), page 10.
Television stars
The book's television chapter says TV stars have always played a large part in the campaign. Stars of shows including Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek, and TV personalities such as Conan O'Brien and Paul Shaffer, appeared in the campaign's first years.
It says that in those early ads the campaign was limited to one or two stars from a show (Jimmy Smits and Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue, Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow of Friends). The Frasier ad broke that: it was the first to feature a show's entire cast.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 10.
Athletes
The book's sports chapter says athletes are a natural fit for the campaign: milk is on the training table of most sports trainers and athletes, which makes them easy to recruit, and the message is that if people who depend on their bodies drink milk, it can help anyone.
It names Pete Sampras, Patrick Ewing and Oscar De La Hoya among the earlier milk mustache sports figures.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 30.
Animated characters
The book says that once the campaign started aiming its ads more at young people, using animated and cartoon characters was a natural step. It names Bart and Lisa Simpson as the first animated characters ever to wear milk mustaches, and says some of the greatest superheroes and television characters have joined them since.
The same page points ahead to the Incredible Hulk and the Amazing Spider-Man, two Marvel Comics superheroes, on pages 50 and 51.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 48.
On the game shows
The book says milk mustache questions were asked on game shows such as Jeopardy and Hollywood Squares from the campaign's beginning. On Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, host Regis Philbin asked contestant Jason Block which of four things Joan Rivers, Spike Lee and Dennis Rodman had all worn for an ad campaign: a milk mustache, a wedding dress, a hat topped with fruit, or SCUBA gear.
Block answered that he knew it, called it one of the greatest advertising campaigns in history, said “got milk?” and gave milk mustache as his final answer. The book calls that advertising money can't buy.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 14.
The Milk House
The campaign sponsored the Milk House, a 54,000-square-foot facility at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Its walls were decorated with milk mustache portraits of sports celebrities.
The book says young athletes from local teams across the country hoped to make it to the complex, that the Milk House was their first stop when they arrived, and that a team lucky enough to reach the finals might pose for its own milk mustache photo. Related record: the Take It To The Milk House Sweepstakes.
Source: Milk Mustache Mania, page 88.