Stars — megastars with instantly recognizable faces such as Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears, Christie Brinkley, Harrison Ford, Serena and Venus Williams — posed with milk mustaches dripping just so from their A-listiest of lips.
The ad campaign eventually was retired in 2014, with marketers at the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP) turning to more relatable, “real people” offering testimonials about their “Milk Life,” the tagline adopted to replace “Got Milk?” (It’s now using “Gonna Need Milk” in a campaign that promotes milk as a fuel for active lifestyles.)
But this week, Big Dairy revived the iconic motif. In a video that was posted on YouTube and other social channels and also runs as a TV ad, actress Aubrey Plaza sports that familiar creamy arc over her upper lip. The spot immediately marks itself as a spoof. “Have you ever looked at a tree and thought, ‘Can I drink this?’” she asks dreamily. “I did.”
She is identified as the founder of a fictitious product called Wood Milk, “the world’s first and only milk made from wood,” which viewers might start to sense is a mockery of the vast array of nondairy milks that have sprung up like so many seedlings. That hunch is confirmed as Plaza describes how Wood Milk is made: it’s “squished into a slime that’s legal to sell,” she intones.
That’s certainly a dig. To the chagrin of the (cow) milk industry, the Food and Drug Administration has indicated it will allow drinks made from oat, soy, and other products to continue marketing themselves as “milk,” and that category is surging in popularity as the OG milk remains in steady decline.
The new ad finishes with the reveal, when Plaza takes a sip of her product and it leaves that telltale mustache — just like the ones from milk’s original campaign — only this one looks like it has bits of sawdust clinging to it. “Is wood milk real? Absolutely not. Only real milk is real,” she says, then pauses. “Then what did I invest in?!”
And so concluded the revival of an advertising juggernaut, only transformed for these wildly different times.
“We wanted to create a standout, satirical piece that shines a light on the fact that many people do not know the nutritional value of their beverages — or lack thereof,” MilkPEP chief executive Yin Woon Rani wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “Not all milk is created equal when it comes to the nutritional profile.”
Consumers, particularly the younger millennials and Gen Zers that Big Dairy wants so badly to win back from the clutches of oat milk and its plant-based ilk, are evermore cynical — and so straightforward testimonials from the rich and famous telling us how good milk is for us simply aren’t the order of the day.
Gary Wilcox, a professor of media and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, says the new ad shares some of the DNA of its predecessor, but it has evolved to reach an endlessly scrolling younger consumer. “It’s a hard target to reach,” he says. “They have a short attention span unless you do something to get their attention.”
Trying to recapture the milk mustache mojo might have been an impossible task. But it turns out that although the “Got Milk?” ads were a genuine cultural touchstone, the campaign was not successful at actually selling the American people on a product, Wilcox notes. Milk sales declined steadily even as celebrities lined up to be a part of it.
And milk mustaches have already been deployed with irony: Plant-based brand Silk Nextmilk earlier this year ran ads featuring nepo-babies such as Brooklyn Beckham (the son of soccer legend David Beckham and Spice Girl Victoria Beckham) and Ella Bleu Travolta (the daughter of actor John Travolta and the late Kelly Preston), whose parents had once posed for the original dairy campaign.
The choice to employ Plaza as the face of the plant-milk spoof was calibrated, of course. The “White Lotus” star’s deadpan delivery and off-kilter roles have made her one of her generation’s most zeitgeist-y stars. (Slate anointed her “the millennial John Cusack.”)
This time around, the cynicism of younger consumers might run even deeper than the ad execs realized, and even the beloved actress couldn’t escape the backlash.
“Never thought I’d see Aubrey Plaza promoting dairy milk propaganda but here we are,” tweeted one disappointed fan. “I’m so heartbroken y’all,” wrote another. “Aubrey Plaza out here doing ads for the dairy industry trying to make fun of plant milks by shilling ‘wood milk.’ Aubrey how could you!”
MilkPEP was clearly hoping for online buzz. “But campaigns with the hope of buzz and virality run the risk of losing control,” says Anindya Ghose, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “Negativity spreads faster than positivity, so it’s a slippery slope, and there is a danger that things can go south.”
