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Sparkle (1)
I loved the Got Milk ad campaign of the 90s. My sister collected the ads from magazines for years, at one point filling an entire wall in her bedroom with them (a brilliant act of one-upmanship in response to my own wall of cracked and scratched CDs).
I loved how each ad seemed to let the viewer in on a story, and how it seemed to provide a perfect illustration to what Andy Warhol, my hero in those days, had once said about Coca-Cola: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
There on that wall were all these people, some stars, some athletes, some well-known for other reasons, some fictional superheroes, and they weren't selling fashion, accessories or cars. They were selling something almost everyone I knew already had in their refrigerators: milk. No matter how grand they seemed, they all wore a milk mustache and I could wear one too. That was cool, and it made the campaign memorable.
The campaign Got Milk? was created for the California Milk Processor Board in 1993 by the advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. It made its debut on televisions in amusing commercials featuring people who had eaten dry or sticky foods and couldn't wash them down because they were out of milk. Two years later, the slogan was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board, which put it on print ads featuring celebrities. Since then, due to its huge popularity, the slogan has been licensed to many other milk boards nationwide.
This year, the California Milk Processor Board unveiled what they must have imagined would be an equally popular campaign based on milk's ability to alleviate the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), which most often manifest in the form of cramps, moodiness, fatigue, and bloating. The campaign, which kicked off on Monday, doesn't target women, however. It's for men. Its tag line, now also a website, is: "Everything I do is wrong."
Print ads in circulation feature cartoonish men in varying stages of distress, with headlines such as "I'm sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant," "I apologize for letting you misinterpret what I was saying," and "I apologize for not reading between the right lines."
It's not a new campaign: in 2005, Goodby, Silverstein created a commercial featuring men in various stages of desperation buying all the milk they could get their hands on, before the screen faded to black and explained that a recent study had shown calcium helped reduce the symptoms of PMS.
What makes it different, perhaps, is the tone. Goodby, Silverstein have taken a clever, if annoying joke, too far. The new print ads are passive aggressive at best -- unlike the mustached ads of the 90s, this campaign doesn't let everyone in on the fun. Women are the irrational ones. The joke about their "condition," which men alone may be able to cure if they buy enough milk for them and memorize the pre-scripted apologies provided by the accompanying site's "Pending Apologies" ticker so as to not exacerbate it, is only for men to enjoy. Most egregious, perhaps is the site's "Current Global PMS Level" that mimics the color-coded threat level system once employed by the Department of Homeland Security -- if PMS is something the California Milk Processor Board wants to alleviate, why are they making women out to be on the same level as terrorists?
Those are not the only aggravating aspects of the site: to ensure that men identify with the content, its creators appeal to all possible stereotypes about what men are "all about." The interface makes the site look like the high-tech programs of spy films, and includes a well-located "Key PMS Indicators Index" listing cocoa futures (har har), silver futures, and gold futures. Because men are all about the stocks. It also suggests a vocabulary of
