For years, the milk industry asked us all the same question: “Got Milk?” We were assaulted with this vague if pithy inquiry from all angles: from magazine pages and TV ads to massive highway billboards where the milk-mustached faces of celebrities like Britney Spears and Dennis Rodman stared down at us demanding to know if we got milk.
Did we get milk? Did we even get this ad? I don’t know. But whether we got it or not, we must have liked it, because it stuck around for more than 10 years before the tagline was dropped in 2014 in favor of the similarly concise yet largely meaningless, “Milk Life.”
But now, Big Milk has decided we’re finally ready for another round of questioning. “Got Milk?” is back, but this time there won’t be any mustaches. Rather, the new campaign seeks to make milk cool again for the “social-first generation,” as Yin Woon Rani, chief executive of the Milk Processor Education Program, told CNN Business.
Apparently, that means featuring TikTokers and YouTubers “using milk in creative ways,” which sounds pretty kinky to me, but apparently involves more G-rated stunts like Olympian Katie Ledecky balancing a glass of milk on her head.
Anyway, while the growing popularity of milk alternatives like almond, oat and cashew milk may suggest the collective answer to the question, “Got Milk?” is increasingly negative these days, Rani says the campaign’s revival was actually sparked by a resurgence in milk consumption amid the pandemic.
“When things got tough, we saw Americans literally went out and got milk,” she said. “And it wasn’t just they were drinking more of it. They were finding fun and surprising ways to use it.”
So apparently, after all these years, Americans still got milk, and whatever fun and surprising things you choose to do with that milk in the privacy of your own quarantine is up to you, America.
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