The missing milk ads
Cool Milk, the British school milk supplier, has launched a campaign with World Superbike Championship rider Josh Brookes, who is helping promote the #FuelledByMilk campaign to promote milk as an essential tool for rehydration, refueling and recovery post exercise and sport. This is indeed a very good thing and very worthwhile, but I do wonder about the lack of a more concerted industry effort to promote milk in the UK, where the long term trend for drinking milk is downward.
In the US, The Milk Processor Education Program, or MilkPEP, runs very successful campaigns, funded by ongoing processor contributions. Got milk? has been a long-running campaign, and has been recently joined by Built with chocolate milk, and milk life, in both English and Spanish versions, to focus on the country’s growing Hispanic communities.
Here in the UK, the Make Mine Milk campaign (www.makeminemilk.co.uk) successfully ran for several years until 2014. Unfortunately, this is not likely to be resurrected, especially as the original was paid for with European Union funds. I wonder if we can get a collection up among the Brexiteers to perhaps pay for further dairy promotions?
Some say that branded milk does the job perfectly fine, whether it’s Arla’s Cravendale cats kidnapping milkmen (“Not on our watch, pussies!”) or Müller’s bear jigging around an office (“Word to your Müller”). I love these ads.
However, I think that overall industry promotion also helps. The government could step up a bit and instead of giving lip service to our industry, could actually assist in promoting it. In the US, the US Department of Agriculture aids and abets the dairy industry in its marketing pursuits with MilkPEP.
This industry has been battered by two years of low prices for dairy milk, so it may be hard to come up with the ready cash for such an enterprise, but maybe now is the time to see what else we can do on the marketing front. Smaller companies use social media to great effect at low cost, and maybe it’s time for the British dairy industry to think big by thinking small.
Ideas on a tweet, please. @dairyindustries
