Electronic Retailer - August 2011 - 58

RiCK PetRY

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electronicRetaileR | august 2011

Don’t Milk an idea to Death
When Goodby Silverstein & Partners launched the “Got milk?” campaign some 18 years ago, they not only unleashed one of the most memorable conceits in the history of advertising, they also solved one of the biggest challenges facing every marketer: How do you cut through message clutter with something not only memorable, but meaningful? The simple elegance of those two words was first introduced in a commercial that featured a hapless museum employee with a chance to win $10,000 from a radio contest by answering the question, “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” Having just stuffed his pie hole with a peanut butter sandwich, the contestant’s response is unintelligible. He desperately tries to pour a glass of milk to solve the problem, but discovers the carton is empty as time runs out. The ad ends with an announcer’s cautionary query, “Got milk?” The beauty of this spot, directed by Hollywood disaster king Michael Bay (Armageddon, Transformers), is that it rolled a combination of exaggeration, humor and simplicity into a potent appeal to stock up on the very thing it was advertising. Much like the use of DRTV vernacular – “Are you tired of … ?” or “But wait, there’s more!” – those two words created a shorthand for consumers taxed by too much information. It was the start of an enduring legacy that has witnessed the campaign’s watchwords themselves transform into part of the pop culture lexicon. An unfortunate byproduct of that success, however, has been the countless adopters of the “got?” convention that explode across the advertising landscape like so many bombs in one of Bay’s epics – in this case, stink bombs. They are everywhere – on signs staked on the side of the road (“Got tennis?”), in marketing publications (“Got media?”) even stenciled on the back of trucks (“Got sand?”). It has become the refuge of the intellectually lazy and the last resort of the creatively deficient. And, in the process, what was once so original has proven that, in some cases, imitation is the lowest form of flattery. The trouble with this tactic is that the original “Got milk?” campaign was devised to sell a commodity on behalf of the California Milk Processor Board, and it was later licensed to the national trade body. Most marketers who are ripping off the concept probably don’t even realize they are employing what they no doubt think is a quick read in exchange for the perception that they are a lowest common denominator supplier of whatever it is they are peddling. Got irony? Therein lies a lesson for marketers: While such shortcuts are convenient and communicate with due swiftness, their overuse can denude them of any remaining impact and relegate them to the heap scrap of clichés. The challenge becomes taking the intentions of such devices – in this case the fear of finding yourself out of a product just when you need it – and devising a new and inventive way of relating that idea. While the “yell and sell” approach has served the direct marketing industry well, there are a variety of other ways, from extreme demonstrations to compelling, nuanced testimonial stories to tales of product innovation and the like, that can capture the public’s imagination without relying on hackneyed ploys that are the stock-in-trade of Saturday Night Live lampoons. So let marketers and their agencies hence forth forever retire the “Got?” convention, put it on the mantle beside the “10 Greatest TV Commercials” designation it received from a USA Today poll in 2002, and let the original thematic continue to shine in print ads like so many milk moustaches. The advertising industry can then turn its attention to coming up with fresh ways to captivate and inspire the consumer, without the distraction of this author’s screaming every time he is rabbit-punched by another horrible use of “Got?” While it may not be as important as solving global warming, for the sake of our collective sanity – OK, mine anyway – it is something we have to do. We’ve just got to. Rick Petry is a freelance writer who specializes in direct marketing and is a past chairman of ERA. He can be reached at (503) 740-9065 or online at rickpetry.com. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thepetrydish.

Electronic Retailer - August 2011

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