Got Milk?

Since we are currently learning about persuasion in my English 225 class, we were assigned to look for a persuasive advertisement. Persuasion is commonly used in the media as a way to convince consumers to take action and buy products or think in specific ways. As I was thinking about advertisements I came across the very popular Got milk advertisements. Got milk? ads have been around since 1993 when fluid milk processors in California agreed to allocate 3 cents for every gallon of milk sold to fund efforts to promote milk consumption through advertising, marketing, and public relations. It has been running since October 1993 and the campaign has been credited with greatly increasing milk sales nationwide.

I think the whole concept behind the got milk campaign was to come up with a catchy phrase in the hopes of embedding this phrase in peoples minds causing them to want to buy milk. This is not specific to any brand or company, but rather milk in general, in order to increase the consumption of milk in the country, they do not care who's milk you buy. With this in mind the goal of these adds would be to make people think about milk and in thinking about milk people would then want to buy milk. They reach this goal by widely distributing the ads and by photographing celebrities with milk mustaches. These characteristics catch people's attention because people find celebrities to be attractive, they are often seen in character appropriate poses, and then they read the ads. Each add has a sentence of two that somehow connects the positive benefits of drinking milk with the person displayed in the picture. For instance, the ad with superman says," Super. That's how milk makes you feel. The calcium helps bone grow strong, so even if you are not from Krypton you can have bones of steel. Got milk?" The ads use catchy phrases such as these in order to describe the beneficial properties of milk which are biologically and nutritionally accurate and then uses them to explain the how awesome the celebrity photographed is. This seems a convincing way to convince someone to drink milk. If milk explains why a person is really good at something than why wouldn't you want to drink milk too? It doesn't even matter who's milk you drink, as long as you drink milk. Other adds focus on increasing awareness of milk’s use in losing weight and staying healthy. The campaign became immensely popular with consumers and “got milk?” became a phrase used in common conversation, proving its effectiveness. Although I would not say when I look at these ads I want to go buy milk, I would say that they are very entertaining and always catch my eye. They don't completely persuade the viewer to buy milk but they do effectively cause the viewer to look at the ads and then think about milk, which may subliminally cause them to buy milk at a later point.

Some fun Got milk ads are: http://www.spreadingjam.com/2009/08/the-case-of-the-missing-cows/, http://phoenix.fanster.com/2007/11/30/nash-has-got-milk/

The Got Milk? has an interesting website: http://www.gotmilk.com/