The Prairie Milk Marketing Partnership has kicked off a campaign targeting nine- to 17-year-olds that serves up a healthy mix of fiction and fact.
The television, print, outdoor and online campaign by Cossette West of Vancouver, which launched Nov. 23, marks a significant departure from the previous “Always Grow” campaign that ran from 2003 to 2009.
The previous campaign increased milk sales around 18%, said Jason Brandes, market development director at Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, part of a partnership that includes Saskatchewan and Alberta.
“Milk has huge volume so any type of percentage increase is significant. Typically we hope for 1% to 2% with all of our campaigns.”
While the previous campaign focused on inspirational messaging about physical and emotional growth and was extremely successful, it was time to add a call to action and build life long milk drinkers, said Brandes.
Research showed teens didn’t know the benefits of drinking milk beyond the basic message of being good for bones. They responded well to a benefits-driven approach and said they would drink more milk if they knew that milk helps builds muscle, replaces nutrients lost during a workout and that 90% of bone mass has been built by the age of 20.
One of the television spots shows cows jogging down a suburban street. The voiceover says “Fact: drinking milk helps replace some of the nutrients lost during a workout. Fiction: skim milk comes from athletic cows.”
The website NeverStopMilk.ca <http://www.neverstopmilk.ca/> was created by Cossette’s interactive arm, Fjord West.
Creative director Rob Sweetman said one challenge in creating the campaign was that regulations governing children’s advertising dictated that facts are stated in a straightforward, scientific fashion. “That played with the fiction really nicely and provides a balance in each ad,” he said. “Once you are in a world of fiction you can be as quirky as you want because you’ve already grounded it in some reality and got the benefits that we needed to communicate across.”
