Most of us remember the print and magazine ads featuring noted personalities with white mustaches…promoting milk. It was one of the most successful advertising campaigns of the nineties, reestablishing nature's drink as safe,healthy and tasty. The advertising executive who created the campaign, Jay Schulberg of Bozell Advertising Agency, explained to local members of the Advertising Club of the Virgin Islands, why it became necessary to turn the nation back on to a product that once needed no promotion.
"Basically milk had been in a thirty year decline and was suffering from negative press."
Schulberg told the ad club executives that the onus was on him to develop a campaign to change the public's perception of milk which had become the subject of stiff competition from soft drinks and designer waters.
Schulberg said the milk moustache print ad campaign was designed to more than make milk look acceptable to respected personalities, but also to provide health conscious consumers with specific information about the value of milk in the diet. "Most people were unaware about the nutritional benefits of milk, so we developed a strategy to provide the public with informational nuggets about milk. For example, most do not know that all the vitamins and minerals remain in milk when the fat is removed. Skim and one percent milk is just as nutritional as whole milk," Schulberg said.
The milk ads linked the product to personalities and celebrities easily recognized by the average consumer. Perhaps because the product was milk, Schulberg said, there was little difficulty getting noted personalities to be comfortable with a look that everyone can relate to, the unavoidable milk moustache.
"The milk moustache was that common denominator that bonds us to the celebrities and they (the celebrities to us)in the ad campaign. Most of the celebrities laughed at themselves after that first sip when they look at themselves with the milk moustache," Schulberg noted.
Schulberg will talk about the milk moustache ad campaign Wednesday at the Ad Club luncheon on St. Croix. His presentations are being sponsored, to no one's surprise, by Trans Caribbean Corporation, St. Thomas Dairies.
