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1993

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Asks: GOT MILK?

Perhaps the most famous commodity brand campaign in history, “Got Milk?” launched its first spot in 1993. The ad featured a hilarious storyline involving a Hamilton-Burr history buff who couldn’t answer a Hamilton-Burr radio contest question because his mouth was full of PB&J. If only he had a glass of milk!

People asked how it came about. It was in many ways an accident. You know someone in a focus group said the only time I notice milk is when I run out of it. … I was asked to come up with a title for a part of the meeting … it said ‘Got Milk?’, and I started thinking, you know, that could be a tag line. Why couldn’t we do, you know, sort of these shaggy dog stories? You didn’t know why you were watching them and then suddenly at the end it was milk that kind of explained the missing thing.

– Jeff Goodby, Co-Chairman and Partner, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (4A’s interview, 2017)

Two years later, they introduced the Milk Mustache. The campaign would last in both print and TV commercials through 2014, when it traded the slogan for “Milk Life.”