Milking it
More dairy advertising, this time monolingual.
Here’s a brief update to yesterday’s post about a couple of outdoor ads that used Spanglish — the conversational blend of Spanish and English — in inventive ways.
Missed it yesterday? Here you go:
One of the ads I wrote about had been created, in Spanglish, by the California Milk Processor Board. Today I direct your attention to an English-only ad from the CMPB — along with an ad-hoc response.
Compared with the Spanglish ad (“Bendita Doble Vida”), this one required a lot less copywriting skill: It’s just a list of dairy-rich or dairy-friendly foods — quiche, tiramisu, cheesecake, horchata, cookies — preceded by hashtags. The headline, “Multi Tasking,” is a salute to dairy milk’s versatility.1
So far, so humdrum.
But check out the little paper square taped over the glass of milk.
Only mother’s milk, the handwritten message implies, is fit for human consumption. And you’re probably way past suckling age.
The QR code purports to connect the reader with “our dairy recipes.” But don’t believe it: The link goes to a YouTube video, recorded by “Erin Janus” in 2015, about how Big Dairy is a big baddie.
For more on milk advertising, and on what we even mean by “milk” these days, read my November 2023 story for Medium, “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Milk’” (gift link). Don’t forget to clap!
Fun fact, brought to my attention by word guy John Kelly on LinkedIn: “Multitasking” was first used to describe computers, not humans. “The word is dated back to 1966, originally naming a computer’s performance of several jobs at once,” John wrote. Have I mentioned that LinkedIn is fun now?