Aaron Burr, peanut butter, and an empty carton
Friday, October 29, 1993, California got a milk commercial that never mentioned strong bones. The California Milk Processor Board had been formed that year. In June it hired Jeff Manning, and a month later he hired Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. The first spot was the one called Aaron Burr.
A history buff is making a peanut butter sandwich. The Los Angeles Times, the following May, described a room of Hamilton souvenirs and the bullet from the duel of 1804. A radio quiz offers $10,000 for the name of the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. He knows it. The carton is empty, and the name will not come out clean. The Times wrote the mumble as "Aawwan Buhhh."
Jeff Goodby, the agency's creative director, told that paper he had tried the line on his own staff. "When I said it," he said, "everyone just kind of shrugged." The line was "Got milk?" His reason: "The time you most notice milk is when it's gone." The board still prints it in lowercase, got milk? The Times said the ads were seen mostly by Californians. Seven months in, Manning said drinking among teenagers and young adults in the state was up for the first time in years.
Sean Whalen played the history buff. He later told Yahoo Entertainment the spot had been "running day and night in California" within a week of the shoot. Michael Bay directed it. On March 11, 1995, the Directors Guild of America named Bay the outstanding commercials director for 1994. California Milk: Aaron Burr led the list of spots that won it.
It was a campaign for people who already drank milk. Douglas B. Holt's case history for the ANA Educational Foundation says about 70 percent of Californians reported drinking it often, and that lectures on calcium had not changed what they bought. Asked how it felt to be mid-bite with nothing in the house, people described a small panic. The ads would stage that feeling. Processors paid three cents a gallon, about $23 million a year, the case history says.
The gallon count is quieter than the fame. In September 1998 Manning told Supermarket News that California sales had been falling 3 to 4 percent a year. In 1994, the campaign's first year, they rose 1 percent. The next year was about flat, 1996 gained 1 percent, and 1997 was up by half a percent. Per person, drinking had fallen from 29 gallons in 1980 to 23 by 1993, then stayed at 23. The campaign, he said, had "stopped the hemorrhaging," and consumption was "growing with the population."
The white mustache was a different campaign. The national Milk Processor Education Program ran celebrity portraits, first under "Milk. What a surprise!" and then "Milk. Where's your mustache?" On March 3, 2014, the California board said got milk? had been licensed to that program, and that from 1996 the state's spots and the national ads were separate work, joined only by the tag. Supermarket News reported on September 21, 1998, that the phrase had just been added to the mustache pages. Dairy Management, the farmers' group, had licensed the campaign since 1995. There is no mustache in Aaron Burr.
Manning said the spot won Best in Show at the 1994 Clio Awards. In 2014 the board said a 2002 USA Today poll had ranked it first among the best ads of all time. The gallons moved a little. What stayed was a man who knew the answer, and nothing to wash it down with.