and the award for most remarkably out of touch marketing campaign this week goes to:
milk who has put out this 30 second commercial. I saw it slotted in during The Daily Show with Jon Stuart. tonight. okay watch it before reading any further.
yes that’s right, you get four (?) girls singing about how urban milk can truly be with a hillbilly DJ raising the roof and farmer jed doing flips over a cow. the death-ray of misappropriated popular culture hits in full force when they drop the URL at the end: www.milkhiphop.ca!!!!
this is not hip hop. including a DJ and someone breakdancing, also not hiphop. getting girls in the video singing, you got it, still not hip hop. and they’re not even joking.
this marketing campaign falls under the “tragically unaware” category along with that vonage commercial i was talking about yesterday. who-ever fesses up to this (i couldn’t find a link to any parent company on the site) will get an extra big gold star from me. i promise.
I think that would be the Dairy Farmers of Canada.
that would make sense. But still no proof of it .. the campaign appears to be so far out of focus that it must have been designed by committee, as that sort of creative structure is usually the culprit of such output.
oh yeah, well, sure… they have an agency working for them…
some digging on my part produced Due North Communications working for dairy farmers… Here’s their explanation of the ad…
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20060117/milk.html
Roberta Jessup-Ramsay, director of marketing for DFC says the objective here is to give milk an image that young people can make their own. “It’s something your Mom used to give you because it’s good for you and all that. This is our way of saying, ‘Lighten up a bit. Don’t take it so seriously.”
the intent is pretty obvious, where they fall down is in the execution of the idea. again, kids will know the difference between hip hop and what they are presented in this ad. kids aren’t idiots and this half-hearted attempt is not going to draw them in — perhaps, if anythng, it’ll alienate those youth who know the difference — and, if they’re targetting kids who have cell phones with the ringtones, which is part of the campaign, then most kids who have cell phones have probably watched much music at least once. not good.