Got milk, Prairie people?
In order to spark milk sales to Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta teens between the ages of 12 and 17, Vancouver-based Cossette West and the Prairie Milk Marketing Partnership (PMMP) have teamed up to launch a substantial multi-platform campaign championing the healthy benefits of cow juice.
Launched last week, the 18-month ‘Fact/Fiction’ campaign includes a youth-focused western Canadian media buy featuring whimsical creative that touts the facts and fiction about milk. The campaign is being conducted under the scrutiny of the Advertising Standards Council (ASC), since the ‘Fact’ aspect of the campaign entails definitive milk benefits being articulated.
‘The benefits pretty much have to be to the vowel exactly as they say they have to be, so we can’t really exaggerate or twist them in any way, shape or form,’ says Rob Sweetman, VP and CD, Cossette West, told MiC.
The campaign includes six 30-second TV spots (on YTV, MuchMusic, Teletoon and MTV) conceived and directed by California-based The Perlorian Bros., as well as a website (where you can chat live with a squirrel), OOH including mall posters, transit shelters and interior bus ceilings, print in teen mags Youthink magazine and Vervegirl and social media. A grassroots campaign involving locker posters in hockey rinks across five markets will be introduced in January, with another spike in activity set for March break 2010.
‘We might involve malls, and there might be contesting elements and things to bring ‘Fact/Fiction’ to life,’ Sweetman said. ‘That’s a little too early to divulge just yet.’
While previous campaigns were focused on an older demographic (specifically mothers), this time they wanted to go for the teen crowd, with a goal to reach 90% of 12- to 17-year-old teens in the Prairies, Sweetman explains.
‘The thinking was that if you could reach the mom, she would buy the big double-litre bottles and keep them in the house so the kids can consume it,’ he said. ‘The last spots were working, but it was a steady rise in sales, and we wanted to reach a new segment and really measure a larger sales increase than before.’
