How do you improve a glass of milk?
By improving the glass of milk. (Ba dum—tss!)
With help from DDB Canada, the Dairy Farmers of Canada introduce The Milk Glass™. Because you don't want to drink milk from just any old thing, and certainly not a clumsy mug that's as adapted to coffee as it is to dairy.
This is a glass with purpose. The pared-down video below explains, "Ultimately you had to look at it, and say to yourself, 'I want to drink milk out of that thing.' "
"The glass was the starting point. It was the mid point, the end point and all the little points in between those points. And my point is, we needed to reimagine this thing from the top down and from the bottom up," the narrator burbles in conviction-laden jargon.
"We asked ourselves the really tough questions: Are you a righty? Are you a lefty? Are you ambidextrous? We could've cut corners. But then the glass probably wouldn't have been round."
If it feels like a whole lot for very little, it's meant to. The approach is a riff on how tech companies—most recently Apple—trumpet massive innovation when the changes are so incrementally minor to the unpracticed eye that whole articles are devoted to sussing them out. (In this same vein, we're big fans of everyone who's raised big money to improve the paper notebook. Come on.)
But many don't realize that "beverage innovation" is also an intensely competitive space. (You can drink charcoal now!) The result is that many Canadians often forget about milk.
"While our target enjoys drinking milk, it's often overlooked due to the overwhelming amount of choice in the beverage category," says Dairy Farmers of Canada's director of marketing and retail, Victoria Cruz. "The campaign aims to get Canadian adults to appreciate milk again, by reminding them of the pleasure and taste of enjoying a glass of milk."
Playing on the idea that many savor-worthy beverages have their own designated vessel—consider Ballantine's zero-gravity whisky tumbler—DDB Canada's Toronto office opted to romanticize the classic milk glass.
"Parodying popular new product launches, this provocative new approach uses humor and science to break through to get people thinking about milk and drinking it more often," says the agency's executive creative director, Paul Wallace.
Well, the science is pretty light. But the humor is certainly there.
The campaign will include TV, pre-roll, out-of-home and social posts, not to mention a website, developed with help from Mirum, where users can learn more about this magical glass. It will run for the next eight weeks.