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Milk Cartoon
Rob
Walker
The New York Times
October 12, 2008
Milk Media
This past July, the Federal Trade Commission handed over
to Congress its 120-page report on the subject of
marketing food to children and adolescents. Among other
things, it confirmed what you’ve already been noticing
in grocery stores for years: the proliferation of
kid-friendly characters who have leapt from pop-culture
entertainment onto product packaging. Shrek and
SpongeBob and Spider-Man shill for everything: breakfast
cereal and cookies, macaroni and cheese and snack
crackers. The potential for criticism at a time of
rising concern about childhood obesity seems obvious
enough.
Just as obvious, however, are the mutual marketing
benefits of such team-ups — and not just for junk food.
Or so it seemed to Richard Long when the
liquids-packaging division of a paper-company client of
his ad agency created a mascot named Rudy the Raccoon.
Rudy was meant to appear on milk cartons sold in school
cafeterias. He was cute and all, but he was unconnected
to anything besides the packaging he appeared on. “If
you’re going to try to influence kids to exercise or
drink more milk, or read, or all those positive things,”
Long says, “you should really be using properties that
they actually relate to.”
Long focused on a new venture, called Milk Media,
devoted to that proposition. As the Milk Media Web site
puts it, “We introduced the concept of branded cartons
to forge relationships between sponsors who had
characters that kids really cared about as a more
effective tactic to make milk ‘Cool for Kids.’ ” His
first deal involved getting the Disney character Doug
onto cartons. According to Milk Media, milk consumption
in participating schools rose as much as 34 percent (and
the percentage of 2-to-11-year-olds watching “Doug” rose
“dramatically” in cities where the schools used the
branded cartons).
Many more such arrangements have followed, involving
Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the
like. A current deal with Hasbro has Transformers
exhorting kids to “Drink Milk and Roll Out!” Last year,
Milk Media announced a more elaborate project called
Milk Rocks! It enlists musicians and involves not only
in-school promotion but also live events and a Web site
jammed with songs and videos; the winner of a “Be a Milk
Rock Star” contest got to join Rascal Flatts onstage.
As it happens, Milk Media was ahead of the curve in
trying to pair pop culture and more healthful eating
habits. In recent years there have been more experiments
with kids’ pop icons and healthful foods. The F.T.C.
report noted that SpongeBob has cross-promoted fruits
and vegetables, and Shrek has been used to promote
apples slices and milk, among other healthful options —
at, uh, McDonald’s. A study released earlier this year
concluded that this strategy had some effectiveness in
getting kids to eat more fruits and vegetables, although
that effect seemed to be short term, and some parents
resisted buying cartoon-endorsed produce.
Milk has few enemies. Branding that reaches out to
children inside the educational system, however, is a
reliable source of outrage. When a report card is
accompanied by a Happy Meal offer, or a bus ride to
school includes radio ads for “90210,” it freaks people
out. The advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free
Childhood slammed both those efforts. And Susan Linn,
the C.C.F.C.’s director and the author of the recent
book “The Case for Make Believe,” doesn’t sound
impressed by milkvertising. “It’s yet another example of
companies exploiting current concerns about children’s
health and food consumption in order to market in
schools,” she says.
Moreover, cajoling kids to like food and beverages that
are associated with “cool” imagery amounts to training
them to buy into the marketing of all the unhealthful
stuff they’ll be bombarded with for the rest of their
lives. The (unrelated) “Got Milk?” ad campaign leans on
pop influence but exists primarily in magazines and
billboards. “Given the commercialization of all of the
rest of children’s lives, shouldn’t schools at least be
free of advertising?” Linn asks.
But the goal of Milk Media, Long insists, is not to
advance the interests of pop-culture products; the goal
is to leverage their power to promote milk consumption.
“You can have Shrek beating the drum for 500 different
sugar products or the Transformers saying, ‘Drink milk
and roll out,’ ” he says. “I think we’re doing a lot of
good.” In other words, he sees Milk Media’s approach as
responding to the realities of the kid-culture
marketplace as spelled out in that F.T.C. report — a
place where all the popular characters advocate junk
food, and Rudy the Raccoon can’t compete.
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