Silk Nextmilk

The Plant-Based Beverage (PB) category has grown exponentially as US-consumers look for dairy-milk alternatives for a variety of health, sustainability, or cultural reasons and it is becoming a staple in households. As the category matures, it’s becoming increasingly cluttered and crowded.

Our media ask was simple enough: relaunch Nextmilk to drive awareness, consideration, and trial. But Nextmilk is the first of its kind, and our media execution needed to be as breakthrough as Nextmilk itself. We needed a plan fit for the next generation of milk.

And we had to accomplish all this in just a two-week window to achieve distribution goals and without any TV/Video channels normally used in a launch.

As Nextmilk set out to (re)launch, we had a sizable opportunity: Our data showed only 25% of US households are loyal dairy milk users. The remaining 75% are ‘dairy fence-sitters.’ They are interested in PB beverages, want a more plant forward diet, but have not yet purchased. They are the next generation of Nextmilk drinkers. But three barriers hold them back:

1) Established dairy rituals: Dairy is emotionally tied to nostalgic food rituals like straight from the glass or in cereal.

2) Taste skeptics: Pre-conditioning that PB won’t taste as good as dairy milk.

3) Not for me: You must be vegan or into environmentalism to join.

We needed to inspire those on the fence that Nextmilk is a better milk for the next generation of milk drinkers.

Nextmilk turned to culture to convince the next generation of milk drinkers. We tapped into everyone’s love for nostalgia and the current “nepo babies” fascination to bring back the ultimate milk moment: the legendary ‘Got Milk?’ campaign that began in the 80s.

But with a modern twist.

We recruited the children of the original celebrities in the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign. Brooklyn Beckham, Ella Travolta, Sailor Brinkley and Myles O’Neal donned the iconic milk mustache — but now made of Nextmilk.

Partnering with the next generation to launch the Nextmilk mustache required an unmissable, integrated media takeover that sparked instant virality and talkability. We turned that spark into engagement asking Who’s Next? and inspiring the world to share their own Nextmilk mustache for a chance to be featured in our ad. Ultimately, the momentum created with this viral campaign was translated into action getting dairy fence sitters to try Nextmilk.

We kicked off to quickly build maximum impact with high impact digital OOH in heavy foot-traffic, “celebrity-rich” environments; a People Magazine takeover, an execution iconic to the original campaign, but now on social and digital to reach the next gen; and custom integrations to bring the Nextmilk mustache into culture at scale

1) Jimmy Kimmel Live: ‘Mr Mustache Competition’ hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, with his side-kick Guillermo as the winning contestant

2) Good Morning America: The following day, Guillermo appeared on GMA to celebrate his win.

We used Social and Search to turn impact into engagement. Creating bespoke TikTok effects for consumers to create their own mustache, we asked and answered, ‘Who’s Next?” Rounding out our 360 takeover, we expanded Search keywords to contextually relevant celebrity related terms to reach hand-raisers.