• by Karl Greenberg , March 22, 2010

The California Milk Processor Board's (CMPB) new campaign, "Mootopia," launching this week, hopes to get Californians drinking milk by offering up a vision of a place where everyone is healthy because milk flows like water. The campaign is also the first in some years to be directed by Jeff Goodby, whose agency -- San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein and Partners -- created the original "Got Milk?" campaign in the early 1990s and has been the board's AOR ever since.

The new ads posit an Arcadian land where people wear Athenian robes, rivers flow with milk and everyone has perfect teeth, hair, and muscles. The effort comprises three 30-second spots. In one, two women recline on a verdant lawn sipping from a lake of milk through long straws. Only one problem: the glare from each other's hair blinds them, and as they engage in a verbal battle, the voiceover says: "Shiny, healthy hair. It happens ... in Mootopia." The spot ends with the "Got Milk?" tag.

In another spot, a dentist sits atop a rustic stone staircase gazing forlornly upon the denizens of Mootopia, calling out that he's offering free cleaning. He comments on people's perfect teeth, then asks his secretary if he has any appointments. "Let me check," she says, not bothering to look down at the schedule. "No." The voiceover says: "Healthy teeth. A fact of life in Mootopia ... got milk?"

The effort includes a new Web site launching this week, VisitMootopia.com, which is kind of a fictive tourism Web site that has TV spots and games supporting the theme that milk strengthens bones, teeth and hair.

Next month, the campaign continues with a Facebook-based game about Mootopia that assigns people who visit the site Mootopian avatars after they take a personality test. The game involves taking the avatar from infant to adult -- the speed and quality of the personal development based on tamagotchi-style interaction -- and the amount of virtual milk the avatar drinks.

Steve James, executive director of the CMPB, tells Marketing Daily that the last "Got Milk?" ad Jeff Goodby actually directed was the "Milk to the Rescue" spot six years ago, in which men bought up all the milk in town as a way to deal with their wives' PMS.

He says the new campaign returns to a more wide-market approach for the California campaign that the board abandoned briefly with its "White Gold" campaign last year that focused on kids and teens with a fictive rock star as the central character. "'White Gold' was a bit of departure for us because it was the first campaign where we specifically targeted teenagers," says James.

"While this goes back to a typical traditional wider audience, we tested the spots and they are still resonating with younger audiences because teenagers are very concerned about the way they look."