A new spot for the California Milk Processors Board titled “Milk to the Rescue” (:30) shows men loading up on milk at the grocery store. Actually, they are literally emptying the shelves of milk, and one guy is so desperate for milk that he raids a delivery truck parked outside the store. Why the run on milk? A recent study has shown that calcium may reduce the symptoms of PMS (premenstrual syndrome), the commercial informs us via title card and voiceover before concluding with a milk-laden man entering his house, tentatively announcing to his unseen wife, “Honey, I’m home.”
A daringly funny spot, “Milk to the Rescue” is the work of Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GSP), San Francisco. “The idea for doing a campaign about PMS actually came from the client discovering a pretty conclusive university study that said calcium really helps people that have problems with PMS,” according to GSP creative director Jeff Goodby, who also served as creative director and art director on the spot as well as its director.
Goodby, who helms select projects, noted that he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to direct this one. “I thought it would be controversial and fun to do,” Goodby said, adding, “It wasn’t a super hard commercial to shoot. It was actually a lot of fun.”
“Milk to the Rescue” was shot over the course of a couple of days on location in Los Angeles, with production support provided by bicoastal/international @radical.media. DP Danny Hiele shot the set-ups handheld.
“Danny did a fantastic job,” remarked the spot’s editor Ted DePalma of GSP’s in-house editorial shop GSP Post. “I’ve got to say I was really impressed. Handheld is not the easiest thing in the world to do. There are timing issues. You’ve got to get right on the stuff, yet maintain that motion and that energy, and he just nailed it every single time and made my life so much easier. I could cut wherever I wanted and somehow it always worked.”
While Hiele made DePalma’s task as an editor easier, so did Goodby. After all, there are benefits to working with the big boss. “You’re working with a guy whose name is on the door, and he is the director as well, so the approvals process is greatly streamlined,” DePalma pointed out. “It’s a little unusual for an editor to have it that easy. Usually, there are a couple of layers you’ve got to get through in the agency before you can even take it to the client, and in this case, you’re working with the person who has conceived the whole thing and gets to have the final say on how it goes.”
For DePalma, the most challenging part of the edit was finding the right music to accompany the visuals. “Music was a thing we batted around a lot. We were open to pretty much any option, and we pulled a broad array of stuff,” DePalma said. “We had some Stones music, a Kinks song, some reggae, some pretty driving rock and roll–all stuff that would go to help tell the tale.”
After trying numerous options, Goodby came to the edit room with the track that was ultimately chosen for the spot–the song “Love’s Theme” performed by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. As for why this classic tune clicked, DePalma mused, “That’s a real intangible. I can tell you that the spot as originally done didn’t have a voiceover in it. So, originally, we were just telling the gag with a title card. But when we got the Barry White music, all of a sudden that voiceover started making a lot more sense to us. That’s where some of the evolution happened.”
MILKING THE HUMOR
Looking back on the project, Goodby acknowledged that it was a risk to tackle the subject of PMS in a humorous way given that not all women find it so funny. Any man who has dared to make a crack about a woman being crabby because of PMS can attest to that.
“We all know people that have problems with PMS, but it is kind of a taboo to talk about it right now,” Goodby said, noting, “I think it was liberating to have some fun with it.”
Still, Goodby did his best not to offend. “We did a lot of due diligence as far as showing the spot to women before we put it on the air,” Goodby reported.
GSP conducted focus groups in which the agency tested the spot, showing panels made up of women two versions of “Milk to the Rescue” with two different endings. One ending, with a man entering his house and calling out to his wife, is the one you see on air. Another potential ending, which didn’t pass muster with the focus group, found the guy entering the house as a vase goes whizzing by his head–the implication being that his cranky, PMS-suffering wife threw it at him.
“It was really interesting because half of the women, especially younger women, thought it was really funny,” Goodby revealed. “But as you got into the older audience, they thought it depicted women as being totally impossible to live with at that time of the month, so we decided not to use it at the last minute.”
Now that “Milk to the Rescue” has been airing on television a few weeks and been seen by a wide audience, has the agency received any complaints from women who didn’t see the humor in the spot? According to Goodby, the agency has received “only a handful of complaints from individuals.”
Meanwhile, Goodby said he hopes that the success of the spot “gives women credit for having a sense of humor about these things.”