Here’s a really neat learning experience: students at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif., are devising a marketing campaign to promote milk among their peers.
Classes at three high schools in California will be spending the next six or seven weeks developing ideas for the “Got milk?” campaign, which is sponsored by the California Milk Processor Board. In a kind of academic version of “The Apprentice,” the classes will function as if they were advertising agencies, responsible for research, strategy, creative concepts, media plans and account management.
The students are being asked to propose ads that could be run next year as part of the efforts by the milk board to help increase consumption among teenagers. They are scheduled to present their work to executives from the milk board and the San Francisco agency behind the “Got milk?” campaign, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group.
The contest is emblematic of a major trend on Madison Avenue: inviting consumers to create the ads that are aimed at persuading other consumers to buy stuff. The trend is gathering momentum as marketing — assisted by technology and the new media — morphs from a top-down lecture into a two-way conversation.
One benchmark they can use is a current campaign with that purpose from Goodby, Silverstein. The ads feature a make-believe rock band, White Gold and the Calcium Twins, which appears in television commercials, on a Web site and on social networks like MySpace.
The inspiration for that campaign, and the contest, is the fact that as teenagers “leave the sphere of influence of the home, and the jug of milk on the kitchen table, what happens to consumption is not a pretty sight,” he added. The reference was to how they eschew milk for soft drinks, energy drinks and other nondairy beverages.
“It would be good for us, and good for them, to get some ‘native intelligence,’ ” Mr. James said, “to help us resonate ever truer with our teen audience.They are a mysterious demographic,” he added, “and we want to reach them with an authentic voice in an authentic way.”