Nextmilk is a plant-based blend of oat and coconut milks that have been meticulously crafted to have the same taste and texture as dairy. After lengthy R&D (and quite a few legal conversations), our clients had given Nextmilk a claim that almost sounded too good to be true: ‘Made from plants. Tastes like milk.’ We wanted to shift perception that a plant-based milk could satisfy diehard dairy fans, while also giving the next generation of milk drinkers a product that delivers on taste and aligns with their values.

Our job was to raise awareness and drive trial of Nextmilk by highlighting the groundbreaking taste of a plant-based, 'tastes like dairy' milk with a campaign that also delivered outsized results relative to the media investment.

Our digital out-of-home placements garnered 336 million impressions, and created the ripple of enthusiasm that has led to more than 5.4 billion overall impressions to date. This includes more than 181 million impressions and 552K engagements thus far on social media, and 208 pieces of earned media coverage in the first 48 hours alone.

The swell of interest and attention was beyond anything the clients could have imagined and set a new benchmark at Silk for creative excellence, awareness, and impact.

In deconstructing the iconic milk-mustache campaign and then recontextualizing its components for a modern, non-dairy audience, it became important to expand our assets beyond the static portraiture of the original.

Motion assets, ubiquitous in the social media landscape, were designed specifically, in our case, to be amplified and magnified not to stop thumbs, but to stop pedestrians in their tracks. Our portraits came to life at tremendous scale in high-traffic areas of NYC, LA, and Las Vegas. In our creative executions, we would begin with a familiar layout of the milk mustache campaign, and a still image would transform into a motion asset.

We also incorporated more contemporary posing of our subjects, further reinforcing that our next generation celebrities had a next generation take on this iconic campaign.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s the dairy industry ran ads that featured celebrities wearing milk mustaches. This is a widely known campaign, and an iconic part of American culture. Recontextualizing this campaign for a plant-based generation helped create a swell of attention for a target audience with a special nostalgia for the 90s and fascination with the “Nepo Babies” phenomenon.