We needed a strategic idea to drive awareness and trial for a product with an audacious claim: Silk Nextmilk is made from plants, but tastes like dairy. With a majority of Americans skeptical about the taste of plant-based milks, our first decision was to target the generation most open to non-dairy: Gen Z.

But we knew that a plant-based milk would always be up against the familiarity of traditional dairy milk. So we started with milk’s most famous piece of pop culture - the milk mustache - and refreshed it for a new generation of milk drinkers.

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), Silk had given Nextmilk a claim that almost sounded too good to be true: ‘Made from plants, tastes like milk.’

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.

Most Americans have grown up drinking dairy milk. It holds a sacred spot in people's hearts, minds, and refrigerators.

Although plant-based milks have grown in popularity, people are still reluctant to try them. 72% of people say they are open to plant based milks, but skeptical about taste and texture. On top of that, Americans are becoming ever more cynical, especially of brand messages and claims.

We knew driving awareness and trial for a new product with a claim like this would be met with skepticism. Therein was our challenge: take an unknown product with a hard-to-believe claim and get people to believe it, and then try it.

We started with a simple fact: you can’t understand dairy-free if you don’t understand dairy.

Focus groups, workshops, and a library of proprietary research told us that dairy plays an outsized and highly emotional role in our lives. Dairy milk is comforting and it’s familiar, and right now people really need comfort and familiarity.

Once we realized our plant-based milk was going to be held up against the emotional weight of dairy, we made two strategic choices: 1) endear ourselves to the next generation of milk drinkers and 2) leverage dairy’s iconic cultural touchpoints and make them our own.

To position Nextmilk as the milk for the next generation, we took milk’s most enduring cultural equity - the milk mustache campaign - and made it our own. We cast the children of the celebrities who appeared in the former campaign to wear a plant-based milk mustache. The campaign featured David Beckham’s son, Brooklyn Peltz Beckham; Kelly Preston’s daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta; Christie Brinkley’s daughter, Sailor Brinkley Cook; and Shaquille O’Neal’s kids, Myles O’Neal and his siblings. We collaborated with a fashion photographer on updating the still portraits into something more 2023: milk mustache portraits, but with motion. The campaign launched with digital OOH in NYC, LA, and Las Vegas. On social media, our portraits further came to life as TikTok posts, and with a Silk ‘stache filter for digital lips.

This campaign helped achieve the goal of awareness and made an impact in culture. Thus far it has generated more than 5.4 billion impressions to date. This included more than 138 million impressions and 344K engagements so far on social media. The first 48 hours of the launch alone garnered 208 pieces of earned media coverage.

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

Instead of staying in a category of plant-based milks, the taste of Nextmilk called for us to challenge dairy milk. To do this, we refreshed dairy milk's most famous campaign for the next generation of milk drinkers.

This elevated Nextmilk above the plant-based category, and allowed it to compete for a larger audience—dairy milk drinkers. Challenging dairy milk was necessary to draw attention to the unique taste of Nextmilk.

The playfully irreverent execution of the campaign challenged expectations in a tasteful yet bold way.

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.