The Association is an active advertiser, putting to market multiple multi-channel campaigns every year. However, the Association could not capitalize on the most powerful consumer exposure to its product: the milk carton. Consumers are exposed to milk cartons multiple times a day: on the table at breakfast and dinner, at the grocery store, and whenever they open the fridge door…

The cartons are the “sacred cows” (no humour intended!) of the commercial brands. The cartons are heavily branded and show no consistency in their shapes, sizes and designs.

But isn’t there a better time than the Holiday season to show a united front? To create a historic truce which would bring together all five competitive commercial brands and unleash the advertising power of their milk cartons?

The app itself was complex to create. It recognized every 125 different products in the marketplace. Each product was assigned different facial features, which made each package looks like a different cartoon. If consumers placed two competitive products next to the other, they would sing along Holiday carols.

To encourage downloads of the augmented reality mobile app, a sophisticated media plan was launched. All digital executions were mobile-first and optimizations were 100% automated to maximize downloads on various app store over three weeks.

Facebook promoted the app and also provided the perfect platform for consumers to share the content they created with the app. In Quebec, Facebook feeds became invaded with carol-signing milk cartons!

The campaign was also supported offline. Giant milk cartons strategically located in key transit locations with Internet access. Consumers could download the app and make these larger-than-life milk cartons sign.

The app leveraged the advertising potential of milk cartons. Not only did it create meaningful consumer interactions, but it also stimulated milk consumption:

• In just three weeks, milk cartons sang over 1 300 000 songs. A remarkable result, in a province of only 7M consumers! 5% of these songs got shared online.

• The app made it to the top 4 entertainment app in its market, according to Google. Nearly every consumer who downloaded the app made a milk carton sing - an astounding engagement metric!

• Cost per download was less than $1.20CAN, well below industry benchmarks.

• This campaign made Quebec the only province in Canada where milk consumption increased in December (+2,1%). This is an amazing resulted for a mature product like milk, in the very competitive month of December.

After more than 20 years, all competitive members of the Quebec Milk Producers finally came together.

The big idea of this campaign was to create an augmented reality application in order to bring together five competitive commercial brands and increase milk consumption during the Christmas period.

The app became the truce. Technology united all five competitive brands, while getting children and parents to sign Holiday carols together! It was a beautiful way to get invited inside consumers’ homes and increase the love for the product.

We knew it was a lost battle to get the commercial brands to alter their milk carton packaging. The production costs to modify the cartons are prohibitive, and it also goes against the milk brands’ culture which protects their carton packaging as their most valuable asset, their point of differentiation.

Our strategy was instead to create a free mobile, augmented reality application. The app recognized any milk carton, regardless its brand, size, or design, and delivered a standardized customer experience.

The app leveraged “face recognition” technology and recognized any of the 125 different cartons in the marketplace. The app then brought to life these unanimated cartons by adding facial features to it. The cartons would bring laughs in our consumers’ homes by singing funny and entertaining Holiday carols. What’s not to love? Carols-signing milk cartons, live from your kitchen table!

The Quebec Milk Producers Association is a complex organization representing over 5,000 dairy farms, five fiercely competitive commercial brands, and over 125 different milk products. The Association’s mandate is to increase milk consumption in Quebec, while remaining 100% neutral. It never favors any commercial brand. At such, its advertising campaigns are always generic.

In December 2017, the Quebec Milk Producers Association was on a mission to convince all competitive milk brands to work hand-in-hand, in a true Holiday spirit.

The goal: to engage Quebecers like never before and increase consumption of this saturated product by 1% over a very short period of time.