Picking up some hardware in Chicago recently for a three-spot campaign for the Federation des producteurs de lait du Quebec was Montreal’s pnmd. As with many award winners, the spots give a decidedly edgy feel to a traditionally wholesome product – in this case milk.

* * *

With the mandate from the Federation des producteurs de lait du Quebec for pnmd to come up with a campaign that would make milk a socially acceptable drink for older people, particularly women, new writer arrival Mike Leger and French partner Michel Beaudet set to work.

Perhaps it was the recent visit to Cannes by Leger, Beaudet and creative director Jean Jacques Streliski that inspired the team to come up with such a quality campaign.

‘When you are exposed to the milk category and the level of work being done and the top-notch work being done around the world, you don’t come back and feel like doing something low key,’ says Leger. ‘You feel like blowing the door off a brief and I think we delivered.

‘It was the first thing I worked on for pnmd,’ says Leger. ‘It was one of those really smooth jobs where you get the brief, work on it, come up with stuff you’re ecstatic about, you meet the client, sell the stuff you want to sell, they buy it, and it goes into production. Everyone was saying to me, `You know, Mike, it’s not always going to be quite this good.’ ‘

Taking the cue from pnmd creative directors Streliski and Louis Courteau to ‘Think in international terms,’ the campaign uses three well-known figures, Frankenstein, Santa Clause and Marie Antoinette, all adults and all voracious milk drinkers.

To make the point that milk is for adults too and is inseparably linked with certain foods, the Frankenstein spot finds Mary Shelley’s monster terrorizing a gothic mansion to find some milk to go with his peanut butter sandwich. At spot’s end, milk in hand, the beast becomes downright civilized.

In the next ad, a nasty Santa Clause eats the Christmas cookies left for him and then proceeds to crumble up an empty milk carton left in the refrigerator, his thirst unquenched.

Finally, when Marie Antoinette is confronted by a gang of murderous peasants, her offer to let them eat cake holds them off – temporarily. It is only when she doesn’t give them any milk to go with their cake that she is dragged to the guillotine.

Making the link with food was vital to the campaign. ‘Entertainment from a spot has to come from insight into the product or else it’s gratuitous,’ says Leger. ‘We really wanted to hammer home how milk goes with certain foods.’

Director Bill Scarlet of Cinelande in Montreal, and pnmd art director Yves Theriault gave the ads a decidedly high-end cinematic look, as did director of photography Pierre Gill, who signed on to do the spots based on the creativity of the scripts.

Caroline Singher-Boucher produced the campaign, which utilized local locations such as the lobby at Hotel Windsor for Marie Antoinette, the Mount Stevens Club for Frankenstein, and a suburban house in Montreal’s West Island for Santa Clause.

The music and sound design, which lent an added emotional kick to the commercials, was done by audio z in Montreal.

‘Everybody was excited to prove that we could do work of this caliber in Montreal,’ says Leger.

‘All we had to do was stay true to the nature of the product. It’s always good wholesome milk, but there’s a downside to being too wholesome. Even though the product is wholesome, the people who drink it can be interesting.’

ALSO IN THIS REPORT

Winning isn’t everything. But it’s a really good thing.

Playback goes behind the boards on recent trophy-winning spots:

– BBDO puts the Doc Martens to truck touting, shows the doors to the pickup pitch, and subverts safe soup spots 29

– Y&R colors outside the emotional lines 30

– Burnett’s bait-and-switch gambit 31

– Marshall Fenn’s low-rollers gamble pays off 32

– Saatchi’s shadowplay and wordplay win for simplicity 35

– Gee Jeffery’s short-form meta-media features 37

The year is 2035, and executional enablers dig up a dangerous advertising artifact: Instinct. A cautionary tale by Randy Diplock 34