Are we ready to Eat Milk?

Utterly Butterly, delicious Amul. The chubby little girl in the red polka dotted dress manages to humourously twist any event without offending anyone, unlike contemporary humour. The Amul girl made memes cool decades before the term and concept of meme officially came into existence.

On your 100 gm butter or the newspaper, the Amul ads will never fail to make you smile. Although it's just about butter, which is only one of the products that the milk industry giant offers, when you say Amul, the adorable girl is the first image that flashes in the head.

 Last Sunday, Amul went overboard promoting the Eat Milk campaign in the Times of India. My brother was flipping through the numerous ads when I happened to notice one of these. 'It's a meme! Is that an Amul ad?' I exclaimed, 'and it's actually a representation of the socially awesome meme,' I told him with a little less enthusiasm as before, 'and it is in the newspaper... wasn't it just a Facebook/9gag thing to gain likes and stuff with such memes?' I thought to myself. 

It was over a short discussion with the Dude of the office the next day, when we both realised we weren't really impressed this time. 

The thing about Amul is, when they've created something like the Amul girl and 'Piyo glassful doodh', you wouldn't expect their ads to be missed easily. Maybe, they thought they could go a step ahead with the meme-approach in the newspaper to grab eyeballs.

The Eat Milk campaign

The Eat Milk campaign is borrowed heavily from the Got Milk?' campaign. You can say that because of two obvious observations - the milk moustache in both the ads and the aim to increase the sale of milk/milk products. That isn't bad really, considering Got Milk only spoke about the 'goodness' of milk and wasn't very humourous with the content. What bothers me is that for a company who set the bar so high with the Amul girl, suddenly decides to take the extremely commonplace meme route where the memes kind of lack punch. The idea is commendable, the execution, maybe not that much.

The Got Milk campaign

From among the people who noticed the campaign in the newspaper, some seemed to like it a lot, while most others trashed it. I wouldn't want to sound biased here, but my brother who is an ardent fan of the Amul girl for as long as I remember and my father, who doesn't miss the little girl's ads in the newspaper, both saw the ads but did not seem to register them for long. By long, I mean they turned pages without really stopping to read the ads. It was pretty evident that the ads had very little impact on them.

Piyo Glassful Doodh!

Hope the campaign gets a little more interesting in the future - if they plan to continue with the memes, that is. Otherwise, Amul is synoymous with 'awesome' for me where the advertisements are concerned.