Resigned to a world where its name has been bogarted by plant-based alternatives—including almond milk, soy milk, oat milk and rice milk—dairy milk is fighting back.

A new campaign is built around an almost-plausible plant-based brand called Wood Milk. It stars Aubrey Plaza as Wood Milk’s co-founder, giving a deadpan performance  (“Have you ever looked at a tree and thought, ‘Can I drink this?’”) that sends up how easy it is to establish a “milk” product. Only in a clever pivot at the end is the sponsor revealed as “Got Milk?” the slogan of the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), the group funded by U.S. milk companies. The campaign comes from the agency Gale.

“We wanted to create something that we thought was real funny, as opposed to ‘ad funny,’ something that was culturally interesting, something that had lots of different angles, and a lot of different ways in,” said Gale CEO and President Brad Simms.

MilkPEP and Gale are fully committed to the joke, treating Wood Milk as though it were an early-stage startup, Simms said. An “ecosystem” around the campaign includes a website with a parody FAQ selling Wood Milk merchandise (T-shirts reading “Got Wood?” and “Does A Body Wood”). There are dedicated Wood Milk social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok. There's a fake press release. There's also a not-fake charitable component, in which MilkPEP is contributing 10,000 trees through One Tree Planted.

“It’s not like this is just a 15-second bumper on YouTube,” Simms said, adding that “dozens” of pieces of content are being prepared to run on social channels. “There's a lot of ways to explore the content, all of which we think just gets funnier and funnier as you continue to watch it, and continues to reinforce the point that anything can be made into milk nowadays.”

FDA ruling

In February, the Food and Drug Administration issued draft rules that allowed plant-based beverages such as almond milk, soy milk and rice milk to continue to call themselves “milk,” saying consumers aren’t confused by the difference between them and dairy milk. MilkPEP CEO Yin Woon Rani called that ruling “unfortunate,” but noted the same document suggested beverages calling themselves milk should include extra nutrition labels to note where they differ in nutrient content versus dairy milk.

These issues framed up Wood Milk, which was completed in five weeks.

“We really wanted to shine a light into the conversation about how everything can be milk today. You can make milk from everything,” said Rani. “But we think it’s important that people understand that when it comes to nutrition, only dairy milk is the OG power player. And we thought that humor and parody was an important way of bringing attention to that. And being able to add Aubrey Plaza and her team to that put it on steroids.”

Rani said MilkPEP and Gale remain committed to the performance-focused “You’re Gonna Need Milk for That” approach that kicked off in 2021. “This one was somewhat opportunistic … We do enjoy being able to move at the speed of culture. Given that we have a very strong foundational base of [health] claims-driven work, it gives us an opportunity to then really ride these cultural waves in a pretty interesting way.”