Marketing milk is kind of like marketing gasoline.

Tangible differences between brands are so minute it is left to the ad business to create perceptual differences or brand profiles.

Not this time.

Ault Foods recently introduced Lactantia PurFiltre milk in Quebec and gave its agency, Lowe SMS, Toronto, a positioning statement based on tangible product attributes.

Lactantia milk is de-bacterialized by a new process which filters the milk through an extremely fine filter. This allows the milk to be pasteurized at a higher temperature, whcih benefits the milk in three ways, its producer says.

It removes 92 times more bacteria, gives the milk a creamier taste and keeps it fresher longer.

Ault’s marketing strategy included using its new filtration process as a key selling argument in its advertising, says Mike Egan, Ault’s national director of sales and marketing, Refrigerated Division.

‘We want to emphasize the benefits of the PurFiltre process, and tell people that we have found a way to produce a fresher, pure and better-tasting milk,’ Egan says.

Another key part of Ault’s marketing strategy was its decision to use the Lactantia brand name for the new type of milk.

‘The Lactantia brand name is a critical element in our marketing strategy,’ Egan says. ‘Lactantia has a superior quality appeal perfectly suited to this product.

‘Lactantia is a premium brand of milk and it is priced 5 1/2 cents higher than other brands,’ he says. ‘The improved filtering process and the prestige of the Lactantia brand name enables us to charge a premium price.

‘It’s more expensive, but we’ve added value with improved production technology.’

Readers with a taste for things European are, of course, highly familiar with the brand name, having probably emjoyed the superior taste of Lactantia unsalted butter.

Lactantia used to be one of the few brands of butter that you could find that was unsalted.

The Lactantia brand is owned by Les Aliments Ault, producers of competing brand, Sealtest. Does Ault risk product cannibalization?

‘Sure, we will cannibalize the sales of our other products, but we will more than make up for it with the sales of the new brand,’ Egan says.

Ault is shooting for 15% of the retail market.

The company admitted a product launch in the milk industry is an unusual event.

If the event is rare, so is the chance for an ad agency to be able to create a campaign which strongly differentiates Lactantia from its competitors. The ad campaign does a fair job of this.

The newspaper ads are four-color, full-page beauties: elegant type, pretty photos, nice illustration, creative layout.

The layout is centred around a bi-directional, four-color photograph of the Lactantia milk carton, which runs the height of the full-page ad and fills half of the space on the page.

The prominent product photo is the way to go in a product introduction campaign. Coincidentally and happily for the art director, the art on the carton is the kind that is easily adapted for the purposes of the newspaper ad.

The illustration depicts a country idyll, with cows, fields, a brook, quaint-looking farmhouse, father and son holding hands returning to the farmhouse.

There is an error in the composition of illustration, however.

It depicts cows grazing too close to the farmhouse, on what would be the farmhouse lawn. While it looks idyllic in an illustration, it would never happen on a real farm for obvious sanitary reasons.

This could have been avoided by drawing a field in the foreground and positioning the cows there.

The headline is also weak in this ad.

‘Une grande tradition, dans la plus pure tradition,’ is too broad and stiff and doesn’t slam home the product’s powerful positioning.

The broad 5 1/2-inch column of display copy is punctuated with two small photographs and three breakers. Great design has created an ad that you want to read.

Lowe SMS’ creative was adapted for the French-speaking market by Creation Lauzon, Montreal.

Michael Judson is president of Judson Woods, a public relations and advertising company in Montreal.