The BC Dairy Association’s “Pour a Little Happiness” campaign is positioning milk as fun and playing the nostalgia card of childhood memories and simpler beverage times.

In the first spot, launched April 10, a father and daughter blow milk bubbles until they fill a whole kitchen. Two additional spots to be released in a few weeks will focus on milk mustaches and cookie dunking, iconic milk moments, according to Kristine Louie, BC Dairy’s acting director of marketing.

“Fun is one of the objectives,” she says, adding that consumers needed to be reminded that milk is not boring, but is a reference point for life’s “good times.” She says milk is something everyone remembers enjoying as a kid, but that people tend to forget about as more choices become available.

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With “Pour a Little Happiness,” Louie says the organization wanted to highlight milk itself as a product. In past campaigns, the organization has focused on the province’s farmers, or the emotions that milk elicits.

Louie says campaigns have always reinforced milk as part of a healthy diet, so the timing of the spot in the wake of  the new Canada Food Guide – which removed “dairy and alternatives” and other standalone food groups to focus more on health eating habits and plant-based foods – is coincidental.

For this campaign, Louie says the ads are designed to remind parents that children mimic their actions and that the whole family benefits from milk’s nutritional benefits.

“Pour a Little Happiness” was done by Taxi Vancouver, and the national media buy spans cinema, OOH, social and digital ads through to September.

According to the Canadian Dairy Information Centre, per capita consumption of milk declined slightly quarter over quarter from 2017 to 2018.