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Media
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By Ruth Shalit

March 23, 2000 |   Early last summer, Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board and one of the architects of the celebrated "Got Milk?" campaign, dreamed up yet another winning idea. The milk lobby would team up with famous cookie-makers -- Entemann's, Keebler, Nabisco -- to produce spots that extolled the glories of milk and cookies together. From the point of view of the cookie-makers, Manning's offer was a no-brainer. "Basically, it was us approaching the Oreo people and saying, 'Hey, we've got $22 million to spend. Can we help you sell more Oreos?' Manning recalls. "How do you say no to that? We got cooperation from everybody." Until, Manning says, "we thought up a very clever idea for an ad that involved Pillsbury."

Manning had asked his San Francisco ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein, to draw up storyboards featuring that squeezably soft gob of goo, the Pillsbury Doughboy. The Goodby creatives came back with a concept that was "a little bit of a spoof," Manning concedes. The ad opened with a shot of an all-American family sitting around the kitchen table, "super clean-scrubbed, looking as perfect as can be," Manning says. "The wife comes to the table and asks her husband and son if they'd like some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies from Pillsbury. The husband says, 'Oh, thank you, darling.' The Doughboy says, 'There's nothing like something fresh from the oven.' Everyone's looking joyous. The Doughboy is looking as happy as can be. All is going well."

Then, Manning says, "The husband takes a bite of the cookie. He says, 'We got some milk?' The teenage son goes to the fridge, picks up the empty carton, and says, 'We're out of milk, man.' And the husband goes crazy. 'We're out of milk? Who drank the last of the milk?' The whole family turns and looks at the Doughboy. And he's got chocolate on his face, as if he had some of his own cookies. Clearly, he drank the last of the milk. And he turns around and dashes off camera."

Manning chuckles at the recollection of the ad. "It was a fabulous spot," he says. "Really interesting and contemporary. Unfortunately, the Doughboy couldn't do it."

What do you mean, the Doughboy couldn't do it? I say. The Pillsbury Doughboy, after all, is not a conscious actor, but a pixelated arrangement of circles, cylinders and rectangles, presumably devoid of any rational mental functioning. Manning sighs. "We ran up against the guidelines," he explains.

The ad, Manning elaborates, had failed to conform to a series of authoritarian, though kindly, rules that all Doughboy-related work must abide by. "The Pillsbury guidelines stipulate that the Doughboy must always be a helper, a teacher or a friend," he says. "Our spot showed the Doughboy drinking the last of the milk. Therefore he wasn't being a helper. He wasn't being a teacher. And he certainly wasn't being a friend."

The Doughboy superego was plumbed in several lengthy conference calls, in which the milk lobbyists tried to persuade the Pillsbury executives that the ad was all in good fun. "It's not as if we showed the Doughboy doing something terrible," Manning reflects. "I mean, he didn't steal money from Mom's purse. He just drank the last of the milk. Because, you know, you've got to have milk with Pillsbury cookies." The Doughboy's handlers were not convinced. "They kept saying it was not in character for the Doughboy to take the last of the milk," Manning recalls. "Because, when he took the milk, that meant the family wouldn't have any milk. And that creates animosity between the family and the icon."

But didn't Pillsbury grasp that the scenario was make-believe? "They just kept going back to the guidelines," Manning says. "They reminded us that the word 'mischievous' is not in the guidelines. 'Playful' is there, but 'mischievous' is not ... Which is unfortunate. Because, as I said, we thought this would have been a neat spot for both of us." So confident were the Pillsbury executives in their defense of the Doughboy's unshakeable goodness that they remained unmoved by the agency's ace in the hole -- focus-group videos that showed consumers cheering at the spot. "Our respondents kept saying, 'It's so cool that the Doughboy would do that!' Manning says. "They said, 'He's always such a goody-goody. It's kind of cool that he would drink the last of the milk.' They didn't see him as being a bad guy. They saw him as a teacher, a helper, a friend, who was so overwhelmed by his desire for milk and cookies that he just had to do this."

All the same, Manning believes it's not his place to question Pillsbury's judgment. "I personally believe it said good things about their brand; good things about refrigerated cookie dough," he says carefully. "Then again, I don't have a $10 billion investment in the Doughboy."

In an attempt to confirm Manning's account, I called Liz Hanlin, director of communications at Pillsbury. Hanlin is a gracious, friendly woman, a consummate professional, but when the conversation turned to the Doughboy, she turned tense and evasive. "I couldn't really speak to that," she told me. "I don't speak for the Doughboy. There's someone else here who does that."

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