Got Milk? U.S. milk consumption declines despite celebrity ad campaign

Investor’s Business Daily just published my Industry Snapshot on publicly traded dairy companies, which got me thinking about those ubiquitous “Got Milk?” ads.
The National Dairy Board launched the “Got Milk?” ad campaign in 1995. The ads feature celebrities with milk mustaches on their upper lip. Since then, scores of stars from movies, television, music and sports have been spotlighted.
But milk consumption in the U.S. continues to decline.
When the “Got Milk?” ads started in 1995, the average American drank 24.24 gallons of milk a year. By 2005, the consumption rate had dipped to 20.98 gallons of milk per year. (See report by ProCon.org.)
Of course, this doesn’t mean the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on milk advertising have gone to waste. The decline could have been much greater without those pictures of celebs with white creamy ’staches.
MilkPEP (the Milk Processors Education Program) has a list of celebrity milk ads here. Wikipedia has a more extensive list of celebrity milk endorsers on its “Got Milk?” page.

Photos:
Rebecca Romijn in “Got Milk?” ad
Man wearing parody T-shirt featuring a doctored photo of Monica Lewinski and the caption “Not Milk”