Milka cow
The Milka cow is a bright purple painted cow that is shown in advertisements for Milka brand chocolate and is also depicted on Milka chocolate packaging.
Origins
As early as 1901, a cow was depicted on a Suchard chocolate pack . However, at that time the cow was still white and only the background was purple. In 1914 a satirical pastiche was published in Switzerland based on a work by Emil Cardinaux , which showed a purple cow .
A purple cow could already be found on the chocolate packaging of Böhme Schokoladen GmbH from Delitzsch in 1936, but disappeared after the Second World War. The Swiss graphic artist Herbert Leupin from Basel was the first to associate the Milka brand with a purple cow on the occasion of a poster order from the Suchard chocolate factory in 1952.
Commercials
In 1972, at the suggestion of Young & Rubicam, an advertising campaign was designed with a live cow dyed using a stencil; not only the cow, but also the surroundings were partly purple. While many other objects such as fir trees and balloons were purple in the first print advertising campaign, the purple cow remained purple in the long run. The first commercial that featured the Milka cow was shot in 1973, for which the agency received a gold award.
From the first successful commercial, Milka always advertised with the purple-spotted cow; there was only a break between 1982 and 1984, when it was believed that cow advertising had become independent and was no longer related to chocolate.
To date, 110 commercials have been shot with the Milka cow. Cows of the Simmentaler Höhenfleckvieh breed were used for the recordings ; the first animal model was a cow named Adelheid, which was taken by Werner Bokelberg . The Milka cow actress Schwalbe , who was saved from slaughter by the indignant public in 1991 and then provided with the bread of grace by Suchard , became particularly well known . Two years later, however, she was killed because of an osteoarthritis without much public response. While the spots were initially always shot in the Simmental , the 1996 Christmas spot moved to Argentina for the background shots and a Bavarian cow shot in Hamburg was added to the film.
Others
The Milka cow is also available as a stuffed animal and prop for the model railroad.
In Titanic 7/1991 a painting by Michael Sowa was published , which shows a satirical adaptation of the motif of the Milka cow. A cow is shown in the typical posture of the Milka cow, which is not painted purple and white, but spotted in black and yellow. It bears the lettering "UHU" on the side, which is known from the advertising for the adhesive of the same name . You can see a large drop running out of the cow's mouth, similar to the way this glue often drips out of the tube. The picture bears the name: "On the Bühler plateau".
It became so well known that in the mid-1990s in Bavaria, 30% of the students chose the color purple to paint a cow in a school-children painting competition with around 40,000 participants.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tagesspiegel from April 18, 2000
- ↑ a b c derwesten.de: How the purple Milka cow Adelheid became an advertising icon
- ↑ zeit.de, knowledge, that's right , May 15, 2007, Christoph Drösser: Bambi Syndrome (January 16, 2011)
- ↑ sdw-nrw.de, University of Marburg, "Soznat" working group, 1997: "Lila Kuh" - study on the alienation of nature in the young generation (January 16, 2011)