Girl Scouts Will Now Pitch Milk Along With Their Cookies

The Girl Scouts got milk to go with their cookies this year.

In a break with tradition, scouts in California will promote milk as they sell cookies next month, marking the first time the organization has endorsed a product in its 85 years.

Scouts will appear on more than 300 billboards pitching milk and cookies in an agreement with the California Milk Processors Board. Thousands of scouts will wear black “Got Milk” badges as they make the rounds selling cookies, becoming pint-size ambassadors for milk.

The deal adds another product to the grab bag of wrapping paper, magazines and candy the schoolchildren are asked to promote. And it offers another example of how nonprofit organizations are teaming up with businesses to attract funds or valuable publicity.

The Girl Scouts are not getting paid for lending their support to the milk promotion. They expect to benefit from publicity generated by billboards that will be in place during their two-month cookie drive. Last year, 174 million boxes were sold.

The scouts said they hoped the billboards, which show three uniformed girls with armfuls of cookie boxes, would nudge consumers to buy. In addition, they hoped the billboards might prompt more girls to join the scouts.

The California Milk Processors said it is spending $750,000 on the campaign.

“Milk and cookies just makes sense,” said Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processors. “We wanted to work with the Girl Scouts because they put a lot of cookies on shelves. The other side of it is they have a warm and fuzzy appeal.”

The deal comes as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of such industry-funded campaigns.

It also comes on the heels of other deals involving nonprofit organizations. The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Assn. and the March of Dimes recently agreed to plug Florida citrus for a fee. The dairy industry has aggressively courted nonprofits, signing a deal earlier this month with the National Osteoporosis Foundation to tout the benefits of milk.

Although the deals have been beneficial to the charities, they have been criticized as unfair to competitors and a threat to the nonprofits’ independence.

Daniel Borochof, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy in St. Louis, said the Girl Scout promotion might cause some to view the scouts as “an advertising mechanism for an industry.”

But he and other charity watchdogs are not personally troubled by the arrangement because the scouts are endorsing a generic product, rather than a single brand, and because the scouts are not making claims about milk.

“There is always a concern about being too commercial-looking, with little girls endorsing products,” said Girl Scouts USA spokeswoman Ellen Christie Ach.

She said the scouts broke with tradition to promote milk because the deal offered benefits without being overly commercial. She said that the scouts routinely turn down offers to endorse brand-name products because it is against Girl Scout policy to do so.

The San Francisco Bay Girl Scout Council, for example, turned down an offer from a retail eyeglass chain that wanted scouts for a commercial. It also rejected a request from a political candidate to have scouts turn out for a rally.

“We are very protective of our image,” Ach said.

The deal with the California milk processors, which represents the dairy industry, was not without minor hitches. The Girl Scouts rejected as too commercial a proposal from milk processors to put the “Got Milk” slogan on the cookie boxes.

In choosing girls for the billboard, the Girl Scout organization wanted to select model scouts who had collected large numbers of badges. But Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the advertising agency for the milk processors, insisted on girls of a certain height and ethnicity.

The girls were selected from a casting call of 200 scouts in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the ad agency is located. One girl is an accomplished scout and veteran of cookie sales. The other two girls are new to scouting.

“We learned about the business of advertising,” said Janine Carlson, spokeswoman for the Bay Area scout councils.

The billboards are appearing throughout the state and may show up outside California as well, since the milk processors are making the ads available to the National Fluid Milk Processors, a national group.