Why Does Ellen Love This Japanese Milk Commercial So Much?

TV commercials get a terrible rep for being cliché, repetitive, and a hard sell of products and services. That’s why we have we have DVR, to skip through the lag time between the scenes of our favourite TV shows. Or better still, we get those shows online.
Some commercials, however, have the power to transcend the attention span of even the most impatient viewers. There are those that are funny, others which are tearjerking, and some that are just straight up bizarre. Just take an example that daytime talk show host Ellen Degeneres shared with her viewers on her TV show two weeks ago and pick a guess which category this commercials fits into.



To put into perspective what you just saw, a bunch of kids were enjoying milk delivered to them through a gigantic, floppy alien cow teat — with perfect aiming we may add — that extended from a UFO wrapped in cow decal. It’s hard not to see why this commercial had Ellen’s audience’s jaws dropping, from shock as well as from laughter.
But Ellen did not just stop at showing it once. She has been incorporating it into several segments of her show since then, such as quizzing her audience on it and featuring it in her parody trailer of the new Star Wars movie.



This is certainly one of the more whacky commercials Japan has produced so far. We can only go so far as to wonder what convinced this milk company, Rakunoh Mother’s marketing team to string such random ideas together. And from their past commercials, it’s clear there’s some kind of narrative thread going on.


As much as we secretly love these commercials, we’re not sure if we can sit through a third instalment to this series. It’s fun once or twice, but don’t you think another one would just be milking the idea dry?
Header image: The Independent