Everyone Moo-Ved Out For Prize Milk Carton

By DON STONEMAN

Nobody at Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) is crowing
about the free publicity for their product garnered
after someone at Toronto's Eaton's Centre thought a
prize-winning mooing milk carton was a bomb and
called police.
The bomb scare incident took place last month at a
noisy coffee counter where an employee opened a
one- litre carton of milk and placed it on the
counter without looking inside. 
When a customer saw the wires inside the milk
carton,  the alarm was raised. The Eaton's Centre,
which covers an entire city block, was evacuated
while police detonated the carton.
"The police did exactly their job, what they were
supposed to do,"  says Mike Cavadias, with the
Bratch, Goehrum and Partners advertising agency,
which developed the promotion for DFO. There have
been 25 million milk cartons in 250 ml, 500 ml and
one-litre sizes printed for the Moo promotion. 
Inside 2,000 cartons is a taped message announcing
that the buyer has won a prize. It was the wires
connected to the tape player in the carton that
alarmed the customer and prompted the call to
police.
"Any time you get public inconvenience on this sort
of scale it is a regrettable occurrence," said Bill
Mitchell, DFO spokesman. 
"With the amount of advertising support and
programs in place we hope everybody knew about it."
The incident occurred Sunday, Oct. 29, at the
Eaton's Centre, about half way through the
advertising campaign. There was widespread
reporting of the incident in the Toronto media.
Cavadias is "relieved that the [media's] slant has
been light hearted" on  coverage of the bomb scare.

"We'd really love to have some fun with this. You
really can't," he said. 
"I can't emphasize how much we didn't want this to
happen."  

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