What Four Vodkas Would Say

"Want to get fertilized?" is not the line you expect from a dairy brand. Müllermilch ran it anyway—Lass dich befruchten, which plays on the German word for fertilize in the biological sense but lands very differently when you say it out loud at a party. The campaign was nominally about Germany’s declining birth rate, which had become the subject of years of anxious national commentary. Their solution: put the subtext on a billboard.

It worked because it had actual structure. The wordplay held up, the product connection wasn’t entirely forced (milk, reproduction, you can draw the line yourself), and it was funny in the way a good dirty joke is funny: you see it coming and you still laugh. What it was really doing was saying out loud what most advertising says through implication—that sex is the actual subject of half the ads you see, and the polite pretense otherwise is its own kind of vulgarity. What takes four vodkas and a dark corner to say in person, Müllermilch put on a poster. European advertising has long had less patience for the puritanical twitch that treats desire as something requiring careful management, and watching a dairy brand weaponize that gap was genuinely satisfying.

They also launched a chai drink around the same time. I was suspicious of it in the way I’m suspicious of all chai drinks that aren’t just tea with too much milk in someone’s kitchen—but I noted it, and I probably tried it, and I’ve forgotten what it tasted like, which tells you everything you need to know about the chai drink and nothing at all about the campaign.