Got milk?

"Got milk?" is best known as the tagline of a major U.S. advertising campaign promoting milk consumption. It originated in the early 1990s as part of a California milk-marketing effort and quickly became a widely recognized pop-culture catchphrase, later adapted in celebrity print ads featuring “milk mustaches” and echoed in parodies and spin-offs. Although often treated as “anonymous” because it functions like a slogan rather than a literary quotation, it is associated with professional advertising work created for a public health/commodity-marketing context rather than a single identifiable speaker in a speech or text.

The slogan’s power comes from its brevity and its implied scenario: you’ve just discovered you need milk (often for cereal, cookies, or coffee) and don’t have it. Grammatically clipped and conversational, it frames milk as a household necessity and uses mild anxiety—being caught without it—to motivate purchase. As a cultural artifact, it exemplifies late-20th-century advertising’s shift toward memorable, easily remixable phrases that invite repetition, parody, and brand association. Its enduring afterlife shows how a commodity campaign can generate a phrase that functions like a modern proverb.

“Got Milk?” (capitalization variant)
“Got milk” (without question mark)
“Got ___?” (template parody/derivative form)