seki milk bottles reveal readable manga comic strips every time you take a sip

Milk Manga bottles can beat nutritional deficiency

Japanese brand Seki Milk and agency VML & Ogilvy Japan, a partnership between Geometry Global (now VMLY&R COMMERCE) and The Ogilvy Group, have created Milk Manga, a series of milk bottles imprinted with readable manga comic strips that every drinker can fully enjoy as they consume the milk. The design for Milk Manga takes cues from the statistics that VML & Ogilvy Japan quotes. It states that in many parts of Japan, around 65 percent of students in elementary schools do not receive the recommended nutritional balance because they are not drinking their daily bottle of milk.

Seki Milk then partnered with VML & Ogilvy Japan to devise a fun way to encourage young students to finish their milk to the last drop. The solution is to print manga comic strips around the milk bottles so that the young students can finish reading only after they have savored the last drop of the milk. Basically, the more they drink, the more manga stories can be revealed. It appears that the milk bottles also narrate sequential stories, giving the impression that if the young students want to know what happens next, they may have to drink more Milk Manga bottles.

images and video stills by Seki Milk and VML & Ogilvy Japan

Ingredients as manga comic strip characters

It seems that young students in Japan have a singular fascination with manga, and Seki Milk and VML & Ogilvy Japan use this observation and turn it into a product that can encourage the students to pay more attention to their nutrition. VML & Ogilvy Japan states that in the Gifu Prefecture, the home of Seki Milk, 95 percent of the children finish their milk now that there are manga comic strips that they can read as they drink. It may also have helped that these fantasy characters are easily relatable to their target audience.

At a glance, Milk Manga does not show the comic strips as they take the same color as the milk in the transparent glass bottles. The video even shows that ingredients transform into playful and often strong characters that boost the manga’s story. Butter looks like a scared ghost that haunts other characters, Ice is a beaming and graceful dancer, Cheese acts as a semi-terrifying and monster-looking figure, and Cream floats in the air as a sweet lady with a flying umbrella. With fun characters like these, children may have to stack up Milk Manga bottles to fully learn and read more about them.

the ingredients turn into manga characters up for adventures in the comic strips