Hi-tech Milk

Everyday on the bus I see several ads from Mengniu, one of China's biggest milk producers and also one of the companies found to have high concentrations of melamine in its milk products.

So these days Mengniu is waging an aggressive campaign to woo back consumers to not only drink milk again, but also to buy its brand.

The commercial starts with cows standing or sitting in an idyllic grassland and then moves to cows eating freshly cut blades of grass in troughs. I never knew cows would sit so still, not even twitching an ear.

Shots then cut to a sleek, modern-looking factory, with people in lab coats looking at test tubes and factory workers watching hundreds of packages of milk going through the production line.

Then there are pictures of foreigners working in the place, also wearing lab coats, proving that yes, having foreigners in your factory does add more credibility to your product.

And finally there are scenes showing the media going through the production centre, clearly illustrating that if the media has inspected the place, surely its milk is safe.

Despite the effort in trying to show Mengniu using the latest technology to produce its milk, that wasn't the cause of the melamine contamination.

Instead it was the milk collection centres, the middlemen who collected milk from farmers who added the chemical.

But also the milk producers themselves were also found at fault for putting melamine in there too. This was apparently a common practice for years.

So what's the point of having such an impressive-looking factory if you can't effectively test the raw milk for melamine, or prove that you don't put harmful additives in the milk?

It's going to take a lot more than flashy ads to persuade people to drink milk again.