This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.
When the Milk Processor Education Campaign hired the Olsen twins for its "Got Milk?" campaign, they though they were buying into the stars' wholesome image. But even from the start, the muttering began. Why was Ashley wearing a t-shirt with an image from the Velvet Underground album famous for celebrating drug use and sadomasochism? Aren't the Olsen Twins' short statures counter to the claims that milk builds strong bones? (The MPEC insisted that teens looked up to the Olsen twins, no matter how short they are.)
And then there was the controversy they really should have seen coming when they dressed up the ultra-mini Mary-Kate for the photo shoot. Two months after the magazine campaign hit the newsstands, Mary-Kate was checked into an eating disorder treatment facility. She not only didn't 'get milk?"; she didn't 'get' any kind of food.
Adding irony to the PR debacle was the statement made by the twins at the time of the campaign launch, that "we want to help make sure our fans are healthy like us." If "healthy" describes Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, and millions of their fans are planning to follow their dietary guidelines, well, the milk industry is in for some trouble.
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