WHAT HAPPENED TO got history?

One of the most successful marketing campaigns in the history of marketing was the “got milk?” campaign in the 1980s and 1990s. It was launched by the Dairy Farmer’s Association of America, because sales were lagging and people thought milk was boring. They didn’t understand its nutritional value and it definitely was not cool. So the Farmers, with the help of the agency Goodby & Silverstein, launched a campaign to make milk cool and individualized and inspiring—and it works. The campaign is still iconic, having seared images of heroes of our generation with a milk mustache and their personal story into our minds. A couple of years ago, in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Fernande and her board member Dina Buchbinder realized that History had the Same problem as Milk, and the idea for got history? was born on the back of a napkin. The idea was born to change the system of history teaching, and to lead an effort to rebrand the subject from being everyone’s most hated topic to becoming a powerful source of civic nutrition.

What then followed was an effort to analyze the entire system and look for the most strategic levers for change, because a campaign is only as effective as the strategy is it meant to support. In that strategy, other elements were more important than the creation of a campaign: giving voice to young people, teachers and museum educators, creating space for them to co-create and problem-solve together, making sure that the insights of learning science, engineering and research were leveraged to the benefit of young people today.

In the summer of 2021, we realized that we had outgrown our campaign title name and needed a headline that captured our commitment to science, collaboration and humanity. And thus we co-created the name of the History Co:Lab. We are proud to have a new banner under which to pursue our efforts to spark collaboration and change, and look forward to, some day, leading a campaign that may well be called “got history?”, but that most certainly conveys the message that history is not dead, or boring, but the source of our capacity to develop fully as humans and lead us to a better future.