Today, we build off an example from last week—a $786.9M per year brand.
"Alternative milk products" is a horribly boring category. Yet despite this, Oatly has managed to become one of the most talked-about brands.
Let's dive into 3 of their insane marketing campaigns.
– Neal
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### Edit
Brought to you by Poplar—a modern approach to direct mail.
Digital ads are getting harder to crack due to privacy regulations. And people are increasingly inundated with email and SMS.
Performance for both is on the decline.
But direct mail is only getting more effective thanks to improved tech.
With Poplar, you can easily launch powerful direct mail campaigns in minutes with the tech-driven features you’re used to, like event-based triggered campaigns, 1:1 personalization, and real-time attribution reporting.
Use it for abandoned carts, lookalikes, upsells, cross-sells, win-back campaigns, and whatever else your creativity allows.
Book a call and get a $250 credit when you deposit $1000 into your account.
Three of Oatly’s insane campaigns
Insight from Oatly and Neal’s carousel.
Oatly asked a kind of dumb question.
“How can we sell oat milk to people who don’t drink it or want to drink it?”
Aren’t we supposed to sell to people who actually want your product?
But by doing so, instead of going after the small market of not-milk drinkers, they went after the gigantic market of cow milk drinkers. And they did that with bold branding, going after baristas, and some insane marketing campaigns.
Last week we talked about how companies in boring categories (like oat milk) need to either keep it super simple (puppies on a toilet paper package) or need to make it interesting by being over the top fun/ridiculous. Oatly has taken the over the top route.
Let’s highlight 3 of their most clever campaigns:
It’s like milk but for humans + F*CK OATLY
This is one of Oatly’s primary marketing messages—subtly reminding people how odd it is that we drink milk intended for baby cows:
These ads got Oatly banned or sued in countries like Ireland and Spain with influential dairy unions.
In response, they created fckoatly.com, pretending to be anti-Oatly:
They didn’t stop there; they made various satirical sites pretending to hate the anti-Oatly or anti-anti-Oatly sites. Here’s fckfckoatly.com:
They go all the way to fckfckfckfckfckoatly.com until they ask you to call a number.
The Dairy Deal
Next, they went after the dairy industry’s climate impact by buying billboards and print ads like this all over the place:
They’re challenging the dairy industry
And if you go to the URL in the corner (oatly.com/DairyDeal), it takes you to a full site pitching the deal to dairy reps (actual deal with up to 140k GBP value):
Note: I think it would have benefitted them if they published the number somewhere in the marketing since otherwise people wouldn’t really know these stats:
Paris cleverness
Paris has some funny laws.
A mural advertisement can’t contain both text and an image of the product. So they painted a bunch of bold, text-only murals, and then cleverly positioned objects in front of the walls to complete the picture:
To dive more into some of Oatly’s top ads, I’ve compiled them into a carousel.