Vol. 77: Oatly’s spam stunt ✉️

More and more brands are expanding beyond typical emails about holiday deals and product drops. The next step? Newsletters. 

Tory Burch has a fashion newsletter called What Should I Wear? The RealReal has a Gossip Girl-style newsletter called RealGirl. And Oatly decided to get in on the newsletter action and decided to announce it to the world very loudly. 

This week, Case Studied explores how Oatly used a nontraditional spam-themed global campaign to launch its newsletter.

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The Brief:

Oatly was founded by Swedish food scientist Rickard Öste and his brother, Björn over 30 years ago. But in 2015, around the time when dairy milk alternatives were gaining widespread popularity, Oatly underwent a major rebrand. 

It went from having the aesthetics of a run-of-the-mill product to a provocative, cheeky brand known for anti-marketing marketing. Now, consumers expect Oatly ads that say things like, “Another ad for our oat drink providing no reason at all why you should try it.” 

Oatly saw huge growth after this rebrand. In the UK alone, revenue went from $6 million in 2016 to $70 million in 2020. Then in 2021, the company went public. But when 2023 came along, the brand wanted a more direct line to its customers via a newsletter. And to launch it, they took a sprawling, spammy approach. 

The Execution:

The monthly newsletter was called Spam by Oatly. The launch campaign was created in-house and developed in partnership with the media agency PHD. It was a massive integrated campaign that leveraged social, digital, OOH, and video content. 

Spam by Oatly spanned seven countries total—the US, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Copenhagen—and mostly targeted locations like airports and train stations. The main design theme featured overlapping pop-up windows that were reminiscent of Windows Me. Here are some notable headlines (which all included the links to sign up):

• The best things in life are free. And also, our newsletter about an oat drink is free. 

• Don’t buy one! Get one free!

• A billboard promoting a newsletter about oat drinks doesn’t make sense. But neither does a newsletter about oat drinks. 

• Can a newsletter be so great, it’s worth its own ad campaign? Asking for an oat drink company. 

Oatly had a billboard in Times Square, gave out free samples at various locations, and they even paid a sign flipper to twirl a sign that said “Free Oat Drink” (which they, of course, took videos of). 

The brand created a TikTok video that was nearly five minutes long of a milk carton being crushed by a hydraulic press. Sounds like a long time for a quick carton smash, right? That’s because milk crushing only lasted about 20 seconds and the rest of the video showed spam-like pop-ups while a voiceover talked about how great Oatly’s campaign was.

Apparently, the brand brought the campaign internal as well. Oatly took over all employee computers and office screens for a mass, simultaneous spamming. Screens simply said, “Should you have to put up with spam even on your computer? Apparently yes.”

Oatly also worked with Reddit’s in-house agency KarmaLab, to create 100 text-only ads as well as one long advertorial Megapost post that recounted all the touchpoints of the Spam by Oatly launch. It used puckish language to “teach” people the best way to create a mass ad campaign to promote a newsletter. 

Oatly left the comments on only for the Reddit Megapost, which KarmaLab typically doesn’t suggest. Feedback in the comments section was mixed, with a fair amount of negative comments. 

In a Contagious interview with Oatly Creative Director Kevin Lynch, KarmaLab’s Senior Creative Strategiest Matthew Gerrard shared thoughts on the Megapost:

Gerrard: “While many of these opinions were overtly negative, Oatly valued this part of the conversation too. It allowed them to directly address the various inaccuracies and criticisms by driving redditors to their fact-checking website, www.fckoatly.com. They truly believe that establishing conversation in any form is the first step in driving societal change, and this was part of that. You quickly learn that Oatly isn’t one to shy away from a challenge, more like, run straight at it head-first, and on fire. I feel that Kevin put it best when he said, ‘We don’t necessarily wish to be hated. But being ignored—now that’s something to fear.”

Meanwhile, in a KarmaLabs case study, Lynch said, “Oatly is in the business of change. We’re trying to shift the eating habits of an entire planet. Such change doesn’t happen without plenty of criticism and debate. So while the feedback we received kept our community management team busy, it was exactly what we had hoped for—the positive as well as the negative.”

The Results:

Oatly hasn’t publicly disclosed subscriber count but they did reveal that the Spam campaign reached 75 million people with 83.6% opening and engaging with the newsletter, compared to a typical average of 20%. 

Oatly’s Megathread generated “the biggest conversation about oat milk ever on Reddit,” achieving a 9,037% comment engagement rate. The post saw a 229% total engagement rate with an average view time of 1.4 minutes (which is 608% higher than Reddit benchmarks).

Key Takeaways:

1) Reconsider what’s “worth” creating a campaign for.

One of Oatly’s headlines joked about dedicating an entire campaign to a newsletter launch. But that wasn’t the true goal. Lynch said, “Technically, the campaign was about signing up for the newsletter, but it was actually a brand awareness campaign in disguise.”

Before writing off campaign ideas, zoom out and consider the larger goals it could accomplish. A highly specific concept may actually ladder up perfectly to a higher level goal, making it worth your team’s while. 

2) Evaluate your brand tolerance for criticism.

Oatly didn’t follow KarmaLab’s usual guidance about allowing comments on their campaign Megapost. And while there was a decent amount of negative criticism (as is expected on Reddit), the brand took it in stride and viewed it as net-positive because of how it laddered up to their mission. 

Take a look at how open your brand is to customer critique. How do community managers decide who to respond to and when? How do consumers feel about engagement with your brand? Think about whether any of your current approaches could use some adjusting to better align with your brand’s goals and your consumer’s desires.

3) Consider launching new touchpoints. 

Despite the jokes about it being spam, Lynch said the newsletter was an intentional undertaking. “We were looking for a channel beyond social media that could create an ongoing dialogue with our biggest advocates—one that allowed us to, as we like to say, ‘act like a human not a brand.’”

Evaluate the ways you engage with your audience. Explore untapped opportunities to surprise and delight your customers in new channels. Even if it’s just for your superfans—having a direct line of contact to them could open all kinds of doors for improvement, engagement, and optimization. 

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