Oatly Lake (Ideas I love #5)
Inflation is not just affecting consumer’s shopping baskets, its proving a significant problem for advertisers too.
A combination of further fragmentation in the media landscape, increased demand from advertisers and consumers disappearing behind paywalls into low/no advertising environments means that it’s getting harder and harder for advertisers to buy ‘quality reach’.
One option available to advertisers in this context is to start exploring advertising vehicles which look less like the traditional spots and space they’re used to buying and more like the content audiences are engaging with when inside a subscription-based environment.
Oat milk brand Oatly launched their spoof mystery podcast Oatly Lake onto all good podcasting platforms recently. It’s 19 minutes of beautifully crafted silliness, going out to meet the target audience in a media environment where they’re spending lots of time, in doing so it lampoons the well-established grammar of podcasts that the audience know and love. If you’ve spent any time listening to the likes of Serial or The Drop Out or Shit Town, you’ll recognise the tropes it riffs on a mile away.
Every American podcast ending (almost). pic.twitter.com/ueiKZyl5AY
— Max & Ivan (@maxandivan) February 15, 2022
Oatly are unflinching in their take-down of these cliches and there is plenty of self-referential nonsense, too. Many brands would lack the confidence to undertake something so unashamedly silly. Oatly is not just laughing at this kind of podcast, but at themselves too. You wait and wait for the ‘sell’ and it never comes. Oatly’s incredibly well defined brand voice, which adorns the sides of their cartons and is plastered across their outdoor advertising, creates the platform for this nonsense - and legitimises it for those listening to the episode.
Just like Netflix’s Drive to Survive, this is advertising that doesn’t look like a conventional advertisement. It’s an idea and an execution which is attempting to generate attention in and of its own right, rather than simply renting it through a traditional media buy. Lack of distribution is not an issue for advertisers today - we have more routes to market than ever before. The issue is a paucity of consumer attention and the cost and competition that exists for ‘quality reach’. And so at a time of increasing costs and decreasing quality, this idea asks the question if there is a more sustainable approach to media planning. A more sustainable approach to building reach. It is an apt question for a brand built on a sustainability mission such as Oatly to be asking.
Aside from being a brilliantly conceived and executed idea, stuff like this podcast from Oatly start to show us what the future could look like for brands in a media landscape which feels like its undergoing further fragmentation. I’ve talked about a need to ‘rethink reach’ in a previous post - and so perhaps I’m pre-disposed to admiring executions which work this angle.
The question marketers will need to answer is not whether reach is important, but how to generate it in a media market where attentive reach is harder and harder to come by. How much scale Oatly will generate from this execution remains to be seen. Whether they need to invest in media inventory to ‘market the marketing’ will also be an interesting thing to monitor. Executions like this will never fully remove the need for conventional media investment, but a variety of executions in this mold may go some way to supplement the shortfalls in quality reach achieved via an approach drive by spots and space alone.
Note: Oatly are a client of PHD and I have worked with the brand for several years, though sadly I cannot claim to have had any involvement with this particular project.
