FckOatly.com and free-falling from space

What's up, marketing wizards — hope you all had a phenomenal Fourth of July. If you're sipping an oat milk latte as you read this, you're in luck: 

• The secret sauce (er–milk?) to Oatly's killer guerilla marketing strategy 
• What's keeping our AI technical marketing manager Josh Blyskal up at night
• Check out Philadelphia Cream Cheese's new country hit

MEET THE MASTER

Name: Brendan Lewis, EVP, Global communications & public affairs at Oatly 

Job: Brendan oversees all of Oatly’s communications across its three markets, including PR, public affairs, and social media

Claim to fame: A Times Square billboard that advocates for climate change; FCKOatly.com 

Fun fact: He once impulse-bought a $400 Carol Channing ventriloquist doll

Lesson 1: Put creatives at the forefront

Brendan Lewis, Oatly’s EVP of global communications and public affairs, says it all started when global chief creative officer John Schoolcraft was tasked with turning a small Swedish milk company into a global sensation.

His first step toward world domination? Firing the entire marketing department. 

Then he took the creative department and put it at the center of the business. The creative team is involved in everything, from sales meetings to supply chain meetings. 

Lewis says this allows his team at Oatly to ignore traditional marketing tactics in favor of feeding off the moment, and enables more transparency. 

A prime (and hilarious) example: When the Spanish dairy lobby sued Oatly over its ad, proclaiming, 'It's like milk, but made for humans', Oatly didn't get defensive. It just posted the entire lawsuit online.

When oat milk spills, so do the lawsuits.

Or, my personal favorite: FckOatly.com — Oatly’s website dedicated to gathering all its bad press and negative comments in one place. 

It’s like if Yelp one-star reviews had a baby with the worst Reddit trolls. Curated by Oatly themselves.

Lewis tells me the meetings about FckOatly.com were some of the most hilarious of his career. There are countless permutations of FckOatly.com (like FckFckOatly.com, and on, and on) and if you follow it to the end, you'll find a phone number you can call to register your displeasure. 

None of which he ran by legal. 

"And now," he concludes with a mischievous grin, "When our marketing doesn't land, it's just more content for FckOatly.com. So everybody wins, even when we lose."

Lesson 2: Don't let growth marketing dominate your strategy

💥 A favorite rant of Lewis’ is his belief that growth marketing needs to be "neutered, if not totally destroyed."

"It's nothing more than spreadsheet marketing," he tells me. When marketers are buying clicks and perfecting their emails for click-through rates, Lewis says they're leaving out an essential ingredient: emotion. 

"If you water down your message to optimize it for clicks, you lose your soul," he tells me without a trace of grandiosity. "The emotion and the belief has to be there. It can't just be somebody looking at email click-rates all day."

(Got it – I'll stop obsessing about this email's subject line…) 

For Oatly, this means taking the leap without testing it to death first. Like in 2023, when the company bought billboards in Times Square to proudly endorse its climate label. (The Oatly team invited the dairy industry to join them. They declined.)

Oatly goes green, dairy goes silent: The aforementioned billboards

The secret sauce? Oatly is a mission-led company that happens to sell oat milk; it’s not a product-led company in search of a mission. So its leaders are able to act on impulse and hunch as long as they know their messaging caters to their larger goal of promoting sustainability. 

Lesson 3: Good marketing is like free-falling from outer space