Oatly’s advertising varies from powerfully personable to downright weird. The oat milk brand’s new 18-minute podcast hovers close to the latter. It’s a “true crime” podcast about a lake called Oatly near the town of Mesick, Michigan.
Oatly has done podcasts in the past. Traditional podcasts – How OATLY Is Changing the Way We Think About Milk by Oatly global creative director, John Schoolcraft in the Brand Activism podcast series and Björn Öste: Oatly and the invention of oat milk in The Founder Hour series, for example (Björn Öste is Oatly’s co-founder). This new podcast, Deep Waters, is an Oatly owned and created podcast and it’s anything but traditional.
The 18-minute “ad” is teased with this preamble:
In Episode 1 of Oatly Lake, which is in fact the only episode of Oatly Lake, podcast producer Schuyler Swenson revisits the moment a Swedish-based oat drink company discovered the lake in Michigan that shares its name. Schuyler then takes listeners on a journey into the American Midwest, to the town of Mesick, to try to find answers to the burning questions this discovery raises.
In the heart of Northern Michigan, hidden in a dense cedar forest in the small town of Mesick, lies a little-known body of water called Oatly Lake. In mid-2021, a Swedish dairy alternative company that goes by the same name—Oatly—stumbled upon this body of water while mindlessly browsing the internet. For reasons that are still unclear, they sent a team to Mesick in search for answers: Who owned this lake? Was there a connection to oat milk? Could it yield headlines in all the reputable industry trades?
They did in fact find answers, and a whole lot more…
The answers include an intriguing twist at the end.
As more and more plant-based milks appear, people are unlikely to forget the name, Oatly, after listening to the podcast. But let’s be honest, Oatly, is a memorable name for an oat with or without a lake namesake.
It wraps Oatly in nature. If you respond to oblique cues.
The podcast is, however, much more sophisticated than the campaign that preceded it – a puppet show that pummels you with oat milk vs cow’s milk benefits.
Its billboard advertising, however – that’s where Oatly stars:
