“Brands know that it doesn’t take talking to 120 clubs to pull this off: They talk to one person and they can activate in a meaningful way,” Brett stated.
Milking it
It didn’t matter that baseball wasn’t precisely the beloved pastime of Oatly’s hometown of Malmö, Sweden. It didn’t matter that elevated competitors amid a market slowdown saddled it with reported losses of $204 million within the fourth quarter of 2023: Oatly needed in on Minor League Baseball, and it needed to barnstorm its oat-milk message to all 120 groups.
In accordance with Ryan Crane, sports activities partnerships and experiential lead at Oatly North America, the model first started sponsorship talks with MiLB within the Fall of 2022. Oatly had already rounded the bases with MLB companions, serving numerous variations of its product with the New York Yankees, Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs, however needed to showcase its model past main metropolitan markets. With MiLB, it tossed concepts forwards and backwards till the league recommended one thing past oat milk concessions or a stadium emblem: a spot as “the 121st team of Minor League Baseball.”
“That’s a perfect example of something where both the brand and the partner are thinking about some of the ways that we can look at the consistent themes across the clubs and create national programs as part of it,” MLB’s Brett stated.
Earlier this 12 months, Oatly launched its Malmö Oat Milkers marketing campaign, permitting every of MiLB’s groups to masquerade as its workforce for a day after a cartoon of oat milk threw out the primary pitch and followers answered milk-alternative trivia questions. MiLB even gave the “team” its web page with a full schedule and video highlights.
In not less than 53 circumstances, Oatly put its frozen dessert bars into workforce concessions.
“The amount of exposure the Oatly brand receives across the country via this partnership cannot be achieved with a single individual MLB partnership or more traditional media buy,” Crane stated. “You can’t put a price on the opportunity to have your brand show up in 120 different markets 135 individual times over the course of a summer. OK, maybe you can, because MiLB did and we agreed to pay that amount, but every penny was and is worth it. “
