“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 said.
Milking it
It didn’t matter that baseball wasn’t exactly the beloved pastime of Oatly’s hometown of Malmö, Sweden. It didn’t matter that increased competition amid a market slowdown saddled it with reported losses of $204 million in the fourth quarter of 2023: Oatly wanted in on Minor League Baseball, and it wanted to barnstorm its oat-milk message to all 120 teams.
According to Ryan Crane, sports partnerships and experiential lead at Oatly North America, the brand first began sponsorship talks with MiLB in the Fall of 2022. Oatly had already rounded the bases with MLB partners, serving various versions of its product with the New York Yankees, Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs, but wanted to showcase its brand beyond major metropolitan markets. With MiLB, it tossed ideas back and forth until the league suggested something beyond oat milk concessions or a stadium logo: 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 said.
Earlier this year, Oatly launched its Malmö Oat Milkers campaign, allowing each of MiLB’s teams to masquerade as its team for a day after a cartoon of oat milk threw out the first pitch and fans answered milk-alternative trivia questions. MiLB even gave the “team” its page with a full schedule and video highlights.
In at least 53 cases, Oatly put its frozen dessert bars into team 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 said. “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. “
