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There’s no halftime in baseball, and fans have to wait until the seventh inning stretch to be part of the entertainment by serenading the crowd with their rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Oatly and Minor League Baseball are fully aware of the storied traditions but ready to add their own twists with a partnership that will spawn such features as a mini-halftime show, a designated “oatfield,” a “sixth-inning shrug” and an “eighth-inning eye roll.”
Even the sponsor tag is cheeky in its excessive length, with Oatly serving as “the official oat milk from Sweden that started like 35 years ago but is now all over America where it’s promoting various kinds of frozen dessert products in one of those first-ever plant-based sponsor deals you know the kind we’re talking about of Minor League Baseball.”
The multi-year Oatly-MiLB relationship, announced today, kicked off recently at 120 stadiums in the U.S. and Canada with recognizable hallmarks like on-site branding and media, sampling and swag giveaways. There’s also product: Oatly’s dairy-free frozen bars have been added to 50-plus ballparks.
But the goal for both parties was to create an alliance that purposely painted outside the lines of typical logo slapping, capturing their offbeat personalities and meshing them in an iconic arena.
‘Down to clown’
With MiLB, Oatly found a like-minded collaborator who was “down to clown” from the first discussions, according to Armando Turco, executive creative director for the brand in North America.
“Instead of talking nuts and bolts, we wanted to see if there was creative synergy and if we could come up with things that hadn’t been done in the world of sports,” Turco told Adweek. “We wanted to establish some new rituals, and they kept one-upping our ideas.”
Foul balls hit into the “oatfield,” the space between first base and the dugout, will trigger free sweet treats for the audience at a dozen stadiums. The “half a halftime show” will run in all parks during the fourth inning, consisting of 30 seconds worth of original content developed by Oatly, known for its memorable Super Bowl commercial, true crime-inspired podcast, puppet-centric ad series and other eye-catching marketing.
“When you take a look at their brand ethos, it mirrors the MiLB in that it’s fun, unique and non-traditional,” Uzma Rawn, senior vice president of global partnerships for sibling properties MLB, MiLB and Little League, told Adweek. “We can play off each other’s uniqueness.”