Oatly and Minor League Baseball are ‘Down to Clown’ in Unique Partnership

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.”

Some MiLB franchises, for instance, employ bat dogs instead of bat boys and girls, and the league has dreamed up mascots ranging from the sublime (the Richmond Flying Squirrels) to the hilarious (the El Paso Chihuahuas).

Plant-based evolution

The partnership works strategically for Oatly, which has been expanding its U.S. distribution but has concentrated its paid media largely in a few key regions like Los Angeles and New York. The brand intends to dig further into experiential marketing, which made the MiLB alliance even more attractive.

A high-profile presence at baseball fields around the country—with its oat-derived desserts, milk substitute and eventually other products—will put the brand in front of new demos and deepen its role in mainstream sports. (Oatly has existing deals with three professional baseball teams and sells its products at Yankee Stadium in New York, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas).

The relationship with MiLB, a first between a plant-based brand and a national sports league, is meaningful for its extensive footprint and category optics, Turco said.

“Baseball is so heartland, and it’s very important that we normalize the transition to a more plant-based diet and that it’s not perceived as something strictly for vegans or people on the coasts,” Turco said. “If our ultimate goal is to covert as many people as possible from dairy, we need to do it at scale and in every pocket of the country.”

Some attendees may be familiar with Oatly but still haven’t tasted it—a robust sampling of the brand’s vanilla and chocolate fudge desserts aims to address that gap and drive on- and off-site sales.

MiLB, which draws some 30 million fans a year to its games, has a sponsor roster that includes Nationwide Insurance, Capital One, Corona, T-Mobile and Wyndham Hotels. The irreverent plant-based Oatly “felt like the right fit” along with the blue-chip brands, Rawn said.

Swedes on the field

Oatly, with a now-legendary in-house creative division called the Department of Mind Control, will rely in part on its Swedish heritage as an explanation for doing things differently with MiLB.

“The conceit is we’re trying our best,” Turco said. “Sometimes, we get it right, and sometimes not, because maybe we don’t know baseball as well as some other sponsor.”

The brand will explore that creative platform further starting in 2024, along with making potential matches between Oatly and specific teams and players. Other details of this season’s partnership are still in the formative stages—such as a social content series—for the four-year deal that Rawn said she’s “looking forward to evolving and possibly extending.”