Oatly created a F*ck Oatly website. Here’s why

NEW YORK: “A time machine of all things bad about an oat drink company.”

That’s how Oatly describes F*ck Oatly, a website the brand created that is devoted to explaining all of its missteps over the years, including selling oat residue to pig farms, a global boycott after adding a new investor and outrage over the company’s lawsuit against Glebe Farm. 

F*ck Oatly also promises that a “new scandal is coming soon.”

“We’ve said everything we need to say about [these] certain things, so why not put it all in one place?” said Brendan Lewis, Oatly’s EVP of global comms and public affairs, detailing the impetus behind the campaign. 

The website ties into the brand’s goal to be “consistently inconsistent, which often means doing things in unexpected ways that can be perceived as the ‘wrong way’ in a traditional marketing sense,” Lewis added. 

Lewis offered other examples that follow the aforementioned ethos, such as OatlyFans, a community platform, and Oatly’s monthly Spam newsletter, which is “about nothing,” he adds, but serves as a “great way to engage people.”

“We’ve never intended to be just another food company. We’ve always strove to be very legitimate and human in everything we do,” Lewis said. “And [F*ck Oatly] is just another manifestation of that.”

Lewis revealed that F*ck Oatly was published October 10, 2022. Oatly didn’t announce or pitch the website, instead wanting people to authentically discover it. 

“We weren’t going to come out and say, ‘Oatly today announces a new website that highlights company missteps.’ That’s not legitimate,” Lewis said. “It’s really blown up organically [and] that’s when we decided to start talking about it.”

In F*ck Oatly’s first three months, the site had 792 visitors. On April 16, it had 54,000 page views. As of Thursday, the figure stands at more than 247,000 page views. 

Oatly also anticipated that people may not love F*ck Oatly, so it created another page for users to voice their dissatisfaction, titled F*ck F*ck Oatly.  

“You’re probably here because you totally hate [F*ck Oatly]. If so, then click below. Your clicks might not change anything, but sometimes it just feels good to click something,” the website reads. 

The website asks users to limit their total number of clicks “to a maximum of 5 so that the accuracy of the hate data produced by this site is slightly, but not hugely, misleading.” So far, more than 257,000 people have confirmed their hate. 

For those that dislike F*ck F*ck Oatly, there’s also F*ck F*ck F*ck Oatly. 

Lewis said Oatly anticipated that people may respond in different ways to the original site, thus birthing the follow up pages. “We need to have more fun. Everyone needs more fun, don’t they?” he added. 

All of the F*ck Oatly sites were created without agency support, Lewis said, tapping Oatly’s “department of mind control,” which is made up of staffers in creative, editorial and comms.