Oatly takes out ad in The Guardian to mock 'desperately out of touch' parents about pronouns in email signatures

Well bye bye, Oatley. We've been buying your Barista milk at a rate of about 10/15 a week for a good while. From today, I'm looking for alternatives.
Best of luck to all the kiddies buying this at £1.80 a bottle.

I don’t think Oat milk is top of the shopping list of a teenager, so good luck with that.

We have bought Oatly for a couple of years. But my first delivery of oat milk is coming via the milkman from milkandmore tomorrow. Washable glass bottles are better environmentally too. Win win. Piss off Oatly with your ageist crap.

I'm very tired of "quirky" branding. It always seems to come with a side order of preachy

Ben and Jerry's did a Facebook post addressed to Priti Patel saying "nobody is illegal". Whilst I don't agree with some of Priti Patel's policies and opinions, what the fuck has it got to do with an American ice cream company?

And of course Innocent can get in the bin too.

Though maybe I'm now past it and this is aimed at Gen Z?

As an oat milk-drinking Millennial, I find all of their advertising a bit cringey. It just comes across like that 'how do you do, fellow kids' meme to me. Trying way too hard to come across as hip and with it.

Indeed I did.

I think they're going for quirky and ironic wackaging, aren't they? Look at the t-shirt range.

Did anyone see their Superbowl commercial? Nothing to do with pronouns, etc. It was just extremely cringy.

@NoCureForLove

I'm still waiting for a reply to my email...

@lucyposting please do share what your reply said.

Could always check with Companies House

I did notice that when I was in Tesco, the Oatly displays looked untouched, whereas the Alpro Oat shelf had gaps signalling a carton had been purchased.

But I'm hesitant to attribute that to a reaction to the ad campaign. It might simply be that Oatly are doing a big push of an ad campaign because Alpro Oat is more popular than their product, and the campaign hasn't made any net change

Ratners. Definitely.

Women. Leaving stuff on the shelves. One product at a time.

Oatly have lost me to Oato over this and I am absolutely loving the regular doorstep deliveries and glass bottles.

I am also a vegan climate activist and know passionate activists of all ages including arrestee grannies so it went down like a cup of cold sick here.

I had a little chuckle in Sainsbury’s yesterday when I saw that they’d been cleaned out of Alpro oat but there was still a full shelf of Oatly. Vagaries of stock replenishment, or Oatly having a Ratners moment? fun anyway.

Just finished the last of my stash of Oatley Barista and will be switching to MOMA (which was 35p cheaper than Oatley this week).

Hopefully MOMA are a little more interested in making decent oat milk and less interested in what anyone things about the ephemeral.

I have now partially solved my milk problem by drinking my coffee black and switching to herbal tea. My teen dcs don't drink milk in any form anyway (part of what's weird about the Oatly campaign is that in my experience teenagers don't really drink/use milk very much, in hot drinks or otherwise - but then we're not a breakfast cereal-eating household) and DH is happy enough with normal dairy.

I checked the ingredients on the various brands and they all contain rapeseed or sunflower oil which puts me off now I know about it. I tried lactose free but it doesn't help with my particular problem with dairy (mucous producing).

Noticed today that Alpro oat drink is cheaper than Oatly in Tesco.

Oh do post it - edited to anonymise. Expose their nonsense to the daylight!

I have had a reply and am even more angry now: patronising, woke and so disparaging, honestly it was just so rude (and I am a vegan, passionate about climate change, very interested in the gender critical debate). I can't post it, but will never, ever buy their products again. I feel angry all over again now thinking about it!

I've been thinking about this all week and how ludicrously bad at their job whoever came up with this campaign is.
Firstly something aimed at teenagers being put in a print newspaper. Secondly the idea that if some unlikely earth shattering event teenagers were sent to do the weekly shop they wouldn't choose a big bottle of sugar filled Yazoo over a cartoon of chocolate oat milk. (the lactose intolerant excluded obvs).
We used to buy oatly. Not anymore.

I'm still waiting for a reply to my email...

Oatly have sponsored an episode of Ed Miliband's Reasons to be Cheerful podcast today, educating middle aged men on the importance of plant based diets for the planet. Won't be listening.

I'm late to this, but I was reading The Times magazine over lunch, saw it and remembered this thread. One of our DC is still a teen and vegetarian, so perhaps DH is their target here.

I therefore asked DH if he'd seen the ad. He said he'd started reading it, thinking it was editorial, then realised it was an ad, but still had no idea what it was advertising, thought it was bonkers, and quickly turned the page! Obviously, DC don't read the ST magazine...

Anyway, the magazine also has a full-page ad for Sainsbury's, almost no writing, picture of food (meat!), price, all very clear. Job done.

No idea what Oatly is thinking of with those ads, but no doubt they played well within the hip young marketing department.

We call the dairy-substitutes that we use oaty, almondy and ricy.

The only thing about them that is intrinsically healthy is that they do us less harm than milk, which can give us cramps and squits.