From Inside Hook:
A Swedish dairy conglomerate is taking on alternative milk like it's a national epidemic
In case you missed it, Sweden is in the midst of a milk war.
Faced with the growing popularity of alternative milks like Oatly, a popular brand of oat milk originating in Sweden, the Swedish dairy conglomerate Arla is waging war against its plant-based competition.
The latest manifestation of this growing unrest, as Jacob Goldberg reported for the Outline, comes in the form of a pro-dairy milk add campaign splashing slogans like “Milk is milk!” and “Only milk tastes like milk” across obviously anti-Oatly TV ads.
“Milk has been a natural part of Swedes’ diet and culture for over a century — it’s in the Swedes’ souls,” Rosanna Hagald of the Stockholm-based ad agency behind Arla’s “Milk is milk” campaign, told Goldberg. “For the last couple of years, a lot of new competitors have entered the market and tried to convince people to choose other beverages over milk.”
Like Hagald herself, the ads make thinly veiled references to Oatly, obviously parodying the plant-based milk alternative. But Arla isn’t having all the fun. Oatly has mounted similarly satirical counterattacks, launching a “flush the milk” campaign modeled after a Swedish public service campaign encouraging alcoholic Swedes to “flush the brandy,” and even going as far as to trademark the nonsense words — “pjölk, brölk, sölk, and trölk” — the Arla ads use to mock Oatly and print them on their products....MORE
