‘Stupid marketing directors killed my best work’: Oatly creative chief’s subversive message
The creative mastermind behind leading oat milk brand Oatly’s global growth, John Schoolcraft, has one incredibly hot take — that it is time to kill the marketing department.
Kicking off day two at Mumbrella360, the Sweden-based creative rocked the room when he shared his journey with the brand as its chief creative officer, which began with sending the existing marketing team “on their way”.
Schoolcraft presenting to a packed room to kick off day two
He said traditional marketing — briefs, unnecessary research, “strategy for the sake of strategy” — is outdated for brands wanting to actually grow, and creatives should instead be at the centre. It’s how to get good work out the door, according to Schoolcraft.
“I’m from the advertising world and these stupid marketing directors killed all my best work,” he said. “So I figured, if you just took them away, then it would be up to me to make something great.”
He argued that brands don’t need CMOs, they don’t need marketing departments, to become great brands.
“Instead, I’m the one sitting with the innovation team, I have to know what’s going on. I’m in the meetings — sales, product development, supply chain production.”
He said it allows creatives to focus on the details, spending all their time “making something great”, rather than dealing with the typical frustrations of approvals, studies, analysis, and so forth.
They had a cheeky approach — any time the brand got sued, or failed at something, they’d turn it into a brief. Tony Petersson, former CEO of Oatly, essentially told Schoolcraft he could do whatever he wanted, “as long as you don’t ruin everyone’s lives”.
“After a while, the dairy industry understood that we were messing with them and they couldn’t beat us.”
Schoolcraft presenting at Mumbrella360 on Thursday
He shared an example where a Swedish dairy company did a campaign with ‘fake milk’ — they created random, fake names for milk and condemned them, with the tagline being ‘only milk tastes like milk’. It was a clear swipe at Oatly and the anti-dairy movement.
But what the dairy brand failed to do was trademark those ‘fake milk’ names, so Oatly did instead. It then used them for a campaign, featured it on their packaging, and cheekily won back the narrative.
Essentially, when Schoolcraft thought something was good enough, the creatives would take it and go make something with it regardless of risk.
“We brief ourselves, we do the work, we approve the work, and then we decide what we spend the money on,” he said.
“And that only works because we’re embedded in the company. We’re sitting and working with everyone else.”
He said a creative-led brand allows for more risk taking, which should be a norm: “We don’t play the game of the market, and instead, we use this anti-authoritarian nature. We challenge industry norms, we drive societal change. And that makes us impossible to copy as a brand.”
But he warned it can come at a cost.
“To do these ideas, you have to be invested in what you’re doing and you have to be working all the time,” he said. “It’s too risky, too complicated, too time consuming, to not.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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