Oatly Arrives in New Zealand With an Epic Long-Copy Billboard

We were just talking about brand voice, and here’s a fun example of it—an entertainingly discursive billboard from Oatly, crafted for the brand’s arrival in New Zealand, that flouts all the rules of out-of-home advertising. I mean, the damn thing doesn’t even end.

Thankfully, they bought a second board that finishes the story—and whose acreage of white space says as much about the brand as the hundreds of typewriter-font words in its sibling do. (As best summed up in a few key sentences from the first ad: “What can we say? We’re human. Or as human as a company can be.”)

The boards were crafted by art director Björn Lindén and copywriter Ida Backman at Oatly’s in-house team in Sweden. They went up at 76 Albert Street and 25 College Hill in Auckland’s central business district.

Kevin Lynch, creative director at Oatly, tells Muse: “The brand’s voice is really human, and if you haven’t noticed, a lot of humans tend to drone on. Plus, we figure if we use all the words, some of them will probably sound really smart.”

He adds: “If you think we use a lot of words, you should write to our co-worker Mårten, whose email address is buried in the middle of the first billboard. That man is not without wind.”