NotCo
Client: NotCo
Product: NotMilk
Title: We didn't write this campaign
Media: Print + Out of Home
Country: Chile
Date Of Campaign: April 2023
Background: NotMilk is a plant-based alternative to milk created by the chilean food-tech NotCo (The Not Company).Since NotMilk was launched in the market, the powerful dairy industry declared war filing a strong lawsuit that presented NotMilk as a company without scruples that was misleading consumers to buy a product that is not milk.As any other legal battle in the corporate world, this was taking years of back and forth without moving a single inch. That wasn’t good for the brand. We feared that this was never going to end, so at one point, we decided to implement a new strategy, one that would disarm their lawyers. A creative strategy with no chance for comeback.
Idea: If the only thing we did was to be true to our product and ethos (plant based food tech company) and both, NotMilk and the powerful Dairy Industry agreed on something, that we are NotMilk and they were pretty eloquent at demonstrating that all across the hundreds of pages in their lawsuit . . . so we said: “Why don’t we use their legal arguments as our best defense?” And that’s exactly what we did. We let them write our campaign.We dived into 2 years of legal documents to find that many of the things those big dairy industry's lawyers wrote about NotMilk, actually defined NotMilk in a perfect way.We simply copy-pasted excerpts from their lawsuit and turn them into our ads. The consumers received our campaign (should we say their campaign?) with humor having a laugh at the expense of the dairy industry, together with us. In words of Matías Muchnick, CEO of NotCo: "It’s pretty surreal having the counterpart lawyers creating the fundamentals of NotMilk’s creative campaign. But Why Not? we’ll take it".
Results: NOTCO WON THE CASE AGAINST THE DAIRY GUILD.• Even though the trial intention for NotMilk was already high (85% of the people who knows the brand, tries it), the effort helped us to boost that index even more, to a historic 93% of trial conversion. • The campaign created a halo effect on the line extensions in NotMilk’s portfolio, with an overall increase in the market share of 5 points during the first Q of 2023 and a strong performance in the Zero Sugar variety with a 10% increase in the market share. • All these results propelled by a campaign that, despite we did not write, it generated:o A 92% positive sentiment in RRSS.o Over US$ 350K in local press CLP in local press (important to understand, the coverage helped us to add pressure to the legal team from our competitors to desist pursuing with their case).o More than 20 minutes of interviews in news media with a reach of over 280,000.o Content published in more than 30 publications in national digital media with a reach of 12,107,000.o 14 mentions in national media profiles in social media with a reach of 13,033,000.