Oatly learned that the city of Paris only accepts murals from brands if they are ‘artistically’ made and don’t feature products or company logos. So, by complying with the rules but placing objects with products in anamorphic perspectives painted on them in front of the murals, the illusion of walls with products on them appeared as pedestrians passing by ended up in the right angle.

Oatly learned that the city of Paris only accepts murals from brands if they are ‘artistically’ made and don’t feature products or company logos. It’s important to follow the rules, we thought to ourselves, but we also wanted to give the Parisians a proper introduction to Oatly as a norm-challenging brand.

Oatly had been available in France for a while but never done a proper campaign to let people know about it – it was time to let the people of France know what kind of company we are and that Oatly had arrived.

The brief was to create a site-specific and local campaign that would reach far beyond the borders of Paris.

The campaign had two related objectives. The first was increased brand awareness, proven by the second objective of increased sales.

The documentation quickly became our most shared, liked, and commented posts to date, or as brands put it, the walls went viral. Sales in France boosted to 28% over the average of the preceding three months.

The creative idea was 100% born out of the insight and limitations that the city of Paris only accepts murals from brands if they are ‘artistically’ made and don’t feature products or company logos, in combination with really needing to show the products and logo to increase brand and product awareness.

We believe people like fun and creative ideas, especially if they are made by the hands of humans, and we also wanted to show France that Oatly is a norm-challenging brand. We trusted the effect of the objects being placed in front of the walls and creating the illusion of a complete painting to be appealing for a wide audience while demonstrating our challenger-brand mentality in a fun way, and that people would want to share the experience on social media. Our own documentation was a large part of the strategy, to have the murals travel outside of Paris to other parts of France and the world.

Local artists hand-painted Oatly packages in anamorphic perspectives on objects chosen to both look natural in the city landscape and a bit misplaced at the same time. We then placed the objects (a pallet with boxes, a porta-potty, and a van) with the distorted pictures in front of walls with our messages spray painted on them, creating the illusion of complete murals with the products either complementing or altering the message, stopping pedestrians in their tracks when they suddenly ended up at the right angle. Naturally, we wanted to make sure people outside of Paris got to experience the illusion, so we documented the placement of the objects and uploaded the film to social media.

The footfall for the 3 murals was limited to 555,205, but our own documentation multiplied those numbers. Paid media across TikTok and Instagram amassed 18mil video views, 35mil impressions, and a 48% engagement rate. That got the organic views going across more social platforms, including Linkedin. According to the social listening tool Brandwatch, the Paris murals were seen almost 10mil times online, with over 2.8k engagements and almost 500 unique authors talking about the campaign. This resulted in a sales boost of 28% over the previous 3-month average in France.