The ingredients of an award-winning “corporate” campaign: “Custard by Giggs”, for Oatly

By Jenna Gifford, Senior Consulting Director, creative strategist

This week, we picked up win for our “Custard by Giggs” campaign with Oatly in the PR Week Corporate Affairs Awards: Best Use of Social Media and/or Influencer category, as well as a Highly Commended for Best Corporate Agency in the UK.

It’s a great feeling to be recognised in both categories, but for me the campaign award for “Custard by Giggs” was extra special – particularly because, on first glance, it’s not an obvious choice. A UK rap legend teams up with a Swedish oat drink company to collaborate on a limited edition drop of Vanilla Custard, complete with exclusive Cake & Custard merchandise. It doesn’t scream “corporate PR”.

And yet that is why I love this campaign so much.  Something that could easily have been a fun celeb partnership was instead imbued with real impact and purpose around a genuine inclusion and health issue. It is creative and strategic. A consumer campaign that also works for corporate audiences.

Here are four reasons I believe this campaign is a winner:

• It’s authentic: the collaboration was borne when Gigg’s slid into Oatly’s DMs to tell them that their Vanilla Custard had “changed his life”. His genuine love for the product gave the campaign an innate authenticity and gave Oatly the confidence to step back and let Giggs take centre stage, which meant it resonated with media and consumers. As Trapped Magazine said, “This collaboration is genius and honest and we really hope other rappers and influencers start to realise that they can have dialogue with brands that they love without having to wait for brands to approach them.”
• Creatively executed: the campaign sprung organically from that original DM, and Oatly knew that it was too good a chance to pass up. Together with Giggs, Oatly and Blurred crafted the most unlikely collaboration of the year – Custard by Giggs. Drawing on the hype playbook, the limited-edition product was dropped to the public with its own Cake & Custard merch and all the fanfare of the latest Supreme collab, including a personal appearance by Giggs to give out Cake & Custard at a bakery in his home borough of Peckham in South London. Judges praised it as a “Great example of an impactful, creative campaign that leveraged a specific opportunity and was spun up at speed.”
• With a serious underlying message: Giggs and his son are lactose intolerance, and Oatly Vanilla Custard meant they could once again enjoy their favourite dessert – you guessed it, Cake & Custard. Five million people in the UK suffer from lactose intolerance, a condition which disproportionately impacts Black, Asian and Ethnic minority communities. We conducted research with the BAME community via specialist research agency, Word on the Curb to help us better understand the issue, ensuring we could tailor the campaign to the audience and craft our messaging to help raise awareness of lactose intolerance and its impact on lives.
• And serious results: we thought that a personal request from Jay Z for the merch and online engagement from influencers such as Rita Ora, Wretch 32, Alfie Steiner, Chase and Status and Harry Pinero were highlights enough. But most significantly, our messaging landed. In quantitative research conducted two months after the campaign (vs industry standard of two days):
  • 14% of UK respondents from ethnic minority backgrounds recalled seeing the campaign
  • Ethnic minority respondents were 7 times more likely to recall seeing the campaign than white respondents
  • And under 35s (of all backgrounds) were more than twice as likely to recall it vs the general population.
  • Of those who recalled the campaign, 94% said it increased their awareness of lactose intolerance and its impact on ethnic minority communities. Those are big numbers when extrapolated!

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that none of this would have been possible without a client as creative and brave as Oatly.  Let alone a celebrity as passionate and open-minded as Giggs. But I hope these lessons serve as a reminder that ‘fun’ and ‘creative’ can also be ‘purposeful’ and ‘impactful’.

Now let me just check my DMs…