This work comes straight out of a very specific and widely relatable cultural insight: Thanksgiving is a meat and dairy-based holiday and therefore nearly impossible for plant-based eaters to navigate. We created a complete audio experience in the form of an interactive telephone hotline to help our plant-based friends face the challenge of America’s most celebrated meal.

The Situation:

Every Thanksgiving, millions of plant-based eaters endure a heavily meat and dairy-based holiday meal with family and friends who rarely understand or accept their dietary choices.

The Brief:

Create an irreverent, insightful and nonsensical outlet for plant-based eaters’ holiday stress and anxiety. Empathize and entertain.

The Objective:

Get people to call the hotline. Make it unexpected, unfiltered and unapologetic.

Strategy: Arm plant-based eaters with everything they need (plus some stuff they don’t) to not only get through the difficulties of Thanksgiving dinner and the tense conversations that come with it, but even positively influence their family & friends.

Target Audience: Any 18+ plant-based eaters who are going to Thanksgiving dinner with meat and dairy-eating family and friends.

The Oatly Emotional Support Hotline for Plant Based Eaters Attending Traditional Meat and Dairy-based Thanksgiving Dinners was created for plant based folks in need of an outlet to blow off the stress and anxiety put on them every year by this traditional meal. Running the week leading up to the Thanksgiving, the hotline offered an obvious-yet-inventive solution to an age-old dilemma. People dialed 1-866-OAT-LINE and received tons of free emotional support in the form of: positive affirmations, conversation stoppers, a motivational locker room speech, the soothing sounds of smooth jazz, plant-based factoids, a blank audio void to scream into and more stuff there’s not enough words left to list. Then on Thanksgiving day, we hired two plant-based operators to answer people’s hotline calls, live. They chatted, joked, educated and generally helped callers through the awkward conversations & infuriating situations they’d be encountering with their meat & dairy-eating family and friends.

All the creative work was concentrated on the 7-day window leading up to and including Thanksgiving 2022 (11/17-11/24), when stress around this famous American holiday is peaking.

Plant-based eaters called 1-866-OAT-LINE to experience positive affirmations, personal hype-ups, compelling plant-based lifestyle factoids, a motivational locker room speech, a blank audio void to scream into, the soothing sounds of smooth jazz and so much more.

On Thanksgiving Day, Oatly Emotional Support Hotline callers were able to get live emotional support from plant-based experts directly, from 3:00 to 10:00 PM EST.

Old school tear away flyers in coffee shops all over the U.S.

OOH Wild Postings in NYC, LA and Chicago

6 Tik Tok videos

2 Instagram videos

Promoted posts across FB/IG

Partnership with James Beard-nominated chef Amanda Cohen—owner of the New York City-based vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy—to curate a special, plant-based holiday menu. Using Oatly products, Cohen recreated three, classic Thanksgiving dishes

Sanity saved for many: 3,183 calls to the hotline over just 7 days , equaling 7,914.64 minutes of emotional support

The average call length was nearly 3 minutes. Which we think is pretty good for a hotline full of nonsense.

Reached over 848k people

313 comments, 460 shares, 462 saves indicating this was a message that resonated with possibly millions of people if you generously extrapolate

People requested another Emotional Support Hotline for Christmas and other meal-based American holidays. Thousands of plant-based people felt seen, heard, less stressed and more confident to get through Thanksgiving dinner.