Out of Control

If you're from around here and you find yourself in the city's commuter rail station you will surely notice the 360-integrated advertising campaign that boasts next to a blindfolded consumer, "I love Oatly in my coffee if I don't know its Oatly."

I can hardly imagine the ad executives standing in front of their clients in a Manhattan conference room pitching the idea. You'll like our product, just so long as you don't know its our product. But really, how often is that the case?

It's not exactly the same, but music appreciation has some similarities. Do you remember when Apple in 2014 pushed to all it's iTunes subscribers U2's Songs of Innocence? Was that cutting edge marketing? Maybe. But in the era of album "ownership" through purchasing individual downloads the idea of extreme exposure by putting it on everyone's device must have been the ultimate board room bruhaha. The underlying premise posits the same scenario; you'll love our new album, it's just that you don't know it yet.

Exposure is currency. That is why I marvel at the reverse engineering of the Ricketts' Cubs and the Yankees' broadcasts to private subscription networks. The Wirtzs' did it first in 1992 with Hawkvision, and it must have netted them a truckload of cash because we have repeat offenders in our midst. I wasn't raised in the Midwest, and we had a professional baseball team much closer to home, but I still remember tuning in to Cubs broadcasts on WGN from afar taking in the afternoon delight of Harry Cary and Steve Stone giving life and breath to what seemed (at the time) like a dull, slowly revealing novel. But it made a fan-for-life long before I took up residency in Chicago. Sellouts and attendance records at Wrigley Field prove my point.

Gracie Abrams opened for Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour last year and this summer in a Thursday afternoon slot she held an audience of 115,000 in Grant Park breathless for an hour. The conduit really is exposure, but for Abrams we wouldn't add the caveat, "if I don't know its Abrams." But I'm thinking title insurance and it's varied and mercurial panoply of endorsements might be closer to Oatly.

Title insurance is an essential fortification behind any real estate transaction, but like it's plant based brethren, not many people appreciate it for what it is. I don't see a line forming at the county fair at the tent titled "Title Insurance," even if it is next to the tent purposely wafting vanilla scent into the air to draw in the crowds for over priced funnel cakes. You (should) love title insurance, even if you don't know (what) it (is).

This is how we could conduct the blindfolded study: first time homebuyers go through the arduous task of finding the right home, securing a commitment from a lender to finance the purchase, and then choosing a date to complete the acquisition. Unbeknownst to them, behind the scenes, a title insurance company researches the public record, identifies liens and encumbrances against the land producing a universal form of commitment to insure, coordinates with the buyer's lender, tracks down payoff statements, invoices, assessment and waiver information, gathers conveyance documents from the owners, prepares a promulgated and mandatory Closing Disclosure. On deadline, revealing to the buyers we are ready to meet your selected appointment. Then collecting and balancing funds into escrow, notarizing legal documents, disbursing payments to lienholders, the county tax assessor, municipal bodies, utilities, recording the transfer of ownership per statute, paying appropriate transfer taxes, and reporting the sale to the I.R.S., all without ever letting on that we were involved.

We really are Oatly. You love us in the largest financial transaction of your life if you don't know we are there.