NotCo turns a dairy-industry lawsuit into its own ad campaign

Chilean food-tech start-up NotCo launched NotMilk, a plant-based alternative to dairy milk, and within a short time the powerful local dairy industry declared war. It filed a lawsuit that portrayed NotMilk as an unscrupulous company misleading consumers into buying something that is not milk. The back-and-forth dragged on for years without either side moving, which hurt the brand more than the claim did.

The agency MRM Santiago decided the only way out was a move the other side could not counter. It read two years of legal filings and found that the dairy lawyers, trying to condemn NotMilk, had written an accurate and persuasive portrait of it. NotCo and MRM copy-pasted excerpts from the lawsuit verbatim and turned those into the campaign: print and billboard ads that were literally the opponent's own words.

Consumers read the ads and laughed at the dairy industry with the brand instead of at NotMilk. The switch reframed the legal attack as weakness and made the accuser look defensive. The trial intention for NotMilk, already strong, rose further, and the campaign generated widespread earned coverage that put pressure on the rival guild to drop its case - before a court ever fully settled the dispute in NotCo's favour.