Is brain-rot TikTok cringe yet? The guy who started the trend says ‘almost’

A few months ago, I was scrolling through TikTok when I came across a video that stopped me in my tracks. It starred an animated frog, dressed in a wizard hat, robe, and pink nail polish, superimposed over a psychedelic background and speaking in a hypnotizing, ethereal voice. “It’s time to stop doing nothing, and start doing something,” he crooned. “I cast . . . motivation!”

I’d stumbled across the Pine Wizard Frog—a recurring character on the official TikTok account of household cleaning fluid Pine-Sol. Pine-Sol’s page, with its surrealist visuals and hypnotizing songs, is an example of what I call “brain-rot-brand TikTok”: It’s a subgenre of digital marketing that rejects traditional advertising in favor of the kind of content that actually performs well on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Rather than selling products directly, brain-rot-brand TikTok embraces head-turning, often nonsensical choices, like fried visuals, abrasive design, and unsettling storylines, to spread brand awareness and—presumably—boost sales. 

A few years ago, most companies wouldn’t have touched brain-rot TikTok with a 10-foot pole. But as brands like Duolingo have built entire communities around bucking digital brand norms, others have gradually jumped on the bandwagon. Nutter Butter might be the first brand that went full brain rot, with hits like a Nutter Butter taking a trip to the playground on what appeared to be way too much acid. More recently, Brita, Amtrak, Sour Patch Kids, Brisk Canada, Mug Root Beer, and Dr Pepper have adopted some flavor of brain-rot branding. 

The strategy appears to be working. According to Clorox, which owns Brita and Pine-Sol, in the past year Pine-Sol was the only brand to crack the top 15 in TikTok’s #cleaning category (the other 14 were creators with followings). In June, Brita’s TikTok content raked in more than 44 million views. In July, Amtrak scored its most-viewed Instagram post of all time by trying out a weirder brand voice. And multiple years into its brain-rot experiment, Nutter Butter still regularly amasses millions of views with its TikToks.

But as someone who’s now likely watched hundreds of these videos (for research, obviously), I’ve been wondering: Is brain-rot-brand TikTok cringe yet? As more and more brands try to break through the crowded attention economy with wackier social concepts, at what point does it stop feeling like they’re in on the joke and more like a desperate plea for attention?

To get to the bottom of this query, I rang up Ryan Benson. He’s the self-described “social media menace” who led Nutter Butter’s original brain-rot strategy, helped build Sour Patch Kids’s uniquely threatening brand voice, and has since gone on to found his own creative agency, Loudmouth. We discussed Nutter Butter’s creepy ’60s commercial, a tea brand that’s weirdly into cheese, and Dunkin’s horny spider donut.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you give a bit of background on the brand story you were telling with Nutter Butter? Why did it make sense to go so weird—even weirder than Duolingo, which many people cite as the OG unhinged brand?

With Nutter Butter, our agency contract was for I think 23 Mondelēz brands. Nutter Butter was a tier three—there were three tiers, so they were on the bottom. 

Like a C-list snack?

Yes, exactly. And that meant the resources that were available to each brand were fully dependent on what tier they were. So tier one is Oreo, and as you can imagine Oreo has six agencies working for it and endless resources. There are ads on TV, billboards, all sorts of agencies. Nutter Butter had $2,000 in an expense account and me.

The narrative we were working with was, this is an old cookie, there’s not a lot of story here. What can we do to get people talking about Nutter Butter? And as we experimented with different formats—brain rot being one of those—what we learned is people were left asking, “Is Nutter Butter okay?” And we were like, “Hey, it’s not, ‘How do I buy a Nutter Butter off the shelf,’ but they’re talking about this.” 

So then we learned how to feed the conversations that they wanted to see. We picked up from the comments like, “Oh, they’re talking about this aspect of the photo–let’s make sure that we edit that into the next one.” Or, “They’re noticing that we put Morse code in the bottom of the image. Let’s make sure we put a message in a different coded language in the next one.” It actually became a conversation.

Through that, we developed Aidan and brought back the Nutter Butter man from the ’60s commercial, and we really started to reintroduce all these creepy analog horror themes. [Editor’s note: Aidan is an original recurring character in Nutter Butter’s videos, based on one of the brand’s biggest online fans.]

I think what some people miss when they’re like, “Let’s copy and paste the Nutter Butter approach,” is that we didn’t have to make things up. We were just pulling from the old commercial that exists already.

If you were consulting for another brand, how would you advise them on whether they should get in on this strategy? 

The first question I would be asking is, “Why?” And if their reason is anything at all about Nutter Butter, I would tell them no. 

What made Nutter Butter so successful is that we already had the audience that was receptive to the weirdness. We were playing off of things that we saw—they were posting, they were reposting, they were interacting on—so we knew that our audience had a shared interest. We understood that some of the outrage that we saw was actually fanship. They were following, they wanted to find out, they were up for the antics. And somehow, at the end of the day, we actually influenced people to go buy more off the shelves. Once the client saw that it was actually somehow affecting sales numbers, they were like, “Okay, go for it.”

I encourage everyone to try out-of-the-box things and do new things for brands that haven’t had attention on them. But if the only reason you want to do it is because it worked for Nutter Butter, go back to the drawing board, because I don’t want you to waste your time. Sure, weird people might see it, but are you going to alienate all of your actual followers?

Are you also noticing more of this brain-rot-brand strategy online? If so, I’m curious if there are any examples that come to mind.

Yeah, absolutely. One of my new favorite things that I’ve just developed as a personality trait is I attract people sending me things from brands that are going rogue or going brain rot, and they’re like, “This is your legacy. You did this.” 

Off the top of my head, some brands that I love that are doing the brain-rot approach right now: Mug Root Beer is insane; Brisk Canada is insane; Dr Pepper is doing a big one right now—not necessarily analog horror vibes, but they are deep-frying images, they’re purposefully low quality. It’s stupid, irreverent humor. These are promising to me because they all seem like they’re playing off the same energy of like, “Oh, it worked in the comments last time.” Brisk Canada’s thing is cheese. They make tea in a can, but they love shredding cheese onto the can. They love just copious amounts of cheese. It makes no sense. They don’t sell cheese. 

What kinds of mistakes do you see companies making when they try this out?

The thing that I see being a problem is that some of these brands have adopted this brain-rot strategy not understanding that it’s a means of communication that transcends traditional marketing. It does that for a reason, because we’ve developed this ability to communicate without selling. But then if a brand comes and co-ops this ability to communicate without selling in order to sell, they’re just kind of shitting on it.

I think that we will continue to see brands try to adopt this, but I don’t know how many will be successful, because they have to understand that at the end of the day, they’re selling to people who experience real things and experience a real world outside. There are two different worlds operating, and the mastery is understanding how to join these communities and have conversations that are two-sided, instead of just showing up and being like, “Hello, you dumb kids—you like cheese on your tea? Well, I have a six-pack and it’s $29.99.” You lose people. And for some brands, all of this is just a ploy to sell, so it will have issues.

I don’t want to make you burn any bridges with brands, but I am curious if you’ve seen anyone try the more unhinged strategy in a way that wasn’t really working for you.

I don’t have any bridges here, so it may burn, but I’m not on the other side. Dunkin’ Donuts and their spider donut thing. They did a first post with an apology graphic, where they bolded certain letters and it spelled out “spidey” or something. That was actually duplicative of my work two or three years ago, where I posted an apology from Nutter Butter and bolded letters to spell “Aidan.” It was the exact same format—with their logo and their colors—almost down to the font. And then they did it again the next year. 

This last year, they put a lot of budget into an experiential drive-through where they decorated the store, but I did see some commentary of fans being like, “Hey, we’re kind of done with the horny spider donut thing.” They’re milking it. 

On that note, do you see a point at which we reach a critical mass of this kind of thing? What’s going to happen that makes people say, like, “Ugh, this is stupid—I’m over it”?

Honestly, sometimes I question if we’re there. I think back to the evolution of the Nutter Butter account. When I started, we were not immediately posting these deep-fried, demon-in-a-closet-covered-in-peanut-butter-type vibes. We were posting memes and text posts on Twitter and doing brand things. So it’s not like we’re a full anomaly and we’ve never done the things that other brand accounts have done. We tried everything. So I question how many brands right now are in the early stages of what we did and are about to hit a wall of responses of people being like, “Meh,” because there’s already comments on my old stuff being like, “Okay, guys, you’ve played this out too long.”

I also questioned the apology trend that hit a couple months ago. For me that was a turning point, because when we did it, we fully understood like, “Hey, it’s not normal for brands to post an apology, it could go south.” We understood this itself is a little bit risky, absurd, extreme. And then it devolved. I question how many brands are about to be shamed, because going back to what I was saying earlier, this method of communication is supposed to be human-based. I don’t know how many brands are pursuing it with that in mind. If you’re just deploying 15 assets in a campaign that are scheduled, you’re not doing any community management, so there’s no user insights in whatever you’re building. They won’t necessarily feel like they’re along for the ride. It will just be like, “Oh, they’re doing an absurdist thing.”

If you add in another degree of people doing it just because it worked for Nutter Butter, there’s no natural tie-in. Now you’re just throwing a pizza party for the marketing team. It’s hard to make a prediction, but I just feel like we’re going to see a brand like Palantir get in on it, or we’re going to see something dystopian, and then everyone’s going to be like, “We’ve had enough.” I don’t think we’re there yet, but I feel like we’ve been bordering on it.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91464170/is-brain-rot-tiktok-cringe