When Brands Break: How Nutter Butter's Descent Into Madness Reveals The Absurdity Of Corporate Social Media

Eleven years ago, American casual-breakfast chain Denny's hired 23-year-old Amber Gordon to improve the brand's presence on Tumblr. Perhaps with carte blanche, Gordon took the opportunity to make memes, infusing well-known meme templates with a pro-Denny's slant.

It might be difficult to imagine today, when every corporate social media account appears to be run by a meme-literate millennial or zoomer who can jigger a pro-brand message into a trending template, but this was considered radical and hilarious in 2013:

Fast forward to now, and we're getting this from Nutter Butter:

Obviously, something has shifted over the past decade of social media marketing. Brands – or rather, the people who run their social media accounts – have spent the last decade trying a variety of memey tactics to appeal to online customers, trying to recapture the magic that got Denny's a flood of positive press in the mid-2010s.

Some have succeeded with sassy tweets (Wendys), socio-political commentary (Steak-Umm) and satirical, psychosexual horror (Duolingo), but for every brand that received positive attention for an original, creative bit of viral marketing, there seemed to be a dozen imitators that got thwacked with "Silence, Brand" memes from frustrated consoomers.

Which brings us to the case of Nutter Butter. It's difficult to imagine how turning "Mr. Nutter Butter" into a genuinely terrifying Slenderman-like cryptid that jumpscares TikTok viewers will lead to the sale of more Nutter Butters, but one certainly can't argue with the increase in attention to the Nutter Butter TikTok account.

As late as March 2023, Nutter Butter was getting four-digit view counts with stereotypical corporate memes, the kind that merely smashes together a native TikTok trend and the product.

For example, this TikTok, showing a Nutter Butter in its package captioned, "I'm in my BAG, don't text," gained 7,800 views in 16 months.

Compare that to this TikTok, posted three days ago: A computer voice flatly reads, "In a land where peanut prance, In a land where peanut prance, Cookie do the nutty dance." Colors then flash and a Nutter Butter cookie contorts and distorts. A disembodied voice growls "I Want It Back" over a ghastly face made of various Nutter Butter cookies. A cat appears on screen for milliseconds. "YES," reads a final bit of text.

This TikTok gained a whopping 3.3 million views in three days.

It's one of many videos Nutter Butter TikTok has been churning out for the last 15 months that frankly seem to have contempt for Nutter Butter — in one popular video, the cookies are portrayed in a house that seems like it could have been the set of Skinamarink. "Mr. Nutter Butter," an old brand mascot, has been turned into an eldritch horror; in an ongoing storyline, a guy named "Aidan" appears to have been cursed to live his life as a Nutter Butter.

One imagines the suits at Nutter Butter's parent company, Nabisco, probably don't want to see their product portrayed this way, but something is clearly working with Nutter Butter's TikTok "strategy." Exactly what is working is harder to define, much like Nutter Butter's TikToks themselves.

Perhaps the answer can be found by studying previous brands that have found success using the language of the internet. Brands like Denny's, Steak-umm and even the state of New Jersey all shared some key elements to their success.

The first is that all the brands' viral social media accounts were the brainchildren of internet natives. The second is that these internet natives were – seemingly – given free rein to post whatever they pleased.

In the case of Denny's, that was Amber Gordon, the 23-year-old internet native who had the bright idea to combine memes and corporate advertising. The official Twitter account of the state of New Jersey was run by Megan Coyne and Pearl Gabel, who used the account mostly to poke fun at other states and make memes. Steak-umm's Twitter was run by Nathan Allebach, who garnered the most attention when he used the account to wax poetic about the role of brands on social media in an exceptionally meta moment in 2018.

In every case, the creators posted content that ran contrary to what one would expect from an official social media channel. In general, the "corporate social media account" is a venue where the bottom line is popularly understood to be "make the company money without getting into trouble."

When a brand successfully strikes out on social media, it's because its content doesn't look like focus-grouped, carefully curated bits of messaging that underwent dozens of editorial checks until getting the CEO's final sign-off. It instead looks like a memer who fell into a social media manager gig and, perhaps bored out of their mind, took a massive, job-endangering risk, went rogue and infused the brand's voice with their own.

When it works for consumers who are also online, likely folks in the Millennial/Gen Z demographic that know what it's like to aimlessly drift into a fake computer job, it feels like "one of us" made it.

At least, that's the myth, and it may not be true for every singular social media account. It's at least not the case for Nutter Butter, whose TikTok account is run by Dentsu Creative, an advertising agency that is absolutely running a strategic, carefully thought-out campaign.

Earlier this year, Marketing Brew talked to creatives at Dentsu to look into the campaign. Dentsu's Aubrey Burrough and Blake Pleasant explained to the publication that Nutter Butter's wild method is a response to other brands' "overly curated Instagram aesthetic."

"We just feel like perfect curation feels fake, so we’ve moved beyond that, culturally, as Nutter Butter," Pleasant said (out of context, that reads like a wild thing to say in the first person as a brand of peanut butter cookies).

It's doubtful that the average Nutter Butter TikTok viewer is aware of all that though. To someone not reading advertising magazines, it seems like another native internet user triumphing over their corporate overlords, losing their mind while making absurd TikToks about Nutter Butter.

While it may be existentially depressing to learn that Nutter Butter's "rogue employee" is just a myth, Pleasant's comment underlines just how far the goalposts of "good branded content" have moved in the past decade.

Nutter Butter emerged from the sea of corporate accounts Fellow Kids-ing their way through social media with surrealism that stretches into malice, both for the viewer and the product itself. Its videos use the language of analog horror and ARGs to craft a singular presence that, whether intentionally or not, highlights the absurdity of brands trying to sell frivolous products through social media.

Few are willing to positively accept a traditional "commercial" on TikTok like you'd see on television, and more are growing weary of brands mashing their products into memes. In this landscape, Nutter Butter found success by killing the idea of meme-based advertising and instead going with a genuine artistic vision — one that's nihilistic and upsetting, but undoubtedly intriguing.

Where brands go from here, however, is another story. How can McDonald's slap "when u r out of chicken mcnuggies" on a picture of Grumpy Cat now that Nutter Butter has demonstrated how to gain an audience by making peanut butter cookies look like Lovecraftian portals to madness? How can Chips Ahoy and Wheat Thins glaze each other in social media threads when Nutter Butter established the new way to advertise a product is to annihilate its brand image?

Now that Nutter Butter has gotten media attention for its TikTok account, it's likely a matter of time before another brand tries to replicate its success. However, it's also likely that the next brand to go full surreal horror will be met with the same pushback as every post-Wendy's sassy Twitter account.

What Nutter Butter has done is unprecedented. "Unprecedented" reads as "brave," and that bravery has been the key to getting online audiences to support corporate social media accounts. What those audiences hate, however, is copycats, and it's difficult to see how any brand can copy or follow Nutter Butter's descent into madness.

The paradigm Nutter Butter has established here feels too far gone for another advertising agency to top. With that in mind, Nutter Butter might just be the last brand to "meme" effectively on social media.