So let’s talk about it.
I’m sure by now you’ve seen the Nutter Butter tiktok account, or at least the many, many people talking about it. So let’s talk about it.
Well for a start it’s pretty insane.
There are a couple of components to the nutter butter utter insanity that I can piece together so let’s go over them.
First of all, there was a meme trend in the late 2010s surrounding surreal and nonsensical ideas. Creating weird images and incoherent sentences that walked the line between comedy and horror. “Me and the boys at 3AM looking for Beans!” you may be familiar.
Over the last few years the analog horror scene exploded on Youtube, I believe this started with five nights at freddy’s fan animations but I may be wrong about that. Analog horror utilises lofi vhs video and audio, glitching visuals and grain to blend animation together, creating a found footage aesthetic and bringing simple animation to life in a way that can be pretty creepy. These can range from one off instalment shorts to full scale seasons of episodic content with characters story and world building.
The last couple of years have been pretty interesting when it comes to how big corporations present themselves on social media, viral marketing seems to have become less about displaying the usps of a company or specifically their products and more about creating a hook with storytelling and… lore?
We saw this with Duolingo, which was one of the first notable examples I can think of where the mascot took over the brand completely on social media, embodying a persona that directly interacted with the audience and capitalised on highjacking social trends and entertainment, netting them over 376 million views in 3 months.
’m sure they weren’t the first to do this, but they certainly weren’t the last.
This is something that other brands have attempted to imitate with varying levels of success, Scrub Daddy, Ryan Air, Opera GX and so on.
So how is Nutter butter any different to these tongue in cheek viral sensations?
Well for a start it’s pretty insane.
So. Nutter butter.
Nutter butter seems to be creating its own blend of surrealist analog horror content, sometimes leaning more towards surreal than horror but definitely dipping into both of those lanes. They’ve created characters, kind of a narrative and are really pushing the wtf factor.
What makes something like this so viral? It’s got to be the sheer absurdity of something like this coming from such an unassuming corporate mouthpiece right? I mean it’s sure to make a few people double take, especially when it just jumpscares you on your feed.
I suppose the question I’ve been asking myself is whether this marketing format has any longevity.
Does this incredible virality actually translate to sales for a business like nutter butter? Or is it just brand deformation for an increase in follower count?