Cookie brand Nutter Butter is the latest company to enjoy success on social media this year with an “unhinged” strategy featuring weird and offbeat content.
After giving digital agency Dentsu Creative free rein to experiment with new images and videos, Nutter Butter struck gold with a quirky campaign centred around a long-term commenter and superfan, Aidan Maloney.
But instead of turning to TikTok, Nutter Butter opted to use Instagram as its main outlet for posts, just weeks after considering de-prioritising Meta’s photo and video sharing app.
It all started in January, when Nutter Butter posted a Reel of some nuts with Aidan’s name on top of them.
Then, at the end of January, the American company posted an image of a family-size pack of cookies with the name Aidan overlaid on the words “family size”.
The real kicker, though, was the caption which advised fans that they would “only respond” if their name was Aidan.
The irreverent tone really struck a chord with Instagram’s younger users, as the image was liked 11,000+ times and drove significantly more engagement overall than anything posted the entire year beforehand.
Nutter Butter then went on a hot streak with a flurry of Aidan-based posts that have been similarly well-received, including one that riffed on recent horror movie M3GAN.
Following the success, Dentsu Creative’s Ryan Benson says social media users now prefer brands to adopt a mindset that is “kind of silly” and encourages everyone to “laugh together”.
This is in contrast to the prevailing trend a few years ago when brands tried too hard to make their products or services appear vitally important to day-to-day life.
Dentsu’s Aubrey Burrough has now urged other brands to go off-piste and look for new ways to interact with people online.
“Instead of being the 90th brand to hop on the bandwagon of some kind of massive trend, we found our niche here with these really small Gen Z trends,” Burrough adds.
Nutter Butter is now planning to go even “weirder”, though it admits it needs to toe the line carefully so the humour does not become oversaturated.
