Until recently, Nutter Butter’s deeply bizarre TikTok account, filled with nightmarish and surreal imagery featuring the brand’s peanut butter sandwich cookies, largely flew under the radar. But after TikTok nano-influencer Cassie Fitzwater urged viewers to drop everything and head to Nutter Butter’s TikTok account earlier this month, millions have done exactly that.

Fitzwater’s video, which has since garnered over 3.2 million views, catapulted Nutter Butter’s unhinged TikTok content into the internet spotlight. “One reaction video to our account turned into thousands,” said Zach Poczekaj, senior social media manager on the Nutter Butter account at Dentsu Creative—the organic social agency for the brand’s parent company, Mondelēz International—in an interview with Ad Age.

Poczekaj and his team responded to the concerns Fitzwater shared in her TikTok—“Nutter Butter, are you guys okay? Are you doing alright? I might have nightmares.”—with a characteristically bizarre video that will likely fuel more nightmares for the nano-influencer. That video, in which two Nutter Butter cookies with unsettling faces eerily repeat “yes,” has quickly garnered just under 15 million views, along with 250,000 shares. 

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In the two weeks since Fitzwater posted her video, Nutter Butter’s TikTok following has “more than doubled,” Poczekaj said, “and I would say we’re probably on track to hit a million followers by the end of the month, which is crazy.” As of this writing, the brand’s account has over 984,000 followers.

While Nutter Butter’s surreal TikTok content has only entered the internet zeitgeist over the past few weeks, it’s not a new element of the brand’s social strategy. Rather, it’s the culmination of a social strategy Dentsu Creative and Mondelēz have been fine-tuning for roughly three years to help the brand stand out in the snack aisle.  

“Nutter Butter is one of the brands in our portfolio that doesn’t have a lot of marketing behind it, so we can kind of have this safe space to experiment,” said Kelly Amatangelo, digital and social lead at Mondelēz. “And what we found, even just a couple of years ago, was there was a lack of unaided awareness” of the brand. That spurred the Nutter Butter team to begin developing its current social strategy focused on unhinged—and memorable—content to “get Nutter Butter back into people’s top of mind and make it start coming up in conversations,” she said. 

Also read: Why absurdist humor is in right now

The brand’s absurd social content isn’t just a jumble of random surreal imagery. Over the past few years, Nutter Butter has constructed a brand universe across Instagram and TikTok centered on a recurring cast of characters and storylines. 

The two main players in the plot unfolding on Nutter Butter’s social channels are Aidan—named after a brand superfan who regularly commented his name on Nutter Butter’s Instagram posts when the brand was still developing its absurd social strategy—and the Nutter Butter Man, a Willy Wonka-esque figure who appeared in one of the brand’s ads from the 1970s and is “sort of a foe to Aidan,” Poczekaj said. 

Rounding out the supporting cast are Nadia (Aidan spelled backward), an amorphous cloud of black smoke; Mr. 1021, a silhouette of a CEO-like figure with an artificially deepened voice; and Nutey Nuter, one of the peanut butter cookies with a human face who starred in Nutter Butter’s response video to Fitzwater. 

“If it were compared to a TV show, it’s definitely not one where you could jump into an episode and understand the whole thing,” said Olivia Matalon, a Nutter Butter content creator at Dentsu Creative. “But if you watch it all the way through, you can definitely pick up clear narratives that really do tell a story and relate back to our main purpose of bringing the cookie to people’s attention.”

Building a brand universe

Constructing the plot lines and characters behind Nutter Butter’s social content has been an ongoing, multi-year collaboration between the brand and its social media audience, Poczekaj said. Perhaps the most salient example is the protagonist Aidan, whose superfan namesake, Aidan Maloney, joined the Nutter Butter social media team as an intern at Dentsu Creative this summer before being hired as a full-time associate social media manager last month. 

“We do have this framework of lore, and we’re constantly developing that, but it really is based on what the fans are saying they want us to put in our content,” Poczekaj said. “They help us write the briefs. During our weekly TikTok brainstorms, we’re just looking at the comments that fans left the previous week and trying to find common themes or common emotions or reactions to the lore, and we try to bake that back into the current week’s content, so that it’s even more jarring when people see it and they feel more emotionally invested because they helped interpret the story.”

The social team named the CEO-like character Mr. 1021 largely because users were commenting “October 1”—apparently an inside joke among Nutter Butter fans—on Nutter Butter TikTok posts, though the origin of the “2” remains unclear.

“We were like okay, let’s have fun with that date,” said Sandra Yang, associate director of social on the Nutter Butter account at Dentsu Creative. 

In the past year, a loyal group of fans has gathered in the “GameTheorists” subreddit—a Reddit community dedicated to the “Game Theorists” YouTube channel, which analyzes and theorizes about various video games—to untangle the bizarre and complex lore that’s taken shape on Nutter Butter’s social channels over the last three years, said Yang.

The Nutter Butter team doesn’t directly interact with that community, but they “very much study” the conversations taking shape in the subreddit and “try to take all the theories into consideration,” Poczekaj said. “We’ve been planting the lore for some time, but in the last two weeks, I've seen so many people say ‘I've spent an hour scrolling through your account,’ or ‘I've looked at all of these videos, and I'm trying to decode it all,’ which is wild,” he added. “It wasn’t just a single post—it was this whole body of work.” 

Nutter Butter’s recent pivot from content that blended footage of the brand’s social team (often slathered in peanut butter) with absurd editing to a hodgepodge of surreal imagery and digital assets assembled in Photoshop, was also driven by its social audience’s preferences, Yang said.

“We saw that content was really picking up, so that’s when we were like, ‘Okay, let’s go all in on that kind of visual,” she said. 

Leaning into TikTok

In the days since Nutter Butter’s TikTok account gained mass awareness on the internet, the brand’s videos on the platform have each received at least 5 million views. But the account first started picking up traction over the summer, with several videos racking up over a million views—a shift Poczekaj attributes to the social team’s increased focus on “brainstorming more specifically for TikTok” by upping the surrealism of Nutter Butter’s content. After all, so-called “unhinged” content is a pillar of the platform and has been readily embraced by brands such as Duolingo and Scrub Daddy.

“If the post makes too much sense to us, then it doesn’t perform as well,” Poczekaj said. “It should be a little confusing to us, even.”

Amatangelo added: “From a brand perspective, if we understand it, then it’s not good, because we’re not the consumer target. It’s actually better if we don't understand it.” 

When Nutter Butter jokingly informed its followers on April Fools’ Day 2023 that the brand’s Instagram account would be “taking a new direction” and swapping absurdism for more conventional recipe content, fans in the comments were horrified, said Caitlin Bolmarcich, Nutter Butter brand manager at Mondelēz. “WHY IS IT A NORMAL POST?!? I didnt follow for this,” one user wrote, while another said simply, “o no. they went normal.”

Unsurprisingly, Nutter Butter’s bizarre content has resonated most with Gen Z consumers, known for their love of absurd humor. But the brand’s TikTok content has also garnered a multi-generational audience, Yang said, with millennials, Gen X and even boomers discussing Nutter Butter’s TikTok strategy in the past few weeks. 

While Mondelēz hasn’t been able to determine whether the recent virality of Nutter Butter’s TikTok content has directly impacted sales, “the comments have definitely pointed toward a lot of awareness of the brand in market,” Bolmarcich said. 

“It’s still a very live situation, but we’re seeing a lot of comments like, ‘I haven't bought Nutter Butter in 30 years,’ or ‘I haven't thought about the brand in a while.’ So, we’re looking forward to seeing how that impacts the brand.” One of the top comments on Nutter Butter’s video responding to Fitzwater, for instance, reads, “this makes me want a nutter butter, and I have no idea why.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen [virality] to this extent and this magnitude, even across any of our other brands in the portfolio,” Amatangelo said. Other Mondelēz brands include Oreo, Sour Patch Kids and Ritz, among a slew of other snack brands, and many of those brands have helped fuel the TikTok conversation around Nutter Butter by commenting on various videos from the brand. Sour Patch Kids racked up over 100,000 likes on a comment reading, “Hey! What” on a Nutter Butter video from July, and another comment from the brand consisting only of the word “oh” garnered more than 83,000 likes earlier this month. 

“We’ve seen a lot of comments like, ‘Are they just throwing stuff out there?” Bolmarcich said. “But no, this is a very intentional strategy. It's been done for years, and to get recognition for it has been really rewarding over the past two weeks or so.”