The Phoenix Mercury's prank on its players, Nutter Butter's nightmarish videos and e.l.f. and Tinder's promotion of their product collab drew attention on TikTok over the past several weeks.
This installment of Ad Age’s expanded “Creativity Top 5” series looks at the best TikTok videos posted by brands over the past few weeks.
In this month’s lineup: Gen Z employees weave internet slang into scripts for their boomer coworkers, Nutter Butter’s intentionally-unsettling videos catch TikTok’s attention and athletes begrudgingly agree to sign their embarrassing childhood photos.
Brands are often mocked when their attempts to incorporate Gen Z slang (or, increasingly, Gen Alpha slang) into their marketing come across as forced or inauthentic, or when brands misuse those slang terms entirely. The TikTok account for the Northumberland Zoo, however, attracted millions of views on a recent video when it played into that “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy by tasking the zoo’s Gen Z staff with writing a script littered with terms such as “main character energy” and “understands the assignment”—and recruiting two (much older) directors of the zoo to read it aloud.
Check out our Gen Z glossary here
The somewhat self-deprecating tone of the resulting video and the directors’ deadpan delivery of their lines attracted over 8 million views and 1.4 million likes, along with thousands of commenters pulling out their favorite moments from the video. Google even showed up to comment on the video, generating more than 66,000 likes on a comment that nods to one of the lines from the script and reads, “adding the river walk to our saved locations for the next menty b.”
Several other small businesses and organizations, including a bookstore in Paris and the U.K. National Museum of Arms & Armor, have also racked up millions of views on similar videos with scripts written by their respective Gen Z employees.
Nutter Butter has been incorporating its peanut-shaped sandwich cookies into surreal and unsettling imagery on TikTok for over a year. But that content largely went under the radar until earlier this month, when nano-influencer Cassie Fitzwater posted a video where she jokingly said she was “concerned” by the brand’s nightmarish TikTok content and asked, “Nutter Butter, are you guys okay? Are you doing alright?” Just a few days later, Nutter Butter responded directly to Fitzwater’s wellness check with another bizarre TikTok of two of the brand’s peanut cookies, which have both been given disturbing faces, repeating the word “yes” against a surreal backdrop. The brand’s response video has since generated over 13.6 million views and more than 940,000 likes, and a slew of brands—including Subway, ColourPop Cosmetics and Clearblue—joined the roughly 11,500 commenters expressing their confusion, fear or appreciation of Nutter Butter’s absurd TikTok strategy.
First dates are always nerve-wracking, especially when you’re meeting up with someone you’ve only exchanged a few words with on a dating app. E.l.f. and Tinder parodied that anxiety spiral many people experience before a first date in a video spot from Mischief @ No Fixed Address tied to the launch of a new Tinder-inspired e.l.f. makeup line. The 90-second video revolves around a woman picturing worst-case first date scenarios as she does her makeup for an upcoming date and features a cameo from influencer and reality TV star Harry Jowsey (who has over 5 million followers on TikTok) as one of her horrible imaginary first dates. The video has since received over 26.5 million views on e.l.f.’s TikTok channel, and another 12,000 on Tinder’s account.
Most professional athletes are accustomed to scrawling their signatures on posters, jerseys or other merch items. Being asked to sign awkward photos of their younger selves, however, is less routine—and, as the TikTok account for the Phoenix Mercury WNBA team discovered, it makes for great social media content. In early September, the Phoenix Mercury’s account shared a video where the person behind the camera asks several unsuspecting players if they’ll sign something, before revealing that “something” is an old photo ripped from the depths of their Facebook accounts. The TikTok captures each player’s reaction, ranging from shocked laughter to instant embarrassment that drives some players to tear up or run away from the photo.
The Phoenix Mercury’s video amassed more than 33 million views and 3.5 million likes. It also set off a TikTok trend among sports teams on the platform, with dozens of teams across the NFL, WNBA and other leagues replicating the format of the Phoenix Mercury’s viral video. It’s also recently jumped from TikTok’s sports community—Access Hollywood, for instance, shared a video of Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher asking actresses Reese Witherspoon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Hannah Einbinder to add their signatures to old photos on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards.
When TikTok beauty creator Jools Lebron spawned a pop culture phenomenon with a viral video educating viewers on how to be “very demure” and “very mindful” (among other adjectives) last month, dozens of brands hurried to participate in the trend while it was still at its peak. TV channel Freeform was arguably one of the most successful brands, generating 53 million views on a six-second clip from the Disney film “Mulan,” where the titular character lists characteristics her family expects her to possess: “Quiet and demure; graceful; polite.” The video also garnered nearly 8 million likes and over 15,000 comments, including one comment with 128,000 likes dubbing Mulan the “OG demure queen.” It just goes to show that, on TikTok, the simplest videos can attract the most attention—as long as they’re not late to the trend.
