Our bot Terri gets weird
What does ChatGPT make of surreal and absurd marketing?
Recently, we introduced Terri, territorial’s marketing AI. We’re training Terri on our brand’s voice and tone and on examples of our client work to see if Terri can produce meaningful observations about real-world activations.
In our most recent post, we wanted to see if Terri could understand a marketing joke. Now, we’re taking it a step further: What will Terri make of a marketing campaign so bizarre that it’s barely even intelligible to the people creating it?
Inspired by a recent AdAge article, we asked Terri to check out Nutter Butter’s absurdist TikTok presence. This time, we provided a more specific brief to get at the specific angle we were interested in: how their efforts compare to similar campaigns and what it means for their marketing going forward.
The Brief
Using the Findings & Indications format, please compare Nutter Butter's current absurdist TikTok campaign with other similar brand campaigns that have used nonsensical, strange, and off-kilter humor to help us understand why Nutter Butter may have chosen this path, whether it's likely to be successful, and what could potentially be next for the brand.
Terri's Findings & Indications: Nutter Butter's Absurdist TikTok Campaign
In the landscape of digital marketing, Nutter Butter's TikTok campaign exemplifies the strategic use of absurdist humor to capture and engage audiences. By comparing this with similar campaigns, we gain insights into the rationale behind such a choice and the probable trajectory of its success.
Findings:
Consumer Engagement and Cultural Alignment: Nutter Butter effectively taps into Gen Z's preference for unexpected and entertaining content, mirroring the quirky approaches seen in brands like Skittles and Old Spice, which have leveraged humor to enhance brand engagement and memorability.
Market Positioning and Differentiation: The brand capitalizes on the growing trend of "weird marketing," where unexpected narratives distinguish the brand in a crowded market. This aligns with trends seen in Duolingo’s TikTok activities, which use playful absurdity to capture audience interest and foster community.
Viral Potential and Influencer Impact: Like Wendy’s social media strategy, Nutter Butter's engagement through influencers capitalizes on viral marketing potential, with their absurdist content significantly boosting follower counts and engagement metrics.
Competitive Strategy: The success of brands such as Skittles and Old Spice has demonstrated that surreal content effectively cuts through advertising noise, making Nutter Butter’s approach a logical extension of a proven method of increasing brand visibility and recall.
Indications:
Broader Adoption of Absurdist Content: Other brands may consider adopting similar strategies, as evidenced by Nutter Butter’s effective engagement of digital-native audiences through humorous and surreal content narratives.
领英推荐
Enhanced Consumer Interaction: Encouraging interactive and narrative-driven brand experiences, like those used by Duolingo, may lead to deeper consumer loyalty and participation.
Strategic Influencer Collaborations: Leveraging influencers for viral potential remains a powerful catalyst for brand reach, as Nutter Butter’s successful amplification through influencer partnerships shows.
Future Opportunities for Innovation: The possibility of expanding character lore and engaging storylines across diverse platforms offers a pathway for Nutter Butter to continue captivating audiences while reinforcing brand identity.
---
By aligning their strategy with these findings, brands like Nutter Butter can navigate the digital market landscape effectively, using absurdist humor as a tool for dynamic engagement and continued growth.
How Did Terri Do?
What Terri Taught Us
What this series continues to demonstrate is that, at least for now, GPTs are only as useful as what they’re fed. When Terri is fed a small amount of information, such as a single article, and given a very simple prompt, it produces what is essentially marketing pablum.?
When fed multiple articles and instructed to draw specifically on a wider body of knowledge (e.g. in this post how we asked Terri to compare Nutter Butter’s efforts to other brands’ similar campaigns), Terri is at least able to pull all this information together in a way that could be meaningful. After all, aren’t most of us are also forming our opinions by synthesizing information we absorb from various sources around us?
However, Terri continues to hallucinate. If synthesizing information is Terri’s chief strength, getting facts wrong or confused is a big red flag. For example, here Terri misunderstood the relationship between Nutter Butter’s strategy and the influencers who amplified it —?they were organically drawn in by the campaign, not tapped as part of some kind of creator partnership. That distinction is huge for a marketing campaign that is designed to build up organic engagement over time.?
Additionally, in creating this post, Terri got confused about the instructions multiple times, to the point where it was creating blog posts that were difficult to read with headings that made no sense. We were able to remind Terri of the format we were looking for, but the fact that quick iterations produced weird mutations was troubling, given that Terri seems, at the moment, incapable of “getting it right” on the first go.
For the next article, we’ll pick a topic about which a lot of ink has spilled — it’ll be interesting to see what Terri can pull together when fed many, many articles about a given topic.
Appendix: Methodology