Nutter Butter Committed to the Bit—It Paid Off a Year Later
An exhaustive look at the brand's deep-fried social media strategy.
To be good at social media is to be okay with being uncomfortable.
It’s uncomfortable explaining a trend to executives and why your brand should participate. It’s uncomfortable when a video you believed in doesn’t perform well. It’s uncomfortable to take risks.
What you do with that discomfort is important. How do you turn feelings of embarrassment into excitement so that executives buy into your concept? How do you turn frustration from a video getting 1,000 views into the motivation to tweak the first 10 seconds to see if it can find an audience? There are learnings in all of the uncomfortable moments of working in social media.
That brings me to Nutter Butter. No, not because the account makes me uncomfortable (it does, as it intends to do) but because for the last year and a half they’ve committed to the bit. I know how uncomfortable that is for a big brand to do.
Despite people just now discovering Nutter Butter’s accounts, the brand has been dedicated to their cryptic strategy for well over a year.
If you scroll back on Nutter Butter’s Instagram or TikTok to early 2023, you’ll notice a shift away from regular brand memes and trends to a strategy that feels a lot like their current one. The first big success came on January 23rd, 2023 when they posted a video with pixelated Nutter Butters and the word Aidan, all set to a fucked up version of “Summer” by Calvin Harris. It has 480K likes on Instagram and 63K on TikTok.
I reached out to Ryan Benson, who worked on the Nutter Butter account at Dentsu Creative from June 2022 to September 2023 and currently co-owns his own social agency. He tells me, “When I started on the account, our most notable piece of content was the Nut Games tweet from the SMM just before me. He had made some content that referenced a super-fan with the name Aidan. I tried to do the same—clearly approaching things a bit differently...lol. I began hiding the name in content in ways that were beyond traditional. Ciphers, binary, morse code, etc. Messages from Aidan and calls from inside ??? (inside where? idk, but it was surely a place of madness on the backend). I coined the term ‘strategic silliness’ and used to say it quite a bit to explain what I was up to each day.”
In the book Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, the author Rory Sutherland, an executive at Ogilvy & Mather group, talks about how most good advertising isn’t logical. Rory writes, “The problem that bedevils organizations once they reach a certain size is that narrow, conventional logic is the natural mode of thinking for the risk-averse bureaucrat or executive. There is a simple reason for this: you can never be fired for being logical. If your reasoning is sound and unimaginative, even if you fail, it is unlikely you will attract much blame. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”
The viral success in early 2023 allowed the team to keep building on their Aidan lore, leaning into deep-fried photos and mysterious videos. The content was illogical and imaginative. Some posts broke through, others didn’t—they were in an experimentation phase. Still, people who discovered one video would then go down a content wormhole thanks to the loose storyline they were creating. Ryan tells me, “An accomplishment I'll always hold close to my heart is when we watched the Instagram page double in the following size over the course of a week or two due to one of our very unhinged videos taking off—MONTHS AFTER WE POSTED IT.”
While their strategy was showing signs of being a success, it was still risky—Nutter Butter is owned by Mondelez International, one of the largest snack companies in the world with global net revenues of approximately $36 billion in 2023. One Reddit commenter described their posts as “SATANIC AF!!!”. Remarkably, they let the team continue on.
I also spoke with Aubrey Burrough, who worked on the Nutter Butter account during her two years at Dentsu Creative—she left in June of this year. She highlighted the importance of trust. “If you're a social media professional, trust that your instincts are correct and trust your audience's intelligence and ability to pick up on what you're doing.” When I asked her what it was like pitching some of the ideas they had to the Mondelez team she said, “Genuinely, so so smooth. Really have to credit the brand team at Mondelez because not many clients would trust their social agency to take the huge swings that Nutter Butter does.”
One of the hardest things to do when you work in social is commit. It’s so easy to pitch an idea for a series, try a few videos, see that it’s not finding a large audience, and give up. It’s uncomfortable. Thankfully, the Nutter Butter team continued to double down—even making a very smart joke on April Fools that it was taking a “new direction” with their social strategy and proceeded to post regular food photos. Someone commented, “WHY IS IT A NORMAL POST?!? I didnt follow for this.”
Today, more than one year after the breakout viral Aidan post, Nutter Butter’s strategy continues on in a surprisingly similar manner. The difference? The audience has gone from indie band with a dedicated following to mainstream pop-star filling stadiums. Thanks to a few viral TikToks calling out the strategy, a step up in their video production (some posts are simply video versions of posts from 2023), and a slightly larger dose of absurdism—the account is having a big moment. I have never had so many people ask me to write about a specific brand’s account before.
Aubrey speculates the recent growth is in part due the current team's “incredibly smart move to embrace not only Gen Z culture, but to be bold enough to look ahead to Gen Alpha and start to incorporate notes of their humor in a way very few, if any, brands have so far.” She calls out the idea of “iPad kid to content creation pipeline” and how Gen Alpha has grown up in front of a screen and have seen it all. “Only truly bizarre and random things grab their attention at this point.” She’s right, although it’s hard to not also see the resemblance to classic old internet videos like Salad Fingers and The Annoying Orange. Brain rot, brand rot. The internet is cyclical.
The account is currently run by Zach Poczekaj, Olivia Matalon, Sandra Yang, and Aidan Maloney—who all work for Dentsu Creative. I reached out to them for comment but have not heard back.
If you’re thinking “Wait, that’s so funny that they have someone named Aidan on their team” then do I have some exciting news for you. Yes, he’s that Aidan. I scrolled back on Aidan Maloney’s LinkedIn and found a post written one year ago from his professor at Temple University—it reveals a bit about how the Aidan storyline started. Aidan commented on Nutter Butter’s Instagram posts for a year straight. His posts were simply his name “Aidan”. Other commenters began to notice and eventually Nutter Butter built him into their strategy. In June 2024 he became an intern for Dentsu Creative and is now an Associate Social Manager on the Nutter Butter account.
The Aidan lore continues to help the account grow to this day. According to SocialBlade, in the last 30 days the Nutter Butter TikTok has gotten 3M likes and 454K new followers. There are Reddit threads dedicated to figuring out what the hell is happening (“Their tiktok should be forwarded to the FBI for further investigation”, says one commenter in complete seriousness). The Today Show is covering it.
As the Nutter Butter strategy gets more press and praise, social media managers will likely get Slacks from their bosses asking “How can our content be more like Nutter Butter?”. The Duolingo effect, if you will. To me, the takeaway for your brand should not be to create some wild conspiracy theory on your account with ominous videos. The takeaway is bigger than that. It’s that brands (and bosses) should stop cutting good social ideas short just because they don’t immediately find an audience. Like Aubrey said, trust your followers’ intelligence and their ability to pick up on what you're doing—and, importantly, give them enough time to do so.
When I asked Ryan about the recent success and the long path to reach this point, he told me, “So what if a post ‘flops?’ Try again and take notes. Don't delete a low-performing post just because it didn't perform how you wanted it to. Learn from it and do better the next time! Ego has no place in the brand feed. You must grow WITH your audience—or they'll get tired of you, too.”
If TikTok is like TV, then don’t cancel your show after the pilot. Remember, some of the best series were almost left behind after a lukewarm introduction—imagine if Parks and Recreation, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, or The Office never got a second episode? Small but dedicated audiences mean you are onto something. Keep investing. Tweak as necessary. Stay uncomfortable.
Aidan
“The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”
I love this notion to staying uncomfortable! Love, love, love this edition 🥳