Does Unhinged marketing work and can anyone do it? From utter Nutter Butter chaos to Duolingo death

  • Agencies
Sal Morton 

29th April 2025

In a political era where chaos reigns supreme, we look to brands and ask: who’s really winning the attention war?

Amidst this war for attention, brands are acting more like meme accounts than market leaders. They post bizarre skits, cryptic visuals, and create #random characters. And they’re not doing this to be funny, but to generate views, shares, and, most crucially, affection from younger digital-native audiences. Welcome to the world of the unhinged.

Of course, unhinged marketing is nothing new. Wendy’s originally started breaking marketing comms conventions by posting ‘clapbacks’ at social media users with its official accounts in early 2017. Though not unhinged in and of itself, Wendy’s led a trend of bizarre marketing that saw Moonpie declare Florida to now be called MoonPieTown a few months later. But what we’re seeing now is unhinged hit the mainstream - these aren’t X posts that stay firmly online, this is about centering an entire brand voice around an unhinged brand personality.

Social media users across many demographics will be familiar with the Duolingo owl’s increasingly unhinged escapades. From threatening users via notifications to literally killing their mascot off, Duolingo’s unhinged approach has gained them a lot of press and notoriety for being extra, random and strange. This has real material benefits for the company - in 2024, they reported an increase of 51% daily active users.

But what is powering this turn towards the unhinged?

Leading unhinged narratives with Pulsar Narratives AI

Using Pulsar’s Narratives AI we took a look at the landscape of Unhinged as a concept. In the large blue circle, we see clusters of Narratives driven by fandom, brands and celebrities. The rest of the conversation is fragmented political conversation, encompassing the whole globe. These narratives reflect the underlying response to the unhinged phenomenon - a rapidly-changing world where the rulebook has been thrown out entirely.

We found using Pulsar TRAC that mentions of unhinged rose almost threefold between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024. In the same two years, mentions of unhinged marketing, ads and campaigns specifically saw a mammoth 25-fold increase. In our research into the unhinged, we found that while audiences rarely describe brands as unhinged, they often describe campaigns and ads that way. It’s a term driven by marketing discourse, but the emotional reaction is where the value lies. These posts work because they cut through the noise. Unhinged marketing throws out polish and gives you chaos. It feels visceral, human, and - despite its surreality - real.

This isn’t surprising - unhinged is now mainstream. It’s in the fabric of our society.

Leading unhinged narratives with Pulsar Narratives AI

Here we see the growth of two top narratives in the Unhinged conversation, as found using Pulsar’s Narratives AI tool. We can see here the links with emotional resonance - something that brands are relying on increasingly in a world of distrust and skepticism. (For more on this, check out the recording of our recent webinar The Business of Love: How Brands Build (and Lose) Emotional Connections.)

In this landscape, brand voices must adapt. The growth of the creator economy and DTC marketing has flattened the line between professional and personal. Brands are now expected to behave like creators - meme fluency and all. 

This is how we get Duolingo’s threatening owl, Ryanair’s petty posts and Liquid Death’s theatrical stunts. But Duo’s TikTok trends seem completely tame compared to the true kingpin of chaos. Let's take a deep dive into Nutter Butter.

 

Putting the Nutter back in Nutter Butter

In early 2023, Nutter Butter shifted their TikTok strategy into full unhinged mode. They invented a universe of unsettling environments, using nonsense words like “cooki” and “nooder" with cryptic characters like Aidan who may or may not be trapped in a parallel dimension. Their fans don’t just watch - they theorise. Reddit threads and YouTube deep-dives label the campaign an ARG (Alternate Reality Game), dissecting videos for meaning.

In 2024, their TikTok account blew up (despite constantly posting unhinged content since early 2023 and meme-posting for years prior.) And the numbers speak for themselves. Posts consistently hit multi-million views on TikTok - one video alone got 13.7M views and 133k shares. YouTube reaction videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Pulsar’s YouTube comment analysis of one Nutter Butter deep-dive (3,000+ comments) reveals keyword clusters around horror, theories, marketing, and pure emotion - “insane,” “weird,” “creepy,” “love.” The engagement isn’t passive. It’s something closer to true fandom.

Nutter Butter is truly committed to unhinged as a brand identity.

When we examined Nutter Butter followers, we found there were large segments that are chronically online Gen Z users, LGBTQ communities, and gaming microcultures. These audiences don’t just appreciate the weirdness - they live and revel in it. These users are already fluent in surrealist internet language, and they’ve adopted Nutter Butter’s unhinged world as their own. Comment sections read more like forums than feedback - full of references, inside jokes, and emotional investment. Some users treat new posts as lore updates, while others roleplay within the Nutter Butter narrative. This isn’t content - it’s a collaborative universe. When we examined the audience behind the conversation about Nutter Butter, rather than just their followers, we found a great political divide - as well as an unsurprisingly high number of marketing professionals. Here, extreme political alignment echoes the wider society unhinged trend.

 

So, can any brand succeed using unhinged marketing? 

This “feral” brand tone picks up over time as we see a shift from campaign marketing to vibe marketing for the truly unhinged.

But something has shifted. What was once a fringe tone is now a recognisable (and replicable) tactic. Unhinged marketing is no longer a glitch in the matrix - it’s part of the system. How does that affect how real it feels? Essentially, are brands ruining it for themselves?

Since its early forays into the Unhinged, Duolingo’s owl-based escapades have brought unhinged marketing into the limelight. Duolingo’s partnerships with HBO, Squid Game and publicly courting Dua Lipa have shown that unhinged is capable of penetrating the mainstream - but there’s a danger that it’s gained too much traction.

Unhinged content doesn’t only rely on a wholehearted feet-first dive into the surreal abyss - it also has to match where your brand resides. Though there’s no sector or industry barred from unhinged success, the brand has to be seen as an underdog. Ryanair is a perfect example of this - would a more reputable airline carrier survive a deep dive into unhinged posting?

It’s hard to imagine American Airlines publicly calling a customer ‘good boy’ or - as Ryanair recently did in another post - joke about a complaining customer's baldness without damaging its brand reputation as a safe, often luxury, airline. There’s a need for these unhinged-compatible b2c brands to be seen as ‘for the people’ - again tying the marketing tactic to a wider political reaction. Audiences will undoubtedly respond negatively if a bottom-up social trend appears too obviously co-opted, or removed from the communities who originated it. This happens (and is frequently called out), but budget, free or youth-orientated brands are able to operate with more leeway and greater effect than legacy brands, luxury brands or general big players.

 

Fully opening the door to the unhinged

Unhinged marketing is the chaotic antithesis of traditional brand strategy. It leans into the political, socioeconomic landscape and unfamiliar milieu to swap polish for pandemonium, engaging those interested in meme culture, creepiness, absurdity, and internet-native humour. Rather than glossy, over-engineered campaigns, successful unhinged-posting feels like it’s been lifted straight out of a WhatsApp group chat.

But these won’t land if the audience can tell the chaos was pre-approved in order to adhere to brand guidelines and KPI focus areas (shout out to Reese’s bringing in a creepy mascot one week and Travis Kelce the next). This leads to high views, but low engagement for Reese’s compared to that of Nutter Butter’s. Oreo similarly occasionally attempts unhinged-adjacent content, but sees a drop-off in engagement when they do.

Dunkin’, of donuts fame, came close to a successful foray into the unhinged in a campaign for Halloween 2024. A spider character ‘took over’ their account for Halloween, posting lewd thirst posts before ‘leaking’ the limited edition seasonal menu on their Instagram. This garnered an increase in engagement on their Instagram, with brands like Pringles and Pop-Tarts commenting on the post. But it still doesn’t match the dizzying Nutter Butter heights - despite the Dunkin’ account having 1.8M more followers.

Dunkin’ subsequently ‘fired’ the spider, marking it a temporary shift into unhinged and leading to no general uptick in engagement post-campaign. This again shows that when it comes to the unhinged, consistency is (somewhat paradoxically) key - the tone doesn’t lend itself to one-off gimmicks.

 

Time for the commitment ceremony

So is unhinged a genuine creative shift, or just another thing brands will ruin?

Unhinged marketing speaks to the broader cultural shift towards authenticity and spontaneous creativity, reflecting the ever-swinging pendulum of internet culture from hyper-polished to feral chaos. It’s powerful, engaging, and undeniably entertaining, but also fragile, at constant risk of dilution or commercial exploitation.

Unhinged is less a strategy and more a sensibility. It’s not just about being funny or weird. It’s about being so embedded in internet language that your content feels native, not performative. Maybe it requires hiring some semioticians, maybe it requires hiring some weirdos (or maybe - both at once?). The love of the unhinged by certain audiences signals a cultural swing from the polished to the chaotic. Audiences are loving the chaos.

It’s also a space that rewards consistency. If your brand only dips into weirdness once a quarter, it won’t land. If it comes from a team still tethered to corporate tone guidelines, it won’t resonate. This style demands creators who understand the culture instinctively - not through approvals, but through instinct.

As Nutter Butter’s social media manager Zach Poczeksaj puts it: “It all starts at this phrase that we say: Commit to the bit.”

Unhinged isn’t a style of marketing, it’s a brand’s entire online lifestyle. One that requires letting go - completely.

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