Class-Clown Brands Are Trying to LoLz Us to Death

The gold standard of this golden age is embodied by smile-in-the-mind print ads … 

… and genuinely comic spots:

But as social media devour consumer attention and ad spend, so the send-and-receive model of ad humor has (d)evolved. When speed trumps strategy and virality is all, the archetype of brand as stand-up — alone in the spotlight, demanding our attention, selling a joke — has spawned a new and chaotic model: brand as class clown.

Of course, not all brands have the aspiration (or ability) to beclown themselves. But those that do are embracing novel commercial comic stylings — wackaging, tacticality, brandinage — that together form a distinctive tone of voice: brandter.

First and hindmost in the pantheon of brandter are gag-name companies — which seem to cluster in specific industries:

Fast-food: Abra Kebabra; A Salt & Battery; Habemus Pizza

Coffee shops: Brewed Awakening; The Daily Grind; Deja Brew

Hairdressers: Shear Lock Combs; Hair Force One; Curl Up and Dye

Toilet rental companies: A Royal Flush; Callahead; Johnny on the Spot

Such midlarity is also to be found in cheese names (Dirt Lover, Dragon’s Breath), beer brands (Tactical Nuclear Penguin, The Big Lebrewski) and, inevitably, strains of weed (Dank Sinatra, Notorious THC). For some bizarre reason, wordplay is also popular with certain religious denominations:

Pun-note humor has long defined small-business banter, after all, You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! What’s curious is how its peculiar tone — both teasing and twee — has permeated the mainstream and been adopted by some of the world’s biggest companies.

Commercial packaging has two aims: to protect and promote. Just ask the first lady of fruit, Miss Chiquita Banana, who bestickers her self-protected products to stand out from the bunch.

Once in a while, packaging’s twin aims are met with wit and style — take Chiclets gum, Hrum & Hrum’s nut-sack squirrels, Milgrad milk or Domino’s pizza:

But a fine line separates witty packaging and irksome “wackaging” — where brands break the fourth wall of product presentation with overfamiliar, faux friendly and cloyingly quirky copy.

It’s no accident that the Waitrose Cooks’ range (“a dash of this … a drizzle of that”) feels like having Jamie Oliver at your elbow … 

As the design agency responsible, Lewis Moberly, explained:

“Strict recipes have been replaced by casual banter. Waitrose Cooks’ ongoing dialogue captures this new spontaneity. What better way to bond with the brand?”

Although brand-bonding through casual banter is nothing new (see Ben & Jerry’s “flavor graveyard”), the patient zero of contemporary wackaging is commonly identified as Innocent Drinks — which stormed Britain’s smoothie market in the late 1990s with a brand voice that was sassy or saccharine, depending on your tolerance for marketing whimsy.

Since then, the plague of perky packaging has left few sectors untouched.

Given the task of tempting carnivores away from meat, it’s not surprising that plant-based food brands deploy wacky “I can’t believe it’s not butter” dazzle — both in naming (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Tofurky) and packaging. Take the “soy-based chicken style chunks” from The Vegetarian Butcher called “What the Cluck,” or the plant-based “pork sausages” from This which are served with a side of Innocent-esque copy:

Virgin Atlantic seems incapable of leaving any object unblessed with its brand voice — from ear plugs labeled “Shhhh…” to “Stay well, Use gel” hand disinfectant:

And even the British bank First Direct attempted brandter in its website’s small print:

“We’re obsessive about the quality of our service, so we monitor or record calls to make sure everything’s tickety boo.”

Striking a balance between sass and strategy is not always easy. In 2004, it took Jaffa Cakes just six months to withdraw a bold new line of perky packaging that relegated its logo to brandter gags like: “I never share,” “This box is empty,” and “One for you, three for me”:

If some brands brandter with perky quip, others deploy logorrhea. And what Innocent did for wackaging, Oatly has done for chatty packaging.

Designed to sound like “it’s made by a bunch of oat punks down in the basement,” Oatly’s brandter bellows from its products, ads and social feeds, combining maximalist copy with a Gen-Z vibe:

Of course, Oatly didn’t invent packaging prolixity. Brands such as Angostura and Dr. Bronner’s have, for decades, crammed minuscule messages onto their labels, even if they remained largely unread:

But Oatly’s brandtering barrage must also be read contextually, both as a rejection of its own clichéd legacy branding, and as a reaction to the competing semiotics of Boomer brands (Quaker Oat Beverage), Millennial blands (Willa’s) and Gen-Z adorkables (Minor Figures).

In 2019 PepsiCo withdrew its Quaker Oat Beverage after less than a year, having failed to pivot “the 142-year-old leader in oats” to new non-dairy drinkers who care less about “heart health” than flavor. Notably, Quaker didn’t even have the nerve to call its beverage “m!ilk,” “m*lk,” “oatmilk” or “notmilk.”

Tactical ads react instantly to a moment in time. The most basic iteration is a newspaper open letter calling, for example, for more consumer tracking (Facebook), world peace (Yoko Ono) or the return of the death penalty (Donald Trump).

Such broadsides are rarely amusing, and when they attempt wit, risk stumbling into snide. Take Slack’s hubristic “welcome” letter to Microsoft Teams in 2016, which echoed Apple’s legendary 1981 “welcome” letter to IBM. Or Burger King’s 2021 “Women Belong in the Kitchen” manifesto, timed for International Women’s Day, which was widely derided as tin-eared.

But when well executed, humorous tacticality overlays acknowledged brand characteristics onto current events with a deft comic timing and touch. Any number of brands deploy the technique once in a while — as Veet depilatory cream did in 2009 to mark Barack Obama’s inauguration, or British Airways did for the 2018 World Cup:

During Covid such brands as McDonald’s, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Chiquita, Audi and Coca-Cola stunted tactical logo gags to promote social distancing:

For a small cohort of companies, tacticality is a defining asset. The Irish gambling brand Paddy Power, for instance, regularly deploys instant-response adverts and activations to promote its irreverent brand character and play on the mercurial nature of betting.

And although self-storage has no obvious claims to comedy or current affairs, Manhattan Mini Storage embraces tactical humor with similar vigor and success:

Because any news story worth piggybacking is definitionally controversial, “newsjacking” can be a high-wire act. And occasionally brands slip. Last August, for example, a viral Twitter thread by @lilliandaisies called out “companies and brands who participated in the global humiliation of Amber Heard and profited from the Depp v. Heard trial,” including Milani Cosmetics, Redbox, Lidl, Starbucks and Duolingo:

The individual responsible for Duolingo’s online “joke” subsequently tweeted a mea culpa that encapsulated not just the risk of newsjack brandter, but the peril of handing the keys of a brand to an inexperienced social-media manager:

“I made a mistake, it’s deleted and I’m listening. I’m 24 – a yr out of college – managing an account that I didn’t expect to grow how it did & learning social responsibility on a curve. Taking full ownership. It’s an early career lesson for me and I’m learning to be better.”

A more successful newsjack strategy has recently been rolled out by Butterkist, which has co-opted the “popcorn” emoji — used online for the social-media schadenfreude of rolling news drama — to hijack the “Partygate” scandal that embroiled Boris Johnson and the “Wagatha Christie” libel trial between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney, the wives of two British football players:

When deftly handled, tactical humor can also help with crisis comms (assuming the crisis is not a tragedy). In 2011, Johnson & Johnson responded to the shortage of its o.b. tampons by creating a comic “triple sorry” power ballad which could be personalized for any name:

And in 2018, KFC apologized to British consumers for running out of chicken with a witty play on birds:

Finally, tactical humor can be flipped for serious effect. In 2015, the Salvation Army in South Africa newsjacked the internet’s fleeting obsession with a dress that appeared white and gold to some and blue and black to others, to hammer home a stark message about misogynistic violence:

When two brands go to war, viral clicks are there to score.

Brandinage describes brands joshing on the socials for clicks and giggles. And for those with the comic chops and commercial confidence, it can be a powerful catalyst of engagement.

The reigning heavyweight of brandinage is surely Wendy’s, which has put a pugilistic spin on its “Where’s the beef?” slogan by cheerfully beefing with all comers.

So eager is Wendy’s to cross tweets with others, it established “#NationalRoastDay” where brands as big as Aflac, Axe, Cinnabon, Coca Cola, Doritos, Gillette, Head and Shoulders, Monster Energy, Oscar Meyer, Oreo, Popeyes, T-Mobile, Triscuit, UPS and Yoplait beg to be insulted … and signal boosted.

A few companies deploy brandinage against customers. The no-frills Irish airline Ryanair, for example, revels in its Millwall…