Why Your Favorite Brand Just Got Weird
Inside the absurdist marketing playbook that’s actually working.
If you’ve been online in the past two years, you’ve watched brands lose their minds in public. Duolingo’s owl threatening you on TikTok. Liquid Death selling actual murder of thirst. Nutter Butter posting unhinged fever dreams that have nothing to do with cookies. The official Scrub Daddy account behaving like it’s having a breakdown.
This isn’t brands going crazy. It’s brands going strategic.
When people spend nearly 30% of their waking hours consuming online media, according to Lippincott’s research, the most effective way to cut through isn’t polish—it’s absurdity. The weird stuff stops the scroll. The predictable stuff gets scrolled past.
Why Normal Doesn’t Work Anymore
The internet has trained us to filter out anything that looks like marketing. We developed banner blindness in the 2000s. We developed influencer skepticism in the 2010s. Now we’re developing content fatigue, an almost automatic dismissal of anything that feels professionally produced and strategically positioned.
The response from the smartest brands has been to make content so unexpected that it breaks the pattern recognition. You can’t dismiss what you can’t categorize.
Duolingo understood this early. Their TikTok doesn’t try to convince you to learn Spanish. It creates an unhinged owl character that comments on pop culture, makes threats, and generally behaves in ways that make you think: “Is the social media person okay?” The answer is yes, they’re excellent at their job.
The strategy isn’t random chaos. It’s calculated weirdness with a purpose: become memorable in an attention economy that punishes forgettable.
The Method Behind the Madness
Here’s what these brands have in common: they’ve given their social presence permission to have a personality that exists independently from their product pitch.
Liquid Death sells water. Their marketing sells an entire worldview “anti-corporate, punk-adjacent, death-metal aesthetic” for hydration. It shouldn’t work. It works incredibly well. They’ve built a billion-dollar valuation on water in a can by making the brand itself entertaining enough to follow.
Wendy’s pioneered this approach years ago with their Twitter roasts. The insight was simple: social media is entertainment. If your brand content isn’t entertaining, it’s interrupting entertainment. And interruption gets ignored.
The People Brands & Things newsletter tracked this with Poppi, whose PR and events team explicitly talks about creating “cultural moments” rather than traditional advertising. Their Super Bowl campaign worked not because it was a good ad but because it became a thing people talked about.
The Risk Is The Point
Not every brand should do this. The absurdist playbook works specifically because it’s risky and because most brands are too scared to try it. If everyone was weird, weird wouldn’t stand out.
It also requires genuine creative freedom. The brands executing this well have internal cultures that allow social media teams to move fast, take risks, and occasionally fail publicly. The ones that try to committee-approve every post end up with watered-down weirdness that’s worse than playing it straight.
The Drum’s 2026 predictions note that brands will continue to lean into “big, bold, wildly creative campaigns that create shared cultural moments.” But they also note the risk: “Brands chasing virality risk eroding trust—a currency that takes years to earn and seconds to lose.”
The line between memorably weird and embarrassingly try-hard is real. It’s also where the opportunity lives.
What This Means
We’re in an era where attention is so fragmented that being professional and polished might actually be a disadvantage. The safe choice has become the risky choice, because safe content is invisible content.
This doesn’t mean every brand should start posting unhinged TikToks. It means every brand should ask: what permission structure do we have for surprising people? What would it take for someone to screenshot our content and send it to a friend?
The brands winning right now understand that the goal isn’t to be seen. It’s to be sent.
Weird works—when it’s authentic to your brand voice, when your audience is in on the joke, and when you’re actually funny. That’s a lot of “whens.” But when you nail it, you’re not competing for attention anymore. You’re creating it.