Why Nutter Butter's TikTok Commercials Are Traumatizing The Internet

If the world learned anything from watching "Mad Men," it's that product advertising is an art form, a delicate dance of both form and function that harnesses the power of human persuasion. That's one approach. Of course, the folks responsible for a marketing campaign could just completely throw out the playbook and start posting a steady stream of surrealist psychedelic nightmare fuel infused with cats and clowns to their TikTok account. At least, that's what Nutter Butter has been doing since at least spring 2024.

In a world where advertisers sometimes spend millions on commercials just for them to end up getting banned from TV, Nutter Butter's enigmatic content harnesses the low-budget virality of analog horror shorts. Like all good viral marketing campaigns, the approach seems to be bringing attention to the brand that has always seemed to live in OREO's shadow. The more unhinged Nutter Butter's posts, the wider the account's reach. 

As equally puzzled and fascinated TikTok users comment or share, more YouTube theorists start to contemplate the subtext of these chaotic neutral ads or whether they may hold a hidden ARG (alternate reality game). Most importantly, the cookie's social media team seems to be having a great time with it — and so are their followers.

Click on OREO's TikTok profile and you'll probably see what you might expect to see: posts about the right way to dunk an OREO, cheeky OREO "facts," and a meme of a car trunk loaded with OREO packages that reads "When it's payday & you remember that you have free will." But click on Nutter Butter's page and you'll see a collection of strange, brightly colored thumbnails that might lead you to believe the account has been hacked. A white house with big The Sims energy presented in a dark, horror-movie angle is covered in peanut butter smears that unsettlingly resemble blood stains. In the doorway stand two small Nutter Butter cookies with the words "im home" hanging above them. Click on that thumbnail, and you'll be treated to what looks like several crime scene photos — if you were a peanut butter cookie — all set to eerie music. The caption for the post, which has been played 8.1 million times, reads simply "come on in."

And however absurdly, this is one of Nutter Butter's most comprehensible posts. For example, an October clip features a gaggle (a murder?) of Nutter Butters, one with a realistic human mouth, floating around the screen against a severely hallucinogenic backdrop of rapidly shifting images that call to mind the scariest scene from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

If you watch enough of this content, you'll notice recurring ideas and characters. A figure with a white drama mask for a face appears to be named Nadia, while someone with a Nutter Butter for a head on a human body is her palindromic twin Aidan. There's the mysterious Mr. 1021, the Nutter Butter nightmare fuel Nutey Nutter, the Nutter Butter Man, a cat, a dog, and more.

One of the best things about Nutter Butter's hallucinogenic approach to its TikTok account is how long the brand had been putting out strange content before people really started to notice. While the forces behind this bizarre content seem to be exponentially cranking up the unhinged factor with each passing month, to suggest Nutter Butter's TikTok is becoming unhinged implies that it was, at some point, hinged. Although the content has always been strange, these days it seems to be taking on more of a narrative, albeit one that is certifiably crazy.

Whether Nutter Butter's content is meant to mean anything at all or is just the latest commodification of brain rot seems to be anyone's guess at this point. Hypothesizing that there might be an ARG behind the content, The GTLive YouTube channel managed to find a few hidden codes in the videos without drawing any major conclusions about the overall meaning or story. Citing the account's analog horror vibes, a few followers have suggested that together, the videos tell the story of an underlying creepypasta.

Posting on r/GameTheorists, one Redditor concluded, "The Nutter Butter TikTok account seems to be crafting a complex and eerie narrative through surreal imagery and cryptic messages. The connections between Aidan, Nadia, and the recurring motifs of violence and mystery suggest a rich, hidden story that we're slowly uncovering." In a breakdown of their Nutter Butter theory, the user outlined a terrifying "Candyman"-style horror story about an evil Nutter Butter Clown, a murdered child, and a bleak world where peanut butter serves as a metaphor for blood.

While Nutter Butter's bizarre content is unconventional, it is by no means the first brand to veer into oddball marketing territory and end up taking a W for it. In December 2020, KFC gifted the pandemic-addled world something no one asked for: an improbably thirsty Lifetime short film about Colonel Sanders starring Mario Lopez. The 15-minute parody earned a surprisingly good Rotten Tomatoes score and even left some viewers hoping for the sequel "A Recipe for Seduction 2."

When it comes to unhinged TikTok marketing, Duolingo was an early adopter with strange content centered around its green owl mascot Duo dating back to 2021. One video features a Duo plush in a blender, some fan art of Duo french kissing Barney the dinosaur, and Duo using a "basura" button to propel someone into a dumpster. Another viral clip featuring four apron-clad suspects — one stained with lime green — is captioned "who roasted and ate the duolingo bird?"

Then there's the evolution of Steak-umm's posts on X (formerly Twitter). Sometime around the lockdown, the brand shifted from primarily posting frozen meat-related content to actively fighting misinformation and sharing posts like "an overlooked aspect of media literacy is being aware of your own biases" or reminding followers "never forget i am a brand here to sell you a product." Wendy's approach to social media resembles their approach to chicken: it's all about roasting. In one X post sharing a clip of Reddit posts complaining about McDonald's perennially broken ice cream machines, Wendy's writes, "I scream. You scream. We all scream for working ice cream machines." In another post sharing a Culture Crave piece on Chick-Fil-A's new streaming platform, Wendy's snarks, "Can't wait to watch... 'Any Given Day but Sunday' a thread 🧵."