If you’re looking for fun in New York City’s Theater District, you ought to check out Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum on West 42nd Street. Founded in 1835 by French wax sculptor Marie Tussaud, the attraction has grown to 23 museum locations across the globe. Personally, I’ve been to enough open-casket funerals in my lifetime that I don’t find wax effigies of human beings entertaining, no matter how lifelike they are. But if you’re into that, your $35 will get you a lot at Madame Tussaud’s. In addition to the standard celebrity wax fare (think pop stars Beyonce and Harry Stiles), the museum has pulled out all the stops for Halloween, including horror film icons in wax like Regan MacNeil, the demon-tortured preteen from The Exorcist.
Imitations are seldom as satisfying as the real thing. And in the wake of the brilliant social media campaign for Nutter Butter sandwich cookies, we’d better be prepared for a lot of imitations that will shamelessly try to cash in on Nutter Butter’s success. It’s an old story in marketing (and an increasingly tiresome one): somebody does something so new and different that it captures the imagination of the marketplace. The imitators are never far behind. One guesses that if they had imaginations of their own, they would use them. It’s always easier to copy a good idea than come up with one yourself.
It’s hard to put a finger on what makes the Nutter Butter campaign so outstanding. It’s quirky to be sure. However, weirdness by itself does always make a campaign successful. Sometimes it comes off as just weird. In a recent New York Times interview with the campaign’s creative team, we get some clues about how everything came together. First, though, let’s take a look at two of Nutter Butter’s more memorable spots.
In one I’ll simply refer to as “The Shrimp Spot,” we see a close-up of a Nutter Butter cookie that fills the screen. A hand comes in and places a single shrimp on top of the cookie as we hear sounds of an audience sighing and then applauding the move. In a companion spot, we see the same shrimp-topped cookie. A hand reaches in and plucks the shrimp from the cookie as we hear the audience booing the removal of the plump crustacean.
My favorite spot is one I’ll call Nightmare on Peanut Butter Street. We see a series of stills of a dollhouse, starting with the exterior. The copy supered over the exterior shot says, “I’m home.” The video then takes us inside and moves us through various rooms. It quickly becomes clear that some kind of peanut butter homicide has taken place in this little house. The walls and doll furniture are all smeared with peanut butter, a bizarre crime scene with various Nutter Butter cookies either lurking in the rooms (assuming they’re alive) or as victims (assuming they’ve been murdered). The whole time, we hear this eerie Helter Skelter music playing in the background.
Part of the fun of the Nutter Butter campaign is its randomness. There’s absolutely no conceptual link between the shrimp spots and Nightmare on Peanut Butter Street. Many of the spots poke at social media visual tropes like the always-popular cats. In the Times interview, the Nutter Butter creatives give us an insight into their process, proving once again that when you set out to do great creative work, the first rule is that there are no rules.
If their creative process is unconventional and a little “free-form,” their strategy is not. The team talks about how in the early days of the campaign, they paid close attention to the comments their viewers were posting. In response to the surreal nature of the spots, one comment that viewers kept posting was, “My dreams have meaning.” That inspired the creatives to ask, “What’s a Nutter Butter fever dream?” You see them try to answer this question in spot after spot, all of which have an absurdist, dreamlike quality that ranges from simply quirky to downright disturbing. The team also reveals that there is no formal execution process. There are no storyboards where they plan everything out frame by frame. They prefer to keep it loose because idiosyncrasy is key to how well these spots draw attention. Here’s another weird thing. The Nutter Butter team also says that the spots actually perform better if they’re a little confusing for the viewer. That’s right. If they’re too logical or conventional, viewers think they’re a yawn. And if it’s a little confusing, you can almost guarantee that the viewer will watch it a second time, because inherently we need to “get it,” right?
Sometimes consumer insight drives the creative process. For the Nightmare on Peanut Butter Street spot, the team knew that to visually show lots of peanut butter provoked an appetite response from the viewer. Showing a lot of peanut butter has taste appeal. And that’s exactly what the spot does. It also flirts with bad taste in the best way, calling to mind every gruesome scene you’ve ever seen on those reality crime shows. But hey, relax! It’s only peanut butter! One viewer who found the spot disturbing commented, “Hey Nutter Butter, you okay?” In the interview, she also admitted that she later went out and bought a package of Nutter Butters and was reminded how much she liked them—even though she hadn’t eaten them for years.
Here’s the deal. I know it’s natural to want to clone somebody else’s success. But if you choose to walk on the weird side, don’t copy. Find the “quirky” in your own brand and work from that. And let Nutter Butter do their thing.
