If you’ve ever been curious about what it’d be like to take LSD, head over to Nutter Butter‘s TikTok account and find out.
Yes, Nutter Butter has a TikTok account. For some of us here at Tubefilter, the peanut butter-filled snack was a well-liked, if long-forgotten, piece of childhood–the sort-of-dessert that was slipped into our lunch boxes. So when we saw an extremely lo-fi TikTok video of a single shrimp being lovingly placed on top of a Nutter Butter with the caption “yes,” we figured it was another Dada-esque sh*tpost from a Gen Z’er, and almost scrolled past it.
Then we saw it was posted by the verified Nutter Butter brand account.
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@officialnutterbutteryes♬ original sound – nutter butter
And it was not the NutBut’s first wild upload. In fact, @officialnutterbutter has been uploading trippy, nonsensical videos for over a year. Back in June 2023, it uploaded one with glitched-out screenshots that say “You have been visited by the Nutter Butter Man. His intentions are unclear,” “Epic nut facts,” and, crucially, “This post was brought to you by Aidan.”
Who is Aidan? That’s what the internet wants to find out. As Nutter Butter’s posts have cranked up the weird factor and gotten more and more views (the 10 videos it posted last month have collectively racked up almost 90 million), TikTok users have become more and more intrigued by just WTF is going on with this account—which means lots of brand exposure for Nabisco’s cookie brand.
The New York Times got ahold of three people behind the content, including Zach Poczekaj, Social Media Manager for Dentsu Creative, which manages Nutter Butter’s accounts.
Poczekaj got right to the heart of why this content has gotten so much attention: “If a piece of content makes too much sense, it doesn’t perform as well,” he said. “So it should even be a little confusing to us at times, too.” He added that Nutter Butter’s approach is to go all-in: “It all starts at this phrase that we say: Commit to the bit.”
Kelly Amatangelo, marketing strategist for Nabisco’s parent Mondelez, chimed in, “It was a commitment to what we know works best with our consumers and continuing to experiment. And then at the end of ’23, beginning of ’24, it felt like something that was driving a cult following.”
We’re not surprised this sort of content can amass cultish favor online. The unsettling imagery and baffling twists and turns, all with an undercurrent of plot thread with consistent characters, is bait to people who love things like super-cheap indie video games and found footage analog horror, both of which do very well on YouTube.
Poczekaj told the Times Nutter Butter is doing something that’s proven successful for digital content creators: paying close attention to comments on its videos, and including more of the elements that drive audience reactions.
“Where it starts is we’re just looking at the comments from the previous week and trying to identify: Are people responding to this specific character in the ‘Nutterverse’? Which is what we call it,” he said. “We really study those comments, because we want to put it back into the content that week.”
They also recognize how important characters are. We’ve seen that with creators like Drew Talbert, who put his acting skills to use recreating scenes from his day job as a waiter and now has nearly 5 million followers on TikTok, many of whom leave comments asking to see more of his characters. The Nutterverse’s main character is the mysterious Aidan, and there’s also been mention of a Nadia, which is “Aidan” backward. Viewers go nuts (no pun intended) for these guys: on that video from June 2023, there are over 100 comments left in the last couple of months, with people pointing out that “this is where it all began” with Aidan, and theorizing that he is, in fact, the Nutter Butter Man.
Caitlin Bolmarcich, Nutter Butter’s brand manager, told the Times Aidan was its first Easter egg. “[I]t really took people on a frenzy of: Who is Aidan? Am I Aidan? Are you Aidan? And we’ve really played into that. Like Taylor Swift’s Easter eggs,” she said.
Nutter Butter has not yet revealed Aidan’s secrets, but it’s trusting its growing viewership to stick with it: “Our audience is so extremely online, and they like when we defy the norms of normal brand social media accounts. It entertains them, and they ask for it. It’s something that they genuinely enjoy. It’s fun,” Poczekaj said.
