Clorox is entering its Nutter Butter era

Clorox has entered the Nutterverse.

The legacy cleaning brand we all grew up with is, like every other legacy brand, trying to figure out how to market to anticonsumption-leaning Gen Z and Alpha. (At least, mostly anti-consumption. Labubus may beg to differ.) Nutter Butter found a way in last year, uploading things like this extremely lo-fi video of a single shrimp being lovingly placed on top of a Nutter Butter with the caption “yes.”

The Dada-esque, nonsensical content worked for NutBut, and now it’s working for Clorox, too.

It first began testing this “unhinged” style of marketing with Pine-Sol, it told Ad Age. Its marketing team populated the account with dancing wizard frogs, memey cats, enough neon patterns to fill a 70s discotheque, and lo-fi graphics similar to Nutter Butter’s. It also introduced a new tagline it hoped would become a TikTok soundbite earworm: “oh em gee da Pine.”

Now, that tagline has become the focal point of Pine-Sol’s TikTok account. Clorox didn’t share growth numbers, but we can see how many views this new approach is bringing on videos. Pine-Sol used to be stuck beneath 5K views on most videos; now it regularly reaches over a million. Some, like the wizard frogs, have topped 5 million.

Compare this to the OG Clorox account, which is primarily comprised of aesthetic and cleaning FAQ vids. While a handful of uploads have reached the 50K mark, most are below 5,000 views.

Eric Schwartz, SVP and CMO of Clorox, told Ad Age that after seeing success on Pine-Sol’s account, Clorox pulled its various social media marketing divisions together into one core hub to produce similar Gen Z bait content.

Now, that team works with Clorox’s in-house agency, Electro Creative Workshop

, to produce 300-400 pieces of content per month for the company’s stable of cleaning brands. This is a change for Clorox, which, as a legacy brand, has historically advertised through more traditional paid media.

“Now, we’re seeing social platforms and the algorithms that govern them as a landscape where we really need to activate differently,” Schwartz said. “It’s more about our consumer obsession—getting close to consumers, understanding consumers, participating with consumers—than it is about a media strategy.”

Rita Gorenberg, Clorox’s Senior Director of Marketing, added that its goal with TikTok content is “being top of mind, feeling like you’re a part of their life […] and like you’re creating this community [together].”

Clorox’s execs also told Ad Age that its social media method has become finding “cohorts” of audiences who share interests, instead of only targeting demographic groups. Yes, it’s targeting younger consumers, but within that broad demo are pinpoint niches like “married couples who share domestic chores.”

That particular cohort inspired Clorox to make TikTok videos with taglines like “If yo man doesn’t refill yo Brita, it’s time for divorce” and “Do they really love me if they don’t refill the Brita?”

It’s rarely easy for companies to inject their products into consumers’ lives, but the Nutterverse approach is working. And CLorox’s other approach, creating a memey ~personality moment~ around it, like making a viewer pause to think about their relationship in terms of Brita-refilling, is catnip for TikTok, where aspirational lifestyle content is a big view-driver.

For legacy brands like Nutter Butter and Clorox, which have become sort of baked in to everyday life, that content is doing what it’s meant to: putting their names in viewers’ minds.