News
Robyn Hardman, Digital Consultant
“Baby Nut” Gets Crushed by Twitter
The Superbowl is host to all kinds of weird and wonderful ads, but it’s Planters’ ‘Baby Nut’ that’s got us scratching our heads – thankfully, Twitter felt the same way.
We don’t really watch the Superbowl for the football – we’re here for the marketing. There were plenty of great ads playing throughout the game – Google’s heartstring-puller about a widower using its Assistant to call up memories of his wife, a tongue-in-cheek Hyundai parking argument between famous Bostonians John Krasinski and Chris Evans, and Bill Murray’s return to Groundhog Day for Jeep, to start with. And then… there was the one with the baby peanut.
Maybe it’s a bit lost on us because Planters isn’t a huge brand here in the UK, but the rebirth of Mr Peanut into the no-doubt Baby Yoda-inspired ‘Baby Nut’ didn’t make it into our top ads of the night. We admire how slick the Planters social media team were though, swapping all their accounts over from old mascot Mr Peanut to the new, improved Baby Nut, all while posting a ton of memes about it.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. Planters had set up three different meme accounts on Twitter – BabyNutBaby, BabyNutMeme and BabyNutLOL – with which it intended to blast out images and interact with each other, citing that “fans would want as much content as they could get”. Twitter banned all three, leaving them with only their main one so that Planters couldn’t game the Twitter trending algorithm.
We’re siding with Twitter on this one. Whether or not you’re a fan of the Baby Nut, content overload can be extremely harmful to your brand and in the long run, overexposure breeds apathy. We believe in a balanced approach to social media – keeping people updated with the news and stories that they want, and if it’s the right audience, while having a bit of fun with it along the way. Unless your brand has a lot of different subdivisions to it, you’re better off keeping to one account per platform. Plus, that way, you can keep a closer eye on what’s happening, rather than diluting your efforts.
In all likelihood, the Baby Nut furore would die down pretty quickly and those meme accounts would go to join the ghosts of Twitter past, but three different accounts firing the same message at each other is essentially spam. Plus, the content that’s going out onto the Baby Nut Twitter account is pretty lacklustre, as it stands – can you imagine multiple accounts shoving this in your face?
Vibing pic.twitter.com/BgNXnCIwD2
— Baby Nut (@MrPeanut) February 6, 2020
As we’ve touched on before, internet culture moves pretty fast, and you need to know your audience if you’re going to go down the humour route. In this instance, we’re glad Twitter put Baby Nut back in the playpen.