There are two types of accounts on Threads:

1) Individuals who take themselves Very Seriously and are trying to become Thought Leaders on Important Topics.

2) CPG globo-brands acting completely out of pocket.

Only one of these account types adds positive value to my day. In the words of Dr. Becky (category 1, god love her), let me explain.

The Good(?) Old Days

I graduated college at a very transitional time in the advertising world. I spent 4 years splitting my time between painstakingly crafting janky Photoshop ad mockups with pixelated, watermarked stock images on the iMacs at the library and calculating hypothetical quarterly media plans with the lion’s share of the budget allocated to radio and magazines. Uphill, both ways, in the snow - while paying 25 cents a text message!

Then I graduated into a world that was ramping up on Facebook ads, embracing the launch of Instagram (Oct. 2010 - can you even believe it!!), and growing Twitter’s monthly active users at a rate of ~2x per year.

All of this to say: none of us actually had a clue what we were doing advertising online.

Sure, I had managers who set targets and dictated KPIs, but really we were all figuring it out together as we went. Plus, many of my superiors were just a few years older than me, themselves managed by execs who still thought it was a flex to pretend they didn’t know how to use their email. [As an aside to demonstrate my point: In the early 2010s I had to beg a well-known brand targeting 18-28 year olds to let me test using emojis in their email subject lines. 🙃 ]

So, it should come as no surprise that “Social” as a strategy has been perpetually underdeveloped over the past ~15 years. Boards and executives demand measurable ROI on a channel that is, at its core, almost entirely vibe-based. The approach is often scattershot and inconsistent, as marketing leaders grapple with whether to sink resources into a channel that’s simultaneously seen as a waste of time and the magic ticket to success, if they can strike viral gold.

One of the biggest disconnects with Social is that brands are determined to sell, while users are there to connect, relax, and escape reality. This has historically resulted in the awkward shoe-horning of products into online conversations, with legacy brand coming off like your old high school friend who now slides into your DMs with a lot of 💃 emojis and a “very subtle” sell on the latest pyramid scheme.

There are literally hundreds of cringey examples of brands trying to jump on social trends with disastrous results. Since this isn’t a Business Insider listicle, I’ll just include this one personal favorite from July 2011, when baked goods brand Entenmann’s tried to get in on a trending hashtag. Millions were tweeting about Casey Anthony’s #notguilty verdict, but Entenmann’s social team took a more “head empty, no thoughts” approach.

As the creators and early adopters of social media, Millennials have always been quick to sniff out inauthentic posting and ridicule poorly executed attempts at advertising. And as social channels matured (and Millennials moved into corporate roles owning those channels) brands became better at softening the sales pitch and developing their platforms into multi-faceted tools for sales, brand awareness, and customer service.

Kirkland Brand Twitter

Now, Gen Z holds the spending power and is (depending on who you believe) either the loneliest generation ever, using parasocial relationships to feel connection or very much in on the joke of corporate try-hard social media strategies being cringe. As a result, social trends are shifting again.

Brands being “unhinged” on social media is nothing new. The trend started around 2017 when Wendy’s embraced a new approach on Twitter. Then-social media managers Meredith Ulmer and Amy Brown pitched the tactic as “Let’s get weird” and it worked — in part, because they didn’t tie it to ROI or strategy; they just tried it.

The brand’s tweets exploded and consumers ate it up (pun intended). In a charmingly dated thread, Redditors debated whether other brands would follow Wendy’s lead, with many saying it was simply too risky.

Other brands, as we know, did follow. The approach has gained traction across almost every social channel and company, to varying degrees. JVN Hair has tutorial videos where the company’s beloved namesake fills every second of air time with stream of conscious conversation while giving an 11-minute styling tutorial. Duolingo’s mascot was a TikTok sensation for months. Cann (previously featured) loves to post some wild takes on Instagram.

And as with all good things, it wouldn’t be a true trend if it didn’t stir up a little backlash. Many, including the New York Times, have recently declared unhinged social tired. “If every brand is funny online, is anything funny?” asked the Times. Several prominent companies took the joke too far and became straight up mean or creepy. Some, including unhinged poster child Wendy’s, were accused of using Gen Z memes to distract from the fact that their actual business was unethically run. And some companies, like Target and Best Buy, have pulled back from Twitter (one of the most popular places to be out of pocket) as a channel entirely, whether due to Elon’s bad behavior or the diminishing returns on ad spend.

But — perhaps due to its own failure to thrive — Threads remains as the last bastion of pure, unhinged content. There, SMMs (social media managers) can really get weird, mostly because their audience seems to only be other SMMs, posting into the void.

From Doom Scroll to Delightful

Scrolling through the Threads app is a disorientingly delightful experience. Corporations seemingly make up the majority of active users these days but are some of the best follows on the channel by a long shot. One gets the sense that Senior Leadership wants rock-solid ROI on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, but doesn’t really know or care what happens on Threads. The resulting strategy is a little less increase value for shareholders and a little more Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead.

But is winging it on this particular social channel such a bad idea?

Take the vegan meat alternative, Beyond Meat. The running schtick of the entire account is that the SMM is potentially unwell and pretends to be a “little cow” online all day. The result is that the brand has cultivated a small-but-avid fanbase of highly engaged followers.

The SMM is so dedicated to the bit that the one (1) time they posted a legitimate product promotion, followers were concerned they had been fired.

There are times where I open the Threads app just to see if Beyond Meat has posted.

Another excellent Threads follow: Old Bay. Their strategy? Being overly fanatical about crabs and seeing if that hits.

One of the best parts about Threads, and part of what makes it such a perfect platform for this style of content, is that the content itself feels a bit like a secret. Search functionality and topic grouping were not native features at launch, so the posting style often mimics the early days of Facebook status updates, just shouting something into the ether. Add to that the fact that Threads lost 80% of their initial user base in the first month, and the interactions feel like intimate conversations with a core community, not big brand plays.

The other great feature of Threads is there are currently no ad or monetization tools on Threads, so post engagement metrics such as Likes and Replies are the only ways to measure “success.” This results in a lot of meme-style jokes where brands are just replying to each other in a feedback loop. It feels a bit like they’re all trying to juice each others’ numbers, one SMM to another, since their parent companies don’t really know what to make of the channel outside of “bigger engagement number = better.”

Almost certainly, one of two things will happen in 2024:

• Threads will shut down as a failed experiment.

• Threads will introduce sponsored ads and monetization opportunities.

But part of me hopes for a third, unlikely option: Threads stays just as it is and we can keep quietly enjoying the chaos. After all, who’s to say being unhinged is ineffective at winning hearts, minds, and dollars?

During the early days of the Pandemic, when groceries were scarce, I bought the last protein-forward food in the long, low mid-aisle cooler: Beyond Meat ground beef. Unfortunately, the brand’s beef-mimicking technology was not fully evolved and the “beef” stayed a disconcerting level of reddish pink after 30 minutes of cooking it in a pan with marinara sauce, giving me the uneasy feeling of eating raw spaghetti bolognese during an apocalypse. This past weekend, nearly four years to the day, I found myself lingering over the packaged proteins again, my hand hovering over the new and improved Beyond Meat IV recipe.

A little cow told me it was better than ever.

A Personal PSA

March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness month. I cannot overstate how important it is to me that friends, family, and complete strangers get routine colon cancer screenings.

If you’re not familiar with the process, I adore Anne Helen Peterson’s frank, humorous description in her Substack post Welcome to Colonoscopy Land. This year she shared a lightly updated version: Welcome to Your Colonoscopy… Again! Read it, and then schedule your colonoscopy.

If AHP’s post doesn’t convince you that this is important, I will leave you with one additional thought: Many people avoid colonoscopies and other colorectal cancer screenings because it’s embarrassing to talk to your doctor about your bowels and their movements — trust me, I know! But the irony is that if you avoid it until there is a problem, you will spend months to years of your life talking about them to everyone, all the time, in great detail.

Colon cancer is a preventable disease. You deserve to be happy, healthy, and polyp-free. For more information, check out the (incredibly branded!) Lead From Behind initiative, part of the Colorectal Cancer Alliance.