🦀 Silence, Brand! Live: Ryan chased down Krafts Pocket Parm truck

*Welcome to* Silence, Brand!*, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals.* *If you like what we do, please consider becoming a* paid subscriber*.* In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, we we opened with a firsthand investigation into Kraft’s disastrous Pocket Parm rollout before spiraling into TikTok’s newest comment-sharing feature, a livestreaming creator bringing back the joy of pandemic-era internet entertainment, a North Carolina pizza shop that accidentally mastered social strategy, Chipotle’s enormous bag, and a Pringles sweepstakes that requires participants to be dead. Between pop-up activations that forgot to tell people where to pop up, creators finding success by being themselves, and brands discovering increasingly elaborate ways to get attention, we kept returning to one question: **what happens when brands get so caught up in the campaign that they forget about the people it’s supposed to reach?** 🦀 Silence, Brand! Live is powered by Ecamm, a live streaming and video production tool that basically turns your laptop into a full-on studio by switching cameras, dropping graphics, sharing screens, and pushing your stream to multiple platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once without everything catching on fire. If you’ve ever wondered how we’re juggling all of this in real time, it’s Ecamm doing the heavy lifting. Get 15% off your first purchase at Ecamm with promo code SILENCEBRAND **🦀** **Topics on the table:** **Kraft’s Pocket Parm activation was a hot mess on wheels.** Ryan managed to acquire Kraft Natural Cheese’s miniature Parmesan shakers after chasing a promotional truck around Los Angeles, and the experience was apparently more difficult than obtaining pit tickets for the Eras Tour. The campaign featured confusing schedules, vague locations, last-minute changes, and a truck that sometimes drove away before people could find it. The product was cute!The experience was an endurance test! A beautifully designed campaign deck doesn’t help someone find a truck that’s already driven away. **A pop-up still requires actual planning.** Kraft’s promotional materials listed multiple locations without sufficiently clear timing or directions, leaving consumers to play an involuntary game of Where’s Waldo with a flatbed truck. At one point, Ryan followed the truck around USC while campus police repeatedly moved it along. Meanwhile, frustrated customers were met with responses directing them back to captions that hadn’t answered their questions in the first place and in other instances, being met with captions on posts being turned off all together. We discussed the difference between manufacturing excitement and manufacturing inconvenience, because people shouldn’t need a private investigator to obtain a tiny bottle of Parmesan shaky cheese. **TikTok is finally acknowledging that culture happens in the comments.** TikTok’s new comment-reposting feature lets people amplify individual comments, introducing another layer of participation beyond making videos or replying directly. We compared it to Tumblr reblogs and quote tweets, although the execution still feels a little half-baked. For brands, it creates an opportunity to acknowledge conversations without barging into someone’s replies. For everyone whose greatest internet accomplishment is getting the top comment, it might finally be time to update the résumé. **LoozeCannon1 is bringing back the joy of 2020 TikTok.** We checked in on creator loozecannon1 whose freestyle Michael Jackson impersonations and nightly livestream battles have been attracting enormous audiences. One battle reportedly peaked around 50,000 viewers and 50 million likes, with fans spending real money on virtual gifts simply because they enjoyed the entertainment. We discussed how his success resembles the early days of comfort streaming, when people gathered online to watch creators do something entertaining without being constantly pushed toward a shopping cart. Brands looking to participate should pay attention to what already makes the experience enjoyable, rather than trying to turn the whole thing into an advertisement. **Pizza Vino discovered that repetition is a feature, not a bug.** A North Carolina pizza shop has been gaining attention on TikTok thanks to Zach, an employee whose straightforward delivery, distinctive mannerisms, and extremely simple videos have become their own recognizable format. He asks questions, tells people about the pizza or sweet tea, swings his arms around a little, and gets millions of views. We compared his newer videos with the restaurant’s older, more conventionally produced content and discussed why the less polished approach works better. Sometimes the best social strategy is to stop trying to look like a commercial and simply tell people that the restaurant sells pizza. **Is it authentic if the creator knows it’s a bit?** Zach’s success prompted a debate about where genuine personality ends and deliberate performance begins. His mannerisms seem to become more exaggerated as the videos progress, but that doesn’t necessarily make the content less authentic. We landed somewhere around the idea that he knows what people enjoy about him and has learned how to amplify it. There’s a difference between developing a recognizable persona and manufacturing a personality from scratch. Also, he has sweet tea. TikTok creators are becoming the entertainment industry.https://playbill.com/article/ashby-florence-will-join-marla-mindelle-josh-sharp-in-a-kidman-carol-off-broadwayWe celebrated creator Ashby’s move into an off-Broadway opportunity before discussing TikTok’s plans to co-produce creator-led micro-series. The conversation expanded into vertical dramas, AI-generated entertainment, and the possibility of TikTok developing its own original programming. We compared the platform’s ambitions to the early days of Netflix originals, when streaming companies began evolving from distributors into studios. Creators are already building audiences and developing recognizable characters online. The next question is how those relationships translate into longer-form entertainment. Chipotle made a big-ass bag, and we had questions. Chipotle brought back its enormous branded to-go bag, which is apparently large enough to compete with IKEA’s iconic blue shopping bag. The campaign leaned into the absurdity with comparisons to other recognizable retail totes, including bags from Trader Joe’s and Gap. We discussed whether the oversized accessory was a fashion statement, a catering announcement, or simply an opportunity to say “big ass” on the brand’s Instagram. We also briefly confused it with a completely different $425 designer bag, because nothing says modern consumer culture like accidentally conducting luxury handbag research during a burrito giveaway. **Pringles wants to put you in a can when you die.** For Halloween, Pringles introduced a sweepstakes offering 200 years’ worth of chips, complete with funeral-themed creative and references to a last will and “tastement.” The campaign draws on the real brand lore surrounding the inventor of the Pringles can, who reportedly wanted his ashes buried in one. We appreciated the connection to the product’s history, but also discussed how brands navigate humor about death when audiences are increasingly exposed to real-world tragedy. Liquid Death may have normalized morbid marketing, but that doesn’t mean every consumer is necessarily ready to joke about their own funeral arrangements. Kelly Clarkson accidentally started a luxury furniture PR crisis. After Kelly Clarkson shared an experience of being dismissed at a Brooklyn boutique, the situation escalated into a public controversy. We discussed footage of the interaction, the shop owner’s increasingly defensive response, and the reported decision to dramatically raise the item’s price. Rather than treating the situation as an opportunity for accountability or even a playful resolution, the store appeared to be making the situation worse. We also considered whether Clarkson’s point was less about being a celebrity who wasn’t recognized and more about how the store might treat an ordinary customer who doesn’t look wealthy. **AI might finally help us escape Big Printer Ink.** We discussed reports of people using chatbots and reverse-engineering tools to work around HP printer restrictions that prevent certain third-party cartridges from functioning. The idea of using AI to regain control over a product someone already owns was appealing, even as the conversation expanded into broader concerns about cybersecurity and increasingly powerful AI systems. **Good marketing isn’t necessarily complicated, but it does require understanding what people actually want from the experience.** Pizza Vino found success by stripping away unnecessary production and giving audiences a recognizable personality. Loose Cannon built a community around entertainment people genuinely wanted to watch. Kraft, meanwhile, managed to make a highly desirable product unnecessarily difficult to obtain. Brands spend enormous amounts of time trying to manufacture attention, but attention is only valuable when the experience behind it delivers. We’ll be back next week with more internet anthropology, questionable campaign logistics, and whatever new consumer product requires us to conduct a citywide search and rescue operation. Our Lives are available as podcasts on Apple Music and Spotify. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap. And follow @silencebranddotnet on IG while youre at it. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan J DiLazio • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Janine Davis **Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.** **In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.** **For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at:** [**editor@silencebrand.net**](mailto:editor@silencebrand.net) **🦀** **Follow our** LinkedIn **for updates and occasional shitposts.** Get full access to Silence, Brand! at silencebrand.substack.com/subscribe