Unhinged Marketing: how employees are changing marketing

Table of content

Social media has changed. Since reaching its peak in 2022, it has been used less and less to interact with friends and celebrities and more and more to fill free time (1). This tendency to fill the small moments of the day, such as a few minutes while waiting for a bus or for your coffee to brew, is met by content that generates more engagement and manages to give the brain a dopamine rush in a matter of seconds. Today, in late 2025 and early 2026, there is an increasingly prevalent trend, namely content related to staff rebelling or engaging in controversial activities in the workplace.

Let's start with the definitions, then we'll look at the overall results achieved and finally at case studies from the first companies to experiment with this type of language on their social media and how you can apply it to yours.

• Employee-Generated Content (EGC) (2) refers to any content – memes, videos, posts – created and shared by a company's employees. It differs from traditional User-Generated Content because it comes from the business rather than customers;

• Employee Advocacy (3) is the strategic framework: it's the company policy that encourages employees to become brand ambassadors on their own channels;

• Unhinged Marketing (4) Because of its “out of control” nature, represents the actual stylistic approach. Controversial, unpredictable, often absurd content, where brands abandon the corporate filter to communicate as a friend would. Born out of Guerrilla Marketing, it includes sharp responses, chaotic mascots and a conversational tone that veers towards the absurd;

• Meme Marketing (5) is the specific tactic of using recognisable formats (memes, in fact) to create culturally relevant content. In other words, to follow trends and make both the algorithm and us happy, because we gain visibility without sponsorship.

These statements are not intended to demonstrate that marketing is complex, but rather that it cannot be confined to mere "advertising"

EGC and Unhinged marketing

First anticipated in 2023 by Ogilvy (6), EGC combined with unhinged marketing is defined as the most influential trend for the coming years, with those who have integrated it seeing mainly positive aspects, both in the workplace and in terms of social content. All this with the extra value of getting company employees involved, the people who live it day to day, and in doing so creating their own influencers. The question is: why does it work?

The strategy works because 76% of consumers (7) trust content created by employees more than branded content. As explained by Zaria Parvez, the 23-year-old who turned Duolingo into a cultural phenomenon: ‘Gen Z actively resists being sold to and seeks brands that create content aligned with their values - from self-deprecating humor reflecting their economic and health struggles to critiques of overconsumption’ (8).

The effectiveness of this approach is based on three interconnected pillars:

• Perceived authenticity: social media is increasingly perceived as lacking authenticity and trustworthiness (9), so people are turning to content shared by real people, who are perceived as 2.4 times more authentic (10) than traditional corporate content (11);

• Amplified reach: Employees have personal networks that are on average 10 times larger than corporate accounts (12), and the messages they share reach 561% more people than official channels (13);

• Emotional connection: As Kara Redman, CEO of Backroom, explains: "People crave connection, with brands and with other people. We are lonely. We need something to belong to, and social media offers unlimited possibilities, which is terrifying. When a brand shows that it understands us, we feel part of something again" (14). Memes create exactly this shared sense of cultural belonging, where all like-minded people can see themselves reflected, and ultimately they are easy to replicate and adapt.

Engagement, ROI and conversions

Now let's move on from theory to practice and what everyone is looking for: data on the effectiveness of implementing certain strategies.

In terms of engagement, i.e. when users physically interact with our content:

• Content shared by employees generates 8 times more engagement and is shared 24 times more than company posts (13);

• Meme marketing achieves 10 times more reach and 60% more engagement than traditional content (12).

As for ROI (I can see that this is the only thing you care about):

• Fujitsu has documented a 3.6 times higher return from employee advocacy than the same amount spent on social advertising (15);

• Capco states that traffic generated by employee advocacy converts at 51.7%, compared to 3.93% for paid advertising traffic - practically 13 times more (37).

In terms of sales, companies with active EGC programmes saw a 19% increase in their first year (2). Here are some specific examples:

• MoonPie, a century-old snack brand, achieved a 17% increase in sales without new products, without increasing distribution, without discounts, without TV. Only one thing had changed: the social media manager's self-deprecating tweets (16);

• Scrub Daddy, the smiling sponge brand, CEO Aaron Krause said in 2022: ‘We rely on memes rather than product demonstrations to sell the brand, and it works!’ He reported a large return on investment from TikTok, with retail sales doubling in one year (17);

• When Ryanair goes from 5 million to 30-40 million people reached weekly – all without advertising expenditure – the economic potential becomes clear.

When it comes to trust, 88% of consumers cite authenticity as a key factor in their choice of brands (18), particularly for Gen Z, who are living in the era of AI-generated content.

Now let's go into even more detail and see what some companies have done and what they have achieved in return. Is it all roses and sunshine? Obviously not, because there is no magic formula, but rather a strategy that must be well organised and applied.

This story starts in June 2020, when Zaria Parvez, 23, fresh out of journalism school at the University of Oregon, got hired as a social media coordinator for Duolingo (8).

For over a year, she says she worked alone on the brand's social media, until September 2021, when she noticed the Duo owl costume abandoned in the HR area.

‘I had some ideas,’ she told her managers. ‘I don't need money. I have a mouldy owl costume and an iPhone.’

From that moment on, the TikTok account went from 50,000 to 16.7 million followers - a 45,600% increase (19). What had she created to make this happen?

• A menacing character who haunts users to complete lessons (20);

• Obsessed with Dua Lipa (Dua Lipa - Duo Lingo, get it?);

• Completely free to ride any cultural trend in a crazy and absurd way.

Little by little, Duolingo refined its character, hiring a “mascot specialist” who worked for Sesame Street (yes, the Muppets) as an external consultant. His role is to establish the character's boundaries. Parvez says of him: 'He would tell us things like, ‘This is what Elmo could or couldn't do’'.

Duolingo's CEO, initially sceptical, now urges the team to be ‘more unhinged.’ Speed is crucial: the viral ‘death of Duo’ campaign in February 2025 — in which the owl is hit by a Tesla Cybertruck, dies, and then resurrects after users collect 50.9 billion XP points — was conceived and executed in just six days.

The result: 1.7 billion impressions in two weeks (19), doubling the combined total of the top 10 Super Bowl 2025 commercials.

Duo even has a full name: Duo Keyshauna Renee Lingo, born in 1000 BC according to his viral ‘death certificate’ (8). She has a personal seamstress who creates different costumes for each event. And on a final note, the song “Spanish or Vanish,” which started as a community meme, has been turned into an actual track released on Spotify (21).

When Zaria Parvez started wearing the hijab full-time in 2023, she said: ‘A lot of people were like, “Wow, I didn't think the Duolingo owl was a Muslim girl wearing a hijab.”’ She explained, ‘I didn't see anyone who looked like me. It made me realise that Muslim women wearing hijabs simply don't exist in marketing.’ (8)

Duolingo

If Duolingo invented unhinged marketing on TikTok, Ryanair refined it with a highly controversial approach: embracing all the criticism it receives. Cramped seats? No comfort? Extra baggage fees? Instead of defending itself, the brand makes fun of itself and is not overly serious (22).

Michael Corcoran, former Head of Social, built a team of eight people divided into two units: one for planned content, the other for real-time reactions. It is worth noting that Corcoran was the sole approver of all content, eliminating the bottlenecks that today paralyse other brands when they need to publish content (23).

When a user complained about the “20-something woke imbeciles” running the account, Ryanair responded by updating the profile bio with that description (24). When someone asked about USB ports for charging devices, the response was: “Yes, they're right under the 'Massage” function on the seat' (25).

The results speak for themselves: 2.5 million TikTok followers – more than easyJet, Jet2, Tui, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Etihad combined. All with zero advertising budget (26).

Notably, in October 2023, Corcoran resigned and posted on X denouncing the toxic corporate culture and managers who ‘verbally abused people in public’.

Later, McDonald's head of social media, Guillaume Huin, would say of him: ‘You and your team have redefined the industry we operate in and opened up new horizons for all social media departments around the world’ (27).

Ryanair

This is history, as it is perhaps the true pioneer in the field of unhinged marketing. It all started in 2017 with a tweet. Amy Brown, Wendy's social media manager, responded to a troll, Thuggy-D, who questioned the brand's “fresh, never frozen” promise (28, 29). When Thuggy-D sarcastically asked where Wendy's stored its meat if not in the freezer like McDonald's, Brown replied, 'Where do you want to store something that's not frozen if not in the refrigerator?

Twitter followers exploded from 2.1 to 3.8 million. From that moment on, National Roast Day was born (originally on 4 January, now on a variable date), a made-up holiday where Wendy's insults other brands and users of all kinds.

It is worth noting that Brown paid a very high personal price (31). In a confessional essay, he revealed that his personal accounts were discovered and attacked: ‘My inbox was filled with anti-Semitic threats, offensive cartoons, photos of genitals. Someone found my address. It was accurate, albeit outdated, and it scared me so much that I threw up.’

The various threats she received and the attention she received from the American alt-right for being Jewish led her to leave her job shortly afterwards in March 2017.

There is one detail that should not be overlooked, which is that unlike Duolingo and Ryanair, Wendy's uses an external agency (VML). Matt Keck, creative director and at the time part of Amy's team, worked on the account for 11 years, gaining a wealth of experience, and recently shared his story on the #RoastME podcast.

Wendy's

So, if unhinged marketing is so powerful, why doesn't everyone do it? Well, because there is no golden rule, only a way to apply it. Michael Caine would say, “Use the difficulties”, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up immediately and listen carefully. Gem of personal growth aside, not all unhinged marketing attempts work:

• Burger King posted ‘Women belong in the kitchen’ on 8 March 2021, with the intention of creating a thread to raise awareness about the inequality of opportunity in the restaurant industry when you are a woman who wants to become a chef. The problem? The first tweet appeared without context and made no sense, prompting Burger King to apologise and delete everything (32). One should not laugh at other people's misfortunes, but I cannot deny that I laughed when I read this story;

• DiGiorno, a frozen pizza brand, wanted to take advantage of the #WhyIStayed hashtag trend to gain visibility and posted: ‘#WhyIStayed You had pizza’. The problem? Nobody had checked that the hashtag was about stories of domestic violence. They spent hours and hours apologising to each user individually, but by then the damage was done (33);

• American Apparel posted a stylised image of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding on 4 July, mistaking it for fireworks. The company's explanation: ‘Our social media manager was born after the tragedy’ (33);

• Chick-fil-A, which strongly urged an employee (known as MiriTheSiren) to stop posting videos of her meals at work, which had earned her 117,000 followers on TikTok (34). It's a controversial issue because, on the one hand, they got some free buzz from the viral videos, but on the other, she broke her contract, which normally says you can't film at work. In the end, she quit, so now we'll never know if Chick-fil-A serves chicken on Wednesdays...

Last but not least, Nathan Allebach, the man behind the philosophical account of Steak-umm (a frozen meat brand), deserves an honourable mention: ‘We get hundreds of DMs about mental health. High school and college students ask us for Steak-umm’s opinion on their academic path’ (35). Nathan Allebach managed the account from 2017 to 2021, growing it from 1,000 to over 200,000 followers with this philosophical approach, which has now become much more “standardised” with light-hearted content for everyone.

The final paradox is that when these brands used a freewheeling, unhinged marketing approach, the content became less tied to standards of perfection and more connected to people and their weaknesses and uniqueness, not to sell but to create a genuine bond with the user.

Missteps and disputes

The bottom line

Successful brands don't sell products. They create characters, become part of a culture, and accept being teased, just like a bond between friends, people and partners. And just like in a romantic relationship, you have to show your weaknesses in order to bond and be more authentic and human.

To implement a strategy based on unhinged marketing, you will need to:

• Identify how your brand can use this approach. Does it solve a problem for consumers? Does your target audience include Gen Z and/or Millennials? Are you willing to give up some control?

• Find the right person. Don't look for experts with 10 years of experience, look for young people who live on TikTok and understand meme culture. Zaria Parvez for Duolingo was 23 when she started. Amy Brown was 27 at the time of the billion-dollar tweet. Leopardi was 21 years old when he wrote his most famous poems, and Picasso was 25 when he started Cubism;

• Set broad and clear boundaries. Think back to the Sesame Street consultant for Duolingo and see it as an example of how to define the character, what they can and cannot do, and ultimately give them complete creative freedom within those boundaries.

Accept that some content will fail. The secret is not to avoid mistakes, but to be quick to recognise them and respond with authenticity.

We are in a unique moment where we can be the first to create a bond, showing something real that others do not have, namely our imperfections. Brands have always acted and communicated as “the best at” or “the strongest in”, and this culture has led us to say that we are all better. Better than whom?

Now... are you able to take yourself less seriously?

'Use the difficulties' is not just a way of saying “turn adversity into opportunity”, but a way to create something new. It is a spontaneous reaction, where we all face difficulties, something that is outside our comfort zone. Use this powerful weapon to achieve great results.

You will finally be able to gain a lot of awareness for your brand, you will be able to achieve the fame you boast about and seek, and then the question will finally become: ‘Will you be able to handle the weight of fame?’

Sources

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