Another April Fools has come and gone, and maybe the surprising thing this year was how innocuous and quaint the social media stunt posts felt. What used to be the one time a year tech brands tried to be funny is now a day where consumer brands post spoofs following a few key templates, as noted by Silence, Brand!, including the wild product collab that may soon become a real thing, like Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuit x Pop Tarts.

But also, when many consumer brands are competing every day in our feeds to grab attention as the most provocative or unhinged, we’re all pretty exhausted by April 1, and it feels better to just take a break.

We have two of my alma mater, Duolingo and YouTube, to thank for much of this. At YouTube we staged the most elaborate April Fools videos any tech company had ever done (most orchestrated by my longtime partner in crime Ben Relles), including one year when we made the entire site available for 360º viewing in Snoopavision.

When I joined Duolingo in 2018 and started building an in-house producing team for our original content, one of the first things we did was bring a little of that energy to Duolingo for an April Fools collab with the marketing team, Duolingo Push, that established a lot of our brand DNA to come. We were leaning into popular memes of the past year reacting to Duolingo’s persistent and sometimes passive-aggressive sounding notifications, which portrayed Duo as a murderous intruder that had broken into your house, or showed up with a gun. There was some concern inside the company — “do people think we’re evil??” — but we had a theory that it was all love, which was proven when the video hit 7 million views and led to Duolingo’s all-time biggest week to date in usage and revenue.

We filmed the video in and around Duolingo’s Pittsburgh office, with all Duolingo employees, and the suit was falling apart while we made it. I asked if I could turn monetization on for the channel since I thought we might get more views, and co-founder Severin told me if we made any money on the video I could buy a new one. It definitely made some money, and paid for the much nicer suit that would one day pick up to lasting social fame and industry renown.

Zaria’s first year of posting with the Duo suit, along with a pattern of being the first brand to comment hilariously on trending TikTok posts, created a gold standard for brand-as-creator: Zaria had no real budget, no team besides those of us she could rope into helping out with videos (I drove her and Duo in a U-Haul van to the Dua Lipa concert), just resourcefulness and creativity. As the account grew to 10M followers, creators would reach out to collab — no need to pay for influencer posts — and the social marketing team and its budget grew, but would always stay relatively small and scrappy.

As Duo blew up on social, friends reached out to me thinking I was behind it, and I would tell them the only thing I could take credit for was not saying no to Zaria, and having her back, which was true for all of the exec team. Much of the seeming takeaway was that Duolingo was successful on social because we were “unhinged,” but the real secret was that no matter what Zaria and the team did on social, they always did it with the goal of reminding you that Duolingo was on your phone, and you should do a lesson. Everything connected back to Duolingo’s mission of learning, so Duo the owl could get away with murder, since everyone knew we had good intentions. It would be nearly impossible to get away with a video where Chester Cheetah was kidnapping and torturing people.

There are a lot more companies now investing in original, social-first content, and the most effective ones aren’t trying to replicate Duolingo’s style, but finding ways to express their own mission and connect with their communities in a way that feels right for them.

FIGS, just featured in a great Rachel Karten interview with FIGS CMO Bené Eaton, has built an in-house production team focused on films celebrating health care workers that live and breathe on social.

Rachel: You have a film director who’s in house?

Bené: Yeah, we have an in-house film director. He does all of the films you’ve seen—including our “Where do you wear FIGS?” films from last year and our “Never Change” films this year. We have an in-house film director, in-house art directors, graphic designers, in-house narrative and copy. Everything is done by the FIGS team.

Having an in-house film team means we’re not reinventing ourselves every campaign. We’re building on a deep understanding of our community. That continuity creates a consistency you can feel. Each campaign is distinct, but all unmistakably FIGS. And just as importantly, it allows us to move quickly, trust our instincts, and create without layers.

Red Bull has been fully invested in online content for years—they led the charge of brands creating on YouTube, and their 2012 Felix Baumgartner Space Jump was more spectacular than anything on TV at the time. But they’re still finding ways to extend their brand to younger audiences, like partnering with YouTube daredevil Michelle Khare as an official Red Bull Athlete.

A24 has taken the traditional biggest hurdle of movie marketing—having to build (and buy) awareness for every movie as a separate campaign—by building a social brand with millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that can host anything from a fake Marty Supreme marketing brainstorm to unnerving trailers to Zendaya giving relationship advice.

So here are some rules for brands wanting to make things worth watching, build an audience, and win at the whole brands-as-creators game:

  1. Stay in your lane. This starts with having a clearly defined mission and brand promises. For Duolingo, it’s getting people to have fun learning every day. For FIGS, it’s celebrating and serving health care workers; Red Bull, it’s enabling athletes and artists to push their limits. If you can connect what you’re making to your mission, you can get the license to do it in any number of creative ways.

  2. Listen, and lean into what’s working. Social at Duolingo originally only focused on Duo, but more and more people started posting fan art of Lily, the emo teen character. Eventually, a Lily suit and trending TikTok dances followed, as well as original content like a dark live action sitcom and (after my time) regular animated Lily vlogs.

  3. Collab and participate. The ability to post collab videos to multiple accounts on every platform now is a game changer, but before that, algorithms were able to detect guest appearances in videos and promote them to both audiences. Collaborations with creators or brands with compatible missions is a win-win, and only really happen when you’re mutual fans — so it pays to spend as much time being part of the community as you are making things — following, commenting, promoting the ones you love.

  4. Finally, put your money where it counts. Part of the Duolingo account’s charm was that it had almost no budget and was scrappy, but when they hosted collab days for creators in Pittsburgh, they rolled out the red carpet—including gifting custom shoes. This also means, don’t use AI — too much of your audience is against it, and they know you can afford to support animators, like Hermés has been doing, or invest in creating characters like Apple’s Little Finder Guy.

Some other things:

Randy Greenberg examined the amount of money top consumer brands spend essentially renting space on other brands’ media. His conclusion: 5% of the paid media spend of consumer media brands — $3.5 billion — “could collectively be financing a content operation the size of a major streaming platform.”

Speaking of Duolingo, the brilliant media truthsayer Evan Shapiro posted this week about the social team’s incredible death of Duo campaign that took over the internet last year, and how depth is more important than size these days in social.

Max Read considered whether ubiquitous AI writing is truly “inevitable,” and noted that the pressures and incentives to cut corners, plagiarize, fabricate (aka “hallucinate”), and produce content faster at lower quality standards have existed since before AI made it faster and easier to do.

Rachel Karten, quoted above, covers this beat spectacularly, and her post from a while back, Treat TikTok Like TV, with Adam Faze, is still a great read on the subject.

And OpenAI just bought TBPN, which shows even the most omnipotent companies on the planet see the value of a great content arm. Erik Barmack at the Ankler digs in on why.

For those of you that made it this far, a couple fun videos:

Flea covering Frank Ocean’s Thinkin Bout You on Jimmy Fallon. I don’t know why everyone cheered every time Flea did a certain thing (I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t know what Flea’s been up to), except I also totally get it. (A Plea, his first video from the new album, is fantastic.)

And my old and dear friends The Gregory Brothers put out this great song about the Most Confusing Place on Earth (60th Road, Place, Lane, Street, Ave, Court, and Drive, in Queens, NY).

Alright, please hit me up in the comments with your best brands-as-creators thoughts. And keep on creating.