Copyright The Boston Globe
He looks so innocent! Great for the kids! Yummy! You might think so. But that shows how little you know. Because over on Dunkin’s social media accounts, Spidey D was wreaking havoc. The spidonut first appeared innocently enough, as part of a rather generic Halloween menu rollout last October. “No tricks, just treats” the brand posted with a series of ghost emojis, promoting its spider confection on Instagram alongside a purple trick-or-treat tub of munchkins. (Honestly, it was meh at best.) The spider doughnut wasn’t even new — since 2017 Dunkin’s Halloween lineup has included a similar treat with an orange coat of frosting. But apparently the new purple hue unleashed some evil inside that munchkin center. Days later, the chaos began. In what would become a signature of the brand’s “unhinged” Spidey D marketing campaign, the tone of the posts about this new doughnut suddenly shifted. Spelling and punctuation began to suffer. Posts took on more main character energy, and that character was Spidey D. “im in charge now,” one photo said. This doughnut had seemingly entered his villain era. In the days that followed, Dunkin’s posts across Instagram, X, and TikTok became increasingly chaotic, and at times borderline NSFW. The spider touted its own virility (“ya grl says I’m not to itsy bitsy”), flirted rampantly (“ive got the long legs all i need is the daddddddy”), and posted not-so-subtle threats (“i will take on evry 1 of u”). The story that Dunkin’s marketing team was pushing was that the anthropomorphized doughnut had seemingly hijacked the brand’s social accounts. Then he broke containment. The evil spider popped up all over the web, posting over 1,000 comments across other social pages, spider videos, and meme accounts. The comments section of the Dunkin’ posts went wild, and the campaign went viral. Users began sharing posts in their own accounts and making reaction videos on TikTok. All this helped push the Spidey D memes into the “For You” feed on Instagram and TikTok, which drove even more chatter. Stephen Colbert featured the campaign on The Late Show. Media outlets across the country covered the arachnid’s antics. And as other brands engaged, Dunkin’ fans literally ate it up. “I’ll never unfollow Dunkin lol” one wrote. “This is the marketing I live for,” posted another. In the span of a week, Spidey D’s 28 posts garnered over 2.5 million engagements and 100,000 new followers for Dunkin’s social accounts. Dunkin’ quickly began selling Spidey D sweatshirts and swag, which sold out within an hour. On Halloween, Dunkin sold 13 million munchkins and doughnuts, setting a new record for the holiday, which was already one of their top-performing days for doughnut sales. Last year’s campaign climaxed with Spidey’s “leak” of Dunkin’s winter holiday menu, and ended with the Dunkin’ team finally trapping Spidey D in a munchkin bucket. A press release apologized for the unacceptable behavior. But it contained a hidden message within: SPIDEY FOREVER. All told, the campaign garnered 2.9 billion earned impressions, according to a case study created by Cornelia Creative, the social marketing team Dunkin’ partnered with to execute Spidey D’s mayhem. This year, that team took home three Shorty Awards, the social media equivalent of the Oscars. “At Dunkin’, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and that’s part of the magic,” said the brand’s chief marketing officer, Jill McVicar Nelson. “It was weird in the best way, and people loved it because it felt like the internet, not a brand pretending to be ‘in on it.’” Going back to its famous “time to make the donuts” ads of yore, Dunkin’ has never taken itself too seriously. But this foray into “unhinged” marketing — the memeified, way-too-online brand of chaotic commerce — is part of a larger trend of brands throwing out traditional playbooks, said Isabel von Stauffenberg, an investor at Battery Ventures, a Boston-based venture firm. Brands have come to realize that Google search or paid advertising on Meta is no longer as cheap or effective as it used to be, she said, while traditional big-budget channels like billboards or TV ads don’t offer the same bang for their buck. Gen Z in particular “is immune to that sort of traditional marketing” she said, and with consumer attention spans contracting, there’s a need to produce more content, cheaper, and with less gloss than in the past. Enter the “unhinged” era. “[It] seems random, but it’s not random at all,” she said. “It’s this deliberate rejection of corporate tone.” Of course, brands have been creating personas on social media for the last decade, having beefs and bantering with competitors, while fans in the comments laugh along. But for most of that time, you typically had to be following the accounts in order to be in on the fun. Now social media algorithms on Instagram and TikTok are designed to constantly serve up new content from accounts you don’t follow, which means brands are doing more to push their posts to the limits to drive more engagement and retention. In a consumer marketplace report Battery released last year, von Stauffenberg cited the language learning platform Duolingo as a master of the form, with its inane owl mascot Duo using toilet humor and anunrequited flirtation with popstar Dua Lipa to rack up 20 million active daily users. Travel brands Flixbus and Ryanair take a similar zany approach to their posts, she said, while peanut butter sandwich company Nutter Butter has garnered millions of views on its absurdist TikToks. Spidey D is the perfect example of the genre, von Stauffenberg said. ”The more outrageous," she said, “the easier it is to win.” So it was perhaps inevitable that Spidey D would return this year. He seemed to announce his arrival with the mysterious takeover of a Dunkin’s in Salem — of all places — where signage had been covered in purple slime and web with the words IM UR CUTEST NITEMARE was left stretched across its windows. Within days, Spidey D was back behind the wheel of Dunkin’s social accounts, posting outlandish (“im a edibl derangement”) and often vaguely sexual memes (“She ghostin u but she goblin me”). This week, it posted a ten-minute long TikTok with just two words: “im baked.” Fans have gone wild, and merch that Dunks rolled out for them — including a Jumbo Spidey D Bling chain ($67.67), and a giant spider plushie ($40) — sold out in 15 minutes. “Spidey D has really become its own universe, and that’s what made this year so fun to build on,” said Cornelia Creative’s president and CEO, Conor Mason. “Once fans started talking to him like he was real, we knew we had something special. Our job was to help Dunkin’ keep feeding that energy and giving him new ways to surprise people.” And while Ben Affleck will be the first to tell you Dunkin’ hasn’t entirely abandoned its traditional marketing playbook, it’s increasingly clear that some unhinged online content has managed to seep into its mainstream campaigns. “This year, our team wanted to see what happens when you take Spidey D off the phone and into the real world,” said Nelson, who reports the “slimed” Salem store has since posted one of the highest single-day sales the brand has ever recorded. And Dunkin’ has already outpaced last year’s spider doughnut sales, 10 days before Halloween. “When people start walking into Dunkin’ saying, ‘I need the Spider Donut — the one from TikTok,’ you know you’ve hit something bigger," Nelson said. Much bigger, in fact. Or at least that’s what one can ascertain from the massive billboard that just appeared outside Penn Station in New York City. It’s a wanted poster, asking “Have you seen this creature?” featuring a photo of Spidey D. And it’s juxtaposed alongside a poorly spelled missive from Spidey himself: “U will never catch mi.”
