Anthpo flips his Crocs into sport mode
Brand deals should unlock bigger creative risks
I explore how brands and startups become media companies. This post is part of my weekly case study series, where I critique a branded entertainment campaign. If you enjoy this, I’d greatly appreciate a share or subscribe <3
Not to be all sir-glaze-a-lot, but Anthpo has truly been on a generational run of stunts over the last year: the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest, the Cheeseball Man, the recent reveal that he was behind John Chungus. He has a knack for bringing internet absurdity to IRL moments, and in a sea of ragebait, I never regret the time I spend with his work. To celebrate all the chaos that is surely incoming with his new stunts agency, I thought I’d break down one of his early swings at branded entertainment: Kid With Crocs.
Anthpo’s an odd character as far as creators1 go. He shuns his 2M YouTube subscribers in the name of anonymity, often creating new 0-follower account and then hiding his face/voice on camera entirely. There’s no doubt that the culture is embracing each stunt on its own merit, and not because of his past success or audience. So when he inked a deal with Crocs, a product already synonymous with an ironic degree of whimsy, it was the perfect opportunity for him to take a swing at the holy grail of branding: creating a cultural moment around a product.2
The purest version of brand marketing is when you’re able to exist naturally inside an interesting story. The issue, of course, is that genuinely novel stories are hard to come by, let alone one that happens to have your brand at the heart of it. That’s why this entire stunt was a masterclass on how branded entertainment can create culture, not just ride on the coattails of an existing moment.
I strongly suggest watching all thirteen videos, but the gist is:
An anonymous masked character (from a fresh 0-follower TikTok account!) posts an elaborate video of him staging a beauty pageant for the Hans Christian Anderson “Ugly Duckling” statue in Central Park. It ends with him giving the statue a custom pair of Crocs.
He teases that there are seven other statues that he’ll be dripping out.
Over the course of the next ~30 days he brings his (rapidly growing) audience along on truly absurd sidequests as he Crocs up all eight statues. He hosts a honey tasting event before he gets the Bear statue, raps over a Tyler The Creator song as he gets the Dog statue, and eventually pulls an elaborate heist-type video to get the Statue of Liberty.
He ends the stunt having amassed ~400,000 followers, an in-person meetup to sign his Giant Croc, and then reveals that this was an art series in collaboration with Crocs.
A few learnings for anyone trying to architect more interesting brand moments:
I. Branded entertainment should empower creators to take bigger creative risks. Create IP that exists beyond your product!
The standard brand deal is a loan on someone else’s reputation: I, the brand, will pay $X to have a respected person deploy a percentage of their reputation to shill my product in front of their audience. That can be boring and straightforward, or it can backfire brilliantly. As a marketer, a standard brand deal like this is not getting you fired, but it’s surely not getting you a promotion.
Branded entertainment, then, is more like a loan on someone else’s creativity. You’re trying to create some IP that lives beyond the brand itself. The key is that Crocs found someone whose flavour of creativity matched their own, and then let him run wild with it. Crocs was already a dream brand for him to work with, but in his own words Anthpo “...just wanted to do an art project, and they [Crocs] funded it.” Putting Anthpo at the helm of an entire campaign — not just a scripted ad read — allowed him to take a bigger creative risk with his particular brand of absurdity.3
II. Remind yourself which part of the funnel you’re optimizing for
If you measure a top-of-funnel fish by its ability to attribute bottom-of-funnel sales, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. Or something like that. Branded entertainment is almost definitionally meant for awareness, and should be measured as such: views, brand lift on other platforms, or search metrics. Middle-of-funnel consideration should be a task for niche experts, and micro-influencers are often best equipped to drive attributable sales.
The only public number Anthpo has shared is that he drove 55M views over the course of the month. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, and doesn’t account for any earned media after the fact, but the average CPM for the Brand Awareness objective on Meta Ads in April was $2.50. Even if you ignore the cultural impact for a moment, from a purely CPM perspective Crocs would’ve come out ahead as long as this brand deal cost them under ~$150,000.
Positive sentiment and top-of-funnel awareness are just ways to lower your future customer acquisition cost.
III. The best way to build an audience is to take them on a mission
The best series have a palpable sense of tension in the comments: when’s the next video coming out? Anthpo does a masterful job of bringing the audience along with him throughout the series via a few levers:
Open Loops
An Open loop is a narrative technique that keeps people engaged through unanswered questions. He does this at a few levels:
The checklist of future statues he’s going to get to (which statue is he getting this time?)
Stories-within-the-story (why is he hosting a beauty pageant when he just said he was going to design a custom Croc for this statue?)
Side quests for side characters (why is he stopping the beauty pageant to print a tophat?)
Inside Jokes
Inside jokes make you feel a part of the in-group. That’s a tough prospect for an account that only existed for 30 days! But Anthpo builds in a few recurring bits that reward you for watching successive videos:
He constantly jokes about being unemployed, a nod to the “your most unemployed at 2pm on a Monday” meme
He jokes that “nobody can stop me” in his first video, and then references it in a text conversation with his mom, and then uses it again in the first verse when he sings about the Bear statue
High-Effort, Low Stakes
High-effort is the opposite of slop. The more that viewers develop an ick against content shortcuts with AI, the more they’ll value extreme high effort. Why is he 3D printing a baby snail for the snail statue in the background of the video? Why is he hosting a honey tasting competition? Why is he reaching for such elaborate means to do any of this in the first place?
It makes no sense. And that’s why viewers keep coming back.
It’d be tough to remix Kid With Crocs in any meaningful way without feeling like a direct ripoff. But it’s a good example of the power of branded entertainment — enabling creators to take big risks with their brand deals gives you a chance at existing in the heart of a cultural moment.
Things I’m consuming this week:
TikTok Launches Podcast Network with iHeartMedia: There is no such thing as Peak Podcast, and in the year 2040 everyone will be granted their state mandated podcast equipment when they turn 18.
How Airrack Made YouTube’s Greatest Comeback: This is from a few weeks ago but it’s a truly excellent breakdown of how YouTubers think about videos from ideation, to concept, to packaging.
Welcome to Girl Room: Gymnasium’s Boy Room has a sister show.
Even though he’s a YouTube/TikTok native creative, it feels reductive to call him a creator. Why “creator” vs, say, a “performance artist”? “Creator” feels like a collapse of several different channels of expression into one flat title, but the reality is that I love his stunts because they do transcend mediums. So maybe “creator” is the only title that works.
Think: the Stanley Cup surviving a car fire, or Loro Piana fueling Succession’s stealth wealth.
This brand deal in particular was, of course, highly risky for both parties, and not without some blowback. Starting from a zero-follower account (and filming every video anonymously) meant that Anthpo wasn’t able to lean on any of his existing reputation here. He admits to having some backup plans, such as calling up a few of the reporters he met through the Timothy Chalamet stunt, but he knew that would be a cop-out to use only if things fell totally flat. But scared money don’t make money!!!
"sir-glaze-a-lot" got me lol