As marketers, we often encounter one of the silliest yet most important tools at the creative front: creative nonsense.
The standard definition of creativity requires novelty and appropriateness as its core pillars. When we remove appropriateness, it becomes ‘overinclusive thinking’: a type of thinking where the connection between ideas is lost, making them irrelevant.
Marketing has always lived in a strange space where brilliance and absurdity look almost identical. What one person calls “genius,” another might dismiss as “nonsense.”
Rise of the Nonsense:
Scrolling through Instagram, you might often notice that some of the most engaging content doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t look planned, it’s impulsive, raw, random and maybe even chaotic.
This by any means does not share accidental grounds. It is a niche that many influencers and companies particularly choose.
Creators today build their entire online presence around absurdity, more so, controlled absurdity. They have jump cuts that feel off, humour that feels too random, pointless narratives, but they bring millions of people in.
Why does it bring engagement, one might ask?
To put it simply, everything on the internet feels the same. The digital landscape has millions of posts by the hour, all overly polished, highly AI-generated. It has become predictable, perfect grammar, structure and deep metaphors no longer feel raw and human, they’re expected.
Creative nonsense, however, disrupts this pattern. When you are stuck in a world of endless scrolling, having the audience look twice and interrupting their flow is your ultimate power.
The Fast pace:
The world online isn’t just fast in its pace, but it skims through all the information available.
Research suggests that the average attention span when watching anything online is now less than a minute, only 47 seconds. That makes it awfully hard to capture an audience that can be uninterested within a millisecond. If a creator cannot strike a blow by the end of the first 1.5 seconds, then the following 45.5 seconds will never even be seen.
That’s the Skimmer’s Rule in play. Nearly 75% of visitors skim-read the text; three-quarters of the audience will not read the carefully crafted 500-word caption you put together. Instead, they will mentally summarise it down to 10 words. That gives you a tighter window to work with. Your 500 words need to be easy enough for a quick summary.
Even when the best search engine results page links enjoy a 39% click-through rate, the “Read More” button on social media is an uncommon occurrence. Your hook must be smart and fast because otherwise, the “Read More” button becomes nothing more than a “Close Ad” button for you.
This means 3 things:
- You have 1.5 seconds to capture attention.
- less than a minute to hold it
- A high chance your content will be reduced to a few words
But something strange has been happening with nonsense; it survives compression. It taps into memory, sense of self and breaks the rhythm.
AI and the Flood of Sameness:
To add to the problem, AI has made it more difficult for content to actually get recognition.
It is fantastic at creating ideas, expressions, and connections.
But most of it is missing something essential: judgment.
An algorithm can produce, but it does not select. Algorithms lack an understanding of context, subtleties, and when something just feels wrong.
And that’s why so much of AI-generated content turns out to be useless. Intelligent-sounding nonsense is still nonsense.
Which is precisely where human thought comes in, not to add more ideas, but to sort through them.
The trick today is not just about being creative. It is about selecting.
Does Nonesense always work?
Not all nonsense is effective, and not all nonsense can work; most of it just becomes noise.
The difference between nonsense and creative nonsense lies in intent.
Creative nonsense feels random only at the surface of things; it is deeply catered to its audience and relevant underneath. For many, it taps into something real and personal, perhaps an emotion, a behaviour or a shared human frustration,
When brands and creators get this right, they do more than just entertain people, but create a connection, turning an audience into a community.
The absurdity then becomes a mirror, something the audience instantly recognises even if it’s exaggerated or irrational. Be it Duolingo’s aggressive bird that threatens to lock you up if you don’t do a lesson or with the Autizmen’s humourlessly funny content, they don’t make sense, but keep the audience engaged till the end.
How Brands Can Use Creative Nonsense
Brands often play it safe. They’re scared of confusion, inconsistency, or anonymity.
However, their attempt to provide answers leads them to disappear into thin air.
The idea here is not to confuse people but to surprise with intention.
The following guidelines help maintain such a balance:
1. Absurdity for the Hook, Not for Clarity
Absurdity can catch people’s attention, but not convey the whole message. After you have caught attention, clarity has to kick in.
2. Start with Friction
The most effective content shouldn’t start with your praise of yourself. It should start where your audience stops to think. Recognition immediately connects.
3. Edit to the Core
If people skim through all the stuff online, any extra words will distract them. Minimalism is not just a style; it’s a requirement.
4. Accept Your Flaws
Anything overproduced becomes part of the crowd. Anything slightly raw and humanised draws attention because of that quality.
5. Be Ruthless about convergence:
Go wild with generating ideas, then go crazy killing those that don’t fit.
Many brands, before the development of AI, have functioned very well on this tactic.
In the 90s, Asian Paints came out with an ad called “Mera Wala Cream” It exploited a peculiar quirk that all advertising producers know: the one that plagues their clients with the infamous “mental shade.”
The commercial follows an obsessive character who turns down dozens of cream samples that all look similar to him with a single, repetitive statement, “Mera Wala cream” (my kind of cream). To the owner of the store, it was just “Creative Nonsense.” However, while one can see no difference between off-white and pearlescent eggshell from afar, there is an ocean separating these shades from each other.
Instead of avoiding the nonsense in its commercial, the company embraced it, doing two things by using the repeated phrase of “Mera Wala [Colour]”:
Reinforced the Obsession: It let the consumer know that it understands them perfectly and knows their irrational fixation on certain colours.
Created a Phrase Branding: The company managed to transform the “irrational” obsession of consumers into a commonly used expression that referred to their desired colour – Mera Wala [Colour].
Instead of searching for trends to follow, they became trends.
However,
Marketing has moved from a world of building recognition to a world of fighting for attention.
Earlier, brands like Asian Paints had time to explain themselves. Today, they have moments.
Earlier, creativity could unfold slowly. Today, it must hit instantly.
This shift changes the role of nonsense. Before, it was risky.
Now, it’s often necessary. We still remember unhinged ads from our childhood, from MTV beats to Idea’s honey bunny. They were creative, catchy, but more importantly, selective and relatable.
Creative nonsense is not the problem. Irrelevant nonsense is.
When used intentionally, absurdity becomes one of the most effective tools in modern marketing. It disrupts patterns, captures attention, and makes ideas stick.
But without clarity, it quickly turns into noise.
In a world where content is abundant and attention is scarce, the goal isn’t to sound creative. It’s to be understood.
Because in the end, the only creativity that matters is the kind that actually makes sense.