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The Northumberland Zoo in northern England has a great marketing team.
With over 184k followers on TikTok, for years they've been producing videos where the zoo animals are the stars.
(The zoo's adorable snow leopards always seem to be a surefire hit with the fans!)
But for a recent video, Northumberland Zoo flipped the script and put zoo directors Brian and Linda front and center.
Then they let some of their younger staffers write the script and cram it full of as much Gen Z slang as possible.
The result is hands-down the best and funniest virtual zoo tour you'll ever see.
The video currently has over 6 million views and counting, with more than a million likes to go with housands and thousands of comments!
@northumberlandzoo Our Zoo Directors didn’t understand the assignment. #genz #genzmarketing #viral #fyp #funny #marketing
In complete (and impressive) deadpan, Brian and Linda give a tour of the zoo and its most popular animals using only Gen Z slang.
Here's just a sampling of the lingo they were able to squeeze into the minute-long video:
- "hits different"
- "poppin'"
- "brat"
- "slay"
- "main character energy"
- "menty b"
- "it's giving"
- and, of course, "very demure, very mindful"
There's something kind of surreal about the whole thing — like it was directed by Wes Anderson — and people all over the globe are absolutely eating up Brian and Linda's brilliant comedic timing.
It's fair to say that they "understood the assignment."
Photo by Janosch Diggelmann on Unsplash
It feels like generational divides are bigger and more stubborn than ever — maybe that's why videos like this one hit the spot so well.
Northumberland Zoo isn't the first brand to play with generational comedy in their marketing.
A real estate agent went mega viral earlier this year when he let his Gen Z employee edit his promotional video with hilarious results .
Pairing Gen X/Millennial/Boomer bosses with Gen Z marketing staff has been Internet gold, and right now it's one of the hottest trends on TikTok.
The idea of all the staff members at the Northumberland Zoo, young and old, coming together to poke a little fun at one another is just a delight.
A survey from Pew Research showed that 79% of respondents believed there was a generation gap, or “a major difference in the point of view of younger people and older people today.”
Maybe that's in part because we really love putting labels on people and using those to box them in.
"OK boomer" to dismiss older people, while Gen Z is "soft," Gen Alpha is "doomed," and Millennials are cringe .
It's just heart-warming and fun to see a group of people of different generations that like each other and can make fun of their differences, and themselves.
Realistically, will a funny TikTok heal all the world's ills? Of course not. But here's hoping all the viral attention Northumberland Zoo is getting will help with their conservation efforts, including programs to protect snow leopards and harvest mice.
Those harvest mice? Extremely cute by the way. Or, as the kids say, "smol."
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