Tactical Absurdity
Some thoughts on keeping things weird.
I’m a huge fan of companies that try to come across as genuinely, unapologetically weird in their public messaging and in the products they make. And I don’t mean when a brand tries to act weird as a marketing ploy, like so many do on Twitter. There’s a very fine line between forced weirdness and genuine absurdity, and those of us who grew up online feel it like an allergy attack when we see that line crossed. Maybe the line isn’t that fine. Maybe it’s a bus lane some brands just should stop trying to run across.
A bunch of examples of real strangeness and delightful whimsy pop into my mind when I think about how much I love it:
Discord seems to have a strong love of absurdity and silliness in their changelogs and April Fools pranks. Their public messaging is written as if they’re a regular user of the platform they run, acting as if everyone is on the same level. They are viewed as friendly to power and casual users simultaneously by striking a delicate balance between technical, weird, and practical.
For a hot minute Slack was in this category, but not really any longer as they’ve moved towards an Enterprise focus. You can still see vestiges of their whimsy in Slackbot and the Slack preferences. Slackbot is friendly and colloquial, and their preferences are matter-of-fact but they squeeze in some cuteness (see the “Mark as Read” shortcuts section of Slack’s desktop app). These little bits of niceness and weirdness helped set them apart from other chat programs, especially when they entered the market.
Panic Software and their offshoot video game creating groups, who have made Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch, and their upcoming game platform Playdate. They are unapologetically weird and their software is a delight to use (and play!) because of it.
Keita Takahashi’s video games, most notably Katamari Damacy. Some of Nintendo’s games, like WarioWare. The Simpsons arcade game. I think a lot of people my age could point back to games like these as examples of commercially and critically successful games thanks to their careful balance of weirdness and ease of gameplay. These games are fun no matter how old you are, which highlights how the childlike silliness of a product can be so compelling.
Here at Tumblr we’ve always tried to be unapologetically eccentric. Our April Fools pranks have been extreme expressions of our continuous internal appetite for public absurdity. We used to embrace this with all of our might, and I’d argue the height of this absurdity came in the Tumblr app’s 4.3.1 release notes and the Lizard Election of 2016. We still do our occasional weird “have a good weekend tumblr” post, and the way we normally participate in the world as a brand is still fairly strange, and I expect us to get back to being much weirder now that Tumblr is not a part of Verizon.
I’ve never heard a name for this style of weirdness but I’d like to call it tactical absurdity. It feels like a conscious principle when writing public-facing communications, building product features, and taking actions as a brand. It’s tactical rather than strategic; the overall long-term product features themselves are not absurd, but the way they’re polished and presented is a little absurd. The features and messages should have weird edges, and I don’t mean the broken functionality kind of “edge case”.
For example, the feature of blog-to-blog messaging on Tumblr is not absurd by any means, it was one of our most-requested features at the time it was launched, but the marketing around the viral rollout and added polish of Tumblrbot made it a fair bit absurd. The continued marketing kept it feeling weird. Similarly, Tumblr’s “live video” feature wasn’t inherently weird, tacking live video onto a platform was in vogue at the time, but the way Tumblr announced it definitely was insane (and I’m not sure if there is any existing artifact of that launch I can link to … since it was broadcasted live).
It may seem bonkers to spend this amount of time writing about “being weird” but I think doing so helps legitimize the tactic, so I’ll continue. I think a lot of the time this absurdity is thanks to that weirdness being held within the people at the company who have the power to be weird, and while that’s amazing, the only way anyone can actually enact, reinforce, and sustain weirdness is to understand and codify it in some way. I hate the need for this but it feels true. Make the weirdness enough of a known process and value to be consciously considered, but not so much to stifle it by becoming formulaic. That’s extremely hard to do; it’s too easy to come off as trying too hard. It’s too easy to be cringey instead of cute, as we all have seen countless examples.
But I’ll try to codify parts of it here anyway. Based on the above collection of examples, here are what I think are the guiding principles of this tactical absurdity:
Obviously, a genuine appetite to be silly, and to not let safety, explicitness, and brand positioning get in the way of being weird. Valuing laughter and delight a little bit more than verbosity and clarity. An appreciation that a human (and not a lawyer) is reading the messages coming from your brand, and that they probably have a sense of humor, and they are probably extremely conscious that it’s “a brand” talking. If something feels weird, it’s weird; if something feels forced, it’s forced.
Affording literal time and space to be silly when formulating ideas, when planning a project, when building a project, and when conjuring a communication strategy. One has to value and set aside unstructured time to allow oneself to be weird and creative. While this can make a project take longer, it seems generally worthwhile; a new feature that has a neat weird part of it is more appealing than just a feature that other platforms already have. There’s a great speech given by John Cleese on the topic of creativity, failure, and unstructured time, and it’s over here and you should watch it.
Accepting the risk of being misunderstood; not everyone will “get it” and that’s okay. This is the most careful work: how to be absurd and yet understood enough. One can easily go too far in the direction of absurdity and lose the intended message along the way, as you could (rightfully) argue when it comes to my example above about our 4.3.1 release notes. You can also go too far and make things feel forced; expect your audience to be smart enough to call you out on it.
Honesty makes the absurd feel more genuine and visa-versa. When a company is willing to be honest about something, it’s corresponding silliness becomes more real. They’re a wonderful combo, and couching honesty with absurdity can help you get a potentially uncomfortable message across. Untitled Goose Game is a great example of this: it has no problem explaining itself as a very simple game in which you are “a horrible goose”. This sets your expectations so you’re not disappointed to discover that the game is truly very simple and fairly short.
I think a lot of the consumer world would feel better if more brands were willing to accept being a little strange and allowing themselves to be genuine about it. Everybody’s a little strange. And companies are just collections of strange people. At least a few. Lean in to it! If you’re working at a company that takes itself way too seriously, you’re welcome to use my very corporate-friendly “tactical absurdity” term to try to sell this to the marketing folks.
