Moo Deng will die. Your brand needs to be immortal

If you’ve even glanced at the internet recently, you’ll have seen greased-up pygmy hippo Moo Deng. She is undeniably the largest “social trend” we’ve seen in 2024 with vast reach, an SNL parody as well as inspiring countless pilgrimages to her home, a Thai zoo.

And naturally, brands are also all over this hippo.

The fascination can be easily explained.

Cute babies of basically any species do well in advertising. Especially baby mammals. They have specific infantile features (large forehead, doughy eyes, etc.) that prompt an innate protection and nurturing mechanism in all mammals. It’s one of those weird things I discovered while studying medicine in my early twenties. You can call it the Baby Schema Effect (BSE) or, hilariously, its technical name is “Kindchenschema”, defined by Konrad Lorenz in 1943.

Moo Deng has captured the hearts and resources of global marketers. Almost every brand with a social account simply can’t help but slap Moo Deng in everything. Here are just a few examples.

Putting the Moo Deng peg in the strategic hole

The marketing obsession with Moo Deng exemplifies what’s wrong with modern advertising. It proves that few marketers have grasped what “culture” means.

There are expert culture marketing teams at large FMCGs with the sole purpose of lodging brands into our lives in a way that feels natural; like a cool mate making a recommendation. The least they can do is sign a new celebrity to go in an ad or make some creator content. The most they can do is create genuine fame for a brand that shifts mass behavior to change history.

The most potent example of these cultural dark arts is the Diageo team and how Guinness became the UK’s favorite pint. Its sponsorship of rugby, and now football, is the obvious example. But the real secret craft is exposed in its fanning of the Fred Again flames. Arguably, the world’s hottest musical talent.

I am a mega Fred Again fan. I was at his post-COVID gig with about 100 people in a wet field. He was there sipping a warm can of Guinness mid-set. The brand picked up on this soon after. Before we knew it, Fred was doing after-shows in pubs pulling pints of the black stuff and rocking up in a van post-gig to pour his fans pints.

Sceptics will say Guinness has been lucky.

Oh, and I suppose the “split the G” ritual, ensuring anyone with a pint of Guinness quickly finishes off a third of it in their first gulp, is lucky too?

Bullshit.

Brands get lucky when they are distinct, meaningful and live in culture. The public has to care for these “lucky” trends to happen. No one would have come up with splitting the G if they didn’t care about Guinness.

Getting brands into culture takes a village. It’s a career-long craft.

And you know what isn’t getting your brand into culture? A greasy hippo in a digital ad.

Strategy has been cast aside for digital tactics

My other beef with Moo Deng-ridden ads is the complete lack of strategy.

This clicked when I told my mate Joe about this column. He challenged me to find at least one good example of a brand using Moo Deng. Finding one was about as hard as wrestling a wet hippo.

I came across a cake shop that hadn’t thrown its strategic eggs out for its Moo Deng icing. It made special, high-quality, lookalike cakes. The creative idea was wowing people in a couple of seconds with this. A Moo Deng execution makes total sense; it’s consistent.

Do you know what makes zero sense? Moo Deng biting a piece of Pizza Hut pizza.

This lack of strategic thinking isn’t surprising.

I review effectiveness data, case studies and advertising all day, every day (when I’m not splitting the G). I advise huge agencies, media owners and brands. I promise you – if you are bothering to read this column on effectiveness, have studied marketing in any way, or even sniffed How Brands Grow or The Long and Short of It, then you’re in the top 10% of trained marketers.

There’s a complete lack of strategic cojones out there. Just look at how marketers chased NFTs and the metaverse. We’d sell our own mentor if it meant being the first to do something and brag about it on LinkedIn.

The most troubling data to prove this is the work from Mark Ritson, the IPA and Better Briefs, which shows that only 38% of UK agencies are clear about who the target audience is from a brief. Worse, only 34% of brand-side marketers know their target audience.

When you’ve no idea what’s going on, slapping a hippo on to Instagram seems rather appealing, right? Well, the hippo is the world’s deadliest large land mammal, killing an estimated 500 people per year. And from a campaign perspective, people aren’t as hungry for hippos as you think.

I just authored some new research with the IPA and System1, showing that what grows brands is the long-term commitment to creative strategy and consistent creative execution.

There’s a huge opportunity loss in every Moo Deng post. If you are chasing this week’s cute hippo, what you aren’t doing is proper long-term brand building.

Platform metrics still delude marketers

I have to lay at least some of the blame for this on the doorstep of digital engagement metrics.

A local florist in Huddersfield getting five times more likes and double the view-through rate on their Dengy TikToks will undoubtedly bloom their tulips, but then what?

I refuse to blame Big Tech for this. They’ve told us many times that engagement metrics are basically worthless. In 2015, Meta clearly showed that engagement doesn’t lead to brand outcomes. It recently even showed CTR isn’t just bad, but its also ageist.

More recently, James Hurman released Future Demand with TikTok and Tracksuit, showing again that clicks have nothing to do with brand awareness.

So, parading Moo Deng about for clicks and views won’t help your sales.

So what will?

Well, building a brand will. In the same research, Hurman has proven Byron Sharp (*thunder cracks in the distance – a cat screeches*) right with his double jeopardy law. You need to build your brand equity to grow your short-term sales performance.

Do the long and the short, often, looks after itself.

That means less Moo Deng and more … insight-driven strategy, consistently executed in emotionally distinctive campaigns across the mix. In Compound Creativity, we showed that consistent brands see double the profit gains for this very reason.

Your brands need to be immortal, unlike Moo Deng

Finally, one of the key principles of brand management must be that your brand should outlive you... or a pygmy hippo’s childhood fame.

You are merely the custodian of your brand. Unlike humans or hippos, strong brands are immortal gods [Editor’s note: With the exception of ancient Egypt’s Taweret, a fertility god, and a hippo].

Too many times in history have brands hooked their ship to the wrong famous mortal, and it’s all gone terribly wrong.

Who knows what Moo Deng will do next?

Whether there’s some biting or wire fraud in her future, I don’t know, but are we so careless that we want our billion-dollar brands associated with this clumsy mammal? Marketers who are worth their salt will be working out how to build their own Moo Deng, branded characters that will outlive them.

Moo-Deng-Mania (MDM for Gen Z) just confirms what the big 2025 marketing trend needs to be - saying no more.

Real brand growth will come from marketers who do less. Don’t chase the latest trend; clarify and align your strategy across your teams, including any digital or social leads.

Winning looks like getting a strategy on a page on the desk of every marketer in the business with the title “COULD YOU SAY NO TO SOMETHING TODAY?”.

If you manage this, look down and see a greasy infant hippo smiling back at you.

It doesn’t take a genius to determine that things have gone terribly wrong.