Perusing the aisles of any supermarket or driving down the highway, the advertising tactics of big businesses are clear. Their advertisements show us well-organized scenes — bright and colorful images, models with airbrushed skin and white teeth and attractive font styles in just the right sizes that marry wonderfully together inside a space that takes on the most marketable shape for the occasion. Their taglines show they know a little bit more about contemporary human desires than we’d like to admit. In my memory, though, corporations haven’t quite succeeded in distancing themselves from what they really are — commercial enterprises, ultimately made to lure us into a parasitic cycle hallmarked by the insatiable consumerist eye and anemic bank account. However, with the seemingly exponential growth of social media, businesses appear to be blurring the lines between enterprise and individual more than ever.
Since downloading TikTok a few years ago, I’ve often noticed in passing the occasional comment by a big brand on an ultra-viral video. “Whatever,” I thought, “just another way for the retail industry to stab at increasing their sales.” The online presence of big businesses is nothing new, and as the ubiquity of the internet advances even further, there seem to be exceedingly fewer online locations where users can find sanctuary from the strobing advertisements of companies hungry for revenue. Why should the comment section of the world’s fifth-most popular social media platform be any exception?
In recent months I’ve noticed an explosion in the number of popular companies taking the initiative to demonstrate their relevance in the comments of TikTok’s most-liked uploads, underscored by the latest megatrends. References to “Brat” and the “Who is this diva?” phenomena find themselves comfortable in the digital rhetoric of these brands. In one video, published in January 2024, content creator @kate invites as many companies as are willing to dive into the comment section of her post, which garnered a massive 1.5 million likes. No shortage of them took advantage of the opportunity, using the call to action as a chance to showcase their awareness of social media’s rapidly churning hyper-popular culture machine. Quizlet’s official TikTok account commented, “hey kate (with rizzlet)” — referring to the term rizz, short for “charisma,” which was popularized to gargantuan proportions in 2021. Meanwhile, eBay contributed, in all-caps, “CAN’T SPELL KATE WITHOUT ‘ATE,’” adding on a couple of apt emoticons at the end of the statement meant to praise the user’s creativity.
Videos that explicitly request brand engagement, though, make up only a marginal space where big corporations like to interact with TikTok’s median users. A post by @kaylimichellee proves an apt example of this particular brand (no pun intended) of zealous corporate outreach — the creator uploaded a simple video of her pet cat vocalizing, and Vita Coco, a company that primarily sells coconut water and other similar beverages, took the occasion as an appropriate one to try out the quip “Me when” in the comments. Unlike the content of the two previously mentioned users, @kaylimichellee’s makes no mention of brand engagement, nor did her upload involve anything to do with specific company products. It may have made more sense if the potential Meow Mix, Friskies or Purina profiles offered up their takes on the post instead, but what does coconut water have to do with a meowing cat?
These brand-user interactions, strangely out of place, are the kind that I have personally observed to proliferate most prominently on TikTok. They are, moreover, those that magnify my annoyance with industry engagement tactics the most. Like Vita Coco, other companies — evidently unconcerned with whether they are contextually relevant — are pouncing on one-on-one digital exchanges with users, as always relevant, in a greedy ploy to exemplify their personhood. As though they weren’t already powerful enough, big corporations now enjoy even more room to stretch their legs and expand their insatiable sales agendas.
In the face of these recent marketing trends, it seems both glaringly obvious and more difficult than ever to acknowledge that companies are not, in fact, people. It would seem that as financially motivated companies take to social media platforms to expand their advertising horizons, here, they attempt to prove that they are capable of functions that are fundamentally unachievable for them — empathy, couth, individualized dialogue. Above all, big brands in interactive online spaces push flattery to the limit, and the tactics are nothing to rejoice at. It is important to remember that their inanimate avarice comes as a function of superimposed appetites for financial excess, with an active-on-TikTok operation such as eBay making off with a whopping revenue of almost $10.1 billion in 2023.
Rather, corporations like these bear a repulsive truth: they believe piously in our stupidity. They crave the human–turned-consumer impulse and its shiny potential to stack their profits higher than the eye can see. And if they find that we are not, in fact, enslaved to our material wants, they’ll quickly find a way to push us over that edge — where it was once that perfectly stylized billboard on the freeway, it is now the timely wit in the comments of your newest TikTok upload. They starve despite eating all of the food at millions of tables and then complement our cooking to ensure that we’ll prepare them another meal.
The preservation of places, whether digital or physical, that bar the screeching of desperate enterprises is badly needed as jaded populations claw their way through new environments that hold irresistible selling opportunities. Social media platforms should be, above all else, spaces in which we can expand the limits of our relationships, communications and ideas — person to person. An advertisement here or there from a popular company isn’t catastrophically damaging, and my suggestion isn’t to prohibit corporations from our digital social spaces completely. After all, consumerism is a philosophy deeply ingrained into our digital and social cultures. But the incessant pandering from companies that already occupy so much of our daily lives and want only to insert themselves more fully — leaving not a single nook of our social arenas uninhabited — is a practice that is quite different.
When we accept and, further, promote ourselves as resource caches for corporate wolves disguising themselves as sheep, we push ourselves dangerously near a dystopia in which we can be manipulated into undermining our own personhood. To see through the ruse is an urgent consideration in maintaining our own ability to differentiate fact from fiction, authenticity from strategy. To be treated as human being over consumer, wallet, pawn, puppet — such is our right, not the exception to a malevolent rule.
Caryn Gagnon is a junior majoring in political science.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.