Planters 'Baby Nut' Super Bowl Commercial: Company's Unexpected Step To Ensure Success May Backfire

On Sunday night, millions tuned in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-20 in Super Bowl LIV. Each year, the big game's audiences are also interested to see what the new Super Bowl commercials have in store. During the 2020 broadcast, one particular ad by Planters, which featured a character called "Baby Nut," emerged as one of the most talked about, but the success may not have been as organic as some would initially believe.

The new commercial, which can be seen below, showcased Baby Nut being born after the company decided to kill off its famous mascot, Mr. Peanut, earlier this year. Many likened the highly-discussed ad's new spokesnut to Baby Yoda, a character in Disney's "The Mandalorian." However, the discussions surrounding Baby Nut may be quite different from those about Baby Yoda thanks to one key difference.

According to Business Insider, the new commercial was accompanied by "an infrastructure designed to produce internet stardom, showing the lengths to which companies will go to ensure they get a viral moment."

Per the outlet, following the Super Bowl debut, the verified @MrPeanut Twitter account retweeted memes from various accounts about Baby Nut. As viral moments are typically accompanied by memes that give a nod to the original material, this didn't seem unusual at first, but upon further inspection, some noticed that the pages had been created in January. Therefore, the memes were created prior to Super Bowl LIV, which suggests they were part of an ad campaign instead of internet users latching onto an idea and creating content themselves.

Now, it has been reported that taking that step could potentially violate the company's policies regarding spam and platform manipulation. This is due to the fact that the social media site states that users "may not use Twitter's services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people's experience on Twitter."

The policies also called out "coordinated activity, that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts, automation and/or scripting." Additionally, "operating multiple accounts with overlapping use cases, such as identical or similar personas or substantially similar content" was also noted.

At this time, it remains unclear whether Twitter will terminate the associated profiles.