"Live más." What does that mean? Taco Bell won't tell you. They've trademarked ambiguity, built a brand on linguistic emptiness that consumers fill with their own meaning. Or don't. The void itself became the message.
Welcome to absurdist advertising, where meaning is optional and coherence is a constraint to be optimized away.
Traditional advertising referenced something—product features, benefits, solutions to problems. Modern advertising increasingly references nothing except its own existence. It's marketing that signifies only that marketing is happening.
Liquid Death sells water by pretending to sell energy drinks marketed to people who hate energy drink marketing. The product is water. The brand is irony about brands. The meaning is the absence of meaning, which somehow creates more meaning than straightforward claims about hydration ever could.
Consumers remember the absurdity more vividly than they ever remembered the benefits copy. The meaninglessness sticks precisely because it doesn't try to communicate product information—it just creates an emotional imprint of weirdness that brand recall studies consistently show outperforms rational messaging.
AI content generation has accelerated advertising's descent into semantic void. Words that mean nothing proliferate: "synergize," "ecosystem," "disruptive," "transformative." Each was drained of meaning through overuse, replaced by new empty signifiers that will themselves become meaningless.
The result is corporate language that sounds authoritative while communicating nothing. "We leverage synergistic partnerships to deliver transformative value propositions through our innovative ecosystem" could describe any company or none. It's performative meaning—language that mimics communication without achieving it.
When Coca-Cola tried to automate Christmas magic with AI-generated ads, they produced technically proficient content emptied of human meaning. The campaign looked like advertising, sounded like advertising, but meant nothing because meaning requires human intention that AI cannot replicate.
Brands adopted internet absurdism wholesale, tweeting non-sequiturs and engaging in surreal exchanges with competitors. Wendy's roasting people on Twitter. Denny's posting existential dread at 3am. Moon Pie's entire social presence as performance art questioning corporate personhood.
This works until it doesn't. The absurdism is intentional, the meaninglessness strategic. Except consumers can't distinguish performative meaninglessness from actual meaninglessness, and both produce the same cultural effect—nothing means anything anymore.
Brand voice consistency traditionally builds trust, but absurdist brand voices aren't consistent—they're deliberately unpredictable. The trust benefit disappears when audiences can't determine what the brand actually stands for beneath the ironic posturing. You've built recognition without coherence.
"Content" replaced "advertising" because it sounds less mercenary. But content is worse—it's communication stripped of purpose beyond existing. Make content. Post content. Optimize content. What's it for? What does it mean? Irrelevant questions. It's content.
This semantic collapse made quality non-negotiable precisely because quality became the only differentiator in an ocean of meaningless content. But "quality" here means craft and attention, not meaningful communication. We're creating well-executed meaninglessness at scale.
The absurdism is built into the system. Companies must produce constant content streams to feed algorithmic attention machines, volume requirements that prevent meaningful communication. You can't maintain semantic coherence across automated content creation producing 47 posts per week. So you don't try. You optimize for engagement metrics that don't measure meaning because meaning can't be measured.
Brands perform authenticity by admitting their inauthenticity. "We're just here to sell you stuff" becomes oddly authentic through its refusal to pretend otherwise. But this meta-authenticity is itself performance, creating recursive layers of ironic distance from meaning.
Consumers respond because the honesty about dishonesty feels more genuine than earnest brand messaging they've learned to distrust. But what are they connecting with? Not the product, not the company—just the shared acknowledgment that marketing communication has become absurdist theater where everyone knows their role.
This creates what philosophers call "sincerity crisis"—when irony becomes so pervasive that genuine communication becomes impossible because audiences can't distinguish real from performed sincerity. Critical thinking collapses when everything might be ironic and nothing can be taken at face value.
The absurdist approach creates challenges for brands trying to build genuine community relationships. When your entire voice is performative irony, balancing community contribution versus promotional content becomes impossible. You can't contribute meaningfully to conversations when your brand positioning is that meaning itself is negotiable.
Reddit communities, in particular, see through absurdist corporate voices immediately. The platform's culture demands either genuine participation or none at all. There's no middle ground where brands can deploy ironic detachment while expecting community acceptance.
Some argue we've entered post-meaning capitalism—where brands sell vibes, aesthetics, and tribal affiliation rather than products. Supreme's entire business model is creating desire for meaningless scarcity. Balenciaga sells deliberately ugly products at luxury prices, the ugliness itself signifying exclusivity.
The product is whatever meaning consumers project onto it. Companies provide blank canvases for identity construction, not functional goods solving problems. This works until market saturation forces differentiation, at which point companies can't articulate what distinguishes them because they built brands on aesthetic void.
This philosophical justification ignores power dynamics. Brands choose meaninglessness strategically—it's harder to make false claims when you're not claiming anything. It's easier to appeal to everyone when you're saying nothing specific. Absurdism isn't existential philosophy—it's risk mitigation disguised as creativity.
Vague, aspirational messaging ("building a better tomorrow") faces fewer challenges than specific claims. Meaninglessness became legally protective. When companies are wasting their MarTech stack on producing meaningless content at scale, they're not making strategic errors—they're making strategic choices to avoid accountability.
The final absurdity: companies proclaiming "values" that mean nothing. Every corporate values statement could be: "We value integrity, innovation, excellence, diversity, and customers." These words appear in thousands of values statements because they've been optimized to offend no one while committing to nothing.
Values matter when they're specific enough to guide decisions and exclude alternatives. "Innovation" as a value means nothing—everything claims to innovate. "We prioritize slow, thorough analysis over rapid iteration" is an actual value statement because it excludes the opposite approach. Beyond bandwagon tech adoption, genuine values require sacrifice.
Consumers are exhausted by meaning's collapse. They're seeking brands that communicate clearly about specific things rather than performing ironic ambiguity about everything. This creates opportunities for companies willing to mean something, even if meaning something risks alienating someone.
The brands surviving long-term won't be the ones that deployed absurdism most cleverly. They'll be the ones that maintained semantic coherence when everyone else optimized it away, that said things clearly when clarity became countercultural.
Absurdist advertising works until audiences realize that nothing any brand says can be taken as meaning anything. Then the entire communication system collapses into noise that consumers learn to ignore completely.
We're approaching that inflection point. The clever irony isn't clever anymore—it's expected, predictable, meaningless in its own right. The cycle completes: absurdism becomes earnestness through overuse.
Want to build marketing communication that means something specific in a landscape of deliberate meaninglessness? We help companies say things clearly when clarity became the ultimate differentiation. Let's talk about building messaging that survives the meaning collapse.
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