Why Fleetwood Mac, Ocean Spray, and Nathan Apodaca Mean the End of Tik Tok’s Golden Age

I’m having a sorrowful sense of deja vu and foreboding lately. I’m watching a community set up for destruction it never sees coming, just when it seems like everything is going well.

The top pop culture moment of fall 2020 seems indubitably to be Idahoan Nathan Apodaca’s Tik Tok moment, longboarding to work down an Idaho Falls highway and lip-synching Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while swigging Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice from the bottle. The video has become the year’s viral sensation, generating more than 50 million views while providing a moment of positivity and good vibes during a turbulent and stressful year of pandemic, death, division, and social upheaval.

Everyone’s seen it. Everyone’s trying to recreate it. Jimmy Fallon did. So did Mick Fleetwood. And Stevie Nicks. And Lindsey Buckingham. And thousands of others. Apodaca has so far gotten a new truck and a trip to Vegas out of his star turn, not to mention being featured in a Tik Tok commercial in heavy rotation during the World Series. Fleetwood Mac is seeing its 43 year old song back in the Top 10 on many music charts and has topped several streaming charts in the past month.

It’s a feel good moment not just for the community, but for Tik Tok itself after an uncertain summer in which the platform was threatened with a ban of downloads in the U.S. (whether due to legitimate security concerns or certain politicians’ embarrassment over being trolled by Tik Tok users, I leave for you to decide). The platform has certainly had its moments, but its most viral capture of communal good will coming so soon after a threat to its growth — if not its very existence — is the equivalent of a go-ahead grand slam in the 8th inning of Game 7.

Unfortunately, I fear it’s also the first sounding of a death knell for what has made this platform and community special: its organic nature. What geopolitics couldn’t kill, runaway success just might.

I say this because we’ve seen this moment before with every social platform that’s come before. The platform is launched, a community develops with its own unique content, unique community-generated norms and rules, and top performers whose influence is bestowed on them by the community. And then… marketers discover it and see potential and dollar signs.

At these inflection point moments, online platforms experience an influx of marketers looking to drop money because their agency has promised virality, or because the client has demanded virality. And the moment brands discover or realize that virality happens on a platform, they start trying to engineer more virality.

This phenomenon stems from the fact that far too many creatives and marketing and PR types (like me, I freely acknowledge) have a fundamental misunderstanding of — or refuse to want to understand — virality and community. They see it as something inherent to the platform and that therefore can be conjured on demand. They see it as an opportunity to sell.

Here’s the thing: Virality is organic. Its origin is natural; it’s not conjured in a lab in China nor in a hip neighborhood building’s conference room with lots of exposed brick, glass walls, and whiteboards. It happens mysteriously and inexplicably, even randomly. Trying to engineer “viral” content is like trying to make “fetch” happen; the harder we try, the less it will work.

That doesn’t dissuade marketers who are convinced that because they either use the platform or have studied Millennial or Gen Z behavior from trying really hard anyway. And soon, a platform once defined by an organic community becomes overrun with branded content and driven less by the creativity and quality of its users and more by money — brands and marketing agencies who want to spend it to buy visibility and influence, and users who want to attract the attention and invoices of those brands and marketing agencies. Soon, that platform is no longer a community; it’s just another marketing channel.

You can see it happening on Tik Tok already. Not that brands and marketers weren’t aware of Tik Tok yet, but the Dreams video has forced it onto the radars of even the most social media-resistant among the profession and its clients — noting the spike in Ocean Spray sales and dreaming breathlessly of the business results they can generate through the Tik Tok audience.

For its part, Ocean Spray gifted Apodaca with a new Nissan truck and an ocean of Ocean Spray as a thank you, and is launching its first national campaign targeting Hispanic consumers in the wake of Apodaca’s video. Its new CEO, Tom Hayes, was quick to join Tik Tok and put out his own tribute. (I’ll give him credit for at least looking smooth and at home on the skateboard… there’s not a lot of CEOs who could pull that off, so props to the man for the effort.) Apodaca’s Vegas vacation came courtesy of Ceasar’s casino, who happily included their own hashtag in recounting his story.

But here’s what bothers me about the whole thing. Nathan Apodaca didn’t set out to get a new truck or a day in Vegas or a TV commercial or the attention of Ocean Spray; he was just making lemons of lemonade after his vehicle broke down. And yet the net effect of this whole phenomenon, beyond giving a potato warehouse worker his 15 minutes, will be the spawning of imitators and ham handed efforts from both brands seeking to be viral, and would-be influencers trying to get in on the gravy train.

(I don’t begrudge Apodaca, who seems a nice guy from everything I’ve read and was just being himself, not trying to be viral. Ride the wave, man. Enjoy your 15 minutes and keep on keeping on.)

I’ve seen this before because I’ve been responsible for it. Working digital and social media 15 years ago, I was part of the chorus pushing brands to get on social platforms and begin engaging, and calling for budgets that reflected the size of the potential audience. But in being part of the vanguard there, I also got to see the downside — seeing what happens to a platform’s nature when marketing takes over, hearing the conversations inside conference rooms where marketers who’ve never been on a platform trying to develop campaigns for it, and fielding the shameless emails and phone calls from self-proclaimed big deals on the platform seeking free product and boasting of the size of their audience. It doesn’t end well; the platform starts to cater to the money being spent, the user content becomes not self-expression but a cynical push for influence, and soon you end up with the FEC having to remind everyone that sponsored content has to be prominently labeled as such because there’s such a wave of it.

I hope Nathan Apodaca is enjoying his moment. Tik Tok may well be enjoying its comeback moment as well, but its leadership — as well as its user community that has made it what it is — should exercise caution and care in the coming months if the platform is to retain its character. Nathan Apodaca may well be the gift of viral fire provided to brands by Tik Tok’s Prometheus — but we’d do well to remember that the Greek gods punished Prometheus for his transgression, and the culture gods could just as easily punish Tik Tok if it follows Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others down the road to becoming just another promotional channel.