How a viral cleaning brand is using TikTok to reach Gen Z with videos making fun of advertising

When Davis Miller and Kerrie Longo joined the social media team for Scrub Daddy—the cleaning brand known for its bright yellow, smiley-face-shaped sponges —they were presented with a monumental task: overhaul the brand’s TikTok strategy to appeal to the platform’s large Gen Z audience.

In just a little over a year, the two social media managers have led Scrub Daddy to become one of the most successful brands on TikTok, amassing over 1.8 million followers and 38 million likes across all of the brand’s videos. Miller and Longo agree that the biggest contributor to Scrub Daddy’s rapid growth on the platform has been their consistent focus on producing “self-aware” content that plays up the fact that their videos are advertisements for the brand and embracing Gen Z’s “almost absurdist” sense of humor.

“The idea of a self-aware ad has translated really well onto TikTok,” Longo said. “Gen Z is very aware of ads; they’re really savvy when it comes to ‘I’m being advertised to, and I don’t like that’ ... We know that you know that we’re advertising a product, and we’re going to throw it in your face.” 

Scrub Daddy first broke onto the cleaning product scene in 2012 when Aaron Krause, the inventor of its original sponge and the company’s president and CEO, promoted his product on the reality show “Shark Tank.” Lori Greiner, one of the investors whom Krause pitched Scrub Daddy to on the show, provided Krause with a $200,000 investment and helped the brand appear on the QVC shopping channel. 

Because of this connection to QVC, Scrub Daddy has historically served a “heavily female demographic,” and advertised primarily to moms and older women, Longo said. Krause hired her and Miller in 2021 specifically to break out of that audience mold and connect with a younger crowd, giving the two full creative control over the TikTok account that he had created in 2020 and previously produced content for. 

“[Krause] is willing to take risks, and so there’s really little to no pushback when it comes to a video that we want to make,” Miller said. “Any ideas that we have for TikTok, pretty much no matter how ridiculous it is, he’s like, ‘If you guys think it’s going to work, then go ahead with it.’ That’s been a huge part of the success: him having trust in people that know the space.” 

Miller and Longo initially worked closely with Vanesa Amaro, a “CleanTok” influencer who promotes household cleaning supplies to her 5.4 million followers, to help “get their footing” on the platform, Miller said. Neither Miller nor Longo initially had much experience producing brand content for TikTok or following trends or memes on the platform, and would frequently consult with Amaro to get her opinion on their video ideas. In the past year, the two have become much more confident in determining the type of videos that do well on the platform, but still occasionally run ideas by Amaro. 

Along with Amaro, the brand also collaborates with a number of other popular influencers in the CleanTok space to help spread awareness about Scrub Daddy products. Miller and Longo are currently partnering with 19 influencers who they work with on a month-to-month contract basis, including Auri Katariina and Clean That Up. These longer contract periods allow for “more genuine connections” with the influencers whom Scrub Daddy partners with, Longo said, and help her and Miller to better gauge the success of these partnerships, rather than trying to determine the results based on only one or two videos. 

When picking TikTok creators to partner with, Miller and Longo seek out influencers who it “makes sense” for Scrub Daddy to work with, rather than picking people whose content has little to do with the brand’s products, Miller said. For example, to help promote the brand’s new “BBQ Daddy,” a grill-cleaning brush, he and Longo enlisted “The Meat Teacher,” a creator whose content revolves almost exclusively around grilling. 

For Miller and Longo, the process of creating a TikTok video varies depending on the video’s goal and the content currently trending on the platform. However, because the TikTok team consists of only the two of them, there’s typically isn't extensive planning that goes into producing a video, and much of their content is created spontaneously. They’ll generally scroll through the platform to look at the trends for a given day and toss ideas back and forth until they “come up with something that we both think is relatively funny,” Longo said. 

“A lot of people have the misconception that there’s some boardroom where we’re coming up with wacky ideas,” she said. “It’s really very casual. Not to say that there’s no strategy. It’s just very much that social media is changing day-to-day, and TikTok is probably the fastest-moving platform, so we’re very conscious to keep up with it.” 

Scrub Daddy is most well-known on TikTok for its bizarre—but highly successful—collaboration with Duolingo. The language-learning brand has skyrocketed to virality on TikTok over the past year, and Miller and Longo reached out to Duolingo’s social media team at the end of 2021 after noticing that the brand’s videos adhered to a similar absurdist sense of humor. Duolingo’s team agreed to meet up with Miller and Longo to spend a day filming, but the idea for the infamous video where the Duolingo owl births green, owl-shaped sponges, was, again, a spur-of-the-moment decision. 

Miller and Longo produced several videos featuring the Duolingo owl and a walking Scrub Daddy that together have amassed more than 17 million views. Duolingo posted its own version of the birthing video that received over 10 million views within only three hours before the brand removed it due to the CEO’s discomfort with the “edgy” content and the innuendo created by the background song, “Glad You Came,” Miller said. If Duolingo hadn’t removed the original video, it would have easily been Scrub Daddy’s top-performing TikTok. However, the brand collaboration still helped boost Scrub Daddy’s presence on the platform and led to more than 22,000 comments. 

“I think we knew that people were going to get a kick out of it, but I don’t think any of us thought it would be that big,” Longo said. “It just goes to show that you could post three different things and the idea that we thought would blow up doesn’t really do anything; and then, all of a sudden, articles are written about a love affair between a sponge and an owl.” 

Smiling yellow sponges

Unlike many brands, Scrub Daddy relies solely on social media content to market its products, Miller said. Their TikTok strategy centers around a combination of both boosting general brand awareness and promoting specific products through entertaining content—a strategy that has led to a steady increase in retail sales since Miller and Longo began producing content. When people view content from the brand on TikTok, they might not immediately open a new tab or run to a store to buy a Scrub Daddy product, but the next time they go to purchase a sponge, they’re more inclined to get one of the smiling yellow sponges because they remember seeing entertaining videos about them, Miller explained. 

Through Miller and Longo’s TikTok content and overall strategy, Scrub Daddy has witnessed the exact transformation that the brand’s CEO and president, Krause, envisioned, with the brand’s audience expanding into a “much younger territory” and witnessing “incremental growth” in their male demographics, Longo said. Over 36% of Scrub Daddy’s current TikTok audience is male, and its male followers on Instagram have grown to 8% from 6% over the past several months. 

“Social media is social. It creates a community, and you can see it online, people becoming part of a community around our brand,” Longo said. “You might not necessarily see a huge spike right after a post. Sometimes we do, which is really great. But when you look at year-over-year, or quarterly numbers, it’s all positive.”