From Raygun to Rawdogging: 2024 Culture Was Dumb

For a little while now, we’ve been chatting between ourselves about the want for ‘dumb’ ideas – ones that help people disconnect from the real world and give them a moment of reprieve (and a much needed dopamine hit).

A few days ago, the earned team at Thinkerbell released a list of what we thought were the top cultural moments of 2024 (with a skew to pop culture). The list was hard to decipher and it created a lot more attention than we thought it would (some good, some bad).

As debate raged, and commenters quibbled as to whether Moo Deng was more important than Mike Tyson, lost in the fog of discourse was a shared commonality between most entries… they were, in fact, really, really dumb.

From Rizzlers to Rayguns, Jaguars to Josh Wines, the question we wondered aloud was: Why can 2024 be so easily characterised by low-value internet meme content?

The answer, more generally, is that the world is a little bit shit and we are all falling into really bad mood management habits.

Economic uncertainty, looming climate catastrophe, and global conflict has us understandably feeling a bit lonely, a bit anxious and a whole lot distracted, and it’s causing us to try and manage our mood (mood management theory) through an intentional narrowing of what we choose to focus our brain power on.

Any easy or simple distraction from the malaise of our world and our own bad mental and physical health habits is a big dopamine kick that becomes reinforcing.

Enter doom scrolling, and those little bumps of dopamine we get from it (dopaminergic responses). These dopamine hits come from watching, reacting, or sharing a piece of content you enjoyed, laughed at, cried at, or were angry about.

Brain rot, a close runner-up for word of the year, is a new term that refers to the impact of consuming too much irrelevant, low-value internet content. It’s the natural effect of doomscrolling through too many Grimace Shake videos and gradually morphing into a human golden retriever. But, in 2024, there is a sense of pride about brain rot and the escapism it offers.

So, in comes our cultural moments of 2024. All highly relatable, silly, a bit weird, odd, or humorous, which ultimately don’t require much brain power (high cognitive fluency). They’re dumb. In the best way.

And while we aren’t suggesting brands should purposefully act dumb, there is power in simplicity. ‘Dumb’ can be intelligent, if deployed correctly. Brands should consider creating lots of high frequency, easy-to-grasp, borderline-silly ideas throughout the year to drive brand fame through owned and earned channels (the most cost effective and best platforms for making you famous).

At Thinkerbell, we have a four leaf clover process for all of our clients, where we first identify our client’s brand meaning. This is simply what they stand for and confirms how they should act and behave in the world (e.g. Vegemite is ‘Tastes like Australia’). Now you know your brand meaning, it gives you a platform to quickly jump into culture quickly and frequently – because you have a clear alignment between the marketing and agency team on what moments in time to activate against and with ideas that feel right (so you can turn stuff around in 2-3 days max that get you a lot of free salience).

So in the spirit of brain rot, let’s take the lab coat off and dumb it down a bit. We’re going to highlight our top five cultural moments in no order of importance, because we want a dopamine hit.

The vox-pop heard around the world. Hailey Welch was interviewed on a night out where she revealed how she likes to “Huawk Tuah’. We don’t need to go into specifics here.

A love-letter to luddites in 2024. Gen Z finally discovered what it’s like to be alive pre the early 2000s – without smart phones and 5G at 35,000 feet.

Rawdogging was a physical and mental challenge to go hours without distraction on commercial flights. A modern adaptation on meditation that saw Genzennials staring only at the flight routes on their screen. No movies, no music…nothing.

No-one knows yet if Raygun’s performance at the Olympics was a stunt or she was legitimately break dancing. But what it did was showcase Australia’s underdog spirit (cliche we know to say this) and gave an urban sport that we’re not well known for… a real red hot go.

A wine maker, Joseph Carr, named his new wine brand after his dad, Josh. The brand equivalent of giving your dog an old man’s name. Once launched and discovered by the masses, a steady stream of memes leaked into the mainstream. We raise a well-bodied glass of Josh to this trend.

A small Sydney band hit it huge in the US after their cover of The Cranberries’ ‘Linger’ on SiriusXM went viral. We included this as this cover perfectly hits the mood of the US and the world at the time: sombre.

It quickly transferred to TikTok, and the rest is history for Royel Otis.

Bubbling in the basement of the internet for a few years, Creed’s reunion was the nostalgia firehose millennials and Gen X needed in 2024. Harking back to a simpler time of tribal tattoos and eyebrow piercings, the band’s reunion and subsequent world tour is a reflection of the return of angst (and our angsty listening habits). Nu-metal is enjoying a post-ironic slow clap.

If you haven’t seen it, Scott Stapp singing “Can you take me higher” whilst performers draped in white curtains fly through the air at the 2001 Thanksgiving game is legendary. Please watch.