How 90s corporations co-opted counterculture
Every countercultural movement follows the same path: reject the mainstream, build its own aesthetic, get copied by big brands, and become the mainstream it rejected. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl walks through how corporations co-opted 90s counterculture, why cynicism and irony became the default brand voice, and how that exhaustion sparked the new sincerity of millennial branding. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on the 90s, When Brands Stopped Giving a Shit.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl describes the moment 90s counterculture went mainstream. Coke, Taco Bell with its Chihuahua ads, and Doritos with extreme flavor and attitude all adopted the edgy aesthetic, and in his view, that’s when mainstream corporations ruined it.
He lays out the cycle behind it: a countercultural movement rejects the mainstream and creates its own aesthetics; those aesthetics become desirable; big brands take them; they go mainstream; and a new counterculture rises to reject them. The 90s version was so widespread that anti-branding itself became the standard. Cynicism, irony, and meta narratives became how brands talked.
The trouble is that sarcasm and aggression are exhausting emotions. By the 2000s, audiences wanted genuine conviction, and the new sincerity of the hipster era and millennial branding took over as the next reaction.
Highlights
Big brands like Taco Bell and Doritos adopted 90s countercultural attitude.
Counterculture follows a cycle: reject, create, get co-opted, go mainstream, repeat.
90s anti-branding became the standard for branding.
Cynicism and aggression are exhausting, and audiences burn out on them.
The new sincerity of the 2000s was a direct response.
Key insights
Counterculture always gets co-opted
The cycle is predictable: what rejects the mainstream becomes desirable, gets borrowed by big brands, and turns mainstream itself. Brands that understand the cycle can see where a trend is in it.
Rebellion as a default stops meaning anything
Once every brand, down to Doritos, speaks in irony and attitude, the stance loses its edge. A tone only stands out when others aren’t using it.
Exhausting emotions don’t last
Sarcasm and aggression are taxing. Calvin links this to today’s rage-driven media, and argues audiences eventually move toward brands with genuine conviction.
Detailed analysis
The clip explains why branding swings between extremes. The 90s pushed edgy cynicism until it was everywhere; the 2000s answered with soft, sincere, caring brands. Each swing is a reaction to the one before, driven less by strategy than by audience fatigue.
For a brand today, that’s a reason to be careful about adopting whatever tone is dominant. By the time it’s everywhere, the next reaction is already forming.
Conclusion
Corporations didn’t just borrow 90s counterculture; they made it the norm, and in doing so, drained it of meaning. The exhaustion that followed set up the next movement.
The cycle repeats forever, Calvin says, which is why chasing the mainstream’s current attitude is a short-lived strategy.
Transcript
But then at some point, a problem starts happening. There’s this huge countercultural movement, and then mainstream brands like Coke start adopting this. You had mainstream brands really double down. You had Taco Bell with their absurd Chihuahua ads. You had Doritos. Doritos became all about extreme, aggressive flavor and attitude. All of those brands started adopting it, and that’s kind of when mainstream corporations ruined it all. They stopped caring. They were just like, you know what, we’re going to go hard. We’ve got to mimic what the counterculture is doing.
And we all know how this pattern goes. A big countercultural movement happens. The counterculture rejects the mainstream and creates its own aesthetics. Those aesthetics become desirable. Brands and big corporations steal those aesthetics. Those aesthetics then become mainstream. Then a whole new countercultural movement develops and rejects that new aesthetic. And that is the cycle we live in forever.
But that was especially true during this time. This movement in the ’90s of brands pushing toward this aggressive, cynical take was so widespread that it essentially led into what’s often referred to as the new sincerity moment of the hipster movement and all of millennial branding. How everything got so soft and feely and sincere and really caring about everything. That was a direct response to all these mainstream brands putting together their own countercultural brands. So it kind of undercut everything that whole countercultural movement stood for, and created the new sincerity movement of the 2000s. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week: hipster brands and millennial branding.
So what happened then is that ’90s anti-branding became the standard for branding, which is just a funny idea to think, but this is how these cycles go. Cynicism and irony became the standard. That became the standard way of communicating for brands. Meta narratives became super common. And that just ruled. I mean, at the point where Doritos are doing it, come on.
The problem with that, though, is that sarcasm, aggression, all of those kinds of emotions and communication tools just become really exhausting. And we’re basically experiencing some of that now in our current world, where all media and everything is designed to enrage us. These are emotions that become very exhausting. They create very taxing emotional states, and we eventually get tired of them.
So that was why, during the 2000s, there was this turn to brands really hitting on genuine conviction, really caring about others. And at that moment, that became the distinction, and that’s what led to the new sincerity movement.
So that’s why we can’t have nice things. At some point, mainstream brands gather up all their money, spin off sub-brands, and ruin the whole movement. Dang it.
Okay. Any other brands I’m not thinking of from that era that we can learn something from, that anyone in chat can think of? There’s got to be some other brands I’m not thinking of. I mean, we had the whole era of the X Games. Does anyone know what year the X Games started? That had to have been somewhere around there. I think skateboarding culture was a really major influence at that time. I didn’t talk about Thrasher magazine. Thrasher became such a big influence during this time. It definitely became a cultural moment.
Oh, Aaron says ’95 for the X Games. Yeah. Dang. For some reason it’s wild to me to think that means the X Games are, what, 31 years old? It’s crazy.