“Brat, slay, yuck”: Zoo ad copy written by Gen Z employees goes viral | TikTok

Ralph the raccoon is very reserved and observant; the prairie dogs are awesome; the bats are brats, and Stilton the goat is, at least in his eyes, the GOAT (that's obviously the greatest of all time, for goodness sake).

We know all this because a new social media video from Northumberland Zoo has gone viral, reaching supersonic speed.

More than 6 million people have watched a video on TikTok in which a couple in their 60s guide people through the zoo in the language of Generation Z.

Part of the charm lies in the deadpan nature of Linda and Brian Bradley. It looks as if someone outside the frame is pointing a loaded gun at them.

“That's me!” joked Maxine Bradley, who was guiding her parents. “It took a long time. It was like, 'You two, please concentrate!'”

The idea of ​​“letting your Gen Z employee write your marketing script” is the latest TikTok trend.

Popular videos from recent weeks include a tour of Fyfield Manor, a B&B in a beautiful 880-year-old (“uncapped”) building in Oxfordshire, by owner Christine Brown, who tells us in a crystal-clear English accent that “the medieval dining room has so much pizzazz” and that the “Georgian panelled room” knew the job.

There is also Beamish Museum in County Durham – “There is always something open at Pockly Old Hall” – and Kenyon Hall Farm in Warrington: “The atmosphere in the farm shop is immaculate.”

Maxine Bradley was directly inspired to write her video after seeing one for Edinburgh Zoo, which featured its CEO, David Field, as narrator.

“I thought, 'This is great… can we do this?' I personally don't like TikTok and social media drives me crazy, but another coworker who is super into trends saw it too and we both said, 'We have to do this.'”

The big problem soon became clear: Both Bradley and her colleague are millennials and have little knowledge of the language of Generation Z (people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s). “Lucy had been looking up all these definitions on the internet and I just thought, 'What is this? This isn't real.'”

Eventually they had a script and hired another colleague from Generation Z. “She understood it. She could say, 'You can't use that, it's too old… Yes, that's trendy.' She taught my father what to do and how to do it.”

“I couldn't believe my parents were so excited about it, but yeah, it was a frustrating process filming it. The one-minute video took two hours… My dad just wasn't paying attention. Neither of them knew what he was saying. I still don't know, to be honest.”

Northumberland Zoo, a family-run non-profit organisation near Morpeth, has grown steadily since being granted a licence in 2015. Its residents include snow leopards, Asian short-clawed otters, capybaras, owls, lemurs, meerkats and wallabies. The zoo is a mix of the deadly serious and the completely crazy.

For example, the zoo plays a key role in protecting the critically endangered Livingstone's fruit bats, which live on two tiny islands between Madagascar and mainland Africa. It is the only place in the UK where the species lives.

It's also probably the only place in the world where the guinea pigs live in a Wild West-style village that includes a prison, inn and blacksmith shop, and is a YouTube hit.

It's crazy and fun, but Bradley hopes it also teaches people how to keep guinea pigs as pets. “We explain what an appropriate diet is and what an appropriate habitat is. Too many people keep guinea pigs in very small spaces, which is really sad.”

Innovations are important to the zoo and that is why Ralph the raccoon is also available on the Cameo welcome video page to give birthday greetings or encouraging speeches.

Why Ralph? “Raccoons can be difficult. They're one of the few animals in the world that take revenge,” Bradley said. “But Ralph is our nicest raccoon. People love him.”