BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA – At MAD STARS 2025 in Busan, the buzz was all about AI, until Inbrax Worldwide Chief Creative Officer Pancho Gonzales flipped the script with a talk on Gen Alpha’s obsession: brain rot.
Defining brain rot
It started with his son. Like most parents, Pancho thought he was losing him to TikTok nonsense — words like skibidi, sigma, Ohio, or gyatt that sound static to Boomers and cringe to Millennials. But to Gen Alpha, this wasn’t nonsense. This was culture. Absurdity equals connection. Inside jokes had become a new mother tongue. Brain rot, he realized, is their shorthand for belonging.
But Pancho wasn’t just decoding memes. He was holding up a mirror to advertising itself.
In science, brain rot means neurological damage. Online, it’s the mental haze from binging nonsense content. In marketing and advertising, Pancho explained it’s something far more insidious: the slow death of originality.
“Brain rot is what happens when creativity stops thinking and starts reacting,” he said.
Creativity on autopilot
Gen Alpha may wear absurdity with pride, but marketers are stuck in their own version of brain rot: content on autopilot.
The symptoms are familiar: feeds clogged with generic posts that erase brand identity; AI-driven templates that drain the soul out of storytelling; meme-chasing campaigns with zero relevance to the brand; and the constant pressure to be “always-on,” leaving no time to think — only react.
It’s no wonder, Pancho argued, that engineered tricks fall flat on Gen Alpha. You can’t outsmart a hyperaware generation by trying too hard — not until you actually understand how they speak, and why nonsense makes sense to them.
Reclaiming creativity
The cure, according to Pancho, isn’t to fight brain rot, but to flip it. Absurdity can be fuel for creatives.
He pointed to the Italian brain rot craze — an online wave of AI-generated characters with nonsensical names like Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Tralero Tralala. While older generations dismissed them as senseless and annoying, Gen Alpha embraced them as a kind of shared cultural code.
Instead of ignoring it, Pancho’s team at Inbrax tapped into this energy for North Star’s International Children’s Day campaign. The result was a delightful lineup of characters with names just as absurd as they were sticky: Monini Piñanini, Avocadina Aquilini, Cebrini Lullini, Cherriny Flamengini … the list goes on.
Each one came with its own look, personality, and a matching North Star sneaker, tying the functional with the fantastical. On social media, the characters became playful, highly shareable storytelling devices. The results? Five million users reached a +7.5% engagement rate, a million views across platforms — all 100% organic.
“We wanted to connect with a generation that lives between memes, visual speed, and characters without logical sense, but full of identity. The Italian brainrot universe allowed us to do storytelling from chaos, and North Star embraced it as an opportunity to speak differently and stand out,” Pancho said about the campaign.
The campaign proved one thing: To win Gen Alpha, brands need to stop trying to “engineer” connections and start speaking their language, even if that language sounds like gibberish to everyone else.
So, how do creatives reclaim creativity in an age of algorithms and automation?
Pancho’s advice was simple: step back, detox from the doomscroll. Go slow again — watch films that breathe, listen to podcasts that stretch, consume media that doesn’t beg for your attention every second.
“In a world of autoplay, real creativity makes people want to press pause,” Pancho reminded the room, encouraging everyone to harness the language and use absurdity as an advantage to yield greater business impact and connect with the generation who speaks it.
“Brain rot isn’t the end of the world,” Pancho noted. For him, it’s a signpost — a signal of how this generation consumes and connects. Absurdity may look stupid. But in a world of sameness, he believes stupid is the smartest way in.
adobo Magazine is an official media partner of MAD STARS 2025.
