'Brat, slay, amped': gen Z-scripted marketing video sends zoo viral

Ralph the racoon is very demure, very mindful; the prairie dogs are poppin'; the bats are brat and Stilton the goat, in his mind at least, is the GOAT (which obviously translates as the "greatest of all time").

- Mark Brown

We know all this because a new social media video for a zoo in Northumberland has, virally, gone supersonic.

More than 6 million people and counting have viewed on Tik Tok a video featuring a couple in their 60s guiding people through the zoo using the language of gen Z.

Part of its charm is that the delivery of Linda and Brian Bradley is so deadpan. It looks like there may well be someone, off screen, with a loaded pistol aimed at them.

"That's me!" joked their daughter Maxine Bradley, the zoo's manager, who directed her parents. "It took a long time. It was: 'You two, please concentrate!"" The concept of "getting your gen Z employee to write your marketing script" is the latest TikTok trend to take off. Popular videos of recent weeks include a tour of Fyfield Manor, a B&B in an 880-year-old building in Oxfordshire, by its owner, Christine Brown, who tells us in a cut-glass English accent that "the medieval dining room has so much rizz", (a short-form of "charisma"). The footage was put together with the help of Christine's daughter Frannie, who writes in the video: "I can confirm she understood nothing she said."