Why The Onion brand is ‘made for right now’

The Onion seems to always know how to seize the moment with a topical headline. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month, President Donald Trump attempted to ascend an escalator that stopped working after he set foot on it. The company followed up the incident with the headline “Trump to Travel with Own Escalator Following UN Embarrassment.”

While the publication has for years maintained a steady reputation for providing a constant source of edgy satire, it has gone through plenty of ups and downs, including a series of sales, first to G/O Media in 2019, and in April 2024 to Global Tetrahedron, a firm created explicitly to house the publication and owned by the co-founder of customer engagement platform Twilio, Jeff Lawson. At Advertising Week in New York, Jordan LaFlure, The Onion’s executive editor, and Leila Brillson, its CMO, discussed some of the changes, including providing an update on its attempted purchase of InfoWars, the media company founded by right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, and shared more about its expansion efforts and work with advertisers.

The brand is “made for right now,” Brillson told attendees.

“We hear all the time that ‘truth has become too ridiculous,’ that ‘The Onion has to shutter its doors,’ or ‘the truth is now more ridiculous than The Onion,’” she said. “I have to say that in these moments where things feel heightened and, dare I say, ridiculous, The Onion shines.”

In the running: During the panel, Brillson and LaFlure discussed The Onion’s continuing attempt to buy InfoWars, which it won at a bankruptcy auction last November after the site was put up for sale as the result of a defamation suit tied to false claims Jones made about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. A federal judge rejected the deal in December, but the publication “is still very much a part of that conversation…and given recent developments, sees a path forward,” Brillson said. (Jones has made a number of efforts to pause the judgement and stop the sale; earlier this month, the Supreme Court rejected a request to intervene.)

In the meantime, The Onion’s team is “trying to figure out how it would work if we got it,” LaFlure said. “It is part of a larger strategy where we as a brand want to show up in weird places…We want to show up in unusual places and make an impact. This, thus far, is maybe the most impactful, and we haven’t even gotten the damn thing yet.”

Elevator pitch: Acquiring other brands isn’t the only way the team is thinking about expansion. The publication has also been running its own marketing shop, America’s Finest Creative Agency, since May, which Marketing Brew exclusively reported. Its client roster has included Project Liberty, an initiative promoting the cause of a decentralized internet, and Brillson said she has found that clients tend to self-select given the company’s reputation.

“We’re not really dealing with the Procter & Gambles of the world,” she said.

Extra, extra!: The Onion is also operating its own print subscription, which LaFlure said is designed to provide a “much more intimate experience” for its fanbase. In distinguishing its physical brand from its digital one, the publication is more strategic with the jokes that appear in the physical edition, opting for “shorter, punchier” jokes.

“It just made sense to create a channel that had a more direct one-to-one relationship, where we send you very personalized little printouts that are slightly ridiculous,” Brillson said.

As The Onion charts its path forward, one thing remains constant: It won’t be using AI, at least not on the editorial side, LaFlure said. “From the editorial staff’s perspective, it is a nonstarter,” he said. “We are vocally, publicly, strongly anti-AI. …As far as it generates content, we will never touch it.”

On the business side, though, it’s a different story.“If we’re running a display media campaign across 18 different platforms, we learned that if we optimize the campaign via AI, we lower the [cost per unit], blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” he said.