How Grant & Ash are rewriting the rules of creator brand safety

If you don’t know Grant & Ash, they have a song for you.

Since 2022, creators Grant Gibbs and Ashley Gill, also known as A Twink and a Redhead, have amassed more than 900,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, where they post comedy skits and music videos. They’re currently on a North American tour performing a collection of songs that often poke fun at brands, including hits like “Panera,” “Barnes & Noble,” “Disney Adult,” and “BJ Maxx,” which riffs on the retailer TJ Maxx (or TK Maxx in Australia and Europe). The backdrop of the stage is, quite literally, a strip mall.

“It’s a brand-heavy show,” Gill told us. “I think we name-drop a lot of brands because it was just what we were raised with in New Jersey, being around strip malls all the time.”

While the content is company-focused, the duo’s humor isn’t exactly safe for work. (In one video, they fake a brand trip with Disney to Avatar’s Pandora and imply that Gill got intimate with the Na’vi.) It’s all part of the charm, and Gibbs said he’s determined to never sacrifice art for money.

“The majority of our content is satire,” he told us, acknowledging that certain creative choices may mean that “Disney will never work with us, and we’re fine with that,” even if the company is one of his dream brand partners.

While Disney may be out of the question, the duo has built a rolodex of other brand partners including Netflix, La Roche-Posay, Bravo, Bose, and American Eagle. Even the DNC got in on the joke, letting the two sing about getting “dicked down” at the convention for a video that racked up more than 76,000 likes on TikTok.

“People will still stop us, that was two years ago now, to be like…that was funny,” Gill said.

Gibbs and Gill, who became friends in sixth grade, have learned a lot in their time together, including how to make content, branded or otherwise, that gets people watching.

“We’re not trying to cater our normal videos to be appealing to a brand,” Gill said. “We’re just hoping the brands that get it, get it.”

In on the joke

When potential brand partners first started to reach out, Gibbs said he and Gill were as surprised as they were happy. “By no means was the goal to make money,” Gill agreed. “We just wanted to post funny stuff.”

Some of the first brands the two worked with were Grindr, Aeropostale, and Spotify. With Spotify, Gibbs said the duo was allowed to “run wild” and “use [their voices]” across all content made with them, which helped it resonate. Ditto for Fossil, which the duo worked with on InStyle’s online series The Intern.

“They weren’t too in the weeds, they let us run crazy [and] do what made that show successful,” Gill said.

Building branded content off of the duo’s long-standing bits is often what works best, as well as being upfront about what’s an ad, Gill said. Eos recently hosted a “Bush on Main” event to promote its shave oils, which was inspired by a trend Gibbs posted about where women were showing their pubes online. He said it was one of his favorite brand partnerships to date.

But sometimes new bits work, too. Gill said the two started dressing up as historical figures and doing skin care in brand deals to pretty positive reception. One TikTok with The Ordinary that shows the two getting ready to attend Ford’s Theatre as Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln has more than 63,000 likes.

“I don’t want a video to be posted just because we’re getting paid for it,” Gill said. “I also want our audience to like it and enjoy it and stay to the end, and I think our branded content fits really seamlessly into the stuff we’re already making.”

In Gill’s opinion, the amount of brand parodies the two do actually works in brand partners’ favor. “I think doing the satirical brand deals helps people [engage] because they don’t know if we’re [being] real or not,” she said. “Especially when brands let us run crazy, they’re always commenting like, ‘I can’t believe Spotify let you do this,’ which is my favorite comment on a brand deal.”

Go all-out

Risk-averse brands can sometimes be a tough nut to crack, as the two learned when they pitched a clean version of their “Panera” song to the fast-casual chain’s reps for a potential partnership and were turned down. More than 84,000 videos on TikTok have featured the explicit version, and Gibbs said he felt like it was a missed opportunity. He added that marketers need not be afraid of being associated with the word “twink,” which means a “slender gay man” and is not, in fact, a slur. Panera did not respond to a request for comment.

In general, Gill said she believes it’s “better to be controversial in advertising than boring,” and with that comes some risk. In other words, brands that want to reap the benefits of the Grant & Ash audience shouldn’t necessarily send slide decks of dos and don’ts or make significant edits, and should ideally be fans of the account so they know what they’re getting into, the two said.

“If there starts to be a weird thing where they’re taking creative control and it becomes a full-blown advertisement that’s not even our voice or style [or] wouldn’t make any sense,” Gibbs said, “then we’d rather just not do it.”

Last year, Gill said Sephora reached out last year hoping for an anthem of its own, and the two are hoping more brands see the opportunity in parody as they continue their tour.

“That’s been really rewarding to see that not everyone is trying to be PG all the time,” Gill said. “We can reel it in if we need to, but I really like people who want to use us for our voice and tap into that audience and don’t try to suppress the humor of it all.”

In summary, she said, “In a world of Paneras, be a Sephora.” To which Gibbs promptly responded, “Get a tramp stamp of that.”