In today’s article, we’re talking about how a TikTok creator’s prank on her boyfriend led to a deftly played comedy moment from Anthropologie, a store not exactly known for its sense of humor.

Read to the end for an inappropriate take about couples comedy and OnlyFans.

Anthropologie doesn’t take up a lot of space in my brain. There’s a short list of things I know about the brand, most of which I picked up from walking past the store at the Glendale Galleria and, for whatever reason, an offhand joke Mindy Kaling made in her 2011 book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).

“…my bedroom is so untidy it looks like vandals ransacked the Anthropologie Sale section.”

Which is a solid enough joke if it stuck around in my head that long.

Here’s what I know about Anthropologie:

• It’s boho-chic for elder millennial women

• Everything is overpriced

• I just assume they abuse “the wedding font”

It’s the kind of place that sells a wicker poodle for $250.

I’m not the core customer for Anthropologie, not even close, but I lived through 2008 Williamsburg and shopped at Urban Outfitters, so I understand the positioning. Get that poodle, girl. That being said, when a TikTok creator tricked her boyfriend into thinking she bought a $150 rock from Anthropologie, I wasn’t shocked that it took the fuck off.

@phoebeadams112His full on crash out at the end HAHA

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Phoebe Adams and her boyfriend Dan Diliberto specialize in “couples comedy” (their words, not mine), an adorkably appetizing genre of social media that runs the gamut from “aw, shucks” to “oh, fuck.”

It’s light, it’s fun, and even though it gives me a healthy dose of cringe, I can’t deny that when it works, it works. Again, I’m not the core customer, but I get it.

Phoebe is the wild card to Dan’s straight man, and she drives most of the comedy in their videos. By the way, Nutty Girl and Straitlaced Dude is clearly the most palatable formula for couples comedy. If you’re wondering why, just imagine how toxic it would feel in 2025 if a husband were constantly pranking his wife for likes and views.

Anyway, Phoebe staged a to-camera video where she unboxes a rock she claims she bought from Anthropologie for only $150 (on sale), much to Dan’s smirking chagrin. The internet loved it. Then Anthropologie jumped in on the joke, creating a surprisingly satisfying collaboration between creator and brand that doesn’t feel cringey or obnoxious. That part, I am actually the core customer for.

Let’s talk about what planets aligned to make this joke work.

To Be Specific

Phoebe is a savvy creator, fully capable of making a video go viral without relying on a well-known brand. Telling My Boyfriend Spicy Food Gives You a Spicy Period got 1.4 million views, Part 2 of What to Do If Your Boyfriend Has Dingleberries pulled 1.9 million, and a video where she… just gives Dan a wet willy… is at 7.4 million.

But Anthropologie rock? That one’s at 12 million views. Clearly, this hit on something bigger than dingleberries, wet willies, or mild betrayals of her boyfriend’s trust.

So what did she do right? She picked a retailer whose brand isn’t just strong but deeply specific. And in comedy, specifics matter. For example:

Someone broke into my car and stole my bag!

vs.

Someone broke into my Kia Sorento and stole my Jansport!

One is specific, the other is generic. One conjures a clear mental picture, saying something about this person’s age and financial status; the other conjures a stock photo and says nothing.

Anthropologie is specific. Even a dipshit like me knows what they sell (bohemian-chic clothes and home goods), who they sell it to (upper-middle-class millennial women), and how much they charge (too much). They’ve been around long enough that most people know when something “feels like Anthropologie.”

Now imagine I asked you to come up with a fake product for Target that says something about the brand and the people who shop there. Hard, right? Target is too big and too broad. What about Nike? Or Apple? Or McDonalds? Powerful, strong brands, but not specific in a way that would make for clear joke writing. These brands are intended for as many people as possible.

Brands that feel specific? Kith. Taschen. Black Rifle Coffee. Fashion Nova. Online Ceramics. They speak directly to a core community and a core customer.

She chose the right rock, too. If she had picked a multicolored igneous rock, or a hunk of concrete, or even a sparkling geode, the joke wouldn’t land the same way. It wouldn’t feel believable. Instead, she chose a slab of shale: a monochromatic, sedimentary rock. It’s not wild to imagine Anthropologie styling a lookbook with that rock and then selling it on the website.

Whether Phoebe realized it or not, she effectively weaponized Anthropologie’s specificity. The joy here is in thinking the joke might be real, or maybe even should be real. That tension drives the impulse to share it with other people who “get” Anthropologie and get the joke.

It’s All About Timing

If you’re a brand and you want to co-own a joke like this, you have to be first to market. It’s an arms race for who can commit the hardest and the fastest. Phoebe posted her video on September 14. Anthropologie responded with their own on September 20.

@anthropologieofficialthe season's hottest décor: ROCKS 🪨 #anthropologierock

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In a surprisingly self-aware move, they built a whole-ass display for the rock! With a sign, and a barcode! To date, this is their best-performing TikTok at 7.6 million views. If they had waited even a little bit longer and let someone else sneak a fake rock display into their stores, it would’ve been game over. And honestly, there’s not a small chance something like that could’ve happened.

In that scenario, the brand’s fortress is breached. The rebels take control. Anthropologie would be left with two bad options: shut it down and look like a narc, or jump in way too late and look like a cringey marketing team that’s not paying attention. The only semi-salvageable move would be to wait until the bit was nearly dead and then, right before we all got tired of it, post a fake promo video. That would still earn them points, but not enough to win. At best, it’d be a draw.

By jumping in quickly, they got to co-own the joke. And for a brand that usually comes off as self-serious and precious, that’s a fantastic look.

An Unhinged Take on Couple’s Comedy

Okay, hear me out…the appeal of this genre of straight-people comedy is rooted in something I don’t think is that far away from OnlyFans.

They’re young, they’re affectionate and tactile. It’s titillating in a chaste, Mormon-kinda way. There’s a physical intimacy on display that’s so genuine it makes me anxious they want to funnel us somewhere to watch more of it for $5.99 a month.

What I’m saying is that couples comedy is an invitation to laugh at their relatability, but also isn’t not about picturing them doing it, right?????

*There are 32 of you here.

Three glasses deep on free natural wine, I outlined a brave new world for comedy writers, one where social media resembles variety shows from the 1940s, like your Colgate Comedy Hour, where brands are the exclusive sponsor and shows are developed far, far, far away from whatever is left of the studio system. I was convinced I was alone in thinking this, but turns out, I’m not!

Historically, advertising has been a safe place for comedy writers to make some cash while protecting their bottom line as they Make Their Dreams Come True™. A bunch of comedians have actually floated in and out of advertising. Jim Gaffigan started at Ogilvy & Mather, Tim & Eric had their now legendary Old Spice run, and Ryan Reynolds is a better marketer than actor at this point. But with the collapse of the entertainment industry, where can comedians work if not in advertising?

Let’s stop separating advertising comedy from “real” comedy. It’s all comedy, all the same magic trick, and it’s one that I love and think about constantly.

Which brings us to a sitcom made by a credit card company.

Roomies is a single-camera, Mike Schur-style sitcom, complete with to-camera confessionals, a yappy cast of approachably hot people, and a four-bedroom loft where characters can reliably crash into each other.

Produced entirely by Bilt, a credit card company that lets you earn points on paying your rent, this is, to my knowledge, the first serialized story entirely funded by one singular brand since Procter & Gamble invented the Soap Opera.

Roomies has been covered a lot, but I’d argue still not enough. I want to focus on two important questions.

1. Is it funny?

2. Does it do shit for the brand?

Roomies, Roomies, Roomies

The show itself follows four roommates, each a familiar Gen Z archetype. Ellie is the blonde, basic, and Midwestern Swiftie. Ovie is the too-smart indoor kid with some codependency issues. Rain is the slightly left-of-heteronormal creative. And Griffin is the hustle-culture bro with a heart of gold.

If you asked ChatGPT to summarize every episode of 30 Rock, filter it through the logline of Friends, and compress it into three to five pages of shooting script optimized for algorithms, you would get something close to Roomies. Binge-watching it was surprisingly fun, and I walked away actually caring about these characters.

Post-The Office, the quality of a sitcom is now measured in joke density. How many crackling one-liners can you cram into 22 minutes? On TikTok, which is the best platform to binge Roomies for reasons I can’t fully explain, the show averages just over two minutes per episode, but even with that limitation, Roomies finds a rhythm and serves enough jokes to cover the spread.

That said, when Roomies whiffs the ball, you notice it. Bits of dialogue can suddenly kill the otherwise propulsive momentum, and actors will sometimes dictate their lines instead of performing them. Every episode tends to have a batch of jokes that clearly read better than they sound.

With only two minutes to fill, comedic bald spots should not be a problem, but fortunately, they’re rare.

I’m old enough to remember the heyday of web series in the early aughts, when every young actor/director/writer tried to make a sitcom with their Canon 7D. Outliers like Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s Broad City, and Ben Sinclair’s High Maintenance turned web series into legit TV careers. Still, for hundreds of others, most were either really boring or really bad.

But that was 2008, and almost twenty years later, the education necessary to get shit to look and feel good is more available than ever. Roomies avoids most amateur pitfalls because the knowledge to light a scene is a YouTube search away.

Also, the writing is just good.

In Episode 9, Ellie has to solve for a broken A/C and buys a kiddie pool from Duane Reade. The line “I knew they would have one! And it wasn’t even locked up!” is as strong and biting a joke as I could ask for.

Episode 12, which boasts a fucking wild 1.9m views on TikTok, features a job-hunt-induced primal scream from Ellie that works as not just a great joke, but a revealing piece of character development that’s elegant in the way only a good comic actress can pull off.

And in Episode 6, we get a pretty good Mike Schur-esque shmatlzy knock-off via Griffin, “When you live with people for a while, you almost forget that they’re separate from you. You don’t realize they’re part of their everyday. How they influence you.”

Leslie Nope, that you?

After 14 episodes, I am shocked at how comfortable it is to live with Roomies.

Bilt, Bilt, Bilt

The real question is, is Roomies doing any favors for Bilt? Not once is the product mentioned or even used throughout the run (so far), and in an act of incredible restraint, the only branding is a tiny message in the bio: “New episodes weekly by @Bilt.”

There is a version of this show where Ovie, a programmer for apps, works at Bilt, talks about Bilt every 15 seconds, and the Bilt logo is somehow in every shot. The fact that there is not a single moment in this show that feels like a commercial is a testament to the level of faith Bilt has in this series, which I’m almost a little worried about.

How in the fuck is anyone supposed to know what Bilt is or that they should use it? If there’s no logo to make bigger, does marketing even exist?

Over on Bilt’s hero social channels, we get a clearer picture.

On Instagram, their preferred platform, you’ll see not just the voice of the brand but who they believe is their ideal customer. Someone young, most likely dating around, living in a city, and importantly, has good enough taste to want expensive shit but probably can’t afford it. Y’know, like someone who’d want to earn points on the thing they spent more than 30% of their income on. Like you and your roommates.

Bilt has clearly gone all in on comedy. Take Rent Free, a series where popular comedians share what lives rent-free in their brains. It’s a smart idea that ladders back to the brand’s goals so easily, it’s insane that this is the first time I’ve seen it.

Everything is shot with a Premium Instagram LUT, their social leans on comedy cred in a smart, modern way, and they are clearly investing in activations and community building that make sense for their audience.

So does a regular-ass sitcom count as a brand extension, the same way a capsule collection might?

I ran the idea past a friend who works in social media branding. She didn’t give me a straight yes on whether Roomies helps Bilt’s brand, but she pointed out something else: because the show is genuinely funny and the characters feel real, the next time she sees a Bilt ad in the wild, that parasocial glow from Ellie, Rain, Ovie, and Griffin could spill over into goodwill for a credit card company.

Sounds like a win to me.

If all branding is lifestyle branding, why not make content for the casual comedy fan? The broke 20-something bingeing Friends or Parks & Rec. Lifestyle branding usually screams luxury, elitism, and aspiration. When was the last time a brand acknowledged its customers’ reality, working too much, still broke, and just trying to afford a little treat?