As news worsens, the potential for comedy rises.
No one understands this inverse relationship better than the team behind The Onion, which has channeled today’s dystopian political slide into banger headlines (“Trump Spends Entire U.K. Trip Trying To Figure Out Where He Knows Prince Andrew From”). The news site has attracted nearly 54,000 subscribers since its relaunch last year, and is on track to generate $6 million in revenue in 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Which is why it seemed particularly comical when, in May, the satirical news outlet issued a press release announcing a “foray into advertising” in order to “expand its marketplace dominance.” Companies could enlist writers at The Onion for creative projects, because “nothing—not spouses, not children, not fragile elderly parents—matters more . . . than helping brands tell their stories.”
It seemed like a classic Onion spoof of capitalism and corporate jargon. But for once, The Onion was not doing a bit. Or at least we don’t think it was.
The Onion has launched what it’s describing as a “strategy and creative agency” that operates adjacent to, yet distinct from, the publication. Called America’s Finest—named for The Onion’s tagline, “America’s Finest News Source”—the agency is avowedly not a gag. Yet it gleefully satirizes itself in its own press release and social media posts.
For The Onion, the agency represents an opportunity to create a new revenue stream: providing corporate clients with copy that is fresh, funny, and written by actual writers, to stand out from AI slop. America’s Finest currently has between five and ten clients, and has done work for Paramount, an ETF fund, and a nonprofit.
It’s “comedy, but packaged as a brand message,” says The Onion’s chief marketing officer, Leila Brillson.
The Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, sees no downside to the effort, “unless we start working with ICE and Raytheon,” he says.
‘The Onion’ launches an Agency
The Onion has been lampooning the news for almost 40 years, running classic headlines like “Black Guy Given Nation’s Worst Job” following Obama’s election, and “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” after countless mass shootings. A surprising new coalition took over the website in April 2024, led by former NBC News reporter Collins, who pledged as the new CEO to give the writers more creative freedom. The publication relaunched a print version in August 2024; Collins reported recently that it “is now the now the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States by subscribers, on a list right between the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, and growing fast.”
Brillson, who previously worked in marketing at Disney, Netflix, and Bumble, and then ran her own agency, says that it was she who’d “ushered through” the agency idea. “I don’t want to say that there were naysayers,” she says of her initial pitch, “but a lot of people didn’t fully understand what it looked like until it was up and running.”
The concept of an agency living within a media company is hardly new—The New York Times’s T Brand Studio and The Washington Post’s WP Creative Group have been operating custom content divisions since 2014 and 2021 respectively, creating stories that may look like standard articles but are really marketing for brands (and acknowledged as such).
The Onion itself used to do something similar. Its previous owners, G/O Media, ran an in-house agency called Onion Labs from 2013 to 2019, which produced ads for brands such as Mr. Peanut and Whitecastle. It generated the kind of sponsored content that mirrored Onion stories, along with ads that ran on The Onion‘s own website.
It was no small operation. At one point, Brillson says, 30 people worked for this full-service studio that had video capacity, which was costly to maintain. “We simply don’t live in that market anymore,” Brillson says.
America’s Finest operates differently. It produces copy for everything from social media posts to billboard ads—but The Onion plays no part in hosting or distributing the work. “People are like, ‘Will The Onion write about this?’ And we have to say, no,” Brillson says. “We have a pretty strong separation of church and state.”
Marnie Shure, the former managing editor of The Onion who now works as creative producer for America’s Finest, explains that “we’re not necessarily trying to make everybody sound like The Onion.” And while video capabilities exist, the focus is “more tightly on copy, content, and strategy.”
To that end, The Onion is commissioning former writers. Louisa Kellogg, a senior staff writer from 2015 to 2018, now accepts agency assignments as they come in, and as they suit her schedule. Her first assignment, in October 2024, was a campaign for The Onion itself, writing fake testimonials from subscribers. She now writes copy for external clients.
Comedy writers for hire
The company put out the ambiguous press announcing America’s Finest in May; today, America’s Finest has a team of roughly eight writers, specifically ones who don’t live in Chicago, including the L.A.-based Kellogg.
Living near the The Onion’s Chicago headquarters is one of the news outlet’s rigid rules for editorial staffers, but it “has left some ‘Hall of Famers’ out there in the wilderness,” Collins says. America’s Finest is a way for Onion management to support writers during a shaky time, in the aftermath of the writers’ strike, COVID, and the L.A. fires. “We wanted to give them a chance to make some rent,” he says, “and use some of the world’s best comedy writers who otherwise should be writing for Colbert. But that show is dead now.”
America’s Finest copywriters use the same system they did in the Onion newsroom: best joke wins. “That very deliberate process, honed for almost 40 years, is something you can apply to projects,” Shure says, “even when the project is not a satirical newspaper.” Since they’re remote, Kellogg says writers often email in their jokes (the ad copy), and Shure chooses the winner. The key difference is that it’s not just the punchline, but also the client brief, that will determine the victor.
Clients like the real writing—an antidote to the “AI-generated slop that’s being presented as advertising right now,” Collins says—and the fact that it can be comical. “Ads just aren’t funny anymore, and it’s a disease,” he says. “I can’t remember the last time I laughed at an advertisement.”
‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’
Many of America’s Finest’s early clients are in the entertainment realm: the agency has written for Paramount, including for The Naked Gun, which did well in theaters this summer as R-rated comedies have floundered in recent years. (The agency is hesitant to identify other movie and TV clients: “They don’t want to admit that they delegate out copywriting to anybody else,” Collins says.)
Other clients have included nonprofits such Subversive ETFs, a fund that invests in equity securities of publicly traded companies—specifically ones that, public disclosures indicate, sitting U.S. Congress members have invested in. America’s Finest created copy for social media and for posters that were recently wheatpasted around New York City that read: “This should not be legal. Congress trades on inside information . . . But if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
The agency also works on events. It threw an off-beat party at SXSW for Project Liberty, a nonprofit, founded by billionaire executive Frank McCourt, aiming to create a “people-powered internet” by shifting control of data to individuals. (America’s Finest wrote the speeches, too.) It also helped throw a party in September for Mexican sports store Culto, themed around the “cult” of soccer as a religion (it featured a ball that predicted the future, among other curiosities).
“People come to us knowing they’re going to get some unhinged stuff and might be made uncomfortable,” Collins says. Some clients have turned down copy pitches, Brillson says, because they were “too weird for them.”
Parodying LinkedIn from the inside, but still for real
One challenge America’s Finest may face as it grows is maintaining its signature voice while convincing potential clients that the whole thing isn’t a gag. The agency’s new LinkedIn feed, for example, features refreshingly facetious posts about capitalism—“You don’t want to be on your deathbed wondering if you could’ve delivered more value to your clients”—alongside more earnest posts, like the invitation to the Culto event: “I would love to invite you folks to come hang out with us. Lemme know here if you want to party!”
Collins reassures me that it is not, in fact, a joke. “Everything involving The Onion, the first instinct is: it’s a bit,” he says. That was true when it announced the rerelease of the print paper, or the bid to buy InfoWars from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yet somehow, I still wonder.
Collins finds this ambiguity fun to play with. “It’s a strange way to run a business where you’re just constantly having to tell people everything you’re doing is real, actually.”
