Six Flags Bets on the Funsultant to Relaunch a Merged Brand
Six Flags launched "We're Serious About Fun" in April 2025 as its first national brand campaign following the 2024 merger with Cedar Fair, created by TMA — The Marketing Arm, an Omnicom agency — and distributed across television, digital, out-of-home, social media, and email channels in the United States, with the central creative device being a deadpan fictional character called the Funsultant.
The campaign arrives at a pivotal moment for the combined parks business. The Six Flags and Cedar Fair merger created one of the largest regional theme park operators in the United States, and this creative push represents the first unified attempt to speak to consumers under a single brand identity. Rather than simply promoting rides or seasonal offers, the work sets out to establish a distinctive personality — one that contrasts the language of corporate seriousness with the visceral, physical reality of world-class thrill attractions. The objective, as reported by Mediapost, is to drive park visits and incremental sales of both daily tickets and season passes across the combined portfolio.
In the United States, the leisure and recreation sector is intensely competitive, making brand differentiation a strategic imperative rather than a creative luxury. The campaign was built around a regional rollout timed to the spring and summer high season — the critical revenue window for any theme park operator. According to Mediapost and Reel360, media placements were strategically positioned around high-profile live programming including the NBA Playoffs, the American Idol finale, and the NFL Draft, ensuring the campaign reached large, engaged audiences at moments of peak consumer attention. The campaign encompasses four media assets and was submitted to the industry by Roy Elvove, President of Elvove Associates LLC.
Six Flags enters 2025 as a fundamentally different business than it was two years ago. The merger with Cedar Fair, completed in 2024, expanded the company's footprint dramatically and created an immediate strategic need: a single, coherent brand voice capable of speaking across dozens of parks to tens of millions of potential visitors in the United States. TMA's creative response was to anchor the campaign not in product features but in a character-driven premise that could carry consistent meaning across every channel and market.
The theme park and amusement park sector is a growing global market. According to Grand View Research, North America represented approximately 36.8% of global theme park revenue in 2025, underlining the outsized importance of the US market to any operator competing at national scale. In the United States, Six Flags competes directly with Universal Parks and Resorts and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts — both of which invest heavily in intellectual-property-driven storytelling and immersive world-building. Against those competitors, a straightforward product-led advertising strategy would struggle to differentiate. The Funsultant concept sidesteps that comparison entirely by operating in a different register: dry, self-aware, and rooted in the idea that the physical thrills at Six Flags parks are so extreme they demand to be taken seriously.
This strategic positioning reflects a genuine consumer insight. Thrill-seeking is not a casual or passive activity — it is something guests actively seek out, plan for, and talk about. By treating fun as a subject worthy of specialist expertise, the campaign flatters the guest's appetite for intensity while creating a character archetype that is inherently shareable. As Harris Wilkinson, Chief Creative Officer at TMA, stated according to Mediapost: the advertising highlights the serious kind of thrills the parks offer, with no detail too big, citing the world's tallest roller coasters as an example. That creative logic — seriousness as a vehicle for communicating scale — is what distinguishes this campaign from generic leisure advertising in the US market.
The Funsultant is a fictional deadpan specialist whose role is to apply the language and affect of corporate consultancy to the business of having fun. The character appears alongside secondary figures called Funterns, creating a miniature office hierarchy that parodies professional seriousness while continuously pointing toward the genuine spectacle of Six Flags parks. As reported by Muse by Clio and Reel360, the character was conceived and developed by TMA — The Marketing Arm — with production handled by Omnicom Production and public relations managed by Ketchum.
Harris Wilkinson, Chief Creative Officer at TMA, is the named creative voice behind the campaign's strategic and executional logic. According to Mediapost, Wilkinson described the work as going beyond merely talking about how much fun people can have at Six Flags, instead using the advertising to highlight the serious kind of thrills the parks offer, with the world's tallest roller coasters cited as a proof point. That framing — earnest expertise applied to absurd subject matter — is the engine that makes the deadpan tone land rather than simply confuse.
The execution spans television film, digital video, out-of-home placements, social media content, and email, giving the Funsultant character room to function across formats with different creative demands. Film allows the full deadpan performance to play out with timing and visual contrast. Out-of-home distills the concept to a single visual and a headline. Digital and social extend the character into shorter, more iterative formats suited to the platforms where Six Flags' core audience — families and young adults in the United States — spends significant time. According to Reel360, media planning for the campaign was handled by Zimmerman Advertising, ensuring the character appeared in contextually relevant environments including live sports and entertainment programming. The campaign comprises four distinct media assets, each calibrated to the demands of its channel while maintaining a unified character-led identity.
No independently verified performance data for the "We're Serious About Fun" campaign — including attendance uplift, ticket sales conversion, or brand tracking shifts — is publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign launched in April 2025 and was designed as a seasonal push through the spring and summer high period, meaning full-cycle results have not yet entered the public record. Analysis here is therefore structural rather than outcomes-based.
The campaign's structural strengths are meaningful. A character-driven creative platform — the Funsultant — provides a repeatable creative asset that can scale across channels and evolve across seasons without requiring a complete creative rebuild. According to Mediapost and Reel360, placement against the NBA Playoffs, the American Idol finale, and the NFL Draft gave the campaign access to some of the largest live television audiences available in the United States in spring 2025, maximising reach during the booking window most critical to theme park revenue. The multi-channel architecture — spanning television, digital film, out-of-home, social media, and email — reflects best practice for a brand attempting to maintain salience across a geographically distributed audience base in the US market.
The campaign's primary structural risk is character recognition. The Funsultant is a new, proprietary construct with no prior audience awareness. Building that recognition requires sustained investment and consistent deployment — precisely the kind of long-term commitment that post-merger businesses sometimes find difficult to maintain as integration pressures compete for resources. Clapboard rates "We're Serious About Fun" at 58 out of 100, reflecting a campaign with a sound strategic idea and capable production whose long-term effectiveness will depend on whether Six Flags commits to the character platform with the consistency it requires.
"We're Serious About Fun" is Six Flags' first national brand campaign following its 2024 merger with Cedar Fair. Created by TMA — The Marketing Arm — and launched in April 2025, the campaign introduces the Funsultant, a deadpan fictional character, across television, digital, out-of-home, social media, and email channels in the United States.
TMA — The Marketing Arm, an Omnicom agency — created the campaign. Media planning was handled by Zimmerman Advertising, production by Omnicom Production, and public relations by Ketchum. Harris Wilkinson served as Chief Creative Officer at TMA and is the named creative lead, as reported by Mediapost and Reel360.
The Funsultant is a fictional deadpan character created by TMA to serve as the creative centerpiece of the Six Flags 2025 campaign. Positioned as a specialist in fun, the character applies corporate consultancy language to the subject of thrill-seeking, accompanied by secondary characters called Funterns, as reported by Muse by Clio and Reel360.
Six Flags launched its first national campaign in 2025 to establish a unified brand identity following the 2024 merger with Cedar Fair. According to Mediapost, the campaign's business objective was to drive park visits and increase sales of daily tickets and season passes across the combined parks portfolio in the United States.
Six Flags placed the campaign across television, digital, out-of-home, social media, and email channels. According to Mediapost and Reel360, media placements included advertising activity around the NBA Playoffs, the American Idol finale, and the NFL Draft — high-audience live programming during the spring 2025 booking season in the United States.
Clapboard rates "We're Serious About Fun" at 58 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with a sound strategic premise and capable multi-channel production, noting that long-term effectiveness will depend on Six Flags' sustained commitment to the Funsultant character platform across future seasons in the US market.
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