Speaker 1: Cold Zone Media. Welcome to part two of the sixteenth
Speaker 1: Minute two Horny Brands on Social Media spectacular. My name's
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus and this week I'd like to open our
Speaker 1: show with a little game. Every time in this episode
Speaker 1: I say the word brand, grab a beverage of your choice,
Speaker 1: I know many of your driving us of your discretion,
Speaker 1: and drink.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is.
Speaker 1: When you hear the word brand in this episode, the
Speaker 1: only guaranteed result is that you will have to pee
Speaker 1: very soon. Enjoy a Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the
Speaker 1: podcast where we revisit the internet's most notorious main characters,
Speaker 1: talk to them and see how their moment in the
Speaker 1: spotlight affected them and what that says about us and
Speaker 1: the Internet. And this week we're not going to beat
Speaker 1: around the bush. We're digging into part two of the
Speaker 1: world of Sentient all two Horny Brands on social Media.
Speaker 1: So to bring you up to speed and go back
Speaker 1: and listen to part.
Speaker 2: One if you haven't.
Speaker 1: Sentient Brands are the culmination of around a century's worth
Speaker 1: of American marketing techniques, beginning with the combination of faulty
Speaker 1: crowd psychology meets faulty Freudian psychology employed by early advertising
Speaker 1: jargonnauts like Edward Burnet's. For a few decades, persuasion was
Speaker 1: all about convincing Americans that by consuming this product, that
Speaker 1: joining this group, the American military anyone, would make you
Speaker 1: just like everyone else, and that being just like everyone
Speaker 1: else was the goal of human existence. The idea was
Speaker 1: to blend into the consuming blob that composed the mid century.
Speaker 1: But around the time of the Vietnam War this changed.
Speaker 1: Fitting in was no longer a popular stance, and so
Speaker 1: advertisers pivoted in response, pushing consumption instead as a way
Speaker 1: of expressing one's individuality. And if you have a boomer
Speaker 1: in your life with an inexplicably weird specific collection that
Speaker 1: they went into debt curating as an act of self expression.
Speaker 1: My mom's was Lungaburger baskets.
Speaker 3: They've learned basket weaving from his father and in time
Speaker 3: created an empire making and selling hand crafted baskets and
Speaker 3: all shapes, sizes, and collars. At its height, the longer
Speaker 3: Burger Company was a billion dollars a year business with
Speaker 3: twelve thousand employees worldwide.
Speaker 1: Beanie Babies was a popular one. The list goes on.
Speaker 1: Then you'll know how successful this pivot truly was. So
Speaker 1: by the time the Internet came around, American advertising had
Speaker 1: undergone a lot of change, as consumption itself had become
Speaker 1: an increasingly large part of the American identity in a
Speaker 1: world that was increasingly flooded with brands and options of
Speaker 1: things to buy. In a world like that of the Internet,
Speaker 1: where influencers were becoming king and there was nothing more
Speaker 1: off putting than a pop up ad, it was up
Speaker 1: to the next generation of millennials to figure out how
Speaker 1: to make an old product fresh and worth paying attention to.
Speaker 1: Last week, we talked to one of the pioneers of
Speaker 1: this space, Serenity Disco, who.
Speaker 2: Used their knowledge of time Humbler in the early twenty.
Speaker 1: Tens, along with its community building techniques, and managed to
Speaker 1: create a brilliant, absurdist way of selling waffles. And this
Speaker 1: was extremely successful. They won industry awards and set the
Speaker 1: bar for future accounts going weird if done by a
Speaker 1: genuine weirdo. And I say this with love, would become
Speaker 1: a near shore fire away to get younger people to
Speaker 1: engage with a brand that they might not normally think
Speaker 1: twice about. But if you've spent enough time online, and
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this show, then I'm assuming you have,
Speaker 1: you'll know that different approaches are necessary in order to
Speaker 1: be effective on different social media platforms. Wholesome absurdism was
Speaker 1: definitely the way to go on Tumbler, but that wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily how to succeed on Twitter or YouTube or eventually TikTok.
Speaker 2: So this week we're taking a.
Speaker 1: Look at what this twenty tens era renaissance looked like
Speaker 1: over on the bad application that used to be fun,
Speaker 1: Twitter dot com. And while a lot of us have
Speaker 1: positive associations with pre elon Twitter, as embarrassing as that
Speaker 1: is to admit, it's undeniable that Twitter has always been
Speaker 1: an excellent tool for rage bait and pedantic arguing, and
Speaker 1: there was absolutely no brand that harnessed this tendency better
Speaker 1: than Amy Brown of the Wendy's account, stoking carefully calibrated
Speaker 1: rivalries that would escalate to flirtation and death threats with
Speaker 1: the likes of Burger King and especially that redheaded bitch
Speaker 1: Ronald McDonald off at McDonald's. There can only be room
Speaker 1: for one redheaded broad in this space. But before we
Speaker 1: can get to Amy it's important to have a little
Speaker 1: insight into what a social media manager's job even looked
Speaker 1: like in the mid twenty tents, something we will continue
Speaker 1: to explore next week as we talk about how it
Speaker 1: changed going into today. Because the field of social media
Speaker 1: management has always been dominated by women and fems and
Speaker 1: what does that mean? Because as I was preparing for
Speaker 1: this series, I realized that I was going to be
Speaker 1: speaking to exactly one man in this three part series,
Speaker 1: as opposed to three people who identify as either.
Speaker 2: Women or non binary.
Speaker 1: And that is no coincidence, particularly the further you go
Speaker 1: back in this space. The social media manager has a
Speaker 1: long history as being considered.
Speaker 2: A job for girls. Ah, but there is truth to this.
Speaker 1: So many of my friends early just out of college
Speaker 1: jobs were as social media managers in male dominated workspaces,
Speaker 1: and she or they often ended up being the person
Speaker 1: who had to translate a relatively boring product that these
Speaker 1: men were selling into a compelling, visually appealing social post.
Speaker 1: And like many niche issues affecting women in fems, there
Speaker 1: was a fair amount of discussion regarding how women dominated
Speaker 1: and by extension, underpaid this position was in the late
Speaker 1: twenty tens, following the Me Too movement. This is from
Speaker 1: a piece in Wired from twenty eighteen by Jesse Hemple
Speaker 1: called how social Media Became a pink collar job. Between
Speaker 1: seventy and eighty percent of social media workers self identify
Speaker 1: as women on the salary compilation site a scale. The
Speaker 1: career has been referred to as the pink ghetto. Duffy
Speaker 1: and Schwartz, who are data analysts, i'll add, studied one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty job postings to determine how businesses recruit
Speaker 1: social media specialists. These companies, which included BuzzFeed, Equinox, and Thrillist,
Speaker 1: advertised jobs that called for applicants to be sociable, exhibit
Speaker 1: deft emotional management, and be flexible, all traits that Duffy
Speaker 1: says are typically associated with women. The feminized nature of
Speaker 1: social media employment, Duffy and Schwartz argue, is connected to
Speaker 1: it quote characteristic invisibility, lower pay, in marginal status unquote.
Speaker 1: Within the tech industry, the parasite statistics from payscill that
Speaker 1: places average pay for a social media specialist at forty
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: But that's for staff jobs.
Speaker 1: I cannot believe the pay is that low in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: and this had been talked about four years already. In
Speaker 1: Alanahope Levinson's twenty fifteen piece The Pink Ghetto of Social Media,
Speaker 1: referenced in the above piece, she draws a comparison between
Speaker 1: the perception of social media as a woman's job to
Speaker 1: the same pattern under compensation and general disdain for the
Speaker 1: long women dominated PR space. She writes, it's hard not
Speaker 1: to hear these stories and draw a parallel to public relations,
Speaker 1: an industry where eighty five percent of workers are women.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: People in the media like to say that PR is
Speaker 1: a pink ghetto because the often low prestige jobs are
Speaker 1: almost exclusively populated by women. A few editor who left
Speaker 1: her job in social media at a major news organization.
Speaker 2: But social media is the true pink.
Speaker 1: Ghetto unquote, She says her time in her previous role
Speaker 1: was characterized by unpaid overtime and a dearth of promotion
Speaker 1: and raises. And so, while I know that many of
Speaker 1: you have your aspersions about the advertising profession, writ large
Speaker 1: that makes sense, but as always, there is a person
Speaker 1: behind the screen who has that job mainly because they
Speaker 1: need it to survive, and they are doing more than
Speaker 1: just tweeting. As Serenity described last week, and as this
Speaker 1: week's guest Amy Brown expands upon, this job would often
Speaker 1: consist of a lot of customers, service, taking in DM
Speaker 1: folders full of verbal abuse, and sometimes balancing multiple clients in.
Speaker 2: Order to make ends meet.
Speaker 1: Not to mention that the whole concept of seeming like
Speaker 1: you're just tweeting is a facade in and of itself.
Speaker 1: While any good account has a lot of humor and spontaneity,
Speaker 1: there is always a strategy and a planned narrative voice.
Speaker 1: To accounts like this, there are real stakes attached to
Speaker 1: the people running them. So even if this isn't your
Speaker 1: favorite approach to advertising, and that's totally fair, this is
Speaker 1: a classic example of everyone being in a somewhat compromised position.
Speaker 2: It's like, well, you know what it is, So as.
Speaker 1: Usual, women are shaping this new space and will fail
Speaker 1: to get adequate credit or compensation for it. And interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: the most dedicated chronicler of this movement in online advertising
Speaker 1: was a pivotal figure in the movement himself. Nathan Alibach
Speaker 1: has written two extensive microhistories of both brand Twitter and
Speaker 1: Horny brand Twitter for Vulture. In twenty nineteen and twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, respectively, And these pieces I cannot overstate were
Speaker 1: enormously helpful in researching this series. They're linked in the description,
Speaker 1: and if you were even a casual observer of this space,
Speaker 1: you will know what I'm talking about when I say that.
Speaker 1: This same writer, Nathan Alibach, was the copywriter behind the
Speaker 1: nihilistic woke Stakhem's Twitter account of the late twenty tens.
Speaker 4: Hey were still going out tonight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a fake plan.
Speaker 5: The only thing real in this ad is that one
Speaker 5: hundred percent real beef though.
Speaker 1: And if you don't know what I'm talking about, good
Speaker 1: for you and put a pin in that. We'll be
Speaker 1: back for more on him next week. But in his
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen piece Brand Twitter Grows Up, Alibach gives a
Speaker 1: pretty comprehensive history of brands across the consumption spectrum. Don't
Speaker 1: know and how we arrived to the subject of today's interview.
Speaker 1: Per Alibach, this world did not exist in earnest until
Speaker 1: around twenty twelve, but there were faint rumblings of the
Speaker 1: bizarre irony that would later dominate Twitter advertising. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, the Los Angeles Chargers tweeted.
Speaker 5: So hungry need to find my wife in head to
Speaker 5: PF Changs iconic.
Speaker 1: But as it turned out, this was not a brilliant
Speaker 1: engagement strategy from the Chargers. It just happened that the
Speaker 1: Chargers took the handle of a lapsed Twitter user who
Speaker 1: had written this himself on a personal account years earlier.
Speaker 1: So it just looked like an entire professional sports team
Speaker 1: wanted to go to Pfchangs with wife? Where was wife?
Speaker 1: Did they ever make it to PF Changs?
Speaker 2: We do not know.
Speaker 1: By the late two thousands, as brands slowly migrated to
Speaker 1: Twitter after the platform's huge surge in popularity and legitimization
Speaker 1: in the wake of the two thousand and eight election,
Speaker 1: some brands experimented with tweeting in first person.
Speaker 2: Alabac uses this.
Speaker 1: Example from KFC in two thousand and nine, where the
Speaker 1: colonel is watching basketball going to watch.
Speaker 5: A little college basketball. I'm told I'm kind of an
Speaker 5: expert on buckets A oh.
Speaker 1: Just kidding, twenty one likes pretty weak and if you
Speaker 1: can believe it. These kinds of posts were considered bizarre
Speaker 1: and kind of risky at the time, but today they're
Speaker 1: kind of boring right. Alibach also points out that most
Speaker 1: people assume that the people running these Twitter accounts were
Speaker 1: just interns, completely unpaid, and therefore inclined to be loose
Speaker 1: and lazy with the accounts, a notion that for some
Speaker 1: still persists to this day. And so I repeat, it's
Speaker 1: not unpaid college students adults, it's exhausted underpaid adults women.
Speaker 1: But in the early twenty tens, as Twitter fights were
Speaker 1: well established as a great way to get attention of
Speaker 1: any kind, brands began to realize that it wasn't drawing
Speaker 1: attention to the competition to interact with other brands online.
Speaker 1: In fact, brands talking to each other seem to help
Speaker 1: both brands. It's a may the best poster win kind
Speaker 1: of mentality.
Speaker 2: But it started.
Speaker 1: Small, with brands interacting that were not in direct competition
Speaker 1: with one another. A good example, Alabac points out is
Speaker 1: a summer twenty twelve fake feud between Old Spice deodorant
Speaker 1: and Taco Bell. Here is me and my fiance performing
Speaker 1: that for you, Old Spice.
Speaker 5: Why is it that the fire sauce isn't made with
Speaker 5: any real fire? Seems like false advertising?
Speaker 2: Is your deodorant?
Speaker 1: Made with really old spices.
Speaker 5: Depends do you consider volcanoes, tanks, and freedom to be spices?
Speaker 1: Okay, the little nationalistic at the end, they're old spice.
Speaker 1: And if you're familiar with these products, this actually makes
Speaker 1: a lot of because guys who eat too much taco
Speaker 1: bell often reek of old spice deodorant.
Speaker 2: Do you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So by the mid twenty tens, this approach is almost
Speaker 1: standard for brands, not news organizations, mind you. It is
Speaker 1: now considered normal to write and post in a way
Speaker 1: that personifies a company with hundreds of thousands of employees
Speaker 1: as just a little guy like you. But this riskier,
Speaker 1: edgier approach is by no means the industry standard until
Speaker 1: later in the decade. In fact, in the early to
Speaker 1: mid twenty tens, the standard was that corporations were so
Speaker 1: desperate on Twitter to fit in with everybody else, just
Speaker 1: like advertising seventy five years ago did almost like we're
Speaker 1: in a demented cycle. Here we see communities like our
Speaker 1: slash fellow kids referencing the hello fellow kids.
Speaker 4: Meme how do you do fellow kids?
Speaker 1: And it actually became a popular corner of social media
Speaker 1: to make accounts parodying brands trying.
Speaker 2: To act like cool young people.
Speaker 1: I had so much fun looking at these old cringe
Speaker 1: attempt to fit in tweets.
Speaker 2: And I want to share some of my favorites. One
Speaker 2: I didn't know.
Speaker 1: About that made me laugh so much was from Spaghettios.
Speaker 1: For context, it was a big thing in the mid
Speaker 1: twenty ten social media to acknowledge what happened on this
Speaker 1: day in history, regardless of whether that historical event had
Speaker 1: anything to do with you or what you were selling.
Speaker 1: This led to the Spaghettio's Twitter account posting a photoshop
Speaker 1: tribute to Pearl Harper. This was done totally sincerely. It
Speaker 1: was so funny, especially if you consider that my friend
Speaker 1: Iffy wadi Way would later pose as Spaghettios on Twitter
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty and released a fake statement of Spaghettio's
Speaker 1: supporting Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 2: Look it up. He's so funny.
Speaker 1: The point is brands were considered cringey more often than
Speaker 1: not during these years. Serenity Disco and Denny's were major
Speaker 1: major outliers, which is part of why people still talk
Speaker 1: about them. And I don't think that the often young
Speaker 1: social media managers themselves are to be blamed for this cringiness. Anecdotally,
Speaker 1: most companies were not as hashtag brave as Denny's and
Speaker 1: weren't willing to let their employees take big narrative swings
Speaker 1: with their social media accounts. And this is how we
Speaker 1: got an influx of brands awkwardly trying to chase trends
Speaker 1: of the time, a lot of brands saying Bay, brands
Speaker 1: saying on fleek, and brands commemorating nine to eleven in
Speaker 1: the weirdest way possible.
Speaker 5: Let's get two thousand, two hundred ninety six retweets for
Speaker 5: the two thousand, two hundred and ninety six people who
Speaker 5: lost their lives thirteen years ago today hashtag nine to eleven,
Speaker 5: hashtag never forget.
Speaker 1: No brand saying Bey was actually a very successful parody
Speaker 1: account that Ala Bach references that I hadn't thought about
Speaker 1: in a long time, but it was a very popular account.
Speaker 1: It was mainly screenshots of popular brands awkwardly saying by,
Speaker 1: while also indicting the job of social media managers in general.
Speaker 1: Here's an example attached to a screenshot of the Jimmy
Speaker 1: Johns account saying Bay A lot it.
Speaker 5: Is straight up someone's job to make a sandwich shop
Speaker 5: seem more likable. People used to be blacksmiths.
Speaker 1: And this is the environment that leads us into the
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen election cycle. Brands get weirder during this time.
Speaker 1: While parody accounts like brand Saying By remains popular, the
Speaker 1: brand accounts themselves double down on trying to be cool
Speaker 1: because at this time, becoming the target of the malevolent
Speaker 1: brand saying Bay was something to be avoided at all costs,
Speaker 1: and this led to Hamburger, Helper and I Promise I'm
Speaker 1: not kidding making a twenty sixteen mixtape, which inspired a
Speaker 1: series of diss tracks from other accounts, including Wendy's. In
Speaker 1: the Years to come, i'by in the kitchen, Well, Women.
Speaker 6: Women Well, i'by Sefish makes it when my on that day?
Speaker 6: What a women of starring y'all want?
Speaker 5: Beeping not a service? What a women of starring sarna
Speaker 5: y'all be I'm a.
Speaker 6: Survig I start, I start, I start right on Starry.
Speaker 4: I hate the babtist bachelor.
Speaker 6: I'll mix it up, mix it up, women on women,
Speaker 6: So get you a think of unnatural?
Speaker 2: Is it a parody of Watch the Throne?
Speaker 1: Called watch the stove, Yes, but I think it's good.
Speaker 1: But it's the Wendy's account, as run by Amy Brown
Speaker 1: that takes this heightened approach, cranks it up to a
Speaker 1: twelve and gets it all the way to the National
Speaker 1: News in January twenty seventeen. And because Andrews and Cooper
Speaker 1: really had some fun with this, and I think reenacts
Speaker 1: the entire feud that took place between Wendy's and some guy,
Speaker 1: I'm going to let him tell it to you, please enjoy.
Speaker 7: Before we get to the meat of it, it'll help
Speaker 7: to have just a little bit of a basic backstory.
Speaker 7: This is about Wendy's, the hamburger place. Every one of
Speaker 7: a certain age remembers where's the beef? But there's actually
Speaker 7: another slogan, one that Wendy's has used for years and years.
Speaker 2: Take a look.
Speaker 5: If hamburgers were meant to be frozen, wouldn't cals come
Speaker 5: from Antarctica?
Speaker 3: Wendy's hamburgers are made with.
Speaker 4: Fresh, never frozen beef.
Speaker 1: Who else can say that it's way better than fast food?
Speaker 5: It's Wendy, Okay.
Speaker 7: Wendy's has this thing about its beef being fresh, not frozen.
Speaker 7: Apparently in the world of Big Hamburger, every distinguishing factor accounts.
Speaker 7: A few days ago, Wendy's tweeted a reminder of its
Speaker 7: long standing policy on its meat and I quote, our
Speaker 7: beef is way too cool to ever be frozen, smiling
Speaker 7: emoji with sunglasses. Totally innocuous tweet. Right, It's like the
Speaker 7: kind of tweet no one could possibly have a problem with. Right.
Speaker 7: But of course, somewhere out there, someone was having the
Speaker 7: kind of day that made them say to themselves, I
Speaker 7: believe I shall now spend a sizable hunk of time
Speaker 7: arguing with the social media account of a fast food company.
Speaker 7: That's someone's name is Thuggy D. An exquisite Twitter exchange
Speaker 7: happened between Wendy's and said Thuggy D. Tonight I will
Speaker 7: be reading the Wendy's tweet, and Frank from our studio
Speaker 7: crew will be playing the role of Thuggy D. Take
Speaker 7: it away, Frank, your beef is frozen.
Speaker 2: We all know it.
Speaker 4: You'll know we laugh at your slogan fresh never frozen.
Speaker 2: Right, Like you're really a joke.
Speaker 7: I like that last line, to which Wendy's replied, sorry
Speaker 7: to hear you think that, but you're wrong. We've only
Speaker 7: ever used fresh beef since we were founded in nineteen
Speaker 7: sixty nine.
Speaker 4: So you delivered it raw on a hot truck.
Speaker 7: Let me pause here because you have to admit that
Speaker 7: is an interesting question that Thuggy he poses. And this
Speaker 7: is where Wendy's gets a little frosty and responds, and
Speaker 7: I quote, where do you store cold things that aren't frozen?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 7: Yes, a riddle, But how will fuggy do you respond?
Speaker 4: Y'all should give up.
Speaker 6: McDonald's got you guys beat with that don't best breakfast.
Speaker 7: And Wendy's brings down the hammer with you don't have
Speaker 7: to bring them into this just because you forgot refrigerators existed.
Speaker 7: First second there, boom, thank you, Frank. He's excellent, excellent read.
Speaker 1: I actually really really love this clip and it does
Speaker 1: remind me of how desperate people were to feel normal
Speaker 1: about anything in January twenty seventeen, if.
Speaker 2: Only they knew.
Speaker 1: In any case, Amy Brown struck again with the Wendy's
Speaker 1: account that March, getting over one hundred and thirty thousand
Speaker 1: legs on Twitter for the following interaction with McDonald's as
Speaker 1: performed by me and my fiance McDonald says, attached to.
Speaker 2: A picture of a steaming quarter pounder.
Speaker 1: Today, we've announced that by mid twenty eighteen, all quarter
Speaker 1: pounder burgers at the majority of our restaurant will be
Speaker 1: cooked with fresh beef.
Speaker 5: Wendy's replies, So you'll still use frozen beef in most
Speaker 5: of your burgers in all of your restaurants.
Speaker 1: Asking for our friend, she got him McDonald's, is he
Speaker 1: hymn to me?
Speaker 2: And this also got a ton of.
Speaker 1: Mainstream media coverage and for a few glorious minutes for
Speaker 1: social media managers, it was actually cool to be a
Speaker 1: brand on Twitter.
Speaker 2: They were so.
Speaker 1: Cool, in fact, that the Wendy's social media team that
Speaker 1: Amy Brown was a part of did a Reddit ama.
Speaker 2: At the end of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: Where most of the commenters either congratulated the brand on
Speaker 1: being the only one funny enough to follow, or we're
Speaker 1: curious how the tweets had translated to actual business, quoth
Speaker 1: Wendy's in response.
Speaker 5: It can be hard to track impressions, engagements, brand metrics,
Speaker 5: other marketing mumbo jumbo. People are talking about us a lot,
Speaker 5: so that.
Speaker 1: Helps, and it's not a stretch to say that the
Speaker 1: success of the account run primarily by Amy Brown. Throughout
Speaker 1: its peak had a big effect on how other brands
Speaker 1: managed their stuff. Oh this is how you get on
Speaker 1: the news. Let's do that. But now things escalated. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just unrelated not competing brands talking to each other.
Speaker 1: Amy's success meant that direct competitors were constantly flaming each
Speaker 1: other on Twitter at this time. Moonpies versus Hostess de
Speaker 1: Giorno versus Papa John. The list goes on. Isn't it
Speaker 1: weird that this is my job? Anyways? You might remember
Speaker 1: Netflix firing off this one to the tune of over
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand likes.
Speaker 5: To the fifty three people who've watched a Christmas Prince
Speaker 5: every day for the last eighteen days. Who hurt you?
Speaker 1: Some brands took the tack of flirtation, which would get
Speaker 1: very popular in the years to come. And yes this
Speaker 1: is dual lingo pispurd foreshadowing. Other brands tried to foster
Speaker 1: friendships with fellow brands, but as has been true in
Speaker 1: the media since time immemorial, the best and most successful
Speaker 1: approach was always aggression, and nothing bears that out more
Speaker 1: than Amy Brown's work. Because the Wendy's tweets were pretty good.
Speaker 1: Here are some of the more successful ones. So this
Speaker 1: interaction is spurred by Duncan. There is a picture of
Speaker 1: a Dunks representative in front of a Wendy's wearing a
Speaker 1: pink sprinkled donut costume, holding a tweet that's printed out
Speaker 1: from Duncan that says, listen to the life sized donut.
Speaker 1: You don't have to settle for spicy nuggets hashtag Duncan's
Speaker 1: Spicy Side. The post says here's some advice about spice.
Speaker 1: It's always better on a donut like the spicy Ghost
Speaker 1: pepper donut hashtag Duncan's Spicy Side.
Speaker 5: Wendy's quote tweets and writes, stick to pushing the food.
Speaker 5: That's so good you took it out of your name.
Speaker 5: My grandma has more heat in her roasts. Lol. Hope
Speaker 5: they'll still take your return at Spirit Halloween after the
Speaker 5: stink of this tweet gets on your costume.
Speaker 1: Okay, play the horns. Here is Wendy's fighting with a
Speaker 1: random guy. Random user Lewis tweets to Wendy's you know
Speaker 1: Burger King also has spicy chicken nuggets.
Speaker 5: Wendy's replies yeah, and there's also water in the bottom
Speaker 5: of the dumpster out back if you're thirsty, and.
Speaker 1: I remember this one another interaction with just a normal person.
Speaker 1: Random user Georges tweets to Wendy's. If you reply, I
Speaker 1: will buy the whole Wendy's menu right now.
Speaker 5: Wendy's replies prove it.
Speaker 1: George is ready to play ball and returns with a
Speaker 1: photo of a full trash bag, saying here's your proof.
Speaker 5: Wendy's order replies, thanks for sharing your baby pictures.
Speaker 1: Work from the Wendy's account was so influential that in
Speaker 1: the years to come, communities like our Fellow Kids and
Speaker 1: brand parity accounts like Brand Saying by actually became less popular.
Speaker 1: Ala Baca explains in his Peace and what this says
Speaker 1: about the world is somewhat unclear, but this account and
Speaker 1: Amy's work did ostensibly change the game permanently. And so
Speaker 1: when we come back, Amy Brown of the Agro Wendy's
Speaker 1: Twitter account, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Can someone please
Speaker 1: link me to an atsy store that can make a
Speaker 1: custom earn My dad has been sitting in a suitcase
Speaker 1: for months, And we're back with more on the Sentient
Speaker 1: brand era of social media. I just want to add
Speaker 1: one last thing before we jump into our chat with Amy.
Speaker 1: The Silence brand meme something that I kind of associate
Speaker 1: with gen X and elder millennials, and it was essentially
Speaker 1: an attempt to push back on this brand interaction of
Speaker 1: the twenty tens. Silence brand means quite literally that it's
Speaker 1: a meme that people use to reply to any brand account,
Speaker 1: like the ones we're talking about. They usually are bad
Speaker 1: photoshops featuring movie monsters with lasers shooting out of their eyes.
Speaker 1: Silence brand, you get it. You'd use these when a
Speaker 1: Wendy's tried to chiculy insert themselves into an unrelated conversation,
Speaker 1: usually by name searching the name of their company. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: this meme evolved from a really depressing conservative one called
Speaker 1: silence Lil used in a similar way to own the
Speaker 1: Snowflakes or whatever, and who did these geniuses have lasers
Speaker 1: coming out of their eyes?
Speaker 2: Famous dictators of course.
Speaker 1: But I've noticed as time goes on, young millennials don't
Speaker 1: seem to have the same qualms with being parasocially advertised
Speaker 1: to if that meant that they could talk to a
Speaker 1: funny stack of pancakes on the Internet, a trend that,
Speaker 1: by the time gen Z and Jen Alfa were on
Speaker 1: social media would become increasingly more normalized. Probably not a
Speaker 1: good thing, but what can you do. We're all going
Speaker 1: to be underwater in thirty years. This week, we're talking
Speaker 1: to another heavy hitter, and for my money, arguably the
Speaker 1: only writer who got big enough outside the account to
Speaker 1: be recognizable to the extremely logged in. Amy Brown and
Speaker 1: I are longtime mutuals, and I honestly didn't even know
Speaker 1: she ran the Wendy's account until I started to work
Speaker 1: on this series. To me, she was a great joke
Speaker 1: writer who had followed a long time ago on Twitter
Speaker 1: under her personal account and then later on Blue Sky
Speaker 1: due to the Nazi problem. But indeed Amy's was not
Speaker 1: just the voice of the Wendy's account at its peak,
Speaker 1: she also got a fair amount of press for having
Speaker 1: done so press. I know she would want me to
Speaker 1: reassure you, because she's very normal and not an attention
Speaker 1: freak that she wasn't really seeking out. People just wanted
Speaker 1: to know who was behind this account they liked so much.
Speaker 5: Behold the sas master behind Wendy's.
Speaker 1: Twitter read a Mashable headline in early twenty seventeen doing
Speaker 1: something that might have seemed counterproductive to the brand, revealing
Speaker 1: the person behind it. But even if Wendy's were opposed
Speaker 1: to it, the knowledge that there was someone just like
Speaker 1: you posting up a storm professionally really seemed to only
Speaker 1: strengthen the brand, which has continued with the same narrative
Speaker 1: voice after Amy's departure with a lot of success. So
Speaker 1: let's hear the story from her side. I give you
Speaker 1: Amy Brown.
Speaker 4: So my name is Amy Brown. I am maybe best
Speaker 4: known as the social media manager at Wendy's from twenty
Speaker 4: twelve to twenty seventeen. I'm currently a freelance writer and
Speaker 4: social media strategist trying to pivot out of social We
Speaker 4: can probably touch on that, but yeah, I live in Berkeley, California,
Speaker 4: with my husband and my kids and our very old dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah there.
Speaker 1: I'm curious a little bit more about you, your background,
Speaker 1: Where did you grow up?
Speaker 2: How did you grow up?
Speaker 6: So?
Speaker 4: I grew up in a place called Piqua, Ohio, which
Speaker 4: is about half an hour outside of Dayton, Ohio, which
Speaker 4: is probably still not a helpful geographic reference if you're
Speaker 4: not from Ohio. But basically I am from a rural
Speaker 4: area half an hour outside a very small city, so
Speaker 4: my world growing up was pretty small. Like I literally
Speaker 4: my backyard was a cornfield and a soybean field. So
Speaker 4: I spent a lot of time on the internet. We
Speaker 4: got a computer at my house like pre y two K,
Speaker 4: and yeah, I just I took to it. I spent
Speaker 4: a lot of time on the internet. I was always
Speaker 4: the I was the nerd in growing up. I am
Speaker 4: my high school classmates actually voted me biggest no and
Speaker 4: like the senior polls, my pictures in the yearbook and everything.
Speaker 4: Not always the easiest to be like the smart kid.
Speaker 4: So I spent a lot of time kind of on
Speaker 4: the computer seeking out, like I don't know, like music,
Speaker 4: and just like people to tell me that there's life
Speaker 4: after high school and all that kind of stuff. And
Speaker 4: I've also always been a writer, so that's the other
Speaker 4: piece of it. I've always been extremely online and always
Speaker 4: been a writer. Went to journalism school. I graduated with
Speaker 4: a degree in newspaper journalism in twenty eleven, which is
Speaker 4: not a great time to be graduating with a degree
Speaker 4: in newspaper journalism. So I pivoted into marketing, and after
Speaker 4: a stint in like copywriting, I ended up at Wendy's
Speaker 4: just because I knew a lot about social media and
Speaker 4: I kind of threw myself out there. And yeah, now
Speaker 4: I've not been working in it for a really long time.
Speaker 1: I do believe that some of our best writers and
Speaker 1: artists today were very online indoor kids. What were your
Speaker 1: early memories of the Internet, What got you hooked?
Speaker 4: As to say, my earliest memory of the Internet is
Speaker 4: actually I was on like a pen pal website my
Speaker 4: mom found when I was like nine or ten years old.
Speaker 4: It was like something my mom had like vetted and
Speaker 4: felt was safe. And I made friends with this girl
Speaker 4: named Catherine in Scotland, and it just like we were
Speaker 4: like besties. I have no idea what happened to her.
Speaker 4: We lost touch when I was like a teenager. I
Speaker 4: hope she's doing well, but yeah, I really like it
Speaker 4: was just like I met a friend who was like minded,
Speaker 4: like I had friends at school, but she was the
Speaker 4: first person I felt like really got me. From there,
Speaker 4: it was like I got I got my foot in
Speaker 4: the door on diary Land, which was like an early
Speaker 4: live journal. I had a regular diary and a poetry
Speaker 4: diary for my like eleven year old poetry and then yeah,
Speaker 4: from there like live journal, zanga. I was very early
Speaker 4: on like the MySpace train, that's where I started.
Speaker 1: I was really into a post Secret.
Speaker 4: Yes, I loved Postsecret. I actually I have a postcard
Speaker 4: in the first post Secret book.
Speaker 1: When I was cleaning up my childhood home last year,
Speaker 1: I found a postcard that I made and was too
Speaker 1: afraid to send to them about having a crush on
Speaker 1: a boy who is eight inches shorter than me in
Speaker 1: high school. And I like made a whole visual and
Speaker 1: I'm like, it probably for the best that I didn't
Speaker 1: send it in, but I remember the feeling of making it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I remember reading post Secret in like the on
Speaker 4: a computer at the library and being like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: this is so this is revolutionary. But yeah, it was
Speaker 4: definitely a lot of like seeking community and just like
Speaker 4: like minded people. I guess people started becoming famous on
Speaker 4: the Internet while I was still in high school, like
Speaker 4: Tila Tequila is probably the first one I can think of, right,
Speaker 4: And I definitely didn't aspire to fame in that kind
Speaker 4: of way, not like a reality TV way, but I
Speaker 4: did always. I always kind of thought it would be
Speaker 4: like a like a cool thing to get out of
Speaker 4: my hometown and be like uh yeah, be someone notable
Speaker 4: and then be like hah, suckers. I don't know, but yeah,
Speaker 4: I always like there was a there was a phase
Speaker 4: where I, like I thought I was going to be
Speaker 4: an actor, and so I do I think there was
Speaker 4: kind of a through line of like attention or like
Speaker 4: external validation. I mean, I think I've always been like
Speaker 4: a very high achieving person, like self driven, so I
Speaker 4: think I kind of saw like like fame is like
Speaker 4: the ultimate, the ultimate thing you can achieve to show
Speaker 4: that you've like been successful at whatever it is you're doing.
Speaker 4: I was pretty shy. I'm still pretty shy, and so
Speaker 4: my way of introducing myself to people would be like
Speaker 4: to connect with them on MySpace first, and it turned
Speaker 4: into a like by the time I was like a
Speaker 4: junior or senior in high school, I would run into
Speaker 4: people at the mall and they'd be like, you're Amy
Speaker 4: from MySpace and so like that.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Okay, wait, tell me more about that,
Speaker 1: because that is an experience I definitely never had.
Speaker 4: I was very much like not cool at high school,
Speaker 4: but then like to people in this other space that
Speaker 4: I inhabited. I was like a person, and I didn't
Speaker 4: necessarily feel like I was being anyone else either. I
Speaker 4: just kind of like put out my interests. I actually
Speaker 4: I found like an old screenshot of my MySpace profile
Speaker 4: the other day and under famous movie under favorite movies,
Speaker 4: it's like every movie I've ever seen in my life. Right,
Speaker 4: It's just like here's every band I've ever listened to.
Speaker 4: But just really trying to like put myself out there
Speaker 4: and find people to like connect with, and a little
Speaker 4: bit of a little bit of posturing for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I would say that was my first brush with like
Speaker 4: using using the internet as like an extension. I don't know,
Speaker 4: as an introvert, it sometimes is like an extension of
Speaker 4: my internal monologue. It's like things I can't say out
Speaker 4: loud I can like put on Twitter or myspits. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I think that was really my first my first experience
Speaker 4: with that.
Speaker 2: What was your feeling when you were going into school?
Speaker 2: What was the what was the goal?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I thought I was going to be like
Speaker 4: girl investigative reporter. I was going to be like investigating
Speaker 4: corruption in the newspaper, which is like not even really
Speaker 4: a thing the newspapers do anymore. An investigative reporter uncovering
Speaker 4: corruption and like doing doing good stuff. I took my
Speaker 4: journalism classes, I branched out into like some creative writing classes.
Speaker 4: I graduated in twenty eleven, so only it wasn't until
Speaker 4: my senior year that we even touched on like blogging
Speaker 4: and online because it seemed like, oh, maybe that'll be
Speaker 4: a thing. So I took like a I took like
Speaker 4: an independent study course where I got to make my
Speaker 4: own blog, which was basically the most preparation I got
Speaker 4: in a formal sense for like social media and the
Speaker 4: internet and stuff. I graduated and took an internship in
Speaker 4: social media because I could not find a job. I
Speaker 4: applied for like one hundred jobs after I graduated and
Speaker 4: ended in like a paid internship doing social media in
Speaker 4: twenty eleven, which was like pretty sleepy. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 4: my experience was very much like it was like just
Speaker 4: like we feel like we should have social media accounts,
Speaker 4: we don't know what to say, and also we need
Speaker 4: we want to make sure that like nobody's saying bad
Speaker 4: stuff about us, which like they weren't because I was
Speaker 4: working for a like a very small division of your
Speaker 4: graill that like I don't think anyone had ever heard of.
Speaker 4: It's like they make standardized tests and stuff.
Speaker 1: The approach to social media at that time was like
Speaker 1: more we need to do this, and like more self
Speaker 1: conscious than we're going to forward our brand by doing this.
Speaker 4: I established the accounts they got set up with like
Speaker 4: a social media monitoring software, a very early iteration of it.
Speaker 4: It was extremely clunky, but like so they wanted to
Speaker 4: know what people were saying about them and also some editors.
Speaker 4: But it was kind of this weird spot at the
Speaker 4: beginning where it's like what do we even like what
Speaker 4: do you say? Or like even who's the audience? Right
Speaker 4: like who is the audience for a Twitter account for
Speaker 4: like a testing company? And I don't know that we
Speaker 4: actually got that answer while I was there, because again
Speaker 4: I was only there two months.
Speaker 2: Where do you go from there?
Speaker 4: So my first two full time gigs were as like
Speaker 4: a copywriter at small marketing agencies, mostly like blog posts
Speaker 4: with SEO keywords in them, right like, and then I'd
Speaker 4: also just like website copy for like municipal governments and
Speaker 4: stuff like I wrote some stuff for like the city
Speaker 4: of New Albany, Ohio, like kind of smaller stuff that
Speaker 4: my name's not on and mostly writing as opposed to
Speaker 4: social media. I'm living in Columbus, Ohio at the time
Speaker 4: because I went to school in Ohio and that's where
Speaker 4: Wendy's is headquartered. And in about twenty twelve, I noticed
Speaker 4: that they have posted for a social media manager. They've
Speaker 4: got a job opening, and I just I had thoughts.
Speaker 4: I was like, I bet I could do this. I
Speaker 4: bet I'd be great at this. So I applied kind
Speaker 4: of on a whim.
Speaker 2: Pretty much fresh out of college. When you started this job.
Speaker 4: I was twenty three when they hired me at Wendy's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you recall what their social media was like
Speaker 1: at the time you entered the position?
Speaker 4: Well, man, I do remember what Wendy's social media was
Speaker 4: like in twenty twelve, because I went into that interview
Speaker 4: room so confident and I was like, here's everything. I
Speaker 4: know what you're doing right now like they had. I
Speaker 4: had like followed them on Pinterest and they were like,
Speaker 4: we're going to do a cool thing that looks good.
Speaker 4: But then it was like just the longest image ever.
Speaker 4: I was like, you're doing stuff that's really annoying to
Speaker 4: me as a user, which looking back, I just I
Speaker 4: walked in like I was just like, yeah, I can
Speaker 4: do this, and for some reason that like went well,
Speaker 4: but I can imagine it going like plenty of other ways.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it was like come to Wendy's and buy
Speaker 4: a Frosty. They were doing like photoshopped pictures of a
Speaker 4: cartoon Frosty doing stuff which like I think could have
Speaker 4: had legs, but like wasn't really dry. Frosty had its
Speaker 4: own Facebook page. It was very Facebook centric at that time,
Speaker 4: right like Facebook and a little bit Twitter there were
Speaker 4: They had an Instagram account that someone was clearly just
Speaker 4: like taking pictures on their iPhone and uploading. I remember
Speaker 4: when I started there were thirty seven thousand followers on
Speaker 4: the Twitter account, which felt like a lot of the time,
Speaker 4: but obviously these days isn't really that much. They were
Speaker 4: working with like a an ad agency based out of
Speaker 4: New York on all of this stuff, and I was
Speaker 4: the first social media person internally. I got hired by
Speaker 4: the director of digital who went on to be like
Speaker 4: a early great mentor to me of.
Speaker 1: The sort of Mount Rushmore of iconic brand accounts.
Speaker 2: You're pretty early to it.
Speaker 1: When you were starting this job, were there any accounts
Speaker 1: specifically that you're like, oh, like, this is an account
Speaker 1: that I think is doing it well.
Speaker 4: It was Taco Bell. Taco Bell was like BuzzFeed would
Speaker 4: put out these lists because it was like the heyday
Speaker 4: of BuzzFeed too, right, and they'd be like twenty five
Speaker 4: times the Taco Bell Twitter account was all of us,
Speaker 4: and I was like, I can do that for Wendy's.
Speaker 4: I can make the Wendy's account all of us. I
Speaker 4: don't know how we're going to get there, but yeah,
Speaker 4: like I saw that and I was just like, we
Speaker 4: could do that, Like I could do Yeah, they were
Speaker 4: like the blueprint to me. It was that and it
Speaker 4: was not Starbucks Social but like Starbucks was such a
Speaker 4: big deal back then. It was like it like, yeah,
Speaker 4: like a lifestyle brand almost, And so that's what I
Speaker 4: was always talking about, is like we're gonna be cool
Speaker 4: like Taco Bell, but also like we want people to
Speaker 4: feel proud that they're holding a Wendy's.
Speaker 2: Cup, especially around this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't I guess I don't know because
Speaker 1: I'm no longer twenty three. But when I was going
Speaker 1: in for similar jobs at the same age. It was
Speaker 1: like with the same level of confidence. And I felt
Speaker 1: like what worked to my advantage was that the people
Speaker 1: who were interviewing me didn't understand how the internet worked.
Speaker 1: They weren't Internet natives, and so I think they were
Speaker 1: sort of like, yeah, sure, great, try it out.
Speaker 4: Actually, so funny story. They my boss after they hired me.
Speaker 4: He told me I was the least experienced candidate they interviewed,
Speaker 4: and that what really put it over the edge is
Speaker 4: that at the time I had I had like two
Speaker 4: hundred followers on my personal Twitter or something, but I
Speaker 4: put my personal Twitter handle on my resume and the
Speaker 4: hiring manager went to my Twitter and he said, what
Speaker 4: set you apart is that you had like an actual personality,
Speaker 4: and like, we're looking for someone to have an actual
Speaker 4: personality like behind the brand. And he's like, all these
Speaker 4: other people were clearly trying to like build a personal brand, right,
Speaker 4: and they're like they're posting, like here is my take
Speaker 4: on XYZ, Like I kind of shit posted my way
Speaker 4: into the job, which is also very funny.
Speaker 1: And they told you in school you couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: Are you working strictly alone? Are you sort of are
Speaker 1: you pitching stuff to your bosses? Are you pitching arcs
Speaker 1: for the Twitter account? How does the day to day
Speaker 1: work in terms of strategizing for an account at that time.
Speaker 4: So when I came on at Wendy's, they also were
Speaker 4: bringing on a new ad agency at right around the
Speaker 4: same time, and so that was really I was the
Speaker 4: entire internal team, and then everything else was these guys
Speaker 4: at VML. They're based in Kansas City. They're like a
Speaker 4: big deal now, largely because of the Wendy's work, which
Speaker 4: is pretty cool for them. I would not have been
Speaker 4: able to do anything I did without that support. But yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like copywriters and strategists and like art directors, and
Speaker 4: so the way it worked when I started was I
Speaker 4: was responsible lately for community management, which is when you
Speaker 4: reply to someone, so all of it, like the funny stuff,
Speaker 4: the customer service stuff, all of it. And then our
Speaker 4: agency worked on first we worked on like revamping a
Speaker 4: strategy and like what does the brand sound like? And
Speaker 4: they they sort of they would take a first pass
Speaker 4: at it and then bring it to us, which was
Speaker 4: me and my boss at the time. And I had
Speaker 4: sort of a lot of latitude to give feedback, be
Speaker 4: like this is or isn't how how we should be proceeding.
Speaker 4: And then yeah, on the day to day they were
Speaker 4: creating posts and copy and then a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of my job was running that up the Wendy's
Speaker 4: side for approvals. So like there are brand managers who
Speaker 4: want who want to make the make sure the product
Speaker 4: looks right, and like legal want size on everything. I
Speaker 4: often did a lot of the behind the scenes like
Speaker 4: internal corporate stuff, and not so much the like the
Speaker 4: actual tweets and Facebook posts were always our agency, but
Speaker 4: I helped. I helped with the strategy, and then the
Speaker 4: community management was me for the first couple of years,
Speaker 4: and then eventually my role expanded. We added another person
Speaker 4: to the team. Internally, we handed off community management largely
Speaker 4: to a guy at our agency who did it up
Speaker 4: until I think like last year. He was there for
Speaker 4: a really long time.
Speaker 1: So it is like a pretty large collaborative operation.
Speaker 4: As I say, that's actually something I've always kind of
Speaker 4: felt bad about in the coverage is that they always
Speaker 4: want to be like this is the person and like
Speaker 4: you can tell people that it's like me and a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of other people, But Obviously the end product
Speaker 4: is whatever, like the writer wants it to be right,
Speaker 4: So I don't know, that's not always a compelling piece
Speaker 4: of the story to be like, I had lots of help,
Speaker 4: but I had lots of help.
Speaker 1: Well, thankfully, I'm not interested in a compelling story. A
Speaker 1: lot of the original pieces about either the Wendy's account
Speaker 1: or you specifically, it was either like the points of
Speaker 1: view that it landed on felt very black and white,
Speaker 1: like you are being duped by a brand by relating
Speaker 1: to the brand, or it's just this one person, but
Speaker 1: it seems like it there is like gray area in
Speaker 1: there where it's like there's multiple people, there is a plane.
Speaker 1: What was the goal of these accounts when you were
Speaker 1: starting and as time went on, what was the goal
Speaker 1: of engagement and what were you building tours?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean obviously we wanted everyone to know about
Speaker 4: like the latest cheeseburger and stuff, right, But when I
Speaker 4: showed up at Wendy's, they were in the middle of
Speaker 4: like a massive corporate rebrand. So like you might remember
Speaker 4: the old Wendy's logo that literally said like old fashioned
Speaker 4: hamburgers on it, which was something they really they were like,
Speaker 4: we don't we want to shed the old fashioned perception, right,
Speaker 4: So they readed the logo, which is the one that's
Speaker 4: now just like Wendy, and they were sort of they
Speaker 4: started they started reding, like making all the restaurants fancy, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm sure you've been to a renovated Wendy's. So that
Speaker 4: was all happening right around the time I showed up,
Speaker 4: and it was very much. It very much played hand
Speaker 4: in hand with the social strategy, which was to kind
Speaker 4: of make people think of Wendy's as not just like
Speaker 4: a place where senior citizens get chilly, which is something
Speaker 4: I saw on light a lot. I would see people
Speaker 4: be like, my grandma likes Wendy who eats Wendy's, And
Speaker 4: so I think that was a big But then there's
Speaker 4: always like individual marketing goals, like we were always supporting
Speaker 4: like campaigns for the latest thing, because in fast food
Speaker 4: there's it's just like a parade of limited time items,
Speaker 4: like that's the that's the entire model. So new limited
Speaker 4: time item, new bunch of posts. But then also doing
Speaker 4: something called always on, which is just like reminding people
Speaker 4: that Wendy's exists, right, And yeah, with the with the
Speaker 4: goal of like ultimately driving people to a Wendy's or
Speaker 4: even just like getting them to think more positively about
Speaker 4: Wendy's in general, so like maybe the next time, like
Speaker 4: bumping Wendy's up from I will never eat there to like,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, I would consider having that for dinner. Because
Speaker 4: it's really hard to like draw a direct line from
Speaker 4: a tweet to a purchase unless someone's like I bought
Speaker 4: this hamburger because of this tweet. So a lot of
Speaker 4: it was around like the brand sentiment and like maybe
Speaker 4: not awareness because like most people have heard of Wendy's,
Speaker 4: but like changing how you think of Wendy's. The whole
Speaker 4: brand's jumping on trending stuff which you didn't ask for
Speaker 4: a history lesson, but I'm gonna give you anyway. Which
Speaker 4: is it? It was? It was not really a thing
Speaker 4: until suddenly it was. I forget which super Bowl it was,
Speaker 4: but it was the one where all the lights went
Speaker 4: out and Oreo Oreo made this tweet. They were like,
Speaker 4: you can still dunk in the dark, and that was
Speaker 4: like an iconic case study and social media for like ever,
Speaker 4: it was like if you go to a conference and
Speaker 4: someone's talking about the dunk in the dark tweet You've
Speaker 4: like got a bingo on your on your bingo board.
Speaker 4: Right wow, Okay, So I think this really they got
Speaker 4: like a ton of attention for it, and I think
Speaker 4: it really started this idea that like, oh, brands can
Speaker 4: jump in and talk about anything. So we we tried
Speaker 4: that a little bit around like super Bowls a lot
Speaker 4: of the time, and often it was a thing where
Speaker 4: it's like we've got we've got pre approved things to
Speaker 4: say for like this scenario and that scenario, and a
Speaker 4: little bit of like having fun in the comments with
Speaker 4: community management. I will say I think a place we
Speaker 4: kind of landed as a company was suddenly there were
Speaker 4: something every brand was trying to make like the Oscars
Speaker 4: or the Grammys or the super Bowl relevant, and it's
Speaker 4: like if everyone's talking at once, nobody's really like. We
Speaker 4: actually kind of pulled back a little bit from that
Speaker 4: kind of stuff because it's like, how do you how
Speaker 4: do you even break through something that noisy.
Speaker 1: Because you're a part of it, seems like and correct me.
Speaker 1: But like this sort of wave of brands developing very
Speaker 1: specific editorial voices, when did that start?
Speaker 2: What was that? Was it a mistake? Was it planned?
Speaker 2: What was that?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So I will say for Wendy's, I think that really
Speaker 4: started like a year before the roast thing blew up,
Speaker 4: we had like another viral incident where we were kind
Speaker 4: of poking fun at burger King, and I actually, I
Speaker 4: will admit I went a little bit rogue, expecting that
Speaker 4: nobody would see it, but we had sort of So
Speaker 4: Wendy's comes out with the four for four and then
Speaker 4: Burger King comes out with the five for four like
Speaker 4: a week or two later. It's like the exact same
Speaker 4: thing as the four for four plus a cookie. Internally,
Speaker 4: we are all pissed off, and we're like, what do
Speaker 4: we do about this? And everyone decides we're not going
Speaker 4: to do anything. We're not going to like bring more
Speaker 4: attention to the five for four. But then people start
Speaker 4: tweeting at us about the five for four, and I remember,
Speaker 4: I'm like in a meeting and I just like I
Speaker 4: dash off a reply about it to someone making fun
Speaker 4: of burger King. I believe, I believe they asked what
Speaker 4: we had that Burger King doesn't, and I said edible food,
Speaker 4: and that was like the whole tweet. And Yeah, I
Speaker 4: got out of that meeting and it was going bananas,
Speaker 4: and I was like, I'm fired because we agreed we
Speaker 4: weren't going to do this and I did it anyway.
Speaker 2: But it worked. I'm assuming it worked.
Speaker 4: I don't remember anyone being mad at me, though, I'm sure. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 4: I feel like they were probably a little miffed at
Speaker 4: the beginning when they were like, I thought, we weren't
Speaker 4: going to talk about this, what are you doing? But yeah,
Speaker 4: I kind of just like, I was like, oh, people
Speaker 4: are asking us to say something, like they're expecting us
Speaker 4: to say something now, which was not the case when
Speaker 4: we made this decision. Yeah, I will say I'm very
Speaker 4: lucky in that regard that my boss was kind of like,
Speaker 4: that's funny. I'm not like, oh my god, you didn't
Speaker 4: listen to me.
Speaker 1: You were making really effective marketing choices that I'm sure
Speaker 1: would have been completely anathema to a lot of marketing
Speaker 1: elders at the time. Do you have any specific memories
Speaker 1: of how those discussions went or yeah.
Speaker 4: I think my favorite example so when we did go
Speaker 4: like mega viral with the roast like the one that
Speaker 4: Anderson Cooper read right in twenty seventeen. I remember at
Speaker 4: work the next day having to explain exactly what happened
Speaker 4: and what it meant, Like our head of market our
Speaker 4: head of marketing didn't have a Twitter account, so he
Speaker 4: was like he also didn't understand. He was like, I
Speaker 4: didn't review or approve this, Like where did you get
Speaker 4: permission to do this? And I was like, well, community
Speaker 4: management is just a thing we always do. We're always
Speaker 4: replying to people. I think they did not realize that
Speaker 4: on our end we were. I think the idea that
Speaker 4: there wasn't an approval process for those reply tweets really
Speaker 4: scared some people. Yeah, we actually we ended up having
Speaker 4: to bring in our ad reupts from Twitter to like
Speaker 4: explain why this was good because there was definitely the
Speaker 4: vibe was a little weird. Yeah, my boss was very excited,
Speaker 4: but like, yeah, his boss was like not sure what
Speaker 4: was happening.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the roast For the uninitiated. How
Speaker 1: did the rose come about? It was twenty seventeen, right.
Speaker 4: In early January twenty seventeen. I actually I remember a
Speaker 4: lot about the day because it was just like such
Speaker 4: a such a nothing of a day until suddenly it
Speaker 4: was like the day. But so it's it's January third,
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen, and the office is still closed, but we
Speaker 4: are technically launching a new brand campaign. So I'm like,
Speaker 4: I'm in my pajamas, I'm working from home on the couch.
Speaker 4: Things are slow though, because it's like the first day
Speaker 4: after the new year, and the new campaign is all
Speaker 4: about fresh, never frozen beef because that's Wendy's like big
Speaker 4: differentiator with the hamburgers. It's like the meat's never frozen.
Speaker 4: So we have some sponsored tweet out about how the
Speaker 4: meat's fresh, never frozen, and the sponsored tweets are always
Speaker 4: where people are getting a little like get a little
Speaker 4: feisty with you because like they're not following you, so
Speaker 4: they're like, why am I seeing this Wendy stuff? Like
Speaker 4: I don't want this.
Speaker 3: OK.
Speaker 4: So this guy comes in and he's like, you're lying
Speaker 4: it's frozen, and I kind of at first I gently
Speaker 4: push back. I'm like you, like, I'm sorry you think
Speaker 4: that I think is what I said, like like very corporate,
Speaker 4: Like you're wrong. It's always been fresh, never frozen since
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty nine. And so this guy really laid it
Speaker 4: up for me though, he really just like he set
Speaker 4: me up so well and he said, you mean you
Speaker 4: want me to believe you deliver it raw on a
Speaker 4: hot truck. And I was just like, and so I
Speaker 4: remember I sort of I answered him with a question.
Speaker 4: I said, where do you store cold things that aren't frozen?
Speaker 4: And I think that made this guy a little bit
Speaker 4: upset because he sort of went like, McDonald's is better
Speaker 4: than you anyway, And I said, the final nail in
Speaker 4: the coffin, I told him he didn't have to bring
Speaker 4: McDonald's into this, just because he forgot that refrigerators existed,
Speaker 4: and the crowd went wild. Literally the next day, Anderson
Speaker 4: Cooper and one of his staff they were like, they
Speaker 4: acted out the tweets on Anderson Cooper three sixty on CNN, which.
Speaker 2: I'm sure Wendy's was thrilled about.
Speaker 4: They were thrilled when we were able to quantify it
Speaker 4: for them in the language that marketing people care about.
Speaker 4: So when we were able to be like, we got
Speaker 4: X amount of media impressions, which is valued at like
Speaker 4: X number of dollars, suddenly they were like, okay, yes,
Speaker 4: we see the value. But when it was like I
Speaker 4: made a funny tweet and it's on Anderson Cooper, they
Speaker 4: were kind of like, Okay.
Speaker 1: Were people tracking you down? Were people sending you weird messages?
Speaker 1: What was the personal uh you know, what were you
Speaker 1: taking home with you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So my fatal misstep was giving an interview about it.
Speaker 4: The week that it happened, someone from Mashable reached down
Speaker 4: and I give this interview and like, my boss is
Speaker 4: in the room, pr is in the room. It's a
Speaker 4: very tame interview. But the piece comes out and it's
Speaker 4: all about me, right, It's like it's about here's Amy Brown.
Speaker 4: They call me the SaaS master in the headline, right,
Speaker 4: and then like there's like a they're talking about how
Speaker 4: my mom is proud of me, right, and it's just
Speaker 4: like it's this. It's like a profile piece that I
Speaker 4: wasn't expecting And so that gets me pegged forever as
Speaker 4: the lady who did it, right, because there's and so
Speaker 4: it did. It got very weird. Yeah, people, My social
Speaker 4: accounts were not private at the time. They they quickly
Speaker 4: became private, but like there was a also being a
Speaker 4: young woman made it weird, Like there was a I stumbled.
Speaker 4: I used to google myself. I don't really anymore, but
Speaker 4: I used to just to see what was going on,
Speaker 4: and there was like a conversation on a message board
Speaker 4: that was like would you bang the Wendy's Twitter lady?
Speaker 4: And I remember these guys were like they had like
Speaker 4: scoured my Instagram photos and they were like, well, I
Speaker 4: think maybe she has weird teeth because she never smiles
Speaker 4: with her mouth open, just like that level. And then yeah,
Speaker 4: there were I I'm Jewish, and some people figured out
Speaker 4: that out. So there were like gropers in my dms
Speaker 4: being like I'll save you when they come for the Jews,
Speaker 4: like literally saying shit like this to me.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Ex boyfriends popped back up. They were like, hey, can
Speaker 4: I tell people I used to date the Wendy's Twitter lady,
Speaker 4: And it's like if you want.
Speaker 1: Like, like I mean, I think even the rare case
Speaker 1: where it's even weirder to ask for permission than to
Speaker 1: simply just do it because it's true there.
Speaker 4: Like I guess if you're interested in that. Also, one guy,
Speaker 4: a guy who dumped me, went on Twitter and was like,
Speaker 4: you guys are all celebrating the Wendy's Twitter lady, but
Speaker 4: she's like a bipolar, alcoholic and a bad person. It's
Speaker 4: like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: I know, oh I did.
Speaker 4: For like a month he dumped me, and I was
Speaker 4: just like, I didn't even know you were mad at me?
Speaker 4: Like what is going on?
Speaker 1: And what a way to find out in a way
Speaker 1: that professionally implicates you as well.
Speaker 4: Honestly, it kind of like ruined my brain for a
Speaker 4: couple of years. I just like like I would wake
Speaker 4: up and I'd be like I would wake up with
Speaker 4: like a sense of dread, being like, what is happening
Speaker 4: on my Twitter account? What happened there while I slept?
Speaker 4: Because like I'd wake up occasionally and there'd be a
Speaker 4: guy in my DMS being like is this your address?
Speaker 4: And it is my address and it's like gee, like which,
Speaker 4: like guy. When that happened, I got like real paranoid.
Speaker 4: Though I never nobody ever came to my house or anything.
Speaker 4: But it's just the idea that someone has that information
Speaker 4: and they did that on they did that for that reason, right.
Speaker 1: But I'm assuming, just based on having had similar jobs,
Speaker 1: that you're not compensated to a level that you can
Speaker 1: really like protect yourself.
Speaker 4: It's such a funny misconception sometimes when I talk about
Speaker 4: the Wendy stuff, people assume I must be like rich.
Speaker 4: They're like, oh, you did that Wendy's thing. You made
Speaker 4: a lot of money. And it's like, no, the sharehold
Speaker 4: Like the shareholders made a lot of money, Like the
Speaker 4: chairman of the board made a billion dollars, right, It's
Speaker 4: like I made five figures. But yeah, I definitely the
Speaker 4: mental health piece was really really tough, honestly, And there
Speaker 4: is there's backstory too. I actually I so I've had
Speaker 4: depression in my whole life, anxiety too, and actually the
Speaker 4: in twenty sixteen, the summer of twenty sixteen, I took
Speaker 4: a leave of absence from work to do an intensive
Speaker 4: outpatient mental health program for depression. And I had just
Speaker 4: come back to I had come back to work in
Speaker 4: October and then all the roast stuff happened in January.
Speaker 4: So I was still like trying to find my footing.
Speaker 1: Still, Like, also a very normal election cycle in the
Speaker 1: middle of that too, that's nuts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a yeah. When I look back at it,
Speaker 4: I can't believe that all happened in like a year.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so I'm still trying to find my footing,
Speaker 4: I like, and I was like very I was like
Speaker 4: vocal about why I was taking leave too, because I'm like,
Speaker 4: I'm like, oh, we're going to break the stigma, Like
Speaker 4: depression is okay. I'm gonna tell everyone I have depression
Speaker 4: and it's gonna be fine. And like it was not fine.
Speaker 4: People were weird, people were uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: There is a brief period of years in the mid
Speaker 1: twenty tents where I genuinely believed that like being very
Speaker 1: straightforward and honest, like it was like, oh, it's not
Speaker 1: that there's a systemic problem.
Speaker 2: It's that like I must not be articulating.
Speaker 4: It's like, no, I just need to talk louder about
Speaker 4: having depression and everyone will understand.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with more Amy Brown. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to sixteenth minute. My mother literally got kidnapped at the
Speaker 1: Austin Airport this week. She's fine now, but oh my god.
Speaker 1: Here's the rest of my interview with Amy Brown.
Speaker 4: In the wake of the of the big tweet, right,
Speaker 4: we sort of we decided we're like, well, we got
Speaker 4: to lean into this, right, like, we we don't know
Speaker 4: that when this will die down, so let's try to
Speaker 4: ride it out. But it got to a point where
Speaker 4: it was it was me, our other person in house
Speaker 4: named Meredith and our community manager at the agency named Matt,
Speaker 4: and we were literally like taking shifts on the Twitter account,
Speaker 4: just trying to reply to like as many people as possible.
Speaker 4: We're like, we can't let it die, and yeah, I
Speaker 4: definitely am. I mean, social media in general is a
Speaker 4: really hard gig for people who want to have work
Speaker 4: life balance.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: It's like there's no there's no stop button. And yeah
Speaker 4: there's the part where it's like, I mean I think
Speaker 4: that probably ties back into the gropers and my dms. Right,
Speaker 4: it's like it's a it's a turning point for the
Speaker 4: Internet where it's like, oh, the Nazis are here and
Speaker 4: Trump is here, and like they're talking to me and like,
Speaker 4: so yeah, it was definitely I Yeah. I actually I
Speaker 4: ended up Wenday's and I ended up mutually parting ways.
Speaker 4: I like to say it that way. We need truly
Speaker 4: parted ways in March of that year, like two months
Speaker 4: after the tweet happened, which in turn turned into they're
Speaker 4: actually like there there are like Reddit threads where people
Speaker 4: are like, why did she get fired? And it's like, ah,
Speaker 4: I didn't get fired you for assuming that. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 4: actually I just kind of went nuts and then so
Speaker 4: like step away.
Speaker 1: For a while, you know, And then this isn't even
Speaker 1: a particular like a stab at Wendy's. I think it's
Speaker 1: like any corporation you would work for where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: that thing worked more of that and you're like, well, no,
Speaker 1: that will kill me, Like, oh, we can't, we can't
Speaker 1: actually do that. I'm glad that you were able to
Speaker 1: step away. I was curious when in twenty seventeen you
Speaker 1: made that call.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I left in March of that year, and I
Speaker 4: freelanced for about a year. Like early I was in
Speaker 4: I was in a position where my name had like
Speaker 4: really been out there, so it was pretty easy for
Speaker 4: me to just like pick up some freelance work. Although
Speaker 4: honestly I was living. I was living with actually yeah,
Speaker 4: my my husband and I got married that year too. God,
Speaker 4: so much stuff happened in like two or three years.
Speaker 4: But I was kind of just like sitting around playing
Speaker 4: video games, like trying to try and to get my
Speaker 4: brain back to normal, like working maybe twenty hours a week.
Speaker 1: There was no playbook for the stress that comes with
Speaker 1: a job like that, in a way that someone starting
Speaker 1: a job like a social media management job or community
Speaker 1: manager job now would it.
Speaker 4: Was really it was harder on my nervous system than
Speaker 4: I think I realized while I was doing it. Just
Speaker 4: like I think about it now, right, how the social
Speaker 4: media platforms are engineered to like keep us engaged and like,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I feel it feels very much like
Speaker 4: a slot machine.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: It's like the lights go off and the like button
Speaker 4: lights up, and it's like my brain is my brain
Speaker 4: is like activated, and then I like I logged off
Speaker 4: and my brain was like very still and quiet, and
Speaker 4: I didn't feel very good, you know. I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. So
Speaker 4: there was a lot of that, and yeah, I think
Speaker 4: a lot of a lot of fear that like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, this is just like because I would take
Speaker 4: job interviews and they would just want me to they
Speaker 4: were like, can you come here and do the Wendy's thing,
Speaker 4: And it's like, I know, I don't want to, Like
Speaker 4: I don't want my whole career to just be like
Speaker 4: writing sassy tweets. So that was also I had this
Speaker 4: fear for a long time that like I would just
Speaker 4: be pigeonholed as this one thing forever, I will say,
Speaker 4: a resource that was very valuable to me. And part
Speaker 4: of the reason all the social media managers seemed to
Speaker 4: know each other is because we had like a we
Speaker 4: had like a private Facebook group back in the day
Speaker 4: that was just like a bunch of social media managers
Speaker 4: for brands, and so I remember when the Wendy stuff happened.
Speaker 4: I was just like, hey, it's me. I feel insane,
Speaker 4: like can anyone help me? And I actually I still
Speaker 4: I have a lot of like long standing friendships that
Speaker 4: came out of that group, which actually no longer exists
Speaker 4: anymore because like online communities grow and die and whatever.
Speaker 4: But I feel like the group really started to grow
Speaker 4: and take off, like right around twenty seventeen when I left,
Speaker 4: just because there were a lot of a lot of
Speaker 4: people working in social at that time. There were some
Speaker 4: other smaller groups I was into, imber. I remember leaving
Speaker 4: one angrily because someone was like talking shit about the
Speaker 4: Wendy stuff. They were like, oh, they'll fall flat on
Speaker 4: their face soon enough, and I was like, I'm right here.
Speaker 2: That's a fascinating thing to me.
Speaker 1: It's like you're being addressed as Wendy's and it is
Speaker 1: personal to you.
Speaker 4: That was also, yeah, it's it took a long time
Speaker 4: for me to disentangle my own personality with Wendy's, which
Speaker 4: was like, it is such a fucked up thing to
Speaker 4: look back on, where it's like, well, if I'm not
Speaker 4: at Wendy's, who am I? And it's like anyone you
Speaker 4: can be Anny, you don't have to, but yeah, I
Speaker 4: just cause I think it all goes hand in hand, right,
Speaker 4: Like I was pretty I was pretty unhappy and I
Speaker 4: didn't realize it. So I just like stayed busy. And
Speaker 4: my way of staying busy was work. Like I had
Speaker 4: a series of like shitty boyfriends and like that was
Speaker 4: not fun. So it's like my personal life was whatever,
Speaker 4: but work was great. Work was silk good. And the
Speaker 4: work got pulled out from under me and I was like,
Speaker 4: well who am I? And I'm like I'm in therapy,
Speaker 4: but like my therapist doesn't know what, Like how do
Speaker 4: you even talk to a therapist about this? Yeah? I
Speaker 4: actually I have a therapist I work with now who
Speaker 4: I've been talking to. I've been working with her for
Speaker 4: like four years. I didn't even approach the the Wendy's
Speaker 4: and online stuff until like year three because she's so offline,
Speaker 4: and then I had to like kind of explain what
Speaker 4: the Wendy's Twitter stuff was like. She wasn't super familiar,
Speaker 4: so that was really fun. I was like, yeah, I
Speaker 4: have trauma because a thing happened to me on the
Speaker 4: internet and she's like what. Because I remember like none
Speaker 4: of the brand managers at work really understanding what I
Speaker 4: did until suddenly we went viral and they were like, oh,
Speaker 4: that's what she does. But like in the early days,
Speaker 4: it was a lot of like what do we need
Speaker 4: to Like I would I would run into people at
Speaker 4: work who are like, oh, yeah, my son has a Facebook,
Speaker 4: can he help? And it's like no. But so a
Speaker 4: lot of like feeling undervalued, feeling stressed out, a lot
Speaker 4: of just like trying to trying to figure out what
Speaker 4: the heck you're doing, Like yeah, a lot of commiserating,
Speaker 4: a lot of like no stupid questions, and yeah, just
Speaker 4: really getting to like getting to meet people who do
Speaker 4: what I did was nice.
Speaker 1: When you're entering like a job that basically hasn't existed
Speaker 1: until now and you're really fucking good at it, how
Speaker 1: does your identity become entrenched? And then how do you
Speaker 1: like untangle that? That sounds like such a bizarre process.
Speaker 4: No, it really it was like I felt, and I
Speaker 4: know now that this is not the case, but it
Speaker 4: felt like I finally found the thing I'm good at.
Speaker 4: It was like, this is the one thing I do,
Speaker 4: and I do it for Wendy's and like I stayed
Speaker 4: there for such a long time because I really liked
Speaker 4: my boss. But yeah, I definitely I had. I had
Speaker 4: thought about leaving before, you know, just to like work
Speaker 4: somewhere else. Was my first real job out of college.
Speaker 4: But yeah, certainly, especially after everything started getting big and
Speaker 4: I was like really proud of the work too, that yeah,
Speaker 4: I got such a sense of pride. I was like, look,
Speaker 4: I'm doing it. But yeah, it was very much like
Speaker 4: this is like I said, outside of work, it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: things aren't going so great like all it Like, honestly,
Speaker 4: the only thing I was really stoked about was my dog.
Speaker 4: There was a long time where I was very weird
Speaker 4: about the Wendy stuff. Like in the process of disentangling
Speaker 4: myself from it, it was like I just don't want
Speaker 4: to talk about it. Like I'm sure people at my
Speaker 4: next couple of jobs probably picked up on it. They'd
Speaker 4: like they'd mentioned that I was the Wendy's Lady, and
Speaker 4: I'd like grimace and be like h or like even now,
Speaker 4: sometimes I just don't mention it. Like I just started
Speaker 4: a freelance project and they were like, introduce yourself and
Speaker 4: I was like, Hi, I'm Amy. I live in Berkeley, California,
Speaker 4: and the the guy who hired me is like tell them.
Speaker 4: I was like, yeah, I've worked for all these companies
Speaker 4: and I did the Wendy's Twitter account, and then of
Speaker 4: course at least one person is like, I'm such a
Speaker 4: big fan, and I'm like, no, I'm just some lady.
Speaker 4: It never stops being weird when people are like that
Speaker 4: was so cool. I love what you did because for me,
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, I made some tweets and I got
Speaker 4: paid for it, and then I didn't do that anymore.
Speaker 4: And but I like, I was writing a freelance article
Speaker 4: and I was interviewing a guy who's in his twenties
Speaker 4: and he was like when I was in college, which
Speaker 4: also made me feel like the oldest person in the world.
Speaker 4: But it was like, when I was in college, what
Speaker 4: you did made me want to do what you do
Speaker 4: and I was just like, I almost cried. I was like,
Speaker 4: that's really he was like, you're He's like, I think
Speaker 4: you are better than you realize, and I was like,
Speaker 4: that is a really cool thing to say to me,
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna cry. I feel ways about that, Like
Speaker 4: other people have managed to make money off the Wendy's thing,
Speaker 4: not me, though. I mean, I guess I should like
Speaker 4: the fact that I am where I am in my
Speaker 4: career and like have a decent network and stuff like it.
Speaker 4: It wasn't nothing, but it certainly like I didn't get
Speaker 4: I didn't get a big fat check for the Wendy
Speaker 4: stuff right. Also, also they're not to not to put
Speaker 4: too fine a point on it, but some of those
Speaker 4: are my tweets, some are Merediths, some are Mats. I
Speaker 4: guess I just I always want to make sure everyone
Speaker 4: because I think I feel like it was really kind
Speaker 4: of a bummer that nobody else got the spotlight shown
Speaker 4: on them, although I have always felt like maybe they
Speaker 4: were lucky.
Speaker 1: In that way too for something at the time that
Speaker 1: you were you know, you were paid a living wage,
Speaker 1: but it's it seems to me that the value you
Speaker 1: were adding to the company outweighed what you were being compensated.
Speaker 4: I would say that's fair. I would also say that's
Speaker 4: pretty typical for advertising. Like I sort of I'm of
Speaker 4: two minds with it, which is like, Wow, I did
Speaker 4: this incredible thing and I didn't really like, like at
Speaker 4: least didn't really receive much in the way of monetary
Speaker 4: value for it. Although I will say my boss did
Speaker 4: give me the company tickets to the super Bowl after
Speaker 4: the Burger king tweet, so like I did, I like
Speaker 4: that was very cool. That was like a thing that
Speaker 4: I never would have experienced otherwise. But yeah, on the
Speaker 4: other hand, it's like, I don't know, that's that's how
Speaker 4: advertising goes. Like you make a the person who made
Speaker 4: the Oreo dunk in the dark tweet isn't famous, isn't
Speaker 4: famous or rich? And like, I don't know, it's you
Speaker 4: don't that's that's not what it's about. But my name
Speaker 4: is a hyperlink on new your meme.
Speaker 1: So in the time you're there twenty twelve to twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: how was social media changing from your perspective working at
Speaker 1: this company at the time.
Speaker 4: Lots more brands, lots more people talking, I think, I
Speaker 4: think also just a shift away to a shift towards monetization. Right,
Speaker 4: Like I started and like we were on Facebook and
Speaker 4: Facebook was a major platform for us, and then suddenly
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, you can't really get organic reach on
Speaker 4: Facebook anymore, partially because everyone's using it now. So it's
Speaker 4: like how does everything go in the feed? Like you
Speaker 4: got to pay for the audience, but certainly a lot
Speaker 4: of that. The other big piece of it, which I
Speaker 4: think a lot of people like to pretend doesn't impact
Speaker 4: their work, but it obviously does, especially nowadays, is the
Speaker 4: political landscape and how that's changing. And like especially now,
Speaker 4: like the political landscape and the social media landscape are
Speaker 4: in extricably linked because of Elon and so like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I think that's another big piece of it that just
Speaker 4: like like I used to, I used to feel like
Speaker 4: I was just having fun with my friends and now
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, I'm using like a state propaganda machine.
Speaker 2: Is there a solution for that?
Speaker 1: How do you ethically yell at a company that's probably
Speaker 1: just run by a point?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean I think to me, the yelling is part
Speaker 4: of it. I will am. I actually got dragged for
Speaker 4: this take on Twitter back in twenty twenty one, I
Speaker 4: don't think it's funny to like send death threats to
Speaker 4: corporate accounts. But I got on I got on the
Speaker 4: wrong side of some people who do think it's funny.
Speaker 4: They were like, no, it's fine to tell mister Peanut
Speaker 4: to kill himself, and I'm like, I mean, in theory,
Speaker 4: that is funny, but like, the person reading the account
Speaker 4: is gonna read it as if you're talking to them,
Speaker 4: and like, I don't know, I know that if enough
Speaker 4: people tell me to kill myself, the wheels in my
Speaker 4: head are gonna start turning, right, Like, no matter whose
Speaker 4: the account I'm.
Speaker 2: Offering, it's gonna feel good.
Speaker 4: It's not gonna feel good. Yeah, but yeah, it was
Speaker 4: very much. It was very much a like, you're a
Speaker 4: tool of capitalism if you think that people need to
Speaker 4: be nice to social media managers. And it's like, I
Speaker 4: don't think it should be illegal to get at a
Speaker 4: brand account. I think you should just remember that there's
Speaker 4: a person back there who's probably doing that job because
Speaker 4: they couldn't get a job as a writer or something.
Speaker 1: The tricky thing is, behaviorally, how do you adjust it to, yeah,
Speaker 1: say what you're trying to say without making someone just
Speaker 1: like you his life harder.
Speaker 4: General idea of like saying you're mad about something, like
Speaker 4: social media managers pull analytics like they will they report
Speaker 4: up and like if enough people say they're mad about something,
Speaker 4: that will reach them. But like, no, you're very specific.
Speaker 4: Tweet that's like kill yourself, Like that's never going to
Speaker 4: reach as the person doing anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a screenshot for the person who tweeted it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is your relationship to social.
Speaker 2: Media and the internet?
Speaker 4: Like now, I am still trying to spend less time
Speaker 4: on it. I've definitely, like I said, I'm not on
Speaker 4: Twitter anymore. I'm on Blue Sky a lot, but I'm
Speaker 4: trying to step back given the just the political landscape.
Speaker 4: My husband's actually on a business trip this week, and
Speaker 4: he was like, if you spent all week on Blue Sky,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna be pissed off at you because you're just
Speaker 4: gonna be like spiraling when I get home. I was like,
Speaker 4: he's very right. I was like, he knows the drill
Speaker 4: at this point. Yeah, I deleted my Facebook. I just
Speaker 4: like I don't know after the inauguration and everything and
Speaker 4: how Zuckerberg's kind of been involved in all that, and
Speaker 4: like I don't know, I don't really use my Facebook
Speaker 4: for much anymore. I was posting pictures of my kids there,
Speaker 4: but like now now they're training the AI on everyone's faces,
Speaker 4: and it's like, I don't, like, maybe my kids won't
Speaker 4: care when they grow up, but maybe they'll grow up
Speaker 4: and be really pissed off at me for letting Mark
Speaker 4: Zuckerberg train his AI on their faces. So I'd rather, like,
Speaker 4: I'd rather be safe than have them real mad at me.
Speaker 4: So I did that. I don't post pictures of my
Speaker 4: kids on Instagram anymore either. I used to have like
Speaker 4: a like I had, like they were very much like
Speaker 4: a part of my a part of my presence on
Speaker 4: the internet, just like here's what I'm doing, here's my family.
Speaker 4: And so I've kind of taken a step back from
Speaker 4: that too, just thinking a lot about like what are
Speaker 4: they doing with our data. I still try to use
Speaker 4: it the same way I always have, Like I'm always
Speaker 4: using it with a focus on just like having fun
Speaker 4: with my friends, like I just yeah, I just want
Speaker 4: to like shit post and laugh. It's also been a
Speaker 4: pretty cool tool for me, the Wendy's thing, even though
Speaker 4: it was weird, Like anytime I need a new job.
Speaker 4: It is much less difficult for me than someone else
Speaker 4: because I can just like can go on LinkedIn and
Speaker 4: be like, hey, I need a job, and people will
Speaker 4: be like, the Wendy's lady needs a job, and so
Speaker 4: like it's been like I am recently well semi recently
Speaker 4: unemployed and just like I Actually I had had this
Speaker 4: fear when I quit Twitter that like people would forget
Speaker 4: who I was, which is such a such a weird
Speaker 4: idea to have. And I heard from like everyone in
Speaker 4: the world, like a billion people were like, I want
Speaker 4: to help you, and it just kind of reaffirmed for
Speaker 4: me that like community is not the website, you know.
Speaker 4: It's like I have a community and they live they
Speaker 4: live in the world, and sometimes I talk to them online,
Speaker 4: but it's like, I don't know. It was a really
Speaker 4: good reminder that my community will still exist if Twitter
Speaker 4: goes away or if Instagram goes away.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: Amy would later quit Twitter in the best way possible
Speaker 1: by changing her profile picture to a young Elon Musk
Speaker 1: as an awkward PayPal executive and tweet why did my
Speaker 1: wife leave me?
Speaker 2: Incredible?
Speaker 1: Also quick shout out to Wendy's because Amy told me
Speaker 1: that she met her husband working there, and they now
Speaker 1: have two little Wendy's. Now that's fresh beef. Can you
Speaker 1: say that about someone's kids? Thanks so much again to
Speaker 1: Amy for her time. Please check out her work in
Speaker 1: the description and follow her on Blue Sky while you're
Speaker 1: at it. She's the best joke writer ever. And next week,
Speaker 1: in our thrilling conclusion of the Sentient Brands That Got
Speaker 1: to Horny series, we look at where this road of
Speaker 1: escalating personification in the social media brand world reaches a
Speaker 1: divergence in a wood on one path, rampant lock down,
Speaker 1: aeron nihilism, the other path begging strangers to pee on them. Anyways,
Speaker 1: here's a little bit more of the Hamburger Helpware mixtape,
Speaker 1: Bye you Catch and Stowe.
Speaker 6: I was whipping up a bow. I just came back
Speaker 6: from the stove. If I start restaurant on their home,
Speaker 6: I just dumped out that whole packet had the power.
Speaker 6: Let this see him my hot with whipping whipping, whipping
Speaker 6: should be dumb.
Speaker 2: I'm ten minutes.
Speaker 5: Hold up, I telling you I'm serving and stroggling of
Speaker 5: out up the oven.
Speaker 4: His mother lopper, Hey, I get some mother mama.
Speaker 5: Hey sartin your aunty and serge.
Speaker 6: Hey a boil the pope in dry the bundle with
Speaker 6: my wrist until I got that carbo Tom. I'm gonna
Speaker 6: talk on this a lot us. I'm gonna pot the handless.
Speaker 5: How you boy?
Speaker 6: I got too many flavors, man, you might have thought
Speaker 6: it was knters.
Speaker 5: I find them noodles like mcambroney.
Speaker 6: I stayed with chickens like catch you Tory trying to
Speaker 6: talk about some people in the now competition in my categuard.
Speaker 6: Hey get that he I be and Nick kitchen three
Speaker 6: degrees m he trying to Hey, all these heads are salty.
Speaker 6: I't two seasoned, hommy dripping down.
Speaker 5: I got cheese on it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, left me make sure that was straight out of serving.
Speaker 6: You have a plate left to make sure that we
Speaker 6: heat left. He stayed with that heat only want people
Speaker 6: deleting it editor different ingredients.
Speaker 4: That's why don't you show me love? It's not me
Speaker 4: because I've always.
Speaker 6: Been rating.
Speaker 1: Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
Speaker 1: iHeart Radios.
Speaker 2: It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: The amazing.
Speaker 1: Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our
Speaker 1: theme song is by Sad thirteen.
Speaker 2: Voice acting is from Brant Crater and Pet.
Speaker 1: Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee
Speaker 1: and Casper and my pet Rockbird.
Speaker 2: Full outlive us, all bye,