the wendy's twitter roast master: amy brown

In part two of our 'Sentient Brands on Social Media' series, Jamie speaks to the GOAT of online joke writing -- the great Amy Brown, who defined the Wendy's brand on Twitter, then got radicalized and left Twitter in a blaze of bullying Elon Musk. We take a look at the brief moment where getting replied to by a cheeseburger could get you on the national news, and take a look at how a girl from Ohio goes from "Amy from Myspace" at the mall to a generation-defining social voice. Next week: nihilism and piss!

Follow Amy here: https://bsky.app/profile/amybrown.xyz

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cold Zone Media. Welcome to part two of the sixteenth
Minute two Horny Brands on Social Media spectacular. My name's
Jamie Loftus and this week I'd like to open our
show with a little game. Every time in this episode
I say the word brand, grab a beverage of your choice,
I know many of your driving us of your discretion,

(00:22):
and drink.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Whatever it is.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
When you hear the word brand in this episode, the
only guaranteed result is that you will have to pee
very soon. Enjoy a Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the

(01:26):
podcast where we revisit the internet's most notorious main characters,
talk to them and see how their moment in the
spotlight affected them and what that says about us and
the Internet. And this week we're not going to beat
around the bush. We're digging into part two of the
world of Sentient all two Horny Brands on social Media.

(01:46):
So to bring you up to speed and go back
and listen to part.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
One if you haven't.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Sentient Brands are the culmination of around a century's worth
of American marketing techniques, beginning with the combination of faulty
crowd psychology meets faulty Freudian psychology employed by early advertising
jargonnauts like Edward Burnet's. For a few decades, persuasion was
all about convincing Americans that by consuming this product, that

(02:12):
joining this group, the American military anyone, would make you
just like everyone else, and that being just like everyone
else was the goal of human existence. The idea was
to blend into the consuming blob that composed the mid century.
But around the time of the Vietnam War this changed.

(02:32):
Fitting in was no longer a popular stance, and so
advertisers pivoted in response, pushing consumption instead as a way
of expressing one's individuality. And if you have a boomer
in your life with an inexplicably weird specific collection that
they went into debt curating as an act of self expression.

(02:53):
My mom's was Lungaburger baskets.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
They've learned basket weaving from his father and in time
created an empire making and selling hand crafted baskets and
all shapes, sizes, and collars. At its height, the longer
Burger Company was a billion dollars a year business with
twelve thousand employees worldwide.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Beanie Babies was a popular one. The list goes on.
Then you'll know how successful this pivot truly was. So
by the time the Internet came around, American advertising had
undergone a lot of change, as consumption itself had become
an increasingly large part of the American identity in a
world that was increasingly flooded with brands and options of

(03:39):
things to buy. In a world like that of the Internet,
where influencers were becoming king and there was nothing more
off putting than a pop up ad, it was up
to the next generation of millennials to figure out how
to make an old product fresh and worth paying attention to.
Last week, we talked to one of the pioneers of
this space, Serenity Disco, who.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Used their knowledge of time Humbler in the early twenty.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Tens, along with its community building techniques, and managed to
create a brilliant, absurdist way of selling waffles. And this
was extremely successful. They won industry awards and set the
bar for future accounts going weird if done by a
genuine weirdo. And I say this with love, would become

(04:22):
a near shore fire away to get younger people to
engage with a brand that they might not normally think
twice about. But if you've spent enough time online, and
if you're listening to this show, then I'm assuming you have,
you'll know that different approaches are necessary in order to
be effective on different social media platforms. Wholesome absurdism was

(04:43):
definitely the way to go on Tumbler, but that wasn't
necessarily how to succeed on Twitter or YouTube or eventually TikTok.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
So this week we're taking a.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Look at what this twenty tens era renaissance looked like
over on the bad application that used to be fun,
Twitter dot com. And while a lot of us have
positive associations with pre elon Twitter, as embarrassing as that
is to admit, it's undeniable that Twitter has always been
an excellent tool for rage bait and pedantic arguing, and

(05:16):
there was absolutely no brand that harnessed this tendency better
than Amy Brown of the Wendy's account, stoking carefully calibrated
rivalries that would escalate to flirtation and death threats with
the likes of Burger King and especially that redheaded bitch
Ronald McDonald off at McDonald's. There can only be room

(05:39):
for one redheaded broad in this space. But before we
can get to Amy it's important to have a little
insight into what a social media manager's job even looked
like in the mid twenty tents, something we will continue
to explore next week as we talk about how it
changed going into today. Because the field of social media

(06:01):
management has always been dominated by women and fems and
what does that mean? Because as I was preparing for
this series, I realized that I was going to be
speaking to exactly one man in this three part series,
as opposed to three people who identify as either.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Women or non binary.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
And that is no coincidence, particularly the further you go
back in this space. The social media manager has a
long history as being considered.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
A job for girls. Ah, but there is truth to this.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
So many of my friends early just out of college
jobs were as social media managers in male dominated workspaces,
and she or they often ended up being the person
who had to translate a relatively boring product that these
men were selling into a compelling, visually appealing social post.
And like many niche issues affecting women in fems, there

(06:59):
was a fair amount of discussion regarding how women dominated
and by extension, underpaid this position was in the late
twenty tens, following the Me Too movement. This is from
a piece in Wired from twenty eighteen by Jesse Hemple
called how social Media Became a pink collar job. Between
seventy and eighty percent of social media workers self identify

(07:22):
as women on the salary compilation site a scale. The
career has been referred to as the pink ghetto. Duffy
and Schwartz, who are data analysts, i'll add, studied one
hundred and fifty job postings to determine how businesses recruit
social media specialists. These companies, which included BuzzFeed, Equinox, and Thrillist,

(07:43):
advertised jobs that called for applicants to be sociable, exhibit
deft emotional management, and be flexible, all traits that Duffy
says are typically associated with women. The feminized nature of
social media employment, Duffy and Schwartz argue, is connected to
it quote characteristic invisibility, lower pay, in marginal status unquote.

(08:05):
Within the tech industry, the parasite statistics from payscill that
places average pay for a social media specialist at forty
one thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
But that's for staff jobs.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
I cannot believe the pay is that low in twenty eighteen,
and this had been talked about four years already. In
Alanahope Levinson's twenty fifteen piece The Pink Ghetto of Social Media,
referenced in the above piece, she draws a comparison between
the perception of social media as a woman's job to
the same pattern under compensation and general disdain for the

(08:39):
long women dominated PR space. She writes, it's hard not
to hear these stories and draw a parallel to public relations,
an industry where eighty five percent of workers are women.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
People in the media like to say that PR is
a pink ghetto because the often low prestige jobs are
almost exclusively populated by women. A few editor who left
her job in social media at a major news organization.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
But social media is the true pink.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Ghetto unquote, She says her time in her previous role
was characterized by unpaid overtime and a dearth of promotion
and raises. And so, while I know that many of
you have your aspersions about the advertising profession, writ large
that makes sense, but as always, there is a person
behind the screen who has that job mainly because they

(09:29):
need it to survive, and they are doing more than
just tweeting. As Serenity described last week, and as this
week's guest Amy Brown expands upon, this job would often
consist of a lot of customers, service, taking in DM
folders full of verbal abuse, and sometimes balancing multiple clients in.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Order to make ends meet.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Not to mention that the whole concept of seeming like
you're just tweeting is a facade in and of itself.
While any good account has a lot of humor and spontaneity,
there is always a strategy and a planned narrative voice.
To accounts like this, there are real stakes attached to
the people running them. So even if this isn't your

(10:10):
favorite approach to advertising, and that's totally fair, this is
a classic example of everyone being in a somewhat compromised position.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
It's like, well, you know what it is, So as.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Usual, women are shaping this new space and will fail
to get adequate credit or compensation for it. And interestingly enough,
the most dedicated chronicler of this movement in online advertising
was a pivotal figure in the movement himself. Nathan Alibach
has written two extensive microhistories of both brand Twitter and

(10:47):
Horny brand Twitter for Vulture. In twenty nineteen and twenty
twenty two, respectively, And these pieces I cannot overstate were
enormously helpful in researching this series. They're linked in the description,
and if you were even a casual observer of this space,
you will know what I'm talking about when I say that.

(11:08):
This same writer, Nathan Alibach, was the copywriter behind the
nihilistic woke Stakhem's Twitter account of the late twenty tens.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
Hey were still going out tonight.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, that's a fake plan.

Speaker 5 (11:23):
The only thing real in this ad is that one
hundred percent real beef though.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, good
for you and put a pin in that. We'll be
back for more on him next week. But in his
twenty nineteen piece Brand Twitter Grows Up, Alibach gives a
pretty comprehensive history of brands across the consumption spectrum. Don't
know and how we arrived to the subject of today's interview.

(11:51):
Per Alibach, this world did not exist in earnest until
around twenty twelve, but there were faint rumblings of the
bizarre irony that would later dominate Twitter advertising. In two
thousand and seven, the Los Angeles Chargers tweeted.

Speaker 5 (12:09):
So hungry need to find my wife in head to
PF Changs iconic.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
But as it turned out, this was not a brilliant
engagement strategy from the Chargers. It just happened that the
Chargers took the handle of a lapsed Twitter user who
had written this himself on a personal account years earlier.
So it just looked like an entire professional sports team
wanted to go to Pfchangs with wife? Where was wife?

(12:36):
Did they ever make it to PF Changs?

Speaker 2 (12:38):
We do not know.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
By the late two thousands, as brands slowly migrated to
Twitter after the platform's huge surge in popularity and legitimization
in the wake of the two thousand and eight election,
some brands experimented with tweeting in first person.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
Alabac uses this.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Example from KFC in two thousand and nine, where the
colonel is watching basketball going to watch.

Speaker 5 (13:04):
A little college basketball. I'm told I'm kind of an
expert on buckets A oh.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Just kidding, twenty one likes pretty weak and if you
can believe it. These kinds of posts were considered bizarre
and kind of risky at the time, but today they're
kind of boring right. Alibach also points out that most
people assume that the people running these Twitter accounts were
just interns, completely unpaid, and therefore inclined to be loose

(13:32):
and lazy with the accounts, a notion that for some
still persists to this day. And so I repeat, it's
not unpaid college students adults, it's exhausted underpaid adults women.
But in the early twenty tens, as Twitter fights were

(13:55):
well established as a great way to get attention of
any kind, brands began to realize that it wasn't drawing
attention to the competition to interact with other brands online.
In fact, brands talking to each other seem to help
both brands. It's a may the best poster win kind

(14:16):
of mentality.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
But it started.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Small, with brands interacting that were not in direct competition
with one another. A good example, Alabac points out is
a summer twenty twelve fake feud between Old Spice deodorant
and Taco Bell. Here is me and my fiance performing
that for you, Old Spice.

Speaker 5 (14:37):
Why is it that the fire sauce isn't made with
any real fire? Seems like false advertising?

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Is your deodorant?

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Made with really old spices.

Speaker 5 (14:47):
Depends do you consider volcanoes, tanks, and freedom to be spices?

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Okay, the little nationalistic at the end, they're old spice.
And if you're familiar with these products, this actually makes
a lot of because guys who eat too much taco
bell often reek of old spice deodorant.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Do you see what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
So by the mid twenty tens, this approach is almost
standard for brands, not news organizations, mind you. It is
now considered normal to write and post in a way
that personifies a company with hundreds of thousands of employees
as just a little guy like you. But this riskier,

(15:27):
edgier approach is by no means the industry standard until
later in the decade. In fact, in the early to
mid twenty tens, the standard was that corporations were so
desperate on Twitter to fit in with everybody else, just
like advertising seventy five years ago did almost like we're

(15:47):
in a demented cycle. Here we see communities like our
slash fellow kids referencing the hello fellow kids.

Speaker 4 (15:55):
Meme how do you do fellow kids?

Speaker 1 (15:57):
And it actually became a popular corner of social media
to make accounts parodying brands trying.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
To act like cool young people.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
I had so much fun looking at these old cringe
attempt to fit in tweets.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
And I want to share some of my favorites. One
I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
About that made me laugh so much was from Spaghettios.
For context, it was a big thing in the mid
twenty ten social media to acknowledge what happened on this
day in history, regardless of whether that historical event had
anything to do with you or what you were selling.

(16:35):
This led to the Spaghettio's Twitter account posting a photoshop
tribute to Pearl Harper. This was done totally sincerely. It
was so funny, especially if you consider that my friend
Iffy wadi Way would later pose as Spaghettios on Twitter
in twenty twenty and released a fake statement of Spaghettio's

(16:56):
supporting Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Look it up. He's so funny.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
The point is brands were considered cringey more often than
not during these years. Serenity Disco and Denny's were major
major outliers, which is part of why people still talk
about them. And I don't think that the often young
social media managers themselves are to be blamed for this cringiness. Anecdotally,

(17:23):
most companies were not as hashtag brave as Denny's and
weren't willing to let their employees take big narrative swings
with their social media accounts. And this is how we
got an influx of brands awkwardly trying to chase trends
of the time, a lot of brands saying Bay, brands

(17:44):
saying on fleek, and brands commemorating nine to eleven in
the weirdest way possible.

Speaker 5 (17:53):
Let's get two thousand, two hundred ninety six retweets for
the two thousand, two hundred and ninety six people who
lost their lives thirteen years ago today hashtag nine to eleven,
hashtag never forget.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
No brand saying Bey was actually a very successful parody
account that Ala Bach references that I hadn't thought about
in a long time, but it was a very popular account.
It was mainly screenshots of popular brands awkwardly saying by,
while also indicting the job of social media managers in general.

(18:31):
Here's an example attached to a screenshot of the Jimmy
Johns account saying Bay A lot it.

Speaker 5 (18:37):
Is straight up someone's job to make a sandwich shop
seem more likable. People used to be blacksmiths.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
And this is the environment that leads us into the
twenty sixteen election cycle. Brands get weirder during this time.
While parody accounts like brand Saying By remains popular, the
brand accounts themselves double down on trying to be cool
because at this time, becoming the target of the malevolent

(19:06):
brand saying Bay was something to be avoided at all costs,
and this led to Hamburger, Helper and I Promise I'm
not kidding making a twenty sixteen mixtape, which inspired a
series of diss tracks from other accounts, including Wendy's. In
the Years to come, i'by in the kitchen, Well, Women.

Speaker 6 (19:27):
Women Well, i'by Sefish makes it when my on that day?
What a women of starring y'all want?

Speaker 5 (19:34):
Beeping not a service? What a women of starring sarna
y'all be I'm a.

Speaker 6 (19:38):
Survig I start, I start, I start right on Starry.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
I hate the babtist bachelor.

Speaker 6 (19:42):
I'll mix it up, mix it up, women on women,
So get you a think of unnatural?

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Is it a parody of Watch the Throne?

Speaker 1 (19:47):
Called watch the stove, Yes, but I think it's good.
But it's the Wendy's account, as run by Amy Brown
that takes this heightened approach, cranks it up to a
twelve and gets it all the way to the National
News in January twenty seventeen. And because Andrews and Cooper
really had some fun with this, and I think reenacts

(20:10):
the entire feud that took place between Wendy's and some guy,
I'm going to let him tell it to you, please enjoy.

Speaker 7 (20:18):
Before we get to the meat of it, it'll help
to have just a little bit of a basic backstory.
This is about Wendy's, the hamburger place. Every one of
a certain age remembers where's the beef? But there's actually
another slogan, one that Wendy's has used for years and years.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Take a look.

Speaker 5 (20:31):
If hamburgers were meant to be frozen, wouldn't cals come
from Antarctica?

Speaker 3 (20:36):
Wendy's hamburgers are made with.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
Fresh, never frozen beef.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Who else can say that it's way better than fast food?

Speaker 5 (20:43):
It's Wendy, Okay.

Speaker 7 (20:45):
Wendy's has this thing about its beef being fresh, not frozen.
Apparently in the world of Big Hamburger, every distinguishing factor accounts.
A few days ago, Wendy's tweeted a reminder of its
long standing policy on its meat and I quote, our
beef is way too cool to ever be frozen, smiling
emoji with sunglasses. Totally innocuous tweet. Right, It's like the
kind of tweet no one could possibly have a problem with. Right.

(21:07):
But of course, somewhere out there, someone was having the
kind of day that made them say to themselves, I
believe I shall now spend a sizable hunk of time
arguing with the social media account of a fast food company.
That's someone's name is Thuggy D. An exquisite Twitter exchange
happened between Wendy's and said Thuggy D. Tonight I will
be reading the Wendy's tweet, and Frank from our studio

(21:29):
crew will be playing the role of Thuggy D. Take
it away, Frank, your beef is frozen.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
We all know it.

Speaker 4 (21:35):
You'll know we laugh at your slogan fresh never frozen.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Right, Like you're really a joke.

Speaker 7 (21:42):
I like that last line, to which Wendy's replied, sorry
to hear you think that, but you're wrong. We've only
ever used fresh beef since we were founded in nineteen
sixty nine.

Speaker 4 (21:50):
So you delivered it raw on a hot truck.

Speaker 7 (21:56):
Let me pause here because you have to admit that
is an interesting question that Thuggy he poses. And this
is where Wendy's gets a little frosty and responds, and
I quote, where do you store cold things that aren't frozen?

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Ah?

Speaker 7 (22:08):
Yes, a riddle, But how will fuggy do you respond?

Speaker 4 (22:12):
Y'all should give up.

Speaker 6 (22:13):
McDonald's got you guys beat with that don't best breakfast.

Speaker 7 (22:16):
And Wendy's brings down the hammer with you don't have
to bring them into this just because you forgot refrigerators existed.
First second there, boom, thank you, Frank. He's excellent, excellent read.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
I actually really really love this clip and it does
remind me of how desperate people were to feel normal
about anything in January twenty seventeen, if.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Only they knew.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
In any case, Amy Brown struck again with the Wendy's
account that March, getting over one hundred and thirty thousand
legs on Twitter for the following interaction with McDonald's as
performed by me and my fiance McDonald says, attached to.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
A picture of a steaming quarter pounder.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Today, we've announced that by mid twenty eighteen, all quarter
pounder burgers at the majority of our restaurant will be
cooked with fresh beef.

Speaker 5 (23:08):
Wendy's replies, So you'll still use frozen beef in most
of your burgers in all of your restaurants.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
Asking for our friend, she got him McDonald's, is he
hymn to me?

Speaker 2 (23:20):
And this also got a ton of.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Mainstream media coverage and for a few glorious minutes for
social media managers, it was actually cool to be a
brand on Twitter.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
They were so.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Cool, in fact, that the Wendy's social media team that
Amy Brown was a part of did a Reddit ama.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
At the end of twenty seventeen.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Where most of the commenters either congratulated the brand on
being the only one funny enough to follow, or we're
curious how the tweets had translated to actual business, quoth
Wendy's in response.

Speaker 5 (23:54):
It can be hard to track impressions, engagements, brand metrics,
other marketing mumbo jumbo. People are talking about us a lot,
so that.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Helps, and it's not a stretch to say that the
success of the account run primarily by Amy Brown. Throughout
its peak had a big effect on how other brands
managed their stuff. Oh this is how you get on
the news. Let's do that. But now things escalated. It
wasn't just unrelated not competing brands talking to each other.

(24:25):
Amy's success meant that direct competitors were constantly flaming each
other on Twitter at this time. Moonpies versus Hostess de
Giorno versus Papa John. The list goes on. Isn't it
weird that this is my job? Anyways? You might remember
Netflix firing off this one to the tune of over
three hundred thousand likes.

Speaker 5 (24:46):
To the fifty three people who've watched a Christmas Prince
every day for the last eighteen days. Who hurt you?

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Some brands took the tack of flirtation, which would get
very popular in the years to come. And yes this
is dual lingo pispurd foreshadowing. Other brands tried to foster
friendships with fellow brands, but as has been true in
the media since time immemorial, the best and most successful
approach was always aggression, and nothing bears that out more

(25:18):
than Amy Brown's work. Because the Wendy's tweets were pretty good.
Here are some of the more successful ones. So this
interaction is spurred by Duncan. There is a picture of
a Dunks representative in front of a Wendy's wearing a
pink sprinkled donut costume, holding a tweet that's printed out

(25:41):
from Duncan that says, listen to the life sized donut.
You don't have to settle for spicy nuggets hashtag Duncan's
Spicy Side. The post says here's some advice about spice.
It's always better on a donut like the spicy Ghost
pepper donut hashtag Duncan's Spicy Side.

Speaker 5 (26:00):
Wendy's quote tweets and writes, stick to pushing the food.
That's so good you took it out of your name.
My grandma has more heat in her roasts. Lol. Hope
they'll still take your return at Spirit Halloween after the
stink of this tweet gets on your costume.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Okay, play the horns. Here is Wendy's fighting with a
random guy. Random user Lewis tweets to Wendy's you know
Burger King also has spicy chicken nuggets.

Speaker 5 (26:27):
Wendy's replies yeah, and there's also water in the bottom
of the dumpster out back if you're thirsty, and.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
I remember this one another interaction with just a normal person.
Random user Georges tweets to Wendy's. If you reply, I
will buy the whole Wendy's menu right now.

Speaker 5 (26:47):
Wendy's replies prove it.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
George is ready to play ball and returns with a
photo of a full trash bag, saying here's your proof.

Speaker 5 (26:59):
Wendy's order replies, thanks for sharing your baby pictures.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Work from the Wendy's account was so influential that in
the years to come, communities like our Fellow Kids and
brand parity accounts like Brand Saying by actually became less popular.
Ala Baca explains in his Peace and what this says
about the world is somewhat unclear, but this account and
Amy's work did ostensibly change the game permanently. And so

(27:30):
when we come back, Amy Brown of the Agro Wendy's
Twitter account, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Can someone please

(27:54):
link me to an atsy store that can make a
custom earn My dad has been sitting in a suitcase
for months, And we're back with more on the Sentient
brand era of social media. I just want to add
one last thing before we jump into our chat with Amy.
The Silence brand meme something that I kind of associate

(28:15):
with gen X and elder millennials, and it was essentially
an attempt to push back on this brand interaction of
the twenty tens. Silence brand means quite literally that it's
a meme that people use to reply to any brand account,
like the ones we're talking about. They usually are bad
photoshops featuring movie monsters with lasers shooting out of their eyes.

(28:40):
Silence brand, you get it. You'd use these when a
Wendy's tried to chiculy insert themselves into an unrelated conversation,
usually by name searching the name of their company. And unfortunately,
this meme evolved from a really depressing conservative one called
silence Lil used in a similar way to own the

(29:02):
Snowflakes or whatever, and who did these geniuses have lasers
coming out of their eyes?

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Famous dictators of course.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
But I've noticed as time goes on, young millennials don't
seem to have the same qualms with being parasocially advertised
to if that meant that they could talk to a
funny stack of pancakes on the Internet, a trend that,
by the time gen Z and Jen Alfa were on
social media would become increasingly more normalized. Probably not a

(29:31):
good thing, but what can you do. We're all going
to be underwater in thirty years. This week, we're talking
to another heavy hitter, and for my money, arguably the
only writer who got big enough outside the account to
be recognizable to the extremely logged in. Amy Brown and
I are longtime mutuals, and I honestly didn't even know
she ran the Wendy's account until I started to work

(29:52):
on this series. To me, she was a great joke
writer who had followed a long time ago on Twitter
under her personal account and then later on Blue Sky
due to the Nazi problem. But indeed Amy's was not
just the voice of the Wendy's account at its peak,
she also got a fair amount of press for having
done so press. I know she would want me to

(30:14):
reassure you, because she's very normal and not an attention
freak that she wasn't really seeking out. People just wanted
to know who was behind this account they liked so much.

Speaker 5 (30:25):
Behold the sas master behind Wendy's.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Twitter read a Mashable headline in early twenty seventeen doing
something that might have seemed counterproductive to the brand, revealing
the person behind it. But even if Wendy's were opposed
to it, the knowledge that there was someone just like
you posting up a storm professionally really seemed to only
strengthen the brand, which has continued with the same narrative

(30:49):
voice after Amy's departure with a lot of success. So
let's hear the story from her side. I give you
Amy Brown.

Speaker 4 (30:57):
So my name is Amy Brown. I am maybe best
known as the social media manager at Wendy's from twenty
twelve to twenty seventeen. I'm currently a freelance writer and
social media strategist trying to pivot out of social We
can probably touch on that, but yeah, I live in Berkeley, California,
with my husband and my kids and our very old dog.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah there.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
I'm curious a little bit more about you, your background,
Where did you grow up?

Speaker 2 (31:24):
How did you grow up?

Speaker 6 (31:25):
So?

Speaker 4 (31:25):
I grew up in a place called Piqua, Ohio, which
is about half an hour outside of Dayton, Ohio, which
is probably still not a helpful geographic reference if you're
not from Ohio. But basically I am from a rural
area half an hour outside a very small city, so
my world growing up was pretty small. Like I literally
my backyard was a cornfield and a soybean field. So

(31:45):
I spent a lot of time on the internet. We
got a computer at my house like pre y two K,
and yeah, I just I took to it. I spent
a lot of time on the internet. I was always
the I was the nerd in growing up. I am
my high school classmates actually voted me biggest no and
like the senior polls, my pictures in the yearbook and everything.
Not always the easiest to be like the smart kid.
So I spent a lot of time kind of on

(32:07):
the computer seeking out, like I don't know, like music,
and just like people to tell me that there's life
after high school and all that kind of stuff. And
I've also always been a writer, so that's the other
piece of it. I've always been extremely online and always
been a writer. Went to journalism school. I graduated with
a degree in newspaper journalism in twenty eleven, which is
not a great time to be graduating with a degree

(32:28):
in newspaper journalism. So I pivoted into marketing, and after
a stint in like copywriting, I ended up at Wendy's
just because I knew a lot about social media and
I kind of threw myself out there. And yeah, now
I've not been working in it for a really long time.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
I do believe that some of our best writers and
artists today were very online indoor kids. What were your
early memories of the Internet, What got you hooked?

Speaker 4 (32:55):
As to say, my earliest memory of the Internet is
actually I was on like a pen pal website my
mom found when I was like nine or ten years old.
It was like something my mom had like vetted and
felt was safe. And I made friends with this girl
named Catherine in Scotland, and it just like we were
like besties. I have no idea what happened to her.
We lost touch when I was like a teenager. I
hope she's doing well, but yeah, I really like it

(33:16):
was just like I met a friend who was like minded,
like I had friends at school, but she was the
first person I felt like really got me. From there,
it was like I got I got my foot in
the door on diary Land, which was like an early
live journal. I had a regular diary and a poetry
diary for my like eleven year old poetry and then yeah,
from there like live journal, zanga. I was very early

(33:38):
on like the MySpace train, that's where I started.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
I was really into a post Secret.

Speaker 4 (33:45):
Yes, I loved Postsecret. I actually I have a postcard
in the first post Secret book.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
When I was cleaning up my childhood home last year,
I found a postcard that I made and was too
afraid to send to them about having a crush on
a boy who is eight inches shorter than me in
high school. And I like made a whole visual and
I'm like, it probably for the best that I didn't
send it in, but I remember the feeling of making it.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Yeah, I remember reading post Secret in like the on
a computer at the library and being like, oh my god,
this is so this is revolutionary. But yeah, it was
definitely a lot of like seeking community and just like
like minded people. I guess people started becoming famous on
the Internet while I was still in high school, like
Tila Tequila is probably the first one I can think of, right,
And I definitely didn't aspire to fame in that kind

(34:31):
of way, not like a reality TV way, but I
did always. I always kind of thought it would be
like a like a cool thing to get out of
my hometown and be like uh yeah, be someone notable
and then be like hah, suckers. I don't know, but yeah,
I always like there was a there was a phase
where I, like I thought I was going to be
an actor, and so I do I think there was
kind of a through line of like attention or like

(34:53):
external validation. I mean, I think I've always been like
a very high achieving person, like self driven, so I
think I kind of saw like like fame is like
the ultimate, the ultimate thing you can achieve to show
that you've like been successful at whatever it is you're doing.
I was pretty shy. I'm still pretty shy, and so
my way of introducing myself to people would be like

(35:14):
to connect with them on MySpace first, and it turned
into a like by the time I was like a
junior or senior in high school, I would run into
people at the mall and they'd be like, you're Amy
from MySpace and so like that.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Oh my god, Okay, wait, tell me more about that,
because that is an experience I definitely never had.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
I was very much like not cool at high school,
but then like to people in this other space that
I inhabited. I was like a person, and I didn't
necessarily feel like I was being anyone else either. I
just kind of like put out my interests. I actually
I found like an old screenshot of my MySpace profile
the other day and under famous movie under favorite movies,
it's like every movie I've ever seen in my life. Right,

(35:52):
It's just like here's every band I've ever listened to.
But just really trying to like put myself out there
and find people to like connect with, and a little
bit of a little bit of posturing for sure. Yeah.
I would say that was my first brush with like
using using the internet as like an extension. I don't know,
as an introvert, it sometimes is like an extension of

(36:13):
my internal monologue. It's like things I can't say out
loud I can like put on Twitter or myspits. So yeah,
I think that was really my first my first experience
with that.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
What was your feeling when you were going into school?
What was the what was the goal?

Speaker 5 (36:27):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (36:27):
Yeah, So I thought I was going to be like
girl investigative reporter. I was going to be like investigating
corruption in the newspaper, which is like not even really
a thing the newspapers do anymore. An investigative reporter uncovering
corruption and like doing doing good stuff. I took my
journalism classes, I branched out into like some creative writing classes.
I graduated in twenty eleven, so only it wasn't until

(36:48):
my senior year that we even touched on like blogging
and online because it seemed like, oh, maybe that'll be
a thing. So I took like a I took like
an independent study course where I got to make my
own blog, which was basically the most preparation I got
in a formal sense for like social media and the
internet and stuff. I graduated and took an internship in
social media because I could not find a job. I

(37:10):
applied for like one hundred jobs after I graduated and
ended in like a paid internship doing social media in
twenty eleven, which was like pretty sleepy. In twenty eleven,
my experience was very much like it was like just
like we feel like we should have social media accounts,
we don't know what to say, and also we need
we want to make sure that like nobody's saying bad

(37:30):
stuff about us, which like they weren't because I was
working for a like a very small division of your
graill that like I don't think anyone had ever heard of.
It's like they make standardized tests and stuff.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
The approach to social media at that time was like
more we need to do this, and like more self
conscious than we're going to forward our brand by doing this.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
I established the accounts they got set up with like
a social media monitoring software, a very early iteration of it.
It was extremely clunky, but like so they wanted to
know what people were saying about them and also some editors.
But it was kind of this weird spot at the
beginning where it's like what do we even like what
do you say? Or like even who's the audience? Right
like who is the audience for a Twitter account for

(38:10):
like a testing company? And I don't know that we
actually got that answer while I was there, because again
I was only there two months.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Where do you go from there?

Speaker 4 (38:18):
So my first two full time gigs were as like
a copywriter at small marketing agencies, mostly like blog posts
with SEO keywords in them, right like, and then I'd
also just like website copy for like municipal governments and
stuff like I wrote some stuff for like the city
of New Albany, Ohio, like kind of smaller stuff that
my name's not on and mostly writing as opposed to

(38:40):
social media. I'm living in Columbus, Ohio at the time
because I went to school in Ohio and that's where
Wendy's is headquartered. And in about twenty twelve, I noticed
that they have posted for a social media manager. They've
got a job opening, and I just I had thoughts.
I was like, I bet I could do this. I
bet I'd be great at this. So I applied kind
of on a whim.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Pretty much fresh out of college. When you started this job.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
I was twenty three when they hired me at Wendy's.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, do you recall what their social media was like
at the time you entered the position?

Speaker 4 (39:09):
Well, man, I do remember what Wendy's social media was
like in twenty twelve, because I went into that interview
room so confident and I was like, here's everything. I
know what you're doing right now like they had. I
had like followed them on Pinterest and they were like,
we're going to do a cool thing that looks good.
But then it was like just the longest image ever.
I was like, you're doing stuff that's really annoying to
me as a user, which looking back, I just I

(39:31):
walked in like I was just like, yeah, I can
do this, and for some reason that like went well,
but I can imagine it going like plenty of other ways.
But yeah, it was like come to Wendy's and buy
a Frosty. They were doing like photoshopped pictures of a
cartoon Frosty doing stuff which like I think could have
had legs, but like wasn't really dry. Frosty had its

(39:53):
own Facebook page. It was very Facebook centric at that time,
right like Facebook and a little bit Twitter there were
They had an Instagram account that someone was clearly just
like taking pictures on their iPhone and uploading. I remember
when I started there were thirty seven thousand followers on
the Twitter account, which felt like a lot of the time,
but obviously these days isn't really that much. They were

(40:13):
working with like a an ad agency based out of
New York on all of this stuff, and I was
the first social media person internally. I got hired by
the director of digital who went on to be like
a early great mentor to me of.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
The sort of Mount Rushmore of iconic brand accounts.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
You're pretty early to it.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
When you were starting this job, were there any accounts
specifically that you're like, oh, like, this is an account
that I think is doing it well.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
It was Taco Bell. Taco Bell was like BuzzFeed would
put out these lists because it was like the heyday
of BuzzFeed too, right, and they'd be like twenty five
times the Taco Bell Twitter account was all of us,
and I was like, I can do that for Wendy's.
I can make the Wendy's account all of us. I
don't know how we're going to get there, but yeah,
like I saw that and I was just like, we
could do that, Like I could do Yeah, they were

(41:01):
like the blueprint to me. It was that and it
was not Starbucks Social but like Starbucks was such a
big deal back then. It was like it like, yeah,
like a lifestyle brand almost, And so that's what I
was always talking about, is like we're gonna be cool
like Taco Bell, but also like we want people to
feel proud that they're holding a Wendy's.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
Cup, especially around this.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
I mean, I don't I guess I don't know because
I'm no longer twenty three. But when I was going
in for similar jobs at the same age. It was
like with the same level of confidence. And I felt
like what worked to my advantage was that the people
who were interviewing me didn't understand how the internet worked.
They weren't Internet natives, and so I think they were
sort of like, yeah, sure, great, try it out.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
Actually, so funny story. They my boss after they hired me.
He told me I was the least experienced candidate they interviewed,
and that what really put it over the edge is
that at the time I had I had like two
hundred followers on my personal Twitter or something, but I
put my personal Twitter handle on my resume and the
hiring manager went to my Twitter and he said, what
set you apart is that you had like an actual personality,

(42:00):
and like, we're looking for someone to have an actual
personality like behind the brand. And he's like, all these
other people were clearly trying to like build a personal brand, right,
and they're like they're posting, like here is my take
on XYZ, Like I kind of shit posted my way
into the job, which is also very funny.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
And they told you in school you couldn't do it.
Are you working strictly alone? Are you sort of are
you pitching stuff to your bosses? Are you pitching arcs
for the Twitter account? How does the day to day
work in terms of strategizing for an account at that time.

Speaker 4 (42:31):
So when I came on at Wendy's, they also were
bringing on a new ad agency at right around the
same time, and so that was really I was the
entire internal team, and then everything else was these guys
at VML. They're based in Kansas City. They're like a
big deal now, largely because of the Wendy's work, which
is pretty cool for them. I would not have been
able to do anything I did without that support. But yeah,

(42:52):
it's like copywriters and strategists and like art directors, and
so the way it worked when I started was I
was responsible lately for community management, which is when you
reply to someone, so all of it, like the funny stuff,
the customer service stuff, all of it. And then our
agency worked on first we worked on like revamping a

(43:13):
strategy and like what does the brand sound like? And
they they sort of they would take a first pass
at it and then bring it to us, which was
me and my boss at the time. And I had
sort of a lot of latitude to give feedback, be
like this is or isn't how how we should be proceeding.
And then yeah, on the day to day they were
creating posts and copy and then a lot of a

(43:34):
lot of my job was running that up the Wendy's
side for approvals. So like there are brand managers who
want who want to make the make sure the product
looks right, and like legal want size on everything. I
often did a lot of the behind the scenes like
internal corporate stuff, and not so much the like the
actual tweets and Facebook posts were always our agency, but

(43:54):
I helped. I helped with the strategy, and then the
community management was me for the first couple of years,
and then eventually my role expanded. We added another person
to the team. Internally, we handed off community management largely
to a guy at our agency who did it up
until I think like last year. He was there for
a really long time.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
So it is like a pretty large collaborative operation.

Speaker 4 (44:16):
As I say, that's actually something I've always kind of
felt bad about in the coverage is that they always
want to be like this is the person and like
you can tell people that it's like me and a
whole bunch of other people, But Obviously the end product
is whatever, like the writer wants it to be right,
So I don't know, that's not always a compelling piece
of the story to be like, I had lots of help,
but I had lots of help.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Well, thankfully, I'm not interested in a compelling story. A
lot of the original pieces about either the Wendy's account
or you specifically, it was either like the points of
view that it landed on felt very black and white,
like you are being duped by a brand by relating
to the brand, or it's just this one person, but

(44:59):
it seems like it there is like gray area in
there where it's like there's multiple people, there is a plane.
What was the goal of these accounts when you were
starting and as time went on, what was the goal
of engagement and what were you building tours?

Speaker 4 (45:13):
Yeah, I mean obviously we wanted everyone to know about
like the latest cheeseburger and stuff, right, But when I
showed up at Wendy's, they were in the middle of
like a massive corporate rebrand. So like you might remember
the old Wendy's logo that literally said like old fashioned
hamburgers on it, which was something they really they were like,
we don't we want to shed the old fashioned perception, right,
So they readed the logo, which is the one that's

(45:34):
now just like Wendy, and they were sort of they
started they started reding, like making all the restaurants fancy, like, yeah,
I'm sure you've been to a renovated Wendy's. So that
was all happening right around the time I showed up,
and it was very much. It very much played hand
in hand with the social strategy, which was to kind
of make people think of Wendy's as not just like
a place where senior citizens get chilly, which is something

(45:57):
I saw on light a lot. I would see people
be like, my grandma likes Wendy who eats Wendy's, And
so I think that was a big But then there's
always like individual marketing goals, like we were always supporting
like campaigns for the latest thing, because in fast food
there's it's just like a parade of limited time items,
like that's the that's the entire model. So new limited
time item, new bunch of posts. But then also doing

(46:19):
something called always on, which is just like reminding people
that Wendy's exists, right, And yeah, with the with the
goal of like ultimately driving people to a Wendy's or
even just like getting them to think more positively about
Wendy's in general, so like maybe the next time, like
bumping Wendy's up from I will never eat there to like,
oh yeah, I would consider having that for dinner. Because

(46:39):
it's really hard to like draw a direct line from
a tweet to a purchase unless someone's like I bought
this hamburger because of this tweet. So a lot of
it was around like the brand sentiment and like maybe
not awareness because like most people have heard of Wendy's,
but like changing how you think of Wendy's. The whole
brand's jumping on trending stuff which you didn't ask for
a history lesson, but I'm gonna give you anyway. Which

(47:00):
is it? It was? It was not really a thing
until suddenly it was. I forget which super Bowl it was,
but it was the one where all the lights went
out and Oreo Oreo made this tweet. They were like,
you can still dunk in the dark, and that was
like an iconic case study and social media for like ever,
it was like if you go to a conference and
someone's talking about the dunk in the dark tweet You've
like got a bingo on your on your bingo board.

(47:21):
Right wow, Okay, So I think this really they got
like a ton of attention for it, and I think
it really started this idea that like, oh, brands can
jump in and talk about anything. So we we tried
that a little bit around like super Bowls a lot
of the time, and often it was a thing where
it's like we've got we've got pre approved things to
say for like this scenario and that scenario, and a

(47:43):
little bit of like having fun in the comments with
community management. I will say I think a place we
kind of landed as a company was suddenly there were
something every brand was trying to make like the Oscars
or the Grammys or the super Bowl relevant, and it's
like if everyone's talking at once, nobody's really like. We
actually kind of pulled back a little bit from that
kind of stuff because it's like, how do you how

(48:04):
do you even break through something that noisy.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Because you're a part of it, seems like and correct me.
But like this sort of wave of brands developing very
specific editorial voices, when did that start?

Speaker 2 (48:20):
What was that? Was it a mistake? Was it planned?
What was that?

Speaker 6 (48:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (48:24):
So I will say for Wendy's, I think that really
started like a year before the roast thing blew up,
we had like another viral incident where we were kind
of poking fun at burger King, and I actually, I
will admit I went a little bit rogue, expecting that
nobody would see it, but we had sort of So
Wendy's comes out with the four for four and then
Burger King comes out with the five for four like
a week or two later. It's like the exact same

(48:46):
thing as the four for four plus a cookie. Internally,
we are all pissed off, and we're like, what do
we do about this? And everyone decides we're not going
to do anything. We're not going to like bring more
attention to the five for four. But then people start
tweeting at us about the five for four, and I remember,
I'm like in a meeting and I just like I
dash off a reply about it to someone making fun
of burger King. I believe, I believe they asked what

(49:06):
we had that Burger King doesn't, and I said edible food,
and that was like the whole tweet. And Yeah, I
got out of that meeting and it was going bananas,
and I was like, I'm fired because we agreed we
weren't going to do this and I did it anyway.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
But it worked. I'm assuming it worked.

Speaker 4 (49:21):
I don't remember anyone being mad at me, though, I'm sure. Yeah, Like,
I feel like they were probably a little miffed at
the beginning when they were like, I thought, we weren't
going to talk about this, what are you doing? But yeah,
I kind of just like, I was like, oh, people
are asking us to say something, like they're expecting us
to say something now, which was not the case when
we made this decision. Yeah, I will say I'm very
lucky in that regard that my boss was kind of like,

(49:43):
that's funny. I'm not like, oh my god, you didn't
listen to me.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
You were making really effective marketing choices that I'm sure
would have been completely anathema to a lot of marketing
elders at the time. Do you have any specific memories
of how those discussions went or yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
I think my favorite example so when we did go
like mega viral with the roast like the one that
Anderson Cooper read right in twenty seventeen. I remember at
work the next day having to explain exactly what happened
and what it meant, Like our head of market our
head of marketing didn't have a Twitter account, so he
was like he also didn't understand. He was like, I

(50:20):
didn't review or approve this, Like where did you get
permission to do this? And I was like, well, community
management is just a thing we always do. We're always
replying to people. I think they did not realize that
on our end we were. I think the idea that
there wasn't an approval process for those reply tweets really
scared some people. Yeah, we actually we ended up having
to bring in our ad reupts from Twitter to like

(50:41):
explain why this was good because there was definitely the
vibe was a little weird. Yeah, my boss was very excited,
but like, yeah, his boss was like not sure what
was happening.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
So let's talk about the roast For the uninitiated. How
did the rose come about? It was twenty seventeen, right.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
In early January twenty seventeen. I actually I remember a
lot about the day because it was just like such
a such a nothing of a day until suddenly it
was like the day. But so it's it's January third,
twenty seventeen, and the office is still closed, but we
are technically launching a new brand campaign. So I'm like,
I'm in my pajamas, I'm working from home on the couch.

(51:19):
Things are slow though, because it's like the first day
after the new year, and the new campaign is all
about fresh, never frozen beef because that's Wendy's like big
differentiator with the hamburgers. It's like the meat's never frozen.
So we have some sponsored tweet out about how the
meat's fresh, never frozen, and the sponsored tweets are always
where people are getting a little like get a little
feisty with you because like they're not following you, so

(51:41):
they're like, why am I seeing this Wendy stuff? Like
I don't want this.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
OK.

Speaker 4 (51:44):
So this guy comes in and he's like, you're lying
it's frozen, and I kind of at first I gently
push back. I'm like you, like, I'm sorry you think
that I think is what I said, like like very corporate,
Like you're wrong. It's always been fresh, never frozen since
nineteen sixty nine. And so this guy really laid it

(52:06):
up for me though, he really just like he set
me up so well and he said, you mean you
want me to believe you deliver it raw on a
hot truck. And I was just like, and so I
remember I sort of I answered him with a question.
I said, where do you store cold things that aren't frozen?
And I think that made this guy a little bit
upset because he sort of went like, McDonald's is better
than you anyway, And I said, the final nail in

(52:31):
the coffin, I told him he didn't have to bring
McDonald's into this, just because he forgot that refrigerators existed,
and the crowd went wild. Literally the next day, Anderson
Cooper and one of his staff they were like, they
acted out the tweets on Anderson Cooper three sixty on CNN, which.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
I'm sure Wendy's was thrilled about.

Speaker 4 (52:50):
They were thrilled when we were able to quantify it
for them in the language that marketing people care about.
So when we were able to be like, we got
X amount of media impressions, which is valued at like
X number of dollars, suddenly they were like, okay, yes,
we see the value. But when it was like I
made a funny tweet and it's on Anderson Cooper, they
were kind of like, Okay.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
Were people tracking you down? Were people sending you weird messages?
What was the personal uh you know, what were you
taking home with you?

Speaker 4 (53:17):
Yeah, So my fatal misstep was giving an interview about it.
The week that it happened, someone from Mashable reached down
and I give this interview and like, my boss is
in the room, pr is in the room. It's a
very tame interview. But the piece comes out and it's
all about me, right, It's like it's about here's Amy Brown.
They call me the SaaS master in the headline, right,
and then like there's like a they're talking about how

(53:38):
my mom is proud of me, right, and it's just
like it's this. It's like a profile piece that I
wasn't expecting And so that gets me pegged forever as
the lady who did it, right, because there's and so
it did. It got very weird. Yeah, people, My social
accounts were not private at the time. They they quickly
became private, but like there was a also being a

(53:59):
young woman made it weird, Like there was a I stumbled.
I used to google myself. I don't really anymore, but
I used to just to see what was going on,
and there was like a conversation on a message board
that was like would you bang the Wendy's Twitter lady?
And I remember these guys were like they had like
scoured my Instagram photos and they were like, well, I
think maybe she has weird teeth because she never smiles
with her mouth open, just like that level. And then yeah,

(54:23):
there were I I'm Jewish, and some people figured out
that out. So there were like gropers in my dms
being like I'll save you when they come for the Jews,
like literally saying shit like this to me.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (54:35):
Ex boyfriends popped back up. They were like, hey, can
I tell people I used to date the Wendy's Twitter lady,
And it's like if you want.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Like, like I mean, I think even the rare case
where it's even weirder to ask for permission than to
simply just do it because it's true there.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
Like I guess if you're interested in that. Also, one guy,
a guy who dumped me, went on Twitter and was like,
you guys are all celebrating the Wendy's Twitter lady, but
she's like a bipolar, alcoholic and a bad person. It's
like Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
I know, oh I did.

Speaker 4 (55:07):
For like a month he dumped me, and I was
just like, I didn't even know you were mad at me?
Like what is going on?

Speaker 1 (55:13):
And what a way to find out in a way
that professionally implicates you as well.

Speaker 4 (55:18):
Honestly, it kind of like ruined my brain for a
couple of years. I just like like I would wake
up and I'd be like I would wake up with
like a sense of dread, being like, what is happening
on my Twitter account? What happened there while I slept?
Because like I'd wake up occasionally and there'd be a
guy in my DMS being like is this your address?
And it is my address and it's like gee, like which,
like guy. When that happened, I got like real paranoid.

(55:42):
Though I never nobody ever came to my house or anything.
But it's just the idea that someone has that information
and they did that on they did that for that reason, right.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
But I'm assuming, just based on having had similar jobs,
that you're not compensated to a level that you can
really like protect yourself.

Speaker 4 (55:57):
It's such a funny misconception sometimes when I talk about
the Wendy stuff, people assume I must be like rich.
They're like, oh, you did that Wendy's thing. You made
a lot of money. And it's like, no, the sharehold
Like the shareholders made a lot of money, Like the
chairman of the board made a billion dollars, right, It's
like I made five figures. But yeah, I definitely the

(56:18):
mental health piece was really really tough, honestly, And there
is there's backstory too. I actually I so I've had
depression in my whole life, anxiety too, and actually the
in twenty sixteen, the summer of twenty sixteen, I took
a leave of absence from work to do an intensive
outpatient mental health program for depression. And I had just
come back to I had come back to work in
October and then all the roast stuff happened in January.

(56:41):
So I was still like trying to find my footing.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Still, Like, also a very normal election cycle in the
middle of that too, that's nuts.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
Yeah, it was a yeah. When I look back at it,
I can't believe that all happened in like a year.
But yeah, so I'm still trying to find my footing,
I like, and I was like very I was like
vocal about why I was taking leave too, because I'm like,
I'm like, oh, we're going to break the stigma, Like
depression is okay. I'm gonna tell everyone I have depression
and it's gonna be fine. And like it was not fine.
People were weird, people were uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
There is a brief period of years in the mid
twenty tents where I genuinely believed that like being very
straightforward and honest, like it was like, oh, it's not
that there's a systemic problem.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
It's that like I must not be articulating.

Speaker 4 (57:25):
It's like, no, I just need to talk louder about
having depression and everyone will understand.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
We'll be right back with more Amy Brown. Welcome back
to sixteenth minute. My mother literally got kidnapped at the

(57:53):
Austin Airport this week. She's fine now, but oh my god.
Here's the rest of my interview with Amy Brown.

Speaker 4 (58:00):
In the wake of the of the big tweet, right,
we sort of we decided we're like, well, we got
to lean into this, right, like, we we don't know
that when this will die down, so let's try to
ride it out. But it got to a point where
it was it was me, our other person in house
named Meredith and our community manager at the agency named Matt,
and we were literally like taking shifts on the Twitter account,
just trying to reply to like as many people as possible.

(58:22):
We're like, we can't let it die, and yeah, I
definitely am. I mean, social media in general is a
really hard gig for people who want to have work
life balance.

Speaker 6 (58:32):
You know.

Speaker 4 (58:32):
It's like there's no there's no stop button. And yeah
there's the part where it's like, I mean I think
that probably ties back into the gropers and my dms. Right,
it's like it's a it's a turning point for the
Internet where it's like, oh, the Nazis are here and
Trump is here, and like they're talking to me and like,
so yeah, it was definitely I Yeah. I actually I
ended up Wenday's and I ended up mutually parting ways.

(58:55):
I like to say it that way. We need truly
parted ways in March of that year, like two months
after the tweet happened, which in turn turned into they're
actually like there there are like Reddit threads where people
are like, why did she get fired? And it's like, ah,
I didn't get fired you for assuming that. Yeah, it's like,
actually I just kind of went nuts and then so
like step away.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
For a while, you know, And then this isn't even
a particular like a stab at Wendy's. I think it's
like any corporation you would work for where it's like, oh,
that thing worked more of that and you're like, well, no,
that will kill me, Like, oh, we can't, we can't
actually do that. I'm glad that you were able to
step away. I was curious when in twenty seventeen you
made that call.

Speaker 4 (59:34):
Yeah. I left in March of that year, and I
freelanced for about a year. Like early I was in
I was in a position where my name had like
really been out there, so it was pretty easy for
me to just like pick up some freelance work. Although
honestly I was living. I was living with actually yeah,
my my husband and I got married that year too. God,
so much stuff happened in like two or three years.

(59:55):
But I was kind of just like sitting around playing
video games, like trying to try and to get my
brain back to normal, like working maybe twenty hours a week.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
There was no playbook for the stress that comes with
a job like that, in a way that someone starting
a job like a social media management job or community
manager job now would it.

Speaker 4 (01:00:16):
Was really it was harder on my nervous system than
I think I realized while I was doing it. Just
like I think about it now, right, how the social
media platforms are engineered to like keep us engaged and like,
I don't know, I feel it feels very much like
a slot machine.

Speaker 5 (01:00:29):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
It's like the lights go off and the like button
lights up, and it's like my brain is my brain
is like activated, and then I like I logged off
and my brain was like very still and quiet, and
I didn't feel very good, you know. I was like, oh,
I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. So
there was a lot of that, and yeah, I think
a lot of a lot of fear that like, oh

(01:00:52):
my god, this is just like because I would take
job interviews and they would just want me to they
were like, can you come here and do the Wendy's thing,
And it's like, I know, I don't want to, Like
I don't want my whole career to just be like
writing sassy tweets. So that was also I had this
fear for a long time that like I would just
be pigeonholed as this one thing forever, I will say,
a resource that was very valuable to me. And part
of the reason all the social media managers seemed to

(01:01:13):
know each other is because we had like a we
had like a private Facebook group back in the day
that was just like a bunch of social media managers
for brands, and so I remember when the Wendy stuff happened.
I was just like, hey, it's me. I feel insane,
like can anyone help me? And I actually I still
I have a lot of like long standing friendships that
came out of that group, which actually no longer exists
anymore because like online communities grow and die and whatever.

(01:01:35):
But I feel like the group really started to grow
and take off, like right around twenty seventeen when I left,
just because there were a lot of a lot of
people working in social at that time. There were some
other smaller groups I was into, imber. I remember leaving
one angrily because someone was like talking shit about the
Wendy stuff. They were like, oh, they'll fall flat on
their face soon enough, and I was like, I'm right here.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
That's a fascinating thing to me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
It's like you're being addressed as Wendy's and it is
personal to you.

Speaker 4 (01:02:02):
That was also, yeah, it's it took a long time
for me to disentangle my own personality with Wendy's, which
was like, it is such a fucked up thing to
look back on, where it's like, well, if I'm not
at Wendy's, who am I? And it's like anyone you
can be Anny, you don't have to, but yeah, I
just cause I think it all goes hand in hand, right,
Like I was pretty I was pretty unhappy and I
didn't realize it. So I just like stayed busy. And

(01:02:24):
my way of staying busy was work. Like I had
a series of like shitty boyfriends and like that was
not fun. So it's like my personal life was whatever,
but work was great. Work was silk good. And the
work got pulled out from under me and I was like,
well who am I? And I'm like I'm in therapy,
but like my therapist doesn't know what, Like how do
you even talk to a therapist about this? Yeah? I

(01:02:45):
actually I have a therapist I work with now who
I've been talking to. I've been working with her for
like four years. I didn't even approach the the Wendy's
and online stuff until like year three because she's so offline,
and then I had to like kind of explain what
the Wendy's Twitter stuff was like. She wasn't super familiar,
so that was really fun. I was like, yeah, I
have trauma because a thing happened to me on the
internet and she's like what. Because I remember like none

(01:03:06):
of the brand managers at work really understanding what I
did until suddenly we went viral and they were like, oh,
that's what she does. But like in the early days,
it was a lot of like what do we need
to Like I would I would run into people at
work who are like, oh, yeah, my son has a Facebook,
can he help? And it's like no. But so a
lot of like feeling undervalued, feeling stressed out, a lot
of just like trying to trying to figure out what

(01:03:27):
the heck you're doing, Like yeah, a lot of commiserating,
a lot of like no stupid questions, and yeah, just
really getting to like getting to meet people who do
what I did was nice.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
When you're entering like a job that basically hasn't existed
until now and you're really fucking good at it, how
does your identity become entrenched? And then how do you
like untangle that? That sounds like such a bizarre process.

Speaker 4 (01:03:52):
No, it really it was like I felt, and I
know now that this is not the case, but it
felt like I finally found the thing I'm good at.
It was like, this is the one thing I do,
and I do it for Wendy's and like I stayed
there for such a long time because I really liked
my boss. But yeah, I definitely I had. I had
thought about leaving before, you know, just to like work
somewhere else. Was my first real job out of college.

(01:04:14):
But yeah, certainly, especially after everything started getting big and
I was like really proud of the work too, that yeah,
I got such a sense of pride. I was like, look,
I'm doing it. But yeah, it was very much like
this is like I said, outside of work, it's like, oh,
things aren't going so great like all it Like, honestly,
the only thing I was really stoked about was my dog.

(01:04:35):
There was a long time where I was very weird
about the Wendy stuff. Like in the process of disentangling
myself from it, it was like I just don't want
to talk about it. Like I'm sure people at my
next couple of jobs probably picked up on it. They'd
like they'd mentioned that I was the Wendy's Lady, and
I'd like grimace and be like h or like even now,
sometimes I just don't mention it. Like I just started
a freelance project and they were like, introduce yourself and

(01:04:56):
I was like, Hi, I'm Amy. I live in Berkeley, California,
and the the guy who hired me is like tell them.
I was like, yeah, I've worked for all these companies
and I did the Wendy's Twitter account, and then of
course at least one person is like, I'm such a
big fan, and I'm like, no, I'm just some lady.
It never stops being weird when people are like that

(01:05:17):
was so cool. I love what you did because for me,
it's like, oh, I made some tweets and I got
paid for it, and then I didn't do that anymore.
And but I like, I was writing a freelance article
and I was interviewing a guy who's in his twenties
and he was like when I was in college, which
also made me feel like the oldest person in the world.
But it was like, when I was in college, what
you did made me want to do what you do
and I was just like, I almost cried. I was like,

(01:05:37):
that's really he was like, you're He's like, I think
you are better than you realize, and I was like,
that is a really cool thing to say to me,
and I'm gonna cry. I feel ways about that, Like
other people have managed to make money off the Wendy's thing,
not me, though. I mean, I guess I should like
the fact that I am where I am in my
career and like have a decent network and stuff like it.

(01:05:57):
It wasn't nothing, but it certainly like I didn't get
I didn't get a big fat check for the Wendy
stuff right. Also, also they're not to not to put
too fine a point on it, but some of those
are my tweets, some are Merediths, some are Mats. I
guess I just I always want to make sure everyone
because I think I feel like it was really kind
of a bummer that nobody else got the spotlight shown

(01:06:17):
on them, although I have always felt like maybe they
were lucky.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
In that way too for something at the time that
you were you know, you were paid a living wage,
but it's it seems to me that the value you
were adding to the company outweighed what you were being compensated.

Speaker 4 (01:06:33):
I would say that's fair. I would also say that's
pretty typical for advertising. Like I sort of I'm of
two minds with it, which is like, Wow, I did
this incredible thing and I didn't really like, like at
least didn't really receive much in the way of monetary
value for it. Although I will say my boss did
give me the company tickets to the super Bowl after
the Burger king tweet, so like I did, I like

(01:06:55):
that was very cool. That was like a thing that
I never would have experienced otherwise. But yeah, on the
other hand, it's like, I don't know, that's that's how
advertising goes. Like you make a the person who made
the Oreo dunk in the dark tweet isn't famous, isn't
famous or rich? And like, I don't know, it's you
don't that's that's not what it's about. But my name
is a hyperlink on new your meme.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
So in the time you're there twenty twelve to twenty seventeen,
how was social media changing from your perspective working at
this company at the time.

Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Lots more brands, lots more people talking, I think, I
think also just a shift away to a shift towards monetization. Right,
Like I started and like we were on Facebook and
Facebook was a major platform for us, and then suddenly
it's like, oh, you can't really get organic reach on
Facebook anymore, partially because everyone's using it now. So it's
like how does everything go in the feed? Like you
got to pay for the audience, but certainly a lot

(01:07:47):
of that. The other big piece of it, which I
think a lot of people like to pretend doesn't impact
their work, but it obviously does, especially nowadays, is the
political landscape and how that's changing. And like especially now,
like the political landscape and the social media landscape are
in extricably linked because of Elon and so like, yeah,
I think that's another big piece of it that just
like like I used to, I used to feel like

(01:08:07):
I was just having fun with my friends and now
it's like, oh, I'm using like a state propaganda machine.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
Is there a solution for that?

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
How do you ethically yell at a company that's probably
just run by a point?

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:08:18):
I mean I think to me, the yelling is part
of it. I will am. I actually got dragged for
this take on Twitter back in twenty twenty one, I
don't think it's funny to like send death threats to
corporate accounts. But I got on I got on the
wrong side of some people who do think it's funny.
They were like, no, it's fine to tell mister Peanut
to kill himself, and I'm like, I mean, in theory,

(01:08:40):
that is funny, but like, the person reading the account
is gonna read it as if you're talking to them,
and like, I don't know, I know that if enough
people tell me to kill myself, the wheels in my
head are gonna start turning, right, Like, no matter whose
the account I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Offering, it's gonna feel good.

Speaker 4 (01:08:52):
It's not gonna feel good. Yeah, but yeah, it was
very much. It was very much a like, you're a
tool of capitalism if you think that people need to
be nice to social media managers. And it's like, I
don't think it should be illegal to get at a
brand account. I think you should just remember that there's
a person back there who's probably doing that job because
they couldn't get a job as a writer or something.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
The tricky thing is, behaviorally, how do you adjust it to, yeah,
say what you're trying to say without making someone just
like you his life harder.

Speaker 4 (01:09:20):
General idea of like saying you're mad about something, like
social media managers pull analytics like they will they report
up and like if enough people say they're mad about something,
that will reach them. But like, no, you're very specific.
Tweet that's like kill yourself, Like that's never going to
reach as the person doing anything.

Speaker 1 (01:09:37):
Yeah, that's a screenshot for the person who tweeted it. Yeah,
what is your relationship to social.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
Media and the internet?

Speaker 4 (01:09:45):
Like now, I am still trying to spend less time
on it. I've definitely, like I said, I'm not on
Twitter anymore. I'm on Blue Sky a lot, but I'm
trying to step back given the just the political landscape.
My husband's actually on a business trip this week, and
he was like, if you spent all week on Blue Sky,
I'm gonna be pissed off at you because you're just
gonna be like spiraling when I get home. I was like,
he's very right. I was like, he knows the drill

(01:10:07):
at this point. Yeah, I deleted my Facebook. I just
like I don't know after the inauguration and everything and
how Zuckerberg's kind of been involved in all that, and
like I don't know, I don't really use my Facebook
for much anymore. I was posting pictures of my kids there,
but like now now they're training the AI on everyone's faces,
and it's like, I don't, like, maybe my kids won't

(01:10:29):
care when they grow up, but maybe they'll grow up
and be really pissed off at me for letting Mark
Zuckerberg train his AI on their faces. So I'd rather, like,
I'd rather be safe than have them real mad at me.
So I did that. I don't post pictures of my
kids on Instagram anymore either. I used to have like
a like I had, like they were very much like
a part of my a part of my presence on
the internet, just like here's what I'm doing, here's my family.

(01:10:49):
And so I've kind of taken a step back from
that too, just thinking a lot about like what are
they doing with our data. I still try to use
it the same way I always have, Like I'm always
using it with a focus on just like having fun
with my friends, like I just yeah, I just want
to like shit post and laugh. It's also been a
pretty cool tool for me, the Wendy's thing, even though

(01:11:09):
it was weird, Like anytime I need a new job.
It is much less difficult for me than someone else
because I can just like can go on LinkedIn and
be like, hey, I need a job, and people will
be like, the Wendy's lady needs a job, and so
like it's been like I am recently well semi recently
unemployed and just like I Actually I had had this
fear when I quit Twitter that like people would forget

(01:11:30):
who I was, which is such a such a weird
idea to have. And I heard from like everyone in
the world, like a billion people were like, I want
to help you, and it just kind of reaffirmed for
me that like community is not the website, you know.
It's like I have a community and they live they
live in the world, and sometimes I talk to them online,
but it's like, I don't know. It was a really
good reminder that my community will still exist if Twitter

(01:11:50):
goes away or if Instagram goes away.

Speaker 6 (01:11:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
Amy would later quit Twitter in the best way possible
by changing her profile picture to a young Elon Musk
as an awkward PayPal executive and tweet why did my
wife leave me?

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Incredible?

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
Also quick shout out to Wendy's because Amy told me
that she met her husband working there, and they now
have two little Wendy's. Now that's fresh beef. Can you
say that about someone's kids? Thanks so much again to
Amy for her time. Please check out her work in
the description and follow her on Blue Sky while you're
at it. She's the best joke writer ever. And next week,

(01:12:28):
in our thrilling conclusion of the Sentient Brands That Got
to Horny series, we look at where this road of
escalating personification in the social media brand world reaches a
divergence in a wood on one path, rampant lock down,
aeron nihilism, the other path begging strangers to pee on them. Anyways,

(01:12:51):
here's a little bit more of the Hamburger Helpware mixtape,
Bye you Catch and Stowe.

Speaker 6 (01:12:57):
I was whipping up a bow. I just came back
from the stove. If I start restaurant on their home,
I just dumped out that whole packet had the power.
Let this see him my hot with whipping whipping, whipping
should be dumb.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
I'm ten minutes.

Speaker 5 (01:13:10):
Hold up, I telling you I'm serving and stroggling of
out up the oven.

Speaker 4 (01:13:13):
His mother lopper, Hey, I get some mother mama.

Speaker 5 (01:13:17):
Hey sartin your aunty and serge.

Speaker 6 (01:13:19):
Hey a boil the pope in dry the bundle with
my wrist until I got that carbo Tom. I'm gonna
talk on this a lot us. I'm gonna pot the handless.

Speaker 5 (01:13:26):
How you boy?

Speaker 6 (01:13:27):
I got too many flavors, man, you might have thought
it was knters.

Speaker 5 (01:13:30):
I find them noodles like mcambroney.

Speaker 6 (01:13:32):
I stayed with chickens like catch you Tory trying to
talk about some people in the now competition in my categuard.
Hey get that he I be and Nick kitchen three
degrees m he trying to Hey, all these heads are salty.
I't two seasoned, hommy dripping down.

Speaker 5 (01:13:49):
I got cheese on it.

Speaker 6 (01:13:50):
Yeah, left me make sure that was straight out of serving.
You have a plate left to make sure that we
heat left. He stayed with that heat only want people
deleting it editor different ingredients.

Speaker 4 (01:14:01):
That's why don't you show me love? It's not me
because I've always.

Speaker 6 (01:14:04):
Been rating.

Speaker 1 (01:14:09):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radios.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
The amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:14:21):
Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our
theme song is by Sad thirteen.

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
Voice acting is from Brant Crater and Pet.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee
and Casper and my pet Rockbird.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Full outlive us, all bye,