Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the wendy's twitter roast master: amy brown

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

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.xyzSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole.

The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretate. Listen to The Unwanted Sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu.

Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams. Ed Sheeran. Fade. Chlorilla. Jelly Roll. John Fogarty, Lil Wayne, L.L. CoolJay, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, The Offsprin, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Welcome to Part 2 of the 16th 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 you are driving you through your discretion, and drink whatever it is when you hear the word brand in this episode. The only guaranteed result is that you will have to pee very soon. Enjoy! Don't make me a start Let's take it too far And give me one moment Let's see you in a face Sixteen minute of fame

Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of faith One more minute of fame I'm not so bad when you're sitting there on my mind and see what they're going to die and what that says about it. And this is 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 the world of sentient, all. 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. So to bring you up to speed and go back and listen to Part 1 if you haven't, 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 jargonauts like Edward Bernays. For a few decades, persuasion was all about convincing Americans that by consuming this product, that 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 in to the consuming blob that composed the mid-century.

But around the time of the Vietnam War, this changed. Fitting in was no longer a popular stance, and so advertisers pivoted in response, pushing consumption instead as a way of expressing one 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, my mom's was Longaber Baskets? Dave learned basket weaving from his father and in time created an empire, making and selling handcrafted baskets in all shapes, sizes, and colors. At its height, the Longaberger

Company was a billion dollar a year business. with 12,000 employees worldwide. 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 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 used their knowledge of Tumblr in the early 2010s along with its community building techniques and managed to create a brilliant, absurdest way of selling waffles. And this was extremely, 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 a near

surefire way 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 that 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 definitely the way to go on Tumblr, but that wasn't necessarily how to succeed on Twitter or YouTube or eventually TikTok. So this week, we're taking a look at what this 2010s era renaissance looked like over on the bad application that used to be fun, Twitter.com. And while a lot of us have positive associations

with pre-elon Twitter, as embarrassing as that is to admit, it's undenerned. that Twitter has always been an excellent tool for rage bait and pedantic arguing. And there was absolutely no brand that harness 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 red-headed bitch Ronald McDonald. Bottom of the fuck off. At McDonald's, there can only be. room for one red-headed 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-2010s, something we will continue to explore next week as we talk about how it changed going into today, because the field of social media management has always been dominated by women and femmes. 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 women or non-binary. 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 a job for girls. But there is truth to this. So many of my 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 and femmes, there was a fair amount of discussion regarding how woman dominated, and by extension, underpaid this position was, in the late 2010s following the Me Too movement. This is from a piece in Wired from 2018 by Jesse

Hempel called How Social Media Became a Pink Collar Job. Between 70 and 80% of social media workers self-identify as women on the salary compilation site pay scale. The career has been referred to as The Pink Ghetto. Duffy and Schwartz, who are data analysts, I'll add, studied 150 job postings to determine how businesses recruit social media specialists. These companies, which included BuzzFeed, Equinox, and Thrillist, 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 its, quote, characteristic invisibility, lower pay, in marginal status, unquote, within the tech industry. The parasite statistics from pay scale that placed average pay for a social media specialist at $41,000. But that's for staff jobs. I cannot believe the pay is that low.

In 2018. And this had been talked about for years already. In Alana Hope Levinson's 2015 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, in general disdain for the long women-dominated PR space. She writes, It's hard not to hear these stories and draw a parallel to public relations, in industry where 85% of workers are women.

Quote, people in the media like to say that PR is a pink ghetto because the often low-pr prestige jobs are almost exclusively populated by women, says a female editor, who left her job in social media at a major news organization. But social media is the true pink 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 need it to survive.

And they are doing more than just tweeting. As Serenity described last week, and as this week's guest, Brown expands upon, this job would often consist of a lot of customer service, taking in DM folders full of verbal abuse, and sometimes balancing multiple clients in order to make ends meet. 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 favorite approach to advertising, and that's

totally fair, this is a classic example of everyone being in a somewhat compromised position. It's like, well, you know what it is. So as 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 Olabock has written two extensive micro histories of both brand Twitter and horny brand Twitter for Vulture in 2019 and 2022 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 this same writer, Nathan Allibach, was the copyrighter behind the nihilistic woke Steakham's Twitter account of the late 2010s. Hey. Are we still going out tonight?

Um... Yeah, that's a fake plan. The only thing real in this ad is that 100% real beef. Dude. No. 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 2019 piece, brand Twitter grows up. Alibach gives a pretty comprehensive history of brands across the consumption spectrum. Don't

know. And how we arrive to the subject of today's interview. Per Alabach. This world did not exist in earnest until around 2012. But there were faint rumblings of the bizarre irony that would later dominate Twitter advertising. In 2007, the Los Angeles Chargers tweeted, So hungry, need to find my wife and head to P.F. Chang's. Iconic. 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 P.F. Chang's with Wife. Where was Wife? Did they ever make it to P.F. Chang's? By the late 2000s, as brands slowly migrated to Twitter after the platform's huge surge in popularity and legitimization in the wake of the 2008 election, some brands experimented with tweeting in first person. Alibach uses this example from KFC in 2009, where the colonel is watching basketball. Going to watch a little college basketball. I'm told I'm kind of an expert on buckets. Ayo!

Just kidding. 21 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? Alabak also points out

that most people assume that the people running these Twitter accounts were just interns, completely unpaid, inclined to be loose 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, you adults. It's exhausted, underpaid, adults, women. But in the early 2010s, as Twitter fights were 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 seemed to help both brands. It's a may-the-best poster win kind of mentality. But it started small, with brands interacting that were not in direct competition with one another. A good example, Alabak points out, is a summer 2012 fake feud between Old Spice Deodorant and Taco Bell. Here's me and my fiancé performing that for you. Old Spice.

Why is it that the fire sauce isn't made with any real fire? Seems like false advertising. Is your deodorant made with really old spices? Depends. Do you consider volcanoes, tanks, and freedom to be spices? Okay, the little nationalistic at the end there, Old Spice. And if you're familiar with these products, This actually makes a lot of sense

because guys who eat too much Taco Bell often reek of old spice deodorant. Do you see what I'm saying? So by the mid-2010s, 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, edgier approach is by no means the industry standard until later in the decade. In fact, in the early to mid-2010s, the standard was that corporations were so desperate on Twitter to fit in with everybody else. Just like advertising 75 years ago did,

almost like we're in a demented cycle here. We see communities like R-slash-Fellow-Kids referencing the hello-fellow-kids meme. How do you, fellow kids? And it actually became a popular corner of social media to make accounts parodying brands trying to act like cool young people. I had so much fun looking at these old, cringy attempt to fit in tweets, and I want to share some of my favorites.

One I didn't know about that made me laugh so much was from SpaghettiOs. For context, it was a big thing in the mid-2010 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. This led to the SpaghettiOs Twitter account posting a Photoshop tribute to Pearl Harbor. This was done totally sincerely. It was so funny, especially if you consider that my friend Ifi Wadiway would later pose as SpaghettiOs on Twitter in 2020 and released a fake statement of SpaghettiOs supporting Black Lives matter. Look it up, he's so funny. The point is, brands were considered cringy 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. Antectotally, 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. Brand saying on fleek. And brands commemorating 9-11 in the weirdest way possible. Let's get 2,200919. 96 retweets for the 2,296 people who lost their lives 13 years ago today.

Hashtag 9-11. Hashtag never forget. No. Brand saying Bay was actually a very successful parody account that Alabak 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, Bay, while also indicting the job of social media managers in general.

Here's an example attached to a screenshot of the Jimmy John's account, saying Bay a lot. It is straight up someone's job to make a sandwiched shop seem more likable. People used to be blacksmiths. And this is the environment that leads us into the 2016 election cycle. Brands get weirder during this time. While parody accounts like Brand Saying Bay remains popular, the brand accounts themselves double down on trying to be cool, because at this time, becoming the target of the malevolent 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 2016 mixtape, which inspired a series of disc tracks from other accounts, including Wendy's, in the years to come. I've been in the kitchen

Whipin, whip it, I've been chefing Mix it with my left end Water whipping and I'm stirring You're on beefing I'm a serving Water whipping and I'm a serving I stir it, I stir it, I stir it, I stir it, I stir it, I stir it, I stir it, I hear the pop of this bachelor I mix it, I mix it, I whip it, I whip it so good you would think I'm a natural

Is it a parody of Watch the Throne 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 12, and gets it all the way to the national news in January 2017. And because Anderson Cooper really had some fun with this, and I think reenacts the entire feud that took place between Wendy's and some guy, I'm going to let him tell it to you. Please enjoy. Before we get to the meat of it, it'll help to have just a little bit

bit of a basic backstory. This is about Wendy's, the hamburger place. Everyone 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. Take a look. If hamburgers were meant to be frozen, wouldn't cows come from Antarctica? Wendy's hamburgers are made with fresh, never frozen beef. Who else can say that? It's way better than fast food. It's Wendy's. Okay, Wendy's has this thing about its beef being fresh, not frozen. Apparently in the world of Big Hamburger, every distinguishing factor counts. A few days ago, Wendy's tweeted a reminder of its longstanding 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? 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 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 crew, will be playing the role of Thuggy D.

Take it away, Frank. Your beef is frozen, and we all know it. You'll know we laugh at your slogan, Fresh, never frozen, right? Like, you're really a joke. 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 1969. You deliver it raw on a hot truck? Let me pause here because you have to admit that is an interesting question that Thuggy D 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? Ah, yes, a riddle. But how will Thuggy D respond?

Y'all should give up. McDonald's got you guys beat with that dope-ass breakfast. And Wendy's brings down the hammer with. You don't have to bring them into this just because. you forgot refrigerators existed for a second there. Boom. Thank you, Frank. That was excellent. Excellent read. I actually really, really love this clip, and it does remind me of how desperate people were to feel normal about anything in January 2017. If only, they knew. In any case, Amy Brown

struck again with the Wendy's account that March, getting over 130,000 likes on Twitter for the following interaction with McDonald's, as performed by me and my fiancé. McDonald says, attached to a picture of a steaming quarter-pounder. Today, we've announced that by mid-2018, all quarter-pounder burgers at the majority of our restaurant will be cooked with fresh beef.

Wendy's replies, So you'll still use frozen beef in most of your burgers in all of your restaurants asking for a friend? She got him. McDonald's is he him to me. and this also got a ton of mainstream media coverage. And for a few glorious minutes for social media managers, it was actually cool to be a brand on Twitter.

They were so cool, in fact, that the Wendy's social media team that Amy Brown was a part of did a Reddit AMA at the end of 2017, where most of the commenters either congratulated the brand on being the only one funny enough to follow or were curious how the tweets had translated to actual business, quoth Wendy's in response. It can be hard to track impressions, engagements,

brand metrics, other marketing mumbo-jumbo. People are talking about us a lot, so that 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. Amy's success meant that direct competitors were constantly flaming each other on Twitter at this time. Moon pies versus hostess. Dejorno

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 300,000. to the 53 people who've watched a Christmas prince every day for the last 18 days. Who hurt you? Some brands took the tack of flirtation, which would get very popular in the years to come. And yes, this is Duolingo Pissbird 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 than Amy Brown's work, because the Wendy's tweets were pretty good. Here's some of the more successful ones. So this interaction is spurred by Duncan. There is a picture of a Dunk's representative in front of a Wendy's wearing a pink sprinkled donut costume, holding a tweet that's printed out from Duncan that says, Listen to the life-size 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 Spicy Side. 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. L.O.L. Hope they'll still take your return at Spirit Halloween after the stink of this tweak it's on your costume. 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? Wendy's replies. Yeah, and there's also water in the bottom of the dumpster out back, if you're thirsty. And I remember this one, another interaction with just a normal person. Random user George tweets to Wendy's. If you reply, I will buy the whole Wendy's menu right now. Wendy's replies, prove it. George is ready to play ball and returns with a photo of a full trash bag saying, here's your proof.

Wendy's, in short order, replies, thanks for sharing your baby pictures. Work from the Wendy's account was so influential that in the years to come, communities like our fellow kids and brand, parody accounts like Brand Saying Bay actually became less popular, Alabak explains in his piece. 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 when we come back, Amy Brown of the Agro Wendy's Twitter account.

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And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. entity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

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shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like, in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance,

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My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin. So, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear.

The 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack,

where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the Eye Heart Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th minute. Can someone please link me to an Etsy 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 with Gen X and Elder Millennials. And it was essentially an attempt to push back on this brand interaction of the 2010s. 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 photoshopps featuring movie monsters with lasers shooting out of their eyes. Silence brand, you get it. You'd use these when a Wendy's tried to cheekily 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 Liberal, used in a similar way to own the snowflakes or whatever. And who did these geniuses have lasers coming out of their eyes? Famous dictators, of course. But I've noticed as time goes on, young millennials don't seem to have the same qualms with being parisocially 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 Gen Alpha were on social media would become increasingly more normalized. probably not a good thing. But what can you do? We're all going to be underwater in 30 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 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 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. Behold, the SaaS Master behind Wendy's Twitter. read a mashable headline in early 2017, 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 voice after Amy's departure with a lot of success. So let's hear the story from her side. I give you Amy Brown. So my name is Amy Brown. I am maybe best known as the social media manager at Wendy's from 2012 to 2017. 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. I'm curious a little bit more about you, your background. Where did you grow up? How did you grow up? So 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 I spent a lot of time on the internet. We got a computer at my house, like, pre-Y2K. And yeah, I just, I took to it. I spent a lot of time on the internet. I was always the nerd in growing up. My high school classmates actually voted me,

biggest nerd in 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 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 2011, which is not a great time to be graduating with a degree in newspaper journalism. So I pivoted into marketing. And after a stint in like copyrighting, 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 now been working in it for a really long time. 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? As I 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 was just like I met a friend who was like minded. Like I had friends at school, but she was the first person. And I felt like really got me. From there, it was like, I got my foot in the door on Diaryland, which was like an early live journal. I had a regular diary and a poetry diary for my like 11-year-old poetry. And then, yeah, from there, like live journal, Zanga, I was very early on like the MySpace train.

That's where I started. I was really into a post secret member. Yes, I loved Post Secret. I actually, I have a postcard in the first Post Secret book. When I was cleaning out 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 was eight inches shorter than me in high school. And I like made a whole visual and I'm like, probably for the best that I didn't send it in. But I remember the feeling of making it. 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, tequila is probably the first one I can think of, right? And I definitely didn't aspire to fame in that kind 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, yeah, be someone notable and then be like, ha ha, suckers. I don't know. But, yeah, I always, like, there was a phase where I like, I thought I was. was going to be an actor. And so I do, I think there was kind of a through line of like attention

or like 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 to connect with them on MySpace first, and it turned into it, 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. Oh, my God. Okay, wait, tell me more about that, because that is an experience I definitely never had. 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. 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 a, like an old screenshot of my MySpace profile the other day. And under famous movie, under favorite movies, it's like every movie I'd ever seen in my life. Right. 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 my internal monologue. It's like things I can't say out loud. I can like

put on Twitter or MySpace. So yeah, I think that was really my first, my first experience with that. What was your feeling when you were going into school? What was the goal? Oh 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 2011. So only it wasn't until 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 applied for like a hundred jobs after I graduated. and ended in like a paid internship doing social media in 2011, which was like pretty sleepy in 2011. 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 stuff about us, which like they weren't because I was working for like a very small division of McGraw Hill that like I don't think anyone had ever

heard of. It's like they make standardized tests and stuff. 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. I established the accounts. They got set up with like a social media monitoring software. A very early iteration of it was extremely clunky. So they wanted to know what people were saying about them and also some competitors. 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 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. Where do you go from there? 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? And then I 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 social media. I'm living. in Columbus, Ohio, because I went to school in Ohio, and that's where Wendy's is headquartered. And in about 2012, 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. Pretty much fresh out of college when you started this job. I was 23 when they hired me at Wendy's, yeah. Do you recall what their social media was like at the time you entered the position? Oh, man. I do remember what Wendy's social media. was like in 2012 because I went into that interview room so confident and I was like here's everything wrong with 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 walked in like I was just like yeah I can do this and for 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 own Facebook page. It was very Facebook centric at that time, right? Like Facebook and a little bit of Twitter. 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 37,000 followers on the Twitter account, which felt like a lot of the time, but obviously these days isn't really that much. They were working with like 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 really great mentor to me. Of the sort of Mount Rushmore of iconic brand accounts, you're pretty early to it. 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.

It was Taco Bell. It was 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, 25 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, I like, I saw that. And I was just like, we could do that.

Like, I could do that. They were like the blueprint to me. It was that and it was not Starbucks social, but like Starbucks was such a big deal back then. And it was like it, like like a lifestyle brand almost. And so that's what I was always talking about is like we're going to be cool like Taco Bell, but also like we want people to feel proud that they're holding a Wendy's Cup. Especially around this. I mean, I guess I don't know because I'm no longer 23.

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. Actually, so funny story, my boss after they hired me, he told me I was the least experience candidate they interviewed. And that what really put it over the edge is that at the time I had, I had like 200 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. 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. 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? 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, it's like copywriters and strategists and like art directors. And so the way it worked when I started was I was responsible completely 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 strategy and like, what does the brand sound like? And 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 we should be proceeding. And then, yeah, on the day to day, they were creating posts and copy. And then a lot of my job was running that up the Wendy's side for approvals.

So, like, there are brand managers 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 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. So it is like a pretty large collaborative operation. 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. 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 it seems like there is like great.

area in there, where it's like there's multiple people. There is a plan. 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 towards? 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 want to. shed the old-fashioned perception, right? So they, they readed the logo, which is the one that's now just like Wendy. And they were sort of, they started, they started making all the restaurants fancy. Like, 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 I saw in line a lot. I would see people be like, my grandma likes Wendy's, 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 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, like, bumping Wendy's up from I will never eat there to, like, oh, yeah, I would consider having that for dinner. Because 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 going to give you one anyway, which is 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 made this tweet. They were like, you can still dunk in the dark. And that was like an iconic case study in 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, right? 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 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 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 even how do you even break through something that noisy 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 what was that

Was it a mistake? Was it planned? What was that? Yeah. 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 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 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. But it worked, I'm assuming.

It worked. 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. But yeah, I will say, I'm very lucky in that regard that my boss was kind of like, that's funny. And not like, oh, my God, you didn't listen to me. 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? Yeah, I think my favorite example is so when we did go like mega viral with the roast, like the one that Anderson Cooper read, right, in 2017,

I remember at work the next day having to explain exactly what happened and what it meant. Like our head of marketing didn't have a Twitter account. So he was like, he also didn't understand he was like, I 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 reps from Twitter to like 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. So let's talk about the roast.

For the uninitiated, how did the roast come about? It was 2017, right? In 2017, early January 2017. I actually, I remember a lot about the day because it was just like such a nothing of a day until suddenly it was like the day. But so it's January 3rd, 2017, and the office is still closed, but we are technically launching a new brand campaign.

So I'm like, I'm in my particular. jammas. I'm working from home on the couch. Things are slow, though, because it's like the first day after the new year. And the new campaign is all about a fresh never frozen beef, because that's Wendy's 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 they're like, why am I seeing this Wendy's stuff? Like, I don't want this. 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, I'm sorry, you think that I think is what I said. Like very corporate. Like you're wrong. It's always been fresh, never frozen since 1969. And so this guy really laid it up for me, though. He really just like, he set me up so well. And he said, 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 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 360 on CNN. Which I'm sure Wendy's was thrilled about. 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. Are people tracking you down? Were people sending you weird messages?

What was the personal, you know, what were you taking home with you? So my fatal misstep was giving an interview about it the week that it happened. Someone from Mashable reached out 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 Sassmaster in the headline, right?

And then like there's like a, they're talking about how 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 um yeah people my my social accounts were not private at the time they they quickly became private but like there was a um also being a young woman made it weird like there was a um i stumbled i i used to google myself i don't really anymore but um 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 of. And then, yeah, there were, I'm Jewish and some people figured that out. So there were like, Groyper's in my DMs being like, I'll save you when they come for the Jews, like literally saying shit like this to me. Oh my God. 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. Like, I mean, I feel like it's even, the rare case where it's even weirder to ask for permission than to simply just do it because it's true. It's 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.

And it's like, Jesus Christ. No, oh my God. He dated 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? And what a way to find out in a way that professionally implicates you as well? 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 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 I, when that happened, I got like real paranoid. 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 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

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 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 mental health piece was really, really tough, honestly. And there's backstory too. So I've had depression my whole life, anxiety too. And actually the, in 2016, the summer of 2016, 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. So I was still, like, trying to find my footing. Still, like... Also, a very normal election cycle in the middle of that, too.

That's nuts. 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 going to tell everyone I have depression, and it's going to be fine.

And, like, it was not fine. People were weird. People were uncomfortable. There is a brief period of years in the mid-2010s where I genuinely believed that being very straightforward and honest, like, it was like, oh, it's not that there's a systemic problem. It's like, like, no, I just need to talk louder about having depression and everyone will understand. We'll be right back with more Amy Brown. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness,

the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests

for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going through something like that is a traumatic experience but it's also not the end of their life that was my dad reminding me and so many others who need to hear it that our trauma is not our shame to

carry and that we have big bold and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us i'm your host and co-president of this organization dr leitra tate on my new podcast the unwanted sorority we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's lock in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app,

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Get your tickets to J-A-X-S.com. Welcome back to 16th minute. My mother literally got kidnapped at the Austin Airport this week. She's fine now. But oh my God. Here's the rest of my interview with Amy Brown. In the wake of the, um, of the, um, of the, big tweet, right? We sort of, we're like, well, we got to lean into this, right? Like,

we don't know 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. We're like, we can't let it die. And yeah, I definitely, I mean, social media in general is a really hard gig for people who want to have work life balance, you know it's um yeah there's no there's no stop button and yeah there's the part where it's like um i mean i think that probably ties back into the gropers in 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 um yeah i actually i ended up wendies and i ended up mutually parting ways i like to say that way we mutually parted ways in march of of that year like two months after the big tweet happened which in turn turned to And there are actually, like, there are, like, Reddit threads where people are like, why did she get fired? And it's like, ah, I didn't get fired. It's for you for assuming that, yeah. It's like, actually, I just kind of went nuts and had to, like, step away 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. It was 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. when in 2017, you made that call. Yeah, I left in March of that year, and I freelanced for about a year.

Like, I really, 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 with, actually, yeah, my husband and I got married that year, too. God, so much stuff happened in, like, two or three years. But I was kind of just, like, sitting around playing video games, like, trying to, trying to get my brain back to normal. like working maybe 20 hours a week. There was no playbook for the stress that comes with a job like that in the way that someone's starting a job, like a social media management job or community manager job now would. It 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 keep us engaged. And like, I don't know, it feels very much like a slot machine, right? 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 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, no. 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. Right. A resource that was very valuable to me. And part of the reason all the social media managers seem to 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 longstanding friendships. that came out of that group, which actually no longer exists anymore because, like, online communities grow and die and whatever. But I feel like the group really started to grow and take off, like, right around 2017 when I left, just because there were a lot of people working in social at that time. There were some other smaller groups I was into.

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. That's such a fascinating thing to me. is like, you're being addressed as Wendy's, and it is personal to you. That was also, yeah, it's, um, 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 anyway. You don't have to. But yeah, I just, um, because I think in all those 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 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 so good yeah 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 I like how do you even talk to a therapist about this yeah I 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 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 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 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 try to figure out what 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. 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. 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 thought about leaving before, you know, just to like work somewhere else. It was my first real job out of college. But yeah, it 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, honestly, the only thing I was really stoked about was my dog. There was a long time where I was very weird about the Wendy's 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 mention that I was the Wendy's lady and I'd like grimace and be like, ugh. Or like, even now, sometimes I just don't mention it. I just started a freelance project, and they were like, introduce yourself.

And I was like, hi, I'm Amy. I live in Berkeley, California. And 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 stopped being weird when people are like, that 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 20s 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, 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 going to 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 wasn't nothing, but it's certainly, like, I didn't get a big fat check

for the Wendy's 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 Meredith. Some are Matt's. 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 on them, although I have always felt like maybe they were lucky 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. Yeah, I would, 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, um, my boss did give. me the company tickets to the Super Bowl after the Burger King tweet. So like I did, I like, 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 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 Year meme. So in the time you there, 2012 to 2017,

how was social media changing from your perspective working at this company at the time? Lots more brands, lots more people talking. I think also just 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've got to pay for the audience. But certainly a lot 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 inextricably 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 I was just having fun with my friends. And now it's like, oh, I'm using like a state propaganda machine. Is there a solution for that? How do you ethically yell at a company that's probably just run by a person? Yeah, I mean, I think to me, the yelling is part of it. I actually got dragged for this take on Twitter back in 2021. I don't think it's funny to, like, send death threats to corporate accounts, but I got on the wrong side of some people who do think it's funny.

They were like, no, it's fine to tell Mr. Peanut to kill himself. And I'm like, I mean, in theory, that is funny. But, like, the person reading the account is going to 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 going to start turning, right? Like, no matter whose account I'm operating. It's not going to feel good. It's not going to 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 yell 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. 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's life harder. 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 the president of the company.

Yeah. That's a screenshot for the person who tweeted it. Yeah. What is your relationship to social media? and the internet 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 spend all week on Blue Sky, I'm going to be pissed off at you because you're just going to be like spiraling

when I get home. I was like, he's very right. I was like, he knows the drill 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 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 presence on the internet, just like, here's what I'm doing, here's my family. 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 shitpost and laugh. It's also been a pretty cool tool for me. The Wendy's thing, even though 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, I 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 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 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 web. site, you know? It's like I have a community and 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 goes away or if Instagram goes away, right? 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? Incredible. 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, in our thrilling

conclusion of the Sentient Brands that Got Too 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 lockdown-era nihilism. The other path, begging strangers to pee on them. Anyways, here's a little bit more of the hamburger helpware mixtape. Bye! You could catch me at the stone. I was whipping up a bowl.

I just came back from the stone. Five-star restaurant at home. I just dumped out that whole packet at the powder, let it simmer. I was whipping, whipping, whipping. Should be done about 10 minutes. Hold up, I told you. serving that strogan of a beat hot up the oven it's molten lava hey i get some more for mama hey serving your auntie and serve your uncle hey i boiled the pot and i dropped the bundle

with my wrist until i got that carbot tummy i want tacos and chiladas no i'm a pasta and lasagna boy i got too many flavors you might have thought it was catered i fried them noodles like macaroni i stay with chickens like cacciatore you're trying to talk about some people there's no competition in my category Hey, keep that heat on me I'll be in the kitchen 350 degrees, homie Hey, all these head are salty I'm too seasoned, hum me

Dripping down, I got cheese on me Yeah, left to make sure that we straight I deserve me up a plate Left to make sure that we eat Lefty stay with that heat Only want beef with the lean in it I added the different ingredients That's why the street so me love

Because I've always been feeding them 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson,

My Cats Flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Bye. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

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