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Six six. Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the Internet's characters, see how their moment affected them and what that says about us and the Internet. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and today after a saga that took us all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century in American marketing and up to literally last week, this is the fourth and final installment in our sentient Brands that sometimes get
too violent or horny series. So just to start, if you haven't listened to our first several parts, please.
Go do that.
And if you're joining us again, congratulations you have made it to the duo lingo this OWL episode. Hopefully that's thrilling for you. Now. When we left off in our last episode, we spoke with Nathan Alibach of the nihilist Stakum's account and we began to inch ever closer toward the present. But while Nathan still works in marketing, as do Amy Brown of Wendy's Twitter Rosemaster Fame, neither are still posting on the accounts that they initially made famous.
Today that changes my interview for the final part of this series is with someone who I've received potentially a weird amount of requests for. Her name is Zaria Parvez, but you probably know her as the duo lingo owl on TikTok. It is not Zaria in the owl suit, at least not usually. Usually it's some guy named Mark.
I got the exclusive Keep listening. But before we can explore how Zaria Parvez, a recent college graduate, went from suggesting that the inoffensive green owl mascot of a free language learning app become extremely horny and virtually grow the company single handedly, let's return to the two marketing roads diverging in a wood we were talking about in our last episode, Ian get the music going. Okay, here we
are in the wood. We've explored nihilism as a marketing tactic now through Nathan Allabach's time running social media for Stakum, and we discussed his feelings on running the account now all these years later. So today we're taking a turn into what was until five or so years ago, the final frontier of selling product to a logged in Internet person being weirdly horn I want to explain being horny to you. You know it when you see it, when
you feel it, you little pervert. But as far as social media marketing goes, being horny as a brand really came alive in the late twenty tens and experienced a somewhat unsettling uptick in the early twenty twenties. And wouldn't you know it, Nathan Alibach carefully tracked and published a short history that marked this turn from anxiety and nihilism in social media advertising being the flavor of the month to the owl that fucks. He published this in Vulture
in twenty twenty two. It's a piece called When Brands Got Horny, and I've linked it in the description. So to give you an idea of what I mean by horny brands, consider where we're coming from here, where Amy Brown at Wendy Twitter tapped into a propensity for violence.
Nathan and Stakham subsequently appealed to anxiety and depression on social media at the time, although because it hasn't come up yet, I will say that no one took advantage of depression more directly, although I do believe it was taken out of context mid thread than the fake orange juice brand Sunny D in February twenty nineteen.
Saying I can't do this anymore.
This still makes me laugh. I'm sorry, but at this point a tweet like this would prompt a reaction from other brands that was well received but kind of expected. At this point, Moonpies replies to sunny D, asking if they're okay, Pop Tart offers sunny D a hug. You get the idea. Even the official account of Satan, Blue, Check and Everything.
Replied, I feel you, sunny D, my friend.
We have to keep moving. And while there were some horny accounts earlier in the decade, it was mostly because being a horny was what actually made sense for that company. Think the porn Hub Twitter account. But in the back half of the twenty tens, it seems like the success of the fifty Shades of Gray franchise sort of emboldened some social media managers to get a little kink.
Here.
From the same week that sunny D threatened suicide, the gigantic, multi billion dollar company Verizon tweeted the following.
Yes, T Mobile, We're into BDSM, bigger coverage map, devastating speed and massive capacity.
Verizon is a terrible company and yet I am laughing at that. The other examples Nathan Ahlabach uses in his piece are photoshops or quote tweeted replies to horny contents from brands like Jimmy John's and the mixtape dropping grocery store brand itself Hamburger Helper in twenty seventeen. But it's the next year that Nathan identifies that being horny on Maine and yes, I do feel quite old saying that, but being horny unmean is now culturally acceptable, which means
that more brand accounts are willing to do it. And this is a very long way of saying that twenty eighteen was the year that it became popular for brands to participate in no Nut November. I quit, I quit my job just getting Here's a tweet from Burger King on November one, twenty eighteen, him it's only a month wif fu crying emoji, and Burger King follows us up with welcome to King Burger, where we can do it your way, but don't get crazy. Okay, this month is
so unpleasant. Next, corn Nuts spells out the word nut in nut emojis. Mister Peanuts. Social media says that you can eat him in November because he's technically a lagome. You can see how this fanned out. Nutter Butter obviously got in on this, really name a nut based product with a Twitter account, and they were engaging with no Nut November twenty eighteen. But I will say that corn Nuts did take the cake because they just at one point posted what is the craziest place you've nutted enough?
Another successful account posting horny stuff was Netflix in the late twenty tens, And keep in mind this was when Netflix was much better thought of in the public sphere than it is today and was still sort of considered to be a place to find generally good TV and wasn't yet bleeding subscribers. But what's interesting here is that
Netflix social media accounts for multiple countries. We're posting horny tweets to the point where it's safe to assume that this was a globally mandated media strategy.
We're seeing post like one time, babe doing a step on me and it was awesome, what's something you.
Can say during sex? But also when you manage a brand Twitter account, And in most detail, to line up with the release of that Zach Effron Ted Bundy movie, I've seen a.
Lot of talk about Ted Bundy's alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally thousands of hot men on the service, almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers.
You get the idea. By early twenty twenty, Arbi's had created their own WIFU character, and by the time the pandemic lockdown happened, Nathan Alibach Crace's accounts like this, moving into a more blue Ball's horny style of content. So by this logic, we were to believe, as social media consumers that the brands were sitting at home along with millions of other people not having sex. By twenty twenty one,
horny brands have been fully normalized. I'm talking weird posts of build a Bears and silk robes called build a
Bear after Dark. I'm talking KFC's Twitter posting jacked Colonel Sanders fanart without any comment, and even Denny's Parkening back to our first episode in this series comes full circle and pulls from the IHOB playbook, briefly rebranding itself as Wait for It, Daddies, and It's here we arrive at the duo Lingo owl horny saga that has since evolved into multiple story arcs, and most recently, a pivot back to violence when the green owl Duo Lingo mascot named
Duo was quote unquote hit by a cyber truck and killed. And all of this happened just as I started working on this series in early February twenty twenty five. And yes, because it is twenty twenty five, Duo Lingo immediately had merch to launch their dead mascot.
With twenty twenty five has got us all knocked down. But not to worry. Where monetizing grief because we are in corporation.
For the low price of twenty nine ninety nine, you could prove you really love Duo and friends with the customs cop.
I mean, you got to hand it to them, monetizing grief. Who do they think they are? Me and every comedian
I've ever met. But none of this would be possible without the Duo Lingo head of social Media, Zaria Parvez, who moved from Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shortly after graduating college to start working at Duo Lingo, and whose energy and enthusiasm and frankly just being a longtime poster brought the company to New heights and escalated all the way to showing Duo the Owl's little ass cheeks during
a Super Bowl commercial. And because we did an ethics check in our last episode to see how closely the business practices of Stakhum aligned with Nathan's progressive social media campaign, I'm going to take this chance to do a quick look at the product that the unhinged energy of Zaria's interpretation of Duo the Owl. So let's take a look
at Duo Lingo. Honestly, after looking at this for a while, I think Zaria Parvez has it a little bit easier than anyone else I've talked to during this series, really, just because she is not hawking processed meat. Instead, it's her job to try and engage younger audiences online into learning a second language on their phone. It is a comparatively wholesome mission, and the company itself has been mostly
without scandal. And I say mostly because like many longtime successful apps, there has been an increased reliance on AI from Duo Lingo that's given them the excuse to lay off much of its workforce. And we can assume using AI has had a tremendously negative impact on the environment. No company without sin, but Duo Lingo was founded in twenty eleven by two twenty some things. As these businesses tend to be founded by a guy named Lewis van
On and the bone chillingly named Severin Hacker. Imagine knowing a guy with that name. So while the AI controversy is entirely bullshit, and from what I can tell, the founders have been very evasive about it as far as an app that inevitably collects user data goes, NordVPN recently said that Duo Lingo is a relatively safe app to use. Sure they've had data breaches before, but not more than
your average app. I actually used Duolingo myself for a while during the summer of twenty nineteen after I saw the movie Midsummar and decided, Hey, Jamie, what if you learned Swedish so you can Midsummar. I'm not sure what the thinking was there, and it was really vulnerable of me to tell you that, because since the twenty twenty lockdown, Duolingo membership with both pay and free account options has
continued to increase. It's a very successful app, and Zaria Parvez explains in our interview that She chose to go to Duo Lingo over other marketing jobs because of its mission. She wanted to work for a company whose mission she believed in and a workplace that was likely to be more diverse. Because being Pakistani American, she very often found herself being the only non white person in the room and hoped that a company with a multicultural mission stood
to be a little bit different. So Zaria comes aboard to Duolingo. In twenty twenty a terrible time to be a person, much less a recent college graduate, but as we just revisited, a sort of darkly advantageous time to be a social media marketer. Speaking in the most cynical terms possible, you weren't likely to find a more captive audience than twenty twenty, and learning a lot language mostly for free seemed to many like a less nihilistic way
to spend one's time. But even with that considered, prior to early twenty twenty one, Duo Lingo wasn't really known for its social media presence, even though, as we just talked about, Horny Brand's strategy on social media had already reached its peak at this time, at least over on Twitter. So while Zaria didn't invent this style, she has essentially perfected it because, as any convincing social media marketer does, I've gleaned at this point, she's made her own playbook
and posted what she actually thought was funny authenticity. It's the thing that all advertisers are going for, and so few actually accomplish. Okay. Early twenty twenty one, Zaria Parvez has yet to take the lead on Duo Lingo's social media, but has been at the company for about a year at this point, and Duo Lingo at this time is running a pretty dry social strategy, and for the purposes of this episode, I'm going to focus on TikTok, where
they've had the most success at this time. The plan was ostensibly to pay existing TikTok influencers to collaborate with the brand and talk about the languages that they were learning in order to get their fans to sign up for the app. You've seen stuff like this before. It's nothing particularly edgy, but the posts you're cute.
Did you know that?
In Dutch there is the saying new compt de app out the mau, which means now the monkey comes out a sleeve.
New compt de app out.
The mau is used when something is revealed that was previously secret.
However, the posts were also underperforming, and per Azaria in our interview, the company didn't think it was worth the fees of the influencers to continue it, and instead of thinking of a new strategy, Duo Lingo very nearly deprioritized TikTok marketing entirely, and Zaria, an avid TikTok fan herself, disagreed with this and asked for the chance to just
chase a few trends on the app. And almost immediately this approach blew up, in no small part thanks to a mascot suit of Duo, the Green Owl, that Zaria found hanging around the office luring at everybody. The first video that blows up is one of Zaria herself, because in the beginning she appeared in these videos pretty regularly. She's sitting at a desk in the Duo Lingo offices with the creepy empty owl mascot suit sitting behind her, with trending audio playing. How am I supposed to live
laugh love in these conditions? And in part because of the weirdness of it, and in part because of using that trending audio, this TikTok blows up and before you know but Zaria is on a roll. She asks a coworker to jump into the duo owl suit that's Mark, and within a couple of weeks, the TikTok account had fully pivoted to using Duo as a sometimes menacing, sometimes vaguely horny tool to remind people on TikTok to do their daily duo lingo or to sign up and start
learning a language if they hadn't already. Now, if you haven't used duo Lingo before, this probably sounds weird and circuitous, but if you have, it's no surprise that Zaria's strategy, which was both very intentional and really fun for her to do, worked really well because the way that she was anthropomorphizing Duo the Owl was very similar to the way that fans of Duo Lingo had been making popular
memes about that same character for years. The difference was that, prior to Zaria taking on this role at the front of social media, the company had never interacted with these very popular memes. So while it might sound out of nowhere that Zaria having a static image of the Duo mascot suit in the office with her eyes, mouth and voice lip syncing to audio like this.
Uh oh oh, I know what the consequences of my actions.
You know it's your boy, and I just want to apologize here because I know how painful it is for people to explain tiktoks to you. Just ask your most annoying friend. But the comments that Duo or Zaria was replying to here all had to do with Duo Lingo streaks or basically, did you use Duo Lingo today to preserve your however many day long streak of learning whichever language. It's a big incentive of using the app and always
had been so. Users had made a ton of memes of the reminder push notifications that Duo Lingo would often send its users to remind them to do their daily lessons or lose their streak, and these notifications were presented somewhat menacingly by the supposedly friendly Duo the owl, and this led to the user generated meme Evil Duo Lingo Owl, a photoshop version of Duo holding a gun and saying something like the Duo Lingo owl when you haven't practiced in two days. It was pretty funny and it became
a meme format for other stuff. But this meme became popular among Duo Lingo users all the way back in twenty seventeen. I can confirm this because it definitely existed the summer that I failed to learn how to introduced myself in Swedish. But it took four full years until twenty twenty one for the Duo Lingo company via Zaria, to embrace this ethos as their mascot's actual personality. So again,
Zaria is using raw material that was already there. Where social media managers like Amy Brown or Nathan Alabach had to create a personality for a legacy company, Zaria Parvez is taking existing memes and using her own creativity to amplify it for a relatively young company, and she gets
a lot of support internally to do this. Zaria was in her early twenties when this began and was basically given free reign to turn Duo the Owl into a mascot suited TikTok sitcom agent of chaos, and, as she explains in our interview, the account's ever climbing presence seemed to boost user retention and daily use on the app itself, particularly among young people, because keep in mind that in the early twenty twenties, the vast majority of TikTok users
were still teenagers and people in their early to mid twenties, and so particularly in twenty twenty one, to do well on TikTok was to uniquely corner a market of young people, and these young people on TikTok, from what at least initial conventional studies have reflected, were more willing to interact with a brand account on social media than the millennials
and particularly gen Z Internet users of your were. And we've traced this throughout this series because even when a brand was attempting to act authentically even ten years earlier, you would very frequently see the comments flooded with silence brand memes. But by the time Zo Maria Parvez is acting as Duo the Owl, if a brand was coming off as authentically online seeming, there were very few calls
of this nature. Because Duo was playing knowingly into a then four year old, originally fan made meme and represented an ostensibly wholesome company, most young users didn't seem to really have a problem with it. And another big difference was that these young users seemed well aware that the account was being run by one of them, making it easier to play into the fun. Going back to the character of Duo of the Owl, when Duo was characterized as violent, it was a brand focused kind of violent.
He was willing to kill in order to keep Duo Lingo users' streaks going, and so in the early days of the account's virality, the shorthand for this was Spanish or Vanish, and the followers of the Duol account loved this and interacted with it very, very frequently, which only boosted its engagement in the algorithm. When the Duo Lingo account posted a vague threat to keep its members on their streaks, commenters would jokingly beg for their lives. Here are a few examples.
Duo, it's the FBI release the families don't feel like it thinks, so Duo watches over my lessons more than the FBI watches over the most wanted criminals.
Duo, it's hard being a single mom who works two jobs and the survive. But Zaria also switches things up every so often so that no one approach lasts long enough to burn out fans of the account, and that was hard on an Internet trend cycle that kept moving faster and faster. But I know why you're here. You're here to hear about the horny posts. So for your purposes,
two things stand out. Not because Duo the Owl was the first to be a horny anthropomorphized character for from it, but Duo certainly went the furthest that a prominent brand had gone to this point. One we'll discuss in more detail in our interview, which was a collaboration between Duo Lingo and Fellow Down for whatever style social media brand scrub Daddy, which is a sponge company that genders sponges. I have a scrub mommy in my sink right now.
No time we talk about it in the interview, but the two social media teams met up, and long story short, Duo Lingo and scrub Daddy decided to make it seem as if their two mascots had a baby together. I promised this will be the last very scary thing I described in this episode. So as this music is playing, it's accompanied by a slideshow of pictures of the scrub Daddy anthropomorphic sponge character holding Duo the Owl's shoulders as the Owl literally gives birth to owl shaped sponges at
what cost? At what cost? And keep in mind this is fairly recent in social media history, so after the fall of the clickbait marketing zenith, years of BuzzFeed, Mashable, you name it. So if you want to go viral as a brand, now it's up to employees to capture the interests of users directly, not a random underpaid writer beholden to posting twenty clickbait pieces a day, and in order to do that, you need to do more. You can't just be horny. You have to be the horniest
brand that's ever existed. The other example in Duo Lingo's case, which sort of served as a story arc, was Duo
the Owls crush on Dua Lipa. Don't overthink it. The name sounds similar, and because TikTok is run by an opaque, uncannily people pleasing algorithm, a TikTok using trending audio that featured the photo of a current celebrity like Dua Lipa was bound to have a good start in the algorithm in terms of gaining subtraction, but it wasn't enough, and the Duo Lingo account escalated most memorably when they posted Duo photoshopped with Zaria's eyes and mouth onto Duo in
a public pool, asking ew who pete.
In the pool?
Cut two a photo of Dua Lipa on the red carpet, captioned sorry it was me. Cut two Duo the Owl photoshopped as a mermaid swimming underwater, swimming in hot Girl piss.
Yay, we did it.
You listen to this series for three hours just so you could get to do a leapus piss. You could just watch porn. The wild thing here is that even when the approach seems deeply unhinged on Duo Lingo's behalf, Zaria is one of the few social media managers that can prove her approach leads to user retention. Data bears this out, but there is also proof from the comments in these same horny posts from Reddit after the Piss TikTok.
Honestly, every time Duo shows up on my for you page, I log and do my owl homework for the day, so it seems like they're doing something right. Do aleapap jokes be damned.
The Duo Lingo TikTok account hits a million followers in late twenty twenty one and now boasts nearly seventeen million followers, and none of this would have happened with the old vagaries of the influence overlap attempt that existed when Zaria began working there. Not only did other young TikTokers love the way that Duo interacted with trends, but they also clearly understood that behind this account was a social media
manager working hard and hopefully having fun. A comment from twenty twenty two bears this out.
If they fire you, I will never duoh another lingo and I literally have a one hundred and fifty nine day streak because of this account.
And this also indicates a pretty significant generational shift from the time that we began covering this series. Our first interview was with Serenity Disco, who, when acting as Denny's on Twitter and Tumbler, had some Internet users recognize that they were a middle class person operating the account, but
it wasn't assumed that they were. The way it is now where Zaria was and is catering to multiple generations of online users, and what seems indisputable based on available research, is that millennials were more willing to engage with targeted ads than Gen X, Gen Z was more willing to engage with targeted ads than millennials, and now Gen alpha
is more willing to engage with targeted ads than Gen Z. Terrifying. Yeah, I'm still constantly pursing out how young people are both uniquely attuned to the ways in which capitalism is dismantling their lives and are willing to engage with it when it's fun. But I'm no better. Gen X is the same,
Gen Alpha is the same. And while I do believe that the children are our future, blah blah blah, the children are being raised by algorithms are generation made, and we don't know what we're doing, so it's a cycle that is bound to continue repeating. Okay, we're talking about the horny owl. By twenty twenty four, Duo Lingo was horny posting during Super Bowl ads, playing the following commercial
and just try to guess what's happening based on the sound. Okay, you win one hundred dollars if you knew that was duo the owls but inflating until it popped into a second Duo the Owl and then just the words do your duo Lingo. While Zaria did not conceive this commercial directly. She made this possible, and as time passed, Zaria was given the funding to build out her own team and work with other ad agencies to build her vision for
Duo to factor directly into the app itself. More recently, when a social media campaign with Duo is rolled out, it's reflected in the logo of the app. So if Duo is sick on TikTok, Duo is sick on the Dual Lingo app, and you can't really lose if you're the company here, because even if a user does not engage with the brand online, seeing an icon that's normally a smiling owl suddenly being a vomiting owl might make you stop in your tracks and remember to practice Spanish again.
Most recently, as I mentioned earlier, this resulted in a stunt that had Duo the Owl and all the other expanded universe Duo Lingo characters murdered by a cyber truck, which got mainstream attention. That's genuinely hard to pull off these days when so many clickbait aggregators have fallen or pivoted to Nazism. I mean, Dua Lipa herself mourned Duo the Owl just a couple weeks ago.
Duo the Owl is dead and pop star Dual is responding. On February eleventh, the language learning app Duolingo announced their mascot, Duo the Owl, was fatally hit by a Tesla cybertruck. In a statement, the app wrote, tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do
we know. Duo Lingo also encouraged users to share their credit card numbers in the comments, adding at the end, we appreciate you respecting do Alipa's privacy at this time, and now do a Lipa is responding on X with her own words of mourning, writing till death Duo part, adding a broken heart.
Emoji and if killing the mascot sounds familiar, it's because this kind of mirrors the nut Alert Mister Peanut death stunt of twenty twenty. There was also a Super Bowl commercial for this, complete with the kool Aid man's tears fertilizing the ground and growing a baby. Mister Peanut.
Mister Peanut, he spent his life bringing people together.
I know he'd be happy that we all hit together.
Thankfully. Dual Lingo changes course quickly after killing off Duo the Owl and instead of doing a weird commercial, instead cross promoted between marketing and the Duo Lingo app itself to quote bring Duo back to life. This meant having users engage with the app in order to do so, and two weeks and a shitload of press later, Duo the Owl was back to normal. And that amount of cooperation across departments and a company is pretty unique by
today's standards. So enough, horny setup, change your underwear. Let's hear it from the Green Owl's proxy herself. Up next, my conversation with Zaria Parves. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I just wanted to take a moment to say I really appreciated the thread on the sixteenth minute reddit board from last week asking politely if I farted during the interview last week. And sorry to disappoint, but I am pretty sure that was a glitch on Apple podcasts. A
likely story, I know. Anyways, here's my interview with Dual Lingo's own, Zaria Parvez. This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
Yeah. Hi, my name is Zaria.
I'm the global Senior Social Media Manager at due Lingo and I've been here for about five years. I handle all of our content with my amazing content team that you see on our TikTok our Instagram or YouTube.
So really just in it and the weeds with social at due Lingo.
What a lot of people don't know is actually Duelingo is my first job out of college. Yeah, so I did not job before this, which is kind of crazy, But I grew up in Portland to Oregon and I attended University of Oregon. I studied marketing there and my
focus was actually brand strategy. Then the pandemic came around and I graduated, so I was like a twenty twenty grad and I knew I wanted a job in marketing, but I was seeing what was out there, and I think, like, for me, like my biggest thing is I really wanted to be like I always say, I work best in the shadows and in the preiphery, So like I wanted to be at a company that was kind of like still starting up with like their marketing, they weren't like
number one in the game at the time, but also like a company that had a good ethos. So like that's kind of how I stumbled into like going to Pittsburgh, I guess from Portland and like finding dueling go and all of this was I just wanted to be at a company that was like inherently diverse, and I thought, hey, like a place that teaches languages sounds like a pretty
diverse place to be. And they had a social media coordinator role open when I was starting, Like, I was interested in marketing, but I didn't know it was social and I was just more chasing the company versus the job. And I was like, I'm new, I'll figured it out and if it's for me, great, If not, we can always pivot. But yeah, that's a little bit about me.
I hope this sounds like the compliment is intended to be. It makes so much sense that you're from Portland. It just really clarifies a lot. That makes me feel good because I miss organ every day. Well, in my experience in college, they weren't teaching the internet correctly or well, I'm curious, how did you get drawn to marketing and how is it taught to you versus what the industry ended up being.
Like, that's such a cool question. I don't think I've ever been asked that before. I actually was in pre med.
I like every other Pakistani kid that I was going to become a doctor and quickly learned one quarter in that I am not going to chemistry and it wasn't for me. But what I did really love about chemistry in general was like writing the lab reports. Like that for me was like, oh, this is fun, and like especially the last part that's always like explain why this
matters in the world. And I think for me, like that was kind of a moment where I was like, Okay, I'm a writer, and like I'm failing my chem tests, but I'm doing well on lab reports, so maybe there's
something here. And as people do in college, started exploring other things and just seeing what was out there, and advertising a university organ is huge because like White and Kennedy Nike, it like all comes from organ so I knew of it and I just like took one class one quarter and absolutely was like, Yeah, this is what I want to do.
I can be creative and I can.
Write, and I can create things and get paid fairly well for it, So like, yeah, why would I not do this? And at my heart and at my core even now, I still think I'm a writer. Like writing is my true joy, whether that's like comedy writing or like little captions or like the punchy lines that you see on Duo's tiktoks, or like long form marketing just kind of became like my whole personality, which is kind
of cringe. But in college I was like part of like our ad team and like went to nationals and like.
Created campaigns for like Wiener Schnitzel.
And like Adobe, which is so random, very class president energy, but I just really fell in love with it. I loved the fact that it mixed art and science, and I loved the fact that it was just like it was just cool, like you could do cool things and create cool stuff and see it out in the world.
But they did not teach social media.
Like going back and looking at these campaigns I made, they were like, yeah, we'll activate maybe on TikTok, but
social was like not there. I think what helped me stand out is I was just I loved it as a consumer, Like I was just on social and I always scared about my grids and how things looked, and that also, I think is kind of what set us up for success here at Duo in the sense where like I was kind of entering this job as like someone who just loves social media and like looking deeper into it versus like an advertiser who specializes in social media, Like it allowed me to not work as an advertiser
and generally they just work as like a creator, which I think ultimately helped the brand because it allowed us to not be so caught up on like advertising things.
I do think it's interesting how little you were taught about social media in your marketing class and now you are quite literally at the top of social media marketing because it wasn't necessarily what you learned at school. What was your relationship with the internet like growing up, What was your sort of flavor of being online growing up?
Yeah?
So I mean I don't remember a life without an internet, Like I feel like that's always been around me. And then I think the funniest thing is I actually wasn't allowed to have social media until I was a junior in high school.
So did you secretly have it?
End? Absolutely yes.
So my favorite story is actually, when I was in third grade, YouTube was like the big thing, right, and so I actually got suspended for making a YouTube video that accidentally went viral and it was yeah, and it was about why students shouldn't be attending my strict Catholic school, and like I was like it was like, so like don't come here because a bit, but for some reason, it like blew up and I got called to the principal's office and I remember this so well, and she's like,
in my dad was there, and my dad my mom and dad both works, and like I always went to like after school things like if my dad's there in the middle of the day, I'm like, I'm WoT. Yeah, I saw him and I was like, oh, but he wasn't like Matt, Like he was just sitting there neutral, So like, okay, what's going on? And our principals like, so we know you have a YouTube channel and I was like, oh god, Like I was more worried about
her saying that my dad getting mad. And she's like, you had this one video and I was like what are you taught? And I was like and it was like such a nothing video to me, and she was like it under your name, Yeah, it was under the Mega Freakable.
That was my Like okay.
I was like what was the user?
Yeah, okay, And she was like we have like we're trying to fundraise for like this new school and like this has blown up and it's inappropriate because you're like bashing the school and the program whatever. And she's like, because of this, like we'll be giving you like a one day suspension. And my dad was like we were just like okay, like it was really neutral, and I was like, he's going to like give it to me after we leave this meeting.
We walk out and he's like, well, at least you get a Monday off. And I was like, what is going on? Literally, and he was like he's like, he's like, I saw it.
He's like, never make a YouTube video ever again and delete your account, which happened, but he was like, I don't see any problem with it. He's like, I'm glad for you. I'm glad that you used your voice. And I'm like, great, thank you. Oh oh yeah, that's so great.
And that was in third grade.
So I think like for me, like Duo's personality of like being unhinged, being out of pocket, like it's just kind of my personality in a way of like I've always probably said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing, and like working for a brand that has that persona made it really easy. But yeah, that was just kind of my my relationship with social has just been like I've always just been on it and used it and loved it.
How does your relationship with social media kind of evolve as you're growing up.
I loved it, like I was always on it.
I cared about my Like getting my Instagram my junior year was like the biggest thing ever. I was like, oh my god, I finally have an account. Loved Twitter, had had the classic like mean girl Twitter moment with like you know, your middle school enemies and like all of that stuff. Going on social was like every part, Like that was what I did my free time. And it's like, I mean obviously other activities too, but like social was just always part of my life, like it
was never That's why it was like never nothing. So like when I saw this, I was like, yeah, I could do social for a brand, Like how hard can it be? Like I know, like content basics, I know marketing basics, Like how hard can it be to bring the expertise that I know personally with professional work, which is a little naive but maybe I needed.
That to have that confidence.
So Okay, so you get this job right out of college?
Yeah, so I was in Portland, but then I moved on my own because I just wanted to move to Pittsburgh in August of twenty twenty, but our office didn't open until September of twenty twenty one, when like we had people coming in and that's actually when our like TikTok really took off. So like I was doing like so like quote unquote boring social work for Duo too for a year, Like I was just figuring out like what it even means to be working a nine to five and what corporate life is.
How do people talk about duo online because I feel like I've been seeing duo with the gun for years.
Yes, when we started the memes exist, we did not acknowledge them. Like it was very like brand safety, we can't say that we can't do that, or language learning app that means we have to have proper punctuation because people are gonna look.
To us blah blah blah.
Like it was very much that way, and I mean I was Neil was like, yeah, you're right, Like who am I to like change that? Like I'm just here to clock and clock out create the content. So that's kind of how it started.
So that was that was like the policy at the time, Yeah, like that's just what it was.
I also wasn't like we need to be doing this, Like I didn't see it at that time because I was still learning like just how to navigate it. I think the switch kind of happened when that original like learn Italian on TikTok and all that stuff started coming
out and it wasn't doing that well. And that was like the first time we actually put like investment into like a social platform, so like money and budget were being put behind that, and they were like, yeah, we need to cut this, like this is not worth our spend, and it got to the point where I see I was like TikTok's on a company priority, like we don't into doing this. And I remember at that point kind of feeling like no, like TikTok still like works, We're
just doing it wrong. And I think even that was like a year into my career where I was like able to build more of a voice and build like more of an understanding of our brand and like just kind of absorb what it is to like work in social And so then to my boss.
She stopped that.
We're like Okay, that's fine, Maybe that's just not the way to go about it my boss. We got back into the office and this was my first day actually in the office during the pandemic, after the pandemic pandemic. So I walk in and this suit is like in this back corner and this suit is actually was first made just for like hr like recruiting events, like just kind of internal things. It was never posted ever on
any of our platforms. I was like, that's weird, Like why is there just like an owl suit sitting by the market. Like it looked weird, So we see it, and I like by the time, like I was just on social and I was like, oh, like there's like this trend that's like how am I supposed to like live, laugh, love in these conditions? And I'm like I literally feel like that right now, Like this is like staring at me. I'm in marketing in like a corporate office, and it's
just like whatever. And I was taught telling my boss, I was like, gonna be funny if we like filmed a TikTok of like me sitting here working and like this owl looking at me being like how am I supposed to live left love in these conditions?
And she's like, yeah, that's funny. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's funny. Can you actually film me?
And I think I have an idea here, and so she's like sure, So she grabbed her phone and we just put like the duo suit behind me and we filmed it with that audio and we posted it and it went stupid viral and that was like, wait a minute, like there is something here with this suit and the comedy, and like since that day, like five like four years ago, like it's just been iterating and iterating and iterating on that court insight that like that suit is just ridiculous
and it's almost like a form of satire because marketing was so fresh at Duelingo at that point, like we didn't have these systems even in place to like get marketing checks or like social checks and like we're an engineering first org. Like respectfully, they didn't care about marketing at that point, like we were not a priority team, like, which is fine, Like that's just how it was.
That's how it was.
But because there was it was a start up vibe and no one really cared. We had free rein to kind of just do whatever.
Seeing like the other sort of weird approaches to two brands had you seen, like the Wendy's Twitter back in the day, was the stuff you were familiar with? Was was there any inspiration you were taking from past approaches?
Yeah, I think, I mean I think everyone knew about Wendy's Twitter, like obviously I think for me though, it was never as an Internet person, I didn't care about brand Twitter or like brand talk. I guess now is what I like and like when I grew like that was not who I was following, Like yeah, and I would hear the couple of clapbacks from Wendy, It's like that one's super viral, But it was never like, oh,
this is my source of inspiration. I think more of what was my source of inspiration for social and how I wanted to build duo on like TikTok particularly, was the success the character has had on the app, and like the funny sentences or like the things people are already sharing. And I actually think a lot of brands do have memes already made about them. They're just scartlean and.
Like we were.
But like my whole thing was like okay, like we've had a couple of Twitter moments that community has made, like do it with a gun, like how do I bring that to life on TikTok, Like that was my
job was translating that. So I think my inspiration was actually more of like how our designers and product team and content team built our app to be like naturally gamified and interesting and getting people like make fan art about it, or like getting people to like talk about the different dynamics of the characters, like there's something there if like people are organically talking about a brand, because no one really does that on social, like at least
I still don't. I mean, I do a little bit for my job outside of that, Like I feel like if I didn't work in marketing, I probably would not care about brands on social. So that was really cool to me that people were they cared about this brand for some reason.
When you start getting kind of like a longer leash to try weirder stuff, it seems like the whole office is on board and is like regularly cast and stuff.
Yeah, so I always say that, Like the number one person that believe me was obviously my boss who filmed the first video, and then Mark Pavoc, who wore the duo suit for me.
Okay, yeah, so is it the is it the same guy.
It changes now now that our team's grown and evolved. We like higher dancers and stuff because Mark does have a full time job at due Lingo.
That's not doing that before everything blew up.
Or I was like I had these ideas, but like no one wants to film with me, Like can you because I just know you, like from just working.
Together, and he was like, yeah, of course, I don't know.
I feel like I literally owe my career to him, and like MICHAELA who was my first boss, because they believed in me and they did it. And then the video started popping off and doing well. And the other person that really believed in me was our legal uh legal Steve was like I love what you're doing on TikTok, Like here's some trends I see, or here's some things we can do, or like how do we make this
like streamline? So it wasn't like I think that's what's special about duos because it was so small and startupy. It never had these like social versus legal or social versus like. It was never that energy and because we started off so viral early on, we've kind of just kept that.
Energy to never exists because we never knew a world where that exis.
Does the staff their skew younger generally?
Yeah, I mean yeah, we definitely do have some like more seasoned marketing people, but they're very like we hired a sow like because I was the only social coordinator at the time, Like, we hired you because we know we're bad at this and we need to be better at it, so please do it. Like that was the mentality.
And then as I hired my team out, I think I'm the eldest, and I'm like it's crazy because I'm still used being the youngest, but like I was youngest on the team and now I'm twenty seven, and like our team spans from like twenty one to twenty four, so like it's a very young team. But we also have like like millennials as well on our team that like help us with like other things. So it's like we kind of just all use our assets as like
across age ranges. I actually really need, like my role managers like expertise and like how do you navigate a strategy and sell it? Like how do you show that like the impact I have actually matters? It's like that's important, right then I also need like the twenty year old on my team of like what does what does Jen alpha in doo now? Because like I'm not gen Alpha and like to help bring that to life. So I think everyone just plays their part in a really different way.
So as you know, I love writing, so I always believe that, like, yes, humans were natural storytellers, and like
that is what brands want to do. But we're so obsessed with telling our own story that we're not listening I guess to the stories that like other people are saying, which sounds like so like bad da, but like other stories, like people are puttingduo with a gun, Like that's a story too, all right, So like for me, it's like yeah, exactly, And I think that for me was like how do I build almost a sitcom around this character and show
these different storylines? And like we all have the tropes, right, Like there's the lover, there's the enemy, there's the like hero's journey, there's the struggle, there's the things they love, the things they hate, and like why can't brands have that, especially when you have a character involved, Like yeah, like I'm going to do it, and the only way to do it is to just keep exposing the audience to it, so like that was like where du Alipa came from,
and the insight is just like Duelingo just sounds like du Alipa, So we're.
Like dumb people are saying that anyways.
Yeah, yeah, and she's hot, so we're like perfect, that's who Like Duo is going to be upset, like that's his love interest or like just kind of integrating the way that we know how to tell stories as humans or the stories that we enjoy and just finding the pieces that need to be filled and figuring out who those are was like, I think kind of how we built our strategy around it.
And has there been any sort of pitch that you've experienced pushback on?
Oh all the time.
Actually, Like the scrub Daddy video, our CEO messaged me to take it down, but it already I was like, it already made us around striking, I'll take it down.
Is the original not of because I remember it's not yea, I guess the different one.
So okay.
The story around this was.
Something I was trying to do at that stage in my career, was like, how do I find more like minded like brands and social teams to like kind of amplify our presence, like as just being content creators. And the scrub Daddy team was a team that I really looked up to. They made really funny content and it literally was just like, hey, guys, do you guys want to do like a free content club, Like we'll bring the duo suit, you bring the scrib Daddy suit, come to the office, we'll create stuff.
We're like, all right, this is like what we want to do.
And then they were like, oh, we created these cute little duo sponges and I was like, oh, that's are cute babies.
And that was kind of it.
And we were creating content and I was like, guys, what if like I've been seeing this like pregnancy like TikTok going off. I don't know, Like it was so crazy, very tradwife kind of stuff, and I was like, what if we use this glad you came with this video and they were like, yeah, yeah, why not. So we like filmed it, we put it up, we posted it, and it blew up, and I think, like for us, and this is actually also in a sense happened with the Dead Duo.
We kind of forget like how attached people are.
To duo that like we're so lost in the sauce sometimes that we're like, yeah, we'll posted an ogle viral. Well I guess like maybe I won't even go that far or maybe maybe a million views, And then people were like no, no, no, we like this, and now it's like lore. When we posted that, it stayed up for like four hours and our c I was like, guys, we cannot be doing this. And I was like, okay, great, I'll take it down. However, what do you not like
about it? He's like the visuals weird, but like he's like, more than that, the glad you came makes it like really weird. So I was like, okay, what if I repost it, but just don't add that part to the top, like the glad you came and change the audio And he's like, okay, fine. Like it's always a negotiation for like these high risk moments, and it's never a like take it down, you're in trouble. How dare you do
this to our brand? Like it's not punishment. It's like we're iterating and learning, and the only way you know where the line is until you cross it on social because social changes every day. Honestly, like the people that are most upset about duo things or marketers like usually are And that's where we were like, well, who are we prioritizing, Like if we see this negative sentiment going up,
like who's driving this? And ninety percent of the time it's someone who works in marketing that's just like upset about us not having the clear brand guidelines and strategy and things that we've all learned to do, while our audience is like, we love it and we're getting new users, so I'm like, our priority is always going to be our new users and new business while like obviously like we love marketers and want them to enjoy what we're doing.
But like when we.
Prioritize, like how we assess risk, its goal is going to have like our users first. I think what was cool is like we have how did you hear about a survey which before just existed as an onboarding survey when you joined, and it would say like did you learn about.
Us from friends, from family, from Google? Whatever?
And as our TikTok started blowing up, we were like, what if we just add TikTok to that and see like who knows? Because at the time we were like impressions, great brand awareness done, and then it was like maybe there is a tie, and then we just added TikTok and every time we had a viral video, like a video over a million views, bam, a spike any users, bam. It would keep like we would keep seeing it. And then that's also when a sl team senior leadership was
like let them cook. And that's literally what it's been like, which is so awesome. And I think the origin stories of how we almost worked backwards like has worked out well. And now it's funny because you'll see like SLT pitch ideas.
To us and they're like will they accept it?
Like will they green light it, which is like different than like a lot of social teams where they're hoping that like their senior leadership like allows them to post what they want to post.
Right, you have the power, Yeah, exactly, And we'll be right back with more. Zaria Parvez and Horny Little Owl. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I'm in the middle of reading that new tell All memoir about working high up at Facebook, and guys, I think this Mark Zuckerberg guy might be kind of a bad fella. Mark.
He's wired in Sorry, he's wired in? Yes, about now you're still wired in?
Where's the rest of my interview with Zaria Parvez.
A big part of my like what I've been working on honestly, like this past half and like this year is evolving our brand and what does that look like.
So we actually started like a writer's room.
Where I brought in people who were like I've always enjoyed their work, love them, think they're smart, and they have no care about dueling. Go like, let like come in and like just tell me, like how you would like how would you advertise due lingo music? And like I gave pretty much gave them no context, barely any brief just to see what they would come out with. Glean, I like, never want unhinged to just be like our crutch.
So I like, for me, it's like we should be unhinged to be funny, Like it shouldn't just be like showing duos, but just to get engagement, Like it needs to have like a reason why we're being unhinged, because that makes it that just makes a joke smarter and funnier. WHOA like you guys just put duos but on national TV like as brands as we try to strategize everything so much, and like humans don't think in strategy, Like
some of these things are serendipitous and good moments. And like I always say, it was like seventy five percent luck honestly that it took off, and then like, what's seventy five was twenty Yeah, twenty five. I'm like, we're a good one hundred and then twenty five.
Percent of like just into marketing I know, right well, I was like I need to do go math, but.
Like twenty five percent of just like us optimizing it and like leaning in and like taking advantage of the moment because it's so sad when I see like something viral that a brand can let land, like you know, lean into and they don't, And I'm like, just take advantage of it.
But yeah, I think that.
That's the cool part about it is we were allowed to take advantage of that moment.
So how did dead duo so but that that sounded like a sort of a full company collaboration.
Yeah, So essentially what happened was, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, every maybe like four months, the product team does an app icon change where the normal duo green owl on your phone changes to a different emotion or something just something different, And the whole point is for you to be on your phone and you're so used to seeing that green bird and all of a sudden, like it's sick and there's like a big booger coming out and you're like, ea, what is that? And that
resurrects new users. Something we realized though, is like when it's an emotion, like we did it with sick, do we did it with like a wrinkly face like old looking duo that when it has a user emotion or something, people talk a lot about it on social. Then we were like, Okay, this works well when social works with product. Next time around, let's build another campaign and again maybe it'll do well like whatever. And what happened is product ab tests two things. So they had a debt duo
and I think they had like a crying duo. They both kind of came out the same like marketing like, since you already kind of did a campaign before, what do you want to do?
Like for us, it's kind of the same.
And I was like, I think we should do debt duo because it's an emotion, like people can react and relate to it. And then they'll probably post about it and we can actually build a storyline around. And originally
it was just supposed to be four posts. He died, we announce his death, show the funeral cause of death, then we resurrect him and that and the whole brand messaging behind that was to be like Duo would fake his own death just for you to do your lesson, Like there's nothing this bird won't do for you to just open your damn phone.
So we posted this fake pr state and it blew up, like, Yeah, virality beyond I've ever seen.
And I think being in Pittsburgh, you're kind of in your own little like bubble because you're not in New York, you're not on LA, you're not in these big cities.
When we were like, oh, we were going to post just like the funeral video tomorrow, but we should post it now like people want answers, And so then we post the funeral video and then we're like, wait, what if we like also kill the other characters and like say they're also debt, and like that's like how it kind of kept building, like the narrative, like these posts sort of entering that weren't part of our original social plan and we're like, oh, dang, we really did build
an icon and we killed him and people cared, and I think for us that was a realization moment too.
Of like what did we just do?
And so like that was that was really fun and we've just we got to work with different team members to just bring it to life in different ways, and it was it was such a joy.
It was like one of my highlights of my career for sure.
Part of the reason you went to do Olingo is because it was a company that aligned with your values, which I know, when we're talking about marketing and advertising general, that is a mine field to find a place that you feel good about. Yeah, and now, just having been in advertising your entire professional life, what are your feelings on that? How have you seen that sort of manifest in other areas of this industry.
So I was able to internet the advertising agency my junior year summer. I think the first reaction I had was like, oh, it's like really white and like I grew up like very proudly Pakistani, very proudly Muslim. Like it was just such a different lifestyle, I think, and it was really weird to like walk into a space where like new York City's one of the most diverse cities right ever in the world, and then you just walk in and you're like, there's literally no one that
looks like me. And I think that's also like candidly, a lot of Muslims also don't enter communications fields because naturally most of us tend to be kids of immigrants, and immigrants care about sciences and arts and not arts, sorry, not art, but like sciences and math, and so like a lot of people come engineers and doctors, and like
we don't enter communications fields. And then we ask, hey, like why are Muslims being like badly represented in media, and like because none of us are there, Like we're not prioritizing like being in these spaces, and that's going to have ramifications. And so for me, like that was kind of a big wake up call during like this experience and like nothing like happened.
It just felt weird.
And my entire thesis in college that I was writing for graduation was actually about like a playbook of how to advertise to Muslims and communicate with Muslims and.
Like what does that look like?
So part of that playbook was like all about like diversity marketing, in a sense and like what's the right appropriate way to go about it?
But also like a part of us.
Like exploring like who are like the five Muslims in marketing because I can barely find any and interviewing them, being like how did you end up here?
And like what is the situation?
And like now in my five years, I've seen it grow and expand and I'm so glad to see that there's more diversity there. But like it was just a really interesting wake up call for me where I was like, I I feel happy and most creative in places that I feel safe, and so like that's where kind of
how do lingo fit into the narrative? Where I was like, this seems like a company that has to be inherently diverse because you need people to speak different languages and usually people who speak different languages come from different parts of the world and have to be part of this mission.
And then the co founders themselves are both immigrants. So it was just like so many levels of oh, this makes sense, And like I remember when I accepted the job, doing marketing was not anything, and I remember like I was a top performer at University of Oregon. It was like You're gonna go to Nike, you and know Addin
Kennedy and do all this stuff. And I remember accepting it and somebody like straight up being like that was the biggest mistake you've ever done, Like you should not, Like why are you doing that?
Like why do you give up an agency?
Like because I had an agency offer at the time, and it was like a whole thing, and I was like stressed, Like I was like, did I just like throw in my career?
Like I don't even know what I'm doing.
But I just something in my gut just felt safe there, Like talking to the people in the interview process, I was like, this is just what I want to do, and I'm just going to try it and do it. And it worked out that safety feeling also working in a place where you just feel comfortable, like I was allowed to be myself, which means I was allowed to be unhinged and weird, which means I was allowed to
post these things. Like it creates an environment of like safety and creativity and like bringing in different ways of thinking and like I always say, like being an immigrant kid, like I was a third culture kid. I knew how to like be wide enough for my white friends at school and be broad enough for my parents at home, and like navigate literally jumping between different audiences and different groups and different people. And that's what you have to
do in marketing. You have to know how to talk to different people in their own language. So like third culture kids are like set up for this, they just need this space and the opportunity to do it. So like that's also why I think Dueling Go is so successful, because we focused on that third culture energy in that space, and like sometimes you'll still see like Tiktoks and Earth
that were reaching a new audience. It's still viral because it's like stuff that I know, or like I'm really intentional about our team, Like I want our team to be as diverse as possible, and like we have people from all walks of life, all backgrounds. No one on my content team actually as a traditional marketing background, or if they do, it's like very lightly touched.
Our production assistant, for example, saw.
Her volunteering somewhere and I was like, I just like the way you work with like the systems of the people here.
I think you could be a great PA. Would you like to like join?
So like she does that, which is like crazy, even like our content designer she got rejected from douling Go from douling Goo's illustration and design team, and I was like, cool, I'll take you, and like it was like stuff like that where it's just like I love the underdogs because I think those stories are like the people who try the hardest, who want to do the best and just never got the opportunity to do it for me, Like even brands that like because I'm so part of gen
Z and like brands that I like, I'm actually not a brand talk person in general, Like I'm like, I work on this, I don't want to see it outside of it. But like any brands that I do fallow where like either I really care about their founders ethos or like you know, it's just more like there's some responsibility or accountability there that feels like they care and you can't about it and people can see right through it when it's not the.
Last thing I wanted to talk about burnout and protecting yourself. Yes, how do you've managed that? And I know that no one has the answer, but I'm curious how you've had to sort of manage that throughout your career.
Yeah, so for me. I.
I am so grateful that I was able to skyrocket to so much success so early on. Like I remember when I got four of thirty or thirty at like twenty two years old. I was like, whoa, I'm not just saying that to be like eh, eh, include, you know what I mean, but like it was just.
It felt really surreal.
But the drawback of that was like I don't think I got the opportunity to make mistakes because every mistake I made was in public, and I don't think it's anyone's fault, Like it like it's not like, oh, do overwork to me or like I did this, Like it was just the reality of this situation, and like, I'm glad I took ownership of the world. I'm glad I stood up and said, hey, that was me that created it.
But at the same time, like that created this mental load on myself to the point where I actually took a medical leave last year for like five months of just like sorry, not five months, five weeks.
I wish it was five months.
And I remember telling my boss. I was like, I'm like not well, like I feel anxious coming into the office. I'm scared of something flopping I'm scared of like what people will say about me, Like I don't want my face being seen anywhere I get exactly like and that's not me. Like I feel very fortunate my entire life. I've never actually had like crazy, any like mental health issues, and I was happy with like who I was and
what I wanted to do. And I was like, I'm just burnt out and I just need time away from the spotlight, Like I just need a break to reset and recharge. And I'm lucky I'm at a place that like allowed that and supported that, and like everyone knew. I wrote about it too, like I said, I loved writing.
I wrote about it on my LinkedIn and I shared it, and it was it was one of those things where like as social managers, like we're always expected to wear so many hats that like at some point that's get heavy and it's like I can't, I can't do this. I came back and I remember my biggest thing was like I just never I never want to feel burnout, and I never want to make other people feel burnout around me, especially my team after going through what I
went through. And I think what I really hang on too, is like creativity ebbs and flows, and like we need to be mindful of that. If if you want impact, you have to have those moments of like ebbs. You have to be okay with, like not posting stuff for a couple of weeks. You have to be okay with like people saying I need time off, or hey I need to work leave work early, or hey, I need to work from home today, Like this is overwhelming, Like that needs to be okay and like accepted in part
of your strategy and part of your team structure. So no, I don't have a cure to burn out, but I think for me, that's what I really try to do of like, I am very aware of it, and I just try to find moments of like I never want you to feel like all you are to meies like an impression generator, Like feel creative when you feel creative, and let's figure out how you can work at it. That's kind of how I've been approaching it. I don't know if it's the right way or the wrong way,
but it's working relatively. So some quarters are going to be great and some aren't. And like, not everyone is meant to go viral, and if they were, then like virality wouldn't exist like, that's just part of the cycle of the Internet and life. So as more gen z become role managers who have been through the ringer like how they act and behave and hopefully prevent burnout.
Thank you so much again, Tazaria for her time and her work. I want her to be a comedy writer so bad. Follow her at the links in the description. And with that, dear listener, we emerge from the sacred wood of sentient brand marketing on social media. And where does this leave us? I don't know, honestly. Well, I'm very grateful to the marketing professionals and just kind people who lent their time and experience to make this series possible.
It still does give me some uneasy about the future of what marketing is going to look like on the Internet, and as some listeners were right to point out, representing a company online that is very often cloud chasing on Internet trends can lead and often does lead to something called digital blackface, which is defined by CNN's John Blake as quote a practice where white people co opt online expressions of black imagery, slang, catchphrases, or culture to convey
comic relief or express emotions unquote, although I would say in the case of this discussion, as there are obviously non white people in corporate marketing, although Aszaria pointed out,
this itself is still a very white dominated space. That digital blackface has been used as a way for companies to seem as if they're a part of the mainstream Internet culture that, like so many creative worlds, has been innovated by black artists and creators before having that work co op did by white people, or just capitalism in general. Jen Alpha is the first generation to truly have no memory of what it's like to build a sense of self free from the Internet, and it remains to be
seen what that's going to mean down the line. Because I don't mean to fear monger, I genuinely don't know. These will be my kids, my nieces, my nephews. And the only thing I think you can do that's more unproductive and self sabotaging than assume your children's generation is going to ruin the world is that your children's generation
is solely responsible for saving the world. It does freak me out that kids are more vulnerable than ever to this kind of advertising, and it's a relief when that advertising is for something as innocuous as learning a second language. But in the big picture, it's hard to say. I have plenty of young parents in my family and friend groups who are trying to shield their kids from pernicious marketing. But let's be honest, we're not going to be any
more successful than our parents were. Think of virtually every social media manager you've heard from in this series. Serenity Disco found themselves on live journaling sites before becoming the Denny's tumbler. Amy Brown was Amy from MySpace before becoming the Wendy's Twitter. Nathan Alibach was an anti capitalist musician before translating that ethos to the stake of Twitter. Zaria Parvez was the kid that was scolded out of taking down a Catholic school in the third grade before becoming
the horny due Lingo bird. As long as there are creative kids, they're going to get around what their parents don't want them to access. And all of these social media managers and writers are talented, funny, creative people who have had to make a living. I think a little bit too easy to criticize this class of writer before
considering how lucky or more often financially privileged. You need to be just to be able to write without worrying where your next rent check is coming from, your healthcare, whatever it may be. Most of us are serving a machine, and to be able to extract yourself from that is a tremendous privilege. But that also doesn't mean that it's the only way to make ends meet. And I feel, to some extent like I'm blowing hot air here. I
probably am because I'm broadcasting this on iHeartRadio. And while I've been really lucky to have basically full creative control of my work here, it's because it's monetized to serve something larger than myself. So I'm certainly not above this, and any criticism of this environment is a criticism of
myself too. The only conclusion I can ever come to is that what would resolve this kind of creativity having to be used to sell something is a public reinvestment into arts and affirming it as something that's important, which under the current American administration. Best of luck, but we should keep talking about it. This weirdly tapers into what we're going to be talking about next week, and so with a little luck and a little bit of revolutionary
action Sentient two Horny Brands. Your sixteenth Minute ends Now. Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeart Radios. It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamielrossis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is from Brant Crater and Pet. Shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats fleeing Casper and my pet rock Bird will
outlive us all. Bye.