Alsone media.
In the late nineteen fifties, the image of the docile, white American housewife was everywhere. The Donna Reed show made plain the expectations of the ideal womanhood of the day, one that strayed significantly from women joining the workforce during World War iiO just a decade earlier.
Children never raises her voice and never screams at them.
Any mother who can get through a day with children without exploding is a saint.
Well, of course, I don't believe in screaming.
A rubber hose is just as effective and it doesn't leave any marks. Of course, Donna Reed produced this show, but that wasn't a part of the narrative. And with Jim Crow laws still in effect for another decade in the seventy year Chinese Exclusion Act just being rolled back earlier in the fifties, you'd be hard pressed to see
anyone but a white woman in American media. The fifties were a time of hyper consumption, of the widespread adoption of television, of telling company your husband just has a little headache when he retreats with a bottle of scotch, having flashbacks to Korea. It was a very different time from now. Well, actually you couldn't get abortions then either. But one thing holds true in America. When faced with discomfort, uncertainty, and oppression, there will always be someone telling you the
solution is to simply buy stuff. And it certainly doesn't hurt if the person telling you to buy stuff is a sexy cartoon man.
Enter Mister Klean gets red of dirt and gum and greet and just a man.
Mister Clean will clean your whole hol Is.
It everything that dinner mister Hotty himself, the brawnie paper towel guy wishes the mister Clean advertising has been strikingly consistent since his debut back in the nineteen fifties. If you live under a he's a bald guy with white eyebrows, huge arms, a white shirt.
And a single earring. Hello, sorry to it. No one wants to hear it. But he is daddy and he always has been.
And from his very inception, mister Clean has been turning on the housewives he's been consistently marketed to. In fact, in that first jingle, a cartoon fifties housewife with a fuck ass little bob is overwhelmed by the tall hunky mister Clean as he makes everything in her home Sparkle. Shout out to the YouTube channel brand Management for aggregating
all of this. As the years continued, mister Clean would appear as either a sexy cartoon or a sexy human man who would tower over cuck husbands and show him what a real man was.
I am serious.
This happens in the ads, but never bragged or.
Made fun of people for not cleaning as well as he could, and customers seemed to love the guy in their own unique, horny little ways. For the record, do I think that mister Clean is kind of like an idealized, slightly queer coded fantasy of a man who simply cleans.
Up after himself.
Sort of?
Yes.
One of mister Clean's weirder moments came pretty early in his story in nineteen sixty two, when a magazine contest was held to give mister Clean a first name. The ad came with suggestive images for mister Clean's new persona, including at least one racist option if you're being generous. Others included mister Clean's take on pirates, weightlifters nights, and even just a mister Clean with a big lipsticky kiss
on his cheek. Check out the copy they write to pitch these first names with the personas Waldo means powerful and mighty, and mister Clean has the might that makes right of the toughest clean jobs, the power to overpower any kind of dirt. Alvin, Alvin is beloved by all men and ladies, brides and babies, recluses, shuntooses, the.
Complete who hooses.
Everybody loves mister Clean, the world's best cleaning man. Bryce means speedy. You can say that twice, because no one ever cleans so much so fast as mister Clean, the original minute man. Guys, I think mister Clean comes fast. I think that's what they're saying. So he's always sexy, but he is sometimes different kinds of sexy. Later in this decade, he was rebranded as sexy mean.
Mean mister Clean.
What made mister Clean on mean lean?
He hates dirt. Eventually the character was translated to Cgi and he got a backstory this whole weird thing.
He was found by farmers.
As a CGI baby who was washing the steps with a magic eraser whatever. By twenty sixteen, parent company Procter and Gamble hired former Twilight Honk kellen Lutz to promote a mister Clean lookalike contest where buff weirdos from all over competed for their chance to appear in ads. But baby, there's no beating the real thing, and so the next year they went for it. By twenty seventeen, mister Clean had made the next logical jump, entering himself into the
annals of horny history. He had a full time social media manager who was working with advertising agencies in Harmony to take away the wink wink and go full fuck. During the twenty seventeen Super Bowl in lieu of booking Elvis Presto as musical act again like they should have, the brand aired an ad that featured CGI mister Clean doing a seductive cleaning dance with a woman in her home, culminating with and its moments like these where I simply
can't stand working in an audio medium. It culminates in this unbelievably detailed shot of mister Clean's toned ass in those white little pants. It's wild, and the clickbait media responded in kind, saying the next day, mister Clean's erotic Super Bowl ad makes us uncomfortable.
The mister Clean super Bowl commercial was too damn sexy and people loved it.
Moms everywhere are losing their minds over the Mister Clean super Bowl commercial, and mister Clean's social media team was fast to react to this attention. The next day, they posted an old school meme of a shy Mister Clean bashfully covering his.
Face with the writing that look when you realize your mom will see your sexy super Bowl ad.
But while mister Clean was making hay of this big moment, the brand was far from alone. By the time this twenty seventeen burst of web activity happened, the Mister Clean brand or the Mister Clean man the lines were getting Hazier.
Was following a carefully developed playbook in which beloved twentieth century American brands, ones that had been developed to become friends with their consumers, took things one step further and they started trying to slide into their customers dms more like mister Cream Right, sorry, sentient sometimes horny brands on
social media. Your sixteenth minute starts now going Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a look back at the internet's main characters, talk to them about how their big moments affected them and what it says about us and the Internet. My name is Jamie Loftus, and I was genuinely, perhaps embarrassingly starstruck to talk to some of the social media managers who are at the heart of this series, because yes, this is going to
be a multi part investigation. It was really cool and surreal to talk to the people behind the pretty controversial practice of how we have come to interact with brands on social media from the twenty tens into now. And while you may be sitting over there saying, Jamie, no need to explain this to me, it makes total sense to me that the American experiment would lead to the Twitter account for fake orangeroduce beverage, Sunny Delight, threatening suicide.
There is actually quite a bit of history that got us there, and even more history since that makes me suspect that if Sonny D made that same threat today, probably no one would care. In this three possibly four part series, let's see what happens.
We're going to go deep, mister clean deep.
Oh my god, on how if you dare look close enough. The duo Lingo Owl begging pop star Dua Liba to fill a pool with her piss so he can swim in it. A thing that truly happened may in fact be the logical endpoint of American marketing. And while it takes until the early twenty tens to become a part of the web to social media history, there are traces of parasocial violence and sex that go back far before then.
And each week we'll be talking to someone who's work got people horny or clench fisted with rage at products, while taking a look at a different facet of why we're here today. This week, we are talking to the creator of the account that started it all, the Denny's Tumblr account run in the early to mid twenty tens by Serenity Disco, who and we'll get into it, still works in tech and advertising now, but now runs an app that encourages self care and avoidance of capitalism driven online burnout.
Could these two things be connected?
Yes.
In futures of this mini series, I'll be speaking with other heavy hitters in this space as it continues to grow and contract with time. I'll be talking to the person who ran the cyberbully Wendy's Twitter account. I'll be talking to the person who ran the lockdown era nihilistic dread of the stakem's account. And yes, listener, I even have a conversation with the person currently running the Horny and possibly canonically dead at the time of this recording, fictional mascot.
Of the Duo Lingo app.
But to get there, you're going to need a little setup on how American marketing has worked and changed over time. How this industry went from a government project turned mad men suited Scotch soaked nightmare all the way to outsourcing the best work in the advertising industry today to underpaid twenty sothter internet natives working check to check. So come with me if you dare to World War One, I am so sorry. You know World War one Archduke Franz
Ferdinandez shot trench foot. Remember that my public schooling was such that it took me a second to remember who fought in World War One, But I vividly remember the pictures that my teacher showed us of trench foot. Good stuff, Thank you, mister Kates. And in the West, advertising took a turn for the insidious as mass advertising began its slow encroachment into our daily lives and then into our homes, and finally directly into our minds. So I'm going to
start with a quick and necessary shout out. The two main sources I use for this installment are Adam Curtis's two thousand and two BBC docuseries The Century of the Self, which traces how Sigmund Freud's ideas went on to deeply impact American marketing, and the twenty seventeen book Via Ten Ti Merchants by Tim Wu, which is a look at how the last century of American marketing tactics have led to many of us becoming our own product to sell. And of course there are plenty of other vital sources
on this topic, but I can't stress enough. I only have a week or so to put these shows together, and it's giving me a skin condition. Okay, World War One a big inflection point in how American marketing works. And that's certainly not to say that attention grabbing, frequently inaccurate news reporting fueled by a need for advertising dollars wasn't already deeply entrenched in Western media by this time.
After all, the term yellow journalism was coined all the way back in the eighteen nineties, modeled after the battle for attention of New Yorkers between rival newspaper publishers William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer. The moment that news became readily accessible and monetized, the integrity of that news came intoes, and in the event of that particular flame war, it's commonly thought to have pushed the US into the Spanish
American War of eighteen ninety eight. And today, as the country's remaining influential news outlets and the social media channels they're disseminated on are largely owned by ugly men with a vested interest in having certain news just not appear or be fully misrepresented, it's much the same, but the
venues where this happens have changed significantly. But what makes the World War One era different, according to Tim Wu, is that this is when the American government decided that it was okay to use these same yellow journalism tactics to get people to enlist in the military, because at the time there wasn't really much of a reason to
volunteer in a war on the side of England. It was politically advantageous for the American administration of the time, but not necessarily for a normal citizen and so to convince people to enlist, they had to bring in admin who could convince a bunch of teenage boys to go get themselves skilled in order to make President Wilson look awesome, and.
They did very effectively.
In the form of the relentless George Creole, a longtime supporter of President Wilson, who churned out ads of young, buff patriotic men fighting against the German army alongside illustrations of the idealized, frail white American woman. And working alongside Creole was a man who would go on to declare
himself the father of public relations. Edward So the Century of the self SIPs the Burneze kool aid a little too hard for my liking, because, after all, leave it to an ad man to say that it was just him who invented PR, which does not appear to be true. According to Tim Wu's research. However, Edward Burnees was scarily good at selling Americans on things they didn't really need, whether that be a war, a box of cigarettes, or
a household product. And his secret weapon was, as it is for many, he was a nepo baby, the American nephew of one Sigmund Freud, whose theories end up having a lot of influence on American marketing as the century wore on. Now I know you know who this guy is, but quick crash course on Freud, Austrian inventor of psychoanalysis. His teachings basically boil down to talk therapy and explaining your current behaviors through repressed memories and feelings.
From the past.
He's the guy that makes it possible for you to blame your being a piece of shit on your mom, whether that's true or not. And his nephew, Eddie Burnez, was a big reason that Freud's work really took off in the US, and Uncle Siggy as he was called, would come to regret this, but by the time he was remorseful about handing his works over to his little nephew in exchange for a nice cigar, it was too late. I'm well aware that there's plenty of dispute on Freud's
actual theories. It's a whole cottage industry basically, but I'm not here to debate whether what he said was true. I'm here to tell you that much of the advertising in the front half of the twentieth century proceeded as if.
It were true.
This meant that advertising, especially headed by a little nephew Eddie Burnez, was designed to appeal to the latent violence and horniness within every prospective consumer. Freudian psychology is centered around repression, and Burnees took this idea and offered up a product to solve a problem that very often consumers
were just told they had. Burne has blended Freud's theories of unconscious desires with herd theory and crowd psychology, equally disputable works that allowed Burns to argue that propaganda was ethical. After all, people left to their own devices are just animals and agents of self destruction. Being told what they wanted could be a gift. Quoth Eddie, this was enlightened manipulation.
The public could very easily vote for the wrong man, and after a lot of success running government propaganda, Hitler and Company would later cite the work of Creole and Brenees on their vision Board of Propagandistic Destruction. If you can believe that Brenees decided to pivot to selling products, he famously said.
I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.
So Brene's pivots to doing damage in the private sector, publishing quite a bit in the next few decades, titles that pulled no punches, like Crystallizing Public Opinion or Ganda Public Relations, and, most famously nineteen fifty five's The Engineering of Consent, one of the scariest and most prescient phrases
of the last hundred years. Among his marketing victories featured time honored classics such as taking advantage of progressive social movements to sell members of that movement things that would
slow their movement down. The best example of this is Brene's selling feminist Suffragettes on cigarettes, famously rebranding lucky strikes as torches of freedom and having feminist march in the New York Easter Day Parade, ripping SIGs as an expression of their liberation, not the source of the cancer that would one day kill them, and while controversial, this was generally supported by prominent feminists of the time.
Brenes later ran a campaign.
For disposable Dixie cups in the nineteen thirties that was predicated on the idea that reusable glasses would give you neural disease. He's part of the reason that we associate eggs and bacon with breakfast. He has an award from
the NAACP question mark. The list goes on, and by the nineteen forties, purveyors of brands had mastered the art of print and billboards and had gotten very good at convincing you that buying X product would mean that you would finally fit in, whether that was smoking cigarettes to show you're a feminist II or gargle with listerine to make sure that you're married before thirty an actual campaign.
But this Bernesian Freud influenced marketing scheme would eventually fall out of favor as the century wore on and gave way to the hippie influenced, highly individualistic marketing of the sixties and seventies. By this time, radio marketing had proved it effective to associate certain brands with popular programs. Unfortunately, the earliest successful example of this was a toothpaste brand subsequent success after being the sole advertiser on the very
racist and extremely popular Amos and Andy Show. Promotions like these and the increased popularity of specific broadcasts was what created primetime, a concept that effortlessly crossed over to TV and directly began to influence the content that was selling products, because in the aim As and Andy days, you couldn't really explain why a toothpaste brand was the right advertiser for this show.
But on TV that changed.
Early soap operas built out theatrics surrounding their characters in the young white upper class, or a model of exactly who their advertisers were hoping to sell products to. And while that sounds kind of hokey and obvious now, it pretty cleanly reflects what social media marketing would become by the twenty tens. The product is mimicking the audience in
order to gain their trust. So in the sixties and onward, product marketing shifted to not selling you something in order to fit in, but to this philosophy of consumption as an act of self expression, buying shit as a radical act. We still do this all the time, and to me it is almost more dangerous than the work of Edward Brenees. Don't worry about the labor issues or why this product is made by children overseas for pennies. Your iPhone case tells the world that you are a girl boss in
the century of the self. Adam Curtis credits this freelove approach to consumption to former Freud friend eventual Freud enemy William Reich, who claimed that any neurosis could easily be attributed to quote a lack of good orgasm unquote, and when his main ideological adversary was Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna, a lifelong virgin whose two main case studies killed themselves, people didn't have a hard time choosing which way they
wanted the wind to blow. They went with the marketing that the coming guy was pushing, although Reich would eventually take this too far for the public and the government's liking when he'd go on to claim that harnessing this organ energy could locate UFOs and cure cancer, and most of his work was ordered destroyed, but his legacy lived on via marketing trying to meet the liberated self, leading to this quote from the Century of the Self.
That made me laugh so much.
Was the idea that people could be happy simply within themselves and that changing society was irrelevant.
Socialism in one person, although that, of course is capitalism. That's the whole joke.
I think it's funny.
I think it's.
Funny because people spend so much of their life life being bedeviled by their past and being locked into their past and being limited by their past, and there's an enormous freedom from that. And while it came with its share of hiccups, advertising benefited from promoting this individualistic, myopic worldview. Buying things was the act of radicalism that showed the world who you were not something like organizing giving a shit about other people wasn't.
Cool, man.
And by participating in capitalism, maybe you were actually fighting it too. Buying products expressed your values. And with that, let's take an ad break. Best of luck, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Thank you for attending my ted talk
on advertising. So we're going to jump ahead a little bit in the timeline through the Reagan and Thatcher era nineteen eighties marketing that only built on and solidified the idea that aging hippies were continuing the work of their youth by blasting a hole in the ozone layer with hair products. Go boomers from the century of the self.
And the generation who had once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumers, now I embraced it because it helped them to be themselves.
And this on a longer timeline, brings us to the Internet, a technology originally invented for government use that early users were horrified at the idea of advertising on. Of course, this would change the second that people realized you could make a single dollar off of it, and this translated to a series of trial and error moments in early
Internet history. If you were there, you might remember America Online, aol became so flaw with advertising that it accidentally killed itself off, and the same could be said for early social networking site MySpace. But one phenomenon that really stuck was the idea of operant conditioning. Tim Wu describes this as the reason that humans are obsessed with refreshing their emails,
their notifications, whatever it may be. We are hard wired to seek out the serotonin and positive reinforcement of acknowledgment and a feeling of belonging. And as it turned out, the best way to sell you something was not in fact an invasive banner ad or a too loud podcast to add, with due respect to iHeartRadio, it was to make you trust in the product and have yourself image
become attached to that product. The two people worth singling out in this department would go on to either build or mistakenly sell off their respective attention economy empires for parts our Jonah Peretti of feed fame and mister Zuki himself.
So we've talked about the legacy of BuzzFeed many times on this show and how its model of curating the clickiest parts of the Internet led to massive business for its founder and a brief clickbait renaissance before collapsing into a series of labor disputes surrounding their top personalities, the shuddering of their Pulitzer winning journalism branch, and essentially nuked the site with AI before then hard pivoting last month
to say he thinks AI might be bad. Really quick sidebar here, I promised, but I am serious that Jonah Peretti recently did this less than two years after facing severe and warranted criticism for shutting down news and laying off sixteen percent of his workforce. He published a somewhat regretful post on BuzzFeed in February twenty twenty five about how, you guys, he's realizing this AI slop is a bunch
of bullshit. He writes about this as if he has discovered it himself, even going so far as to make a cringey millennial shorthand for what he's talking about.
Social media has become overrun with snarf. S is for stakes, exaggerate stakes to make content urgent and existential. N is for novelty, manufacture novelty, and spin content as unprecedented and unique. A is for anger. Manipulate people's anger to drive engagement via outrage. R is for retention. Retention hacks by withholding info and promising a payoff at the end of a video. F is for fear. Take advantage of fear to make people focus with urgency on their content.
Yeah, why did you do that with your Pulitzer Prize winning website? You dork handened over Back in Peretti's On New Days, he had a pretty solid handle on the attention economy as it existed in the two thousands and twenty tens, and even wrote a full manifesto on how
to hold a user's attention. This included experiments like asking contest entrants to see which unhinged clickbait ideas would get the most engagement, and later setting strict content rules during peak BuzzFeed to avoid having anything on the main page
that was by his description, a bummer. And this sounds ridiculously simple, but it was very successful until one of Peretti's big mistakes appeared to be a pretty familiar one in the Internet space, that being capitulating to the temptation of obvious, annoying ads and losing user trust at BuzzFeed. This came in the form of sponsored posts, something I
still find shockingly unethical a decade later. Basically, these were posts that looked and were formatted exactly like unsponsored BuzzFeed pieces that related to how cool it would be to have a certain product, or how having something would make
you feel a certain way. And these pieces would be tagged paid for by Audi or whichever brand, in tiny, easy to miss lettering somewhere on the piece, and people understandably hated this as the only way to engage with these pieces were to be tricked into looking at them, and Peretti continued to fumble the back from there.
All the way up to snarf dah yo, I cannot believe snarf.
And then of course there's Mark Zuckerberg, who famously I am a colleague. You can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life haha. In two thousand and seven, and I know that there is no shortage of things to say about this fucking guy, but I'm going to put the five years too late hype beast rebrand and the pivot to fascism aside.
For the moment.
It's important, but it's for another day. Early Zuckerberg also benefited from a commitment to prioritizing user attention over advertising dollars. And just as Jonah Peretti did eventually nuked his own website, Facebook with aislop, but in the beginning, back when he was just a bad man and not a robot playing the part of a bad.
Man, Mark Zuckerberg was extremely.
Resistant to advertising on Facebook in a way that made the site more popular because instead of overwhelming users with Brene's style consent engineering by controlling their site experience or slamming users with ugly banner ads like AOL or MySpace, Zuckerberg was adamant that the bland, white and blue Facebook layout remain consistent and clean.
So how did he make money?
As you probably know, he just sold all of our data to those same advertisers through the back door. Another long step in the lurch toward us becoming our own products to sell and our inner lives being the final items on offer before we were subsumed by late capitalism entirely.
How are we feeling? Do we need a mister clean sting? No, you're right, we don't need one.
Early Twitter was similar to Facebook in this respect. The particulars were different, but layout consistency and an initial lack of sponsor posts was one of the elements of early Twitter that made old school journalists more inclined to adapt to it in order to spread their work. I will never forget miss pivot. In the two thousands, my dad like squeezed his brick cell phone between his hands like he was trying to pop it after the newspaper he worked at said he had to learn how to use Twitter.
But with social media's most enduring platform displaying this initial resistance to ads, people native to these platforms grew to trust the ads that did eke through these algorithms a little bit more, even if this trust, as subsequent data brokering deals would lay bare, was extremely naive. But for the advertisers themselves, they had to either figure out how to turn their brands into a friend to be added, followed and interacted with or be left in the past.
Enter the age of personified social media brands, ones where you didn't just have in your horny fantasies, but you could DM mister clean your horny fantasies, and someone on the other side of that account would be tasked with the psychic torture of reading it. So we've made it up to the point of Web two. In marketing, the early twenty tens, just shy of the Cambridge analytical scandal that would lose Zuckerberg the last few fanboys he had.
After this social network the era where Tumbler and Pinterests were considered fem fan paradises and ignited some of the most bizarrely specific feuds of all time. The Internet was still fun, but its days were numbered, just as in previous eras of advertising. The next generation of advertisers, this time young millennials, adapted to their audience and learned from
the banner ad catastrophes of time gone by. While a lot of early social media marketing was happy to tweet out, hey guys, here's the special this week.
Here's a link to more info, a.
Handful of creative twenty somethings.
Were already well aware that these were mediums that needed actual personality and direct engagement to stand out on an increasingly crowded timeline.
And so they became.
The mascots, not appearing in front of the camera like in TV ads, but now behind the keyboard, developing a personality that effectively modernized a decade's old brand. And I'll be honest, so far, we have mainly talked about the heads of these marketing empires, the highest titles, not the folks who are tasked with actually executing the usually bizarrely specific task of winning your loyalty as a customer. That's because employees at this level of marketing are rarely appreciated
in wider media. The expected powerful male figureheads still dominating the history of the industry that changes during this era, though in no small part, I think because of its overlap with the huge popularity of innocuous clickbait led by sites like BuzzFeed that overlapped with this time, and so as early brand accounts begin to refine their voice, usually into absurdist humor. I think Taco Bell was the earliest to do this, but they were quickly followed by Denny's
and Wendy's. The grotesquely curious Internet would want to know just who was doing this, and when they found out it was generally someone just like them, people really liked it, turning lower level and certainly lower paid copywriters and customer service reps who had always been generally anonymous in years prior into Internet micro celebrities the main character behind the main character, if you will, and that is why I was so excited to talk with you one and only
Serenity Disco. Serenity's work on the Dennis Tumbler and Twitter is somewhat legend in social media marketing. It won their team a Shorty Award and really clarified the brand voice
of Denny's until this day. As I explained in our interview, there was some precedent for the world that they dropped into when it came to social media brand voice at Denny's, including a gorgeous, inexplicable partnership with the Emo band Brand New, but Serenity essentially turned Denny's the Diner in to an extremely online Emo teenager, the same kind of customer that might roll up to the Diners stoned at three in the morning and debate the virtues of MCR with their friends.
I think that's what they did. They wouldn't let me hang out with them. Unlike a lot of effective advertisers, Serenity really throws themselves into this job whole hog.
Although on the Denny's.
Accounts they were technically acting as a character, the Tumblr community and its absurdist, edgy but not offensive joke style and hyperbonded mostly queer and fem communities were something that Serenity was already familiar with. The assignment was to make the account another weird friend to bond with and sell witching our pancakes doing it, and Serenity was damn good at it.
And like they and every.
Other social media manager singled up for a brand account's success has told me in the research for this series, this was not something that they did alone. Serenity credits their graph designer and account manager just as much for bringing her gently demented visions to the page. So what do I mean when I say the Denny's Tumblr account that Serenity curated? Okay, so buckle in because it is very hard to describe.
Some examples an image of a contact lens full of coffee with the caption if you're up really late, studying for finals. Try swapping your contact solution.
With coffee for a quick pick me up.
Next, user Hella Spooky King asks are you single? The Denny's Tumblr account answered, we are a restaurant and finally a classic, a photoshopped stock image of a woman in a candlelight bath, but now she's covered in Denny's waffles. The caption reads, after a hard day, nothing is more relaxing than the syrupy SuDS of a waffle bath. And tumblers generally adored the Denny's account and responded in kind, and that is a critical component.
Of this working.
When users would interact with or expand on the joke that Serenity made on the Denny's account, Denny's would reply back, often at random or in the middle of the night, and this was obviously something that earlier generations of marketers could never have done.
The commercials and billboards.
Obviously can't talk back, but the social media accounts can, and posting challenges like tag yourself at Denny's and will repost did seem to draw a lot of younger people to the restaurant, predicated on a combination of wanting their image scene on a widely followed account and kind of the parasocial relationship they had formed with the account for a diner.
And is it weird when you say it all like that?
Yes, but you'll have to trust me when I say there was very much a time where hearing back from Denny's on Tumblr would be like hearing back from a celebrity on Twitter, and that celebrities and brands not for nothing. We're using the exact same playbook to expand their name,
recognition and relevance. I mean, there is a strong argument to be made that Ashton Kutcher would never have had much of a career if he hadn't become a pathological reply guy and smug Twitter joke writer, which is actually a bad example because we would be better off without him.
Here's a clip from his Steve Jobs.
Movie I Already Fired You saw that drunk on my twenty first birthday. Back to Pancakes, Serenity's work was routinely written up on clickbait websites with headlines like twenty eight weirdly wonderful images from the Denny's tumbler page. And I really do find their professional trajectory super, super interesting and specific. You'll hear a lot in their experience that's reflected in the experience of other people I speak with later in
this series. Serenity was in their early twenties and starting a life in a big city when they started at Denny's, and they later branch out to make their own startup, and then they pivot again and end up working in celebrity and political social media management at a crucial point in American history. And there is a lot to talk about when it comes to this era of advertising. And we're going to take a closer look and what the ins and outs of early social media management was like
next week. But today I'm going to let our first interviewee lay out what a brand management job was like on the ground floor of it having massive advertising influence in the twenty tens, as in generations past, advertising two young people was.
A job best suited to other.
Young people who could make the argument that marketing something as innocuous as Denny's diner food was an act of self expression, regardless of how underpaid or burnout inducing the job may one day become. When we come back, Serenity Disco of the Denny's Tumblr account, Welcome back to sixteenth minute I'm so sleepy. Here's my interview with Serenity Disco and.
My name is Serenity Disco. I'm the founder of Alobud, which is a self care app, but I also do freelance consulting on the side.
I mean, you've had truly a storied and like wide variety of work online over the years.
I'm really excited to talk about it.
But what brings us together today is the Denny's Tumblr account. I would love to know just a little bit more about you. Where did you grow up? How did you grow up?
I love the question of like where did you grow up? Because is I can't like pinpoint one place that because I moved so many times. I've probably moved like twenty times in total. I guess I could say I lived in between Wisconsin and Connecticut. You know, parents, divorce, school, work relationships. That's kind of what caused me to move all over the place. I definitely was a child of
the Internet, raised by machines. I started out on aim and you know, AOL chat rooms as a minor, like in the adult chat rooms I discovered as a teen, MySpace and neopets. Yeah, jeffree Star posted on my MySpace page once and that was like an iconic moment for me.
What a sentence.
Yeah, if you've learned about jeffree Star in the last five years, that may seem actually quite terrifying. Yes, ever, yes there was a time where it was a sign that you've made it on MySpace, specifically.
Exactly being someone who moved so many times, Like I didn't really have much of a community in real life, so the Internet had become my community consistent for my childhood and my teen years. I learned how to code on neopaths, took that to creating my own forums for people. One was called Rebel mb message Boards.
What was the theme?
It was like, you know, if you're a rebel, if you're an outsider, a misfit, you can join. It was good times. I wanted to be a developer growing up, you know, coding my attention span. I had ADHD and struggle with like activities of daily life made it really hard for me to focus. And we couldn't really afford college in my family. So even though I self taught myself a lot of it. I did get a job doing QA engineering for a game company, but I just
wasn't passionate about it. And until the doors opened for my work at Denny's.
When did you start working for Denny's.
I'm pretty sure it was back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. I kind of like fell into this job because a friend referred me. I can't tell you which parody account, but I had a very successful parody account on Twitter. A lot of people, like you know, knew about it and loved it, and a friend of mine who followed the account was like, whatever you're doing on this account,
I think we could use it at Denny's. Because she was the current her name is Ariel, called her on, and she was the current social media manager at Denny's. I came into my interview and I showed them my tweets.
I would love to hear more about the interview. Well, here's here's my little joke.
Yeah, literally printed out some of my favorite tweets into a portfolio and I was like, you know, this sounds like something that your brand might like. The brand strategy for Denny's was I'm not sure if it still is is Denny's is always open, it's twenty four to seven. It's a community meeting space, it's a family gathering. It's a place, you know, to go with your partner, and being that it's twenty four to seven, it's very it
can get very silly there. It can get very silly in the booths because you know, maybe you just went out drinking with your friends and now you need an evening stack of pancakes. And so we wanted to create a personality was in their late teens, goes to Denny's with their friends, likes punk pop. They had an initiative with brand New the band for a long time. Really yeah, I knew that that was before I started, so I
think that they wanted to carry that over. They thought that I would be a good fit for the role, and I was like, great, I don't have a job right now, and it sounds, you know, like being myself on social media for a brand. It didn't feel as larger than life then, you know, like look back now. I was like, oh my gosh, like look what you did. So, yeah, they hired me and they didn't have a tumbler at the time, so I was tasked with making a tumblr, which I already had my own tumblr, so it was
really easy for me to set them up. We started following people who posted, you know, at Denny's, like their Denny's selfie, we called them. So anyone who's like at Denny's in the booth posting photos selfies, we would share them. It kind of spiraled into like a meme where they people would actually take photos of themselves in front of the Denny's sign and be like, hey Dad, I'm here like my my friend Denny's.
And you are like a lot of power for a twenty three year old, Yeah, like shaping the image of this.
And I got a lot of like confusion from people in my immediate family and like you know, close friend circle. They're like, so, what exactly do you do? Like you sure you tweet? And I just was like, yeah, that's my job. And now if they were to ask me, they would immediately know. Because brands having personalities online is just so common and everyone's using social media.
Denny's already had sort of an idea of what the persona of this company is when you come in, and I feel.
Like it seems like they were pretty early too.
Yes, Monday's and Denny's were like very early on in the brand persona. You know, they let me have free rain I could post virtual like there was a process of content as an art being approved. But I could just fire off tweets whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted. Case in point. Some might see this as like bad business practice, but I would wake up at like two in the morning and I would tweet on the Denny's account at two in the morning because Denny's is always
open and seeing that time stamp. This was before like buffer exist to where you could schedule posts. Seeing Denny's up at two am and replying to a post and having Denny's reply back to you. Like for some people, it was so surreal because brands, you're a brand, Like, what are you doing because Denny's is your friend?
Were you running all of the social media?
Yeah? I was running all of the social media accounts. Oh and I just want to mention that the fact that I was given this free reign is because I had an amazing that I worked with. My direct report and our graphic designer were incredible and so smart and really like we were like the dream team together. So it just it fit together so perfectly.
Was there a moment where you're like, oh, this is like really working.
I think I kind of had the wow moment when I saw this meme going around on Tumblr this text post saying like relationship status and then whatever, and we took that and did relationship Status breakfast. It got like three hundred thousand notes on it. I just loved the community on Tumblr so much. They were so fun and supportive and made every post into a meme and the comments section was incredible, and that's just really rare, I think. And then I don't know if you know, but I
actually got tired at Tumblr directly after Denny's. They they poached me because they liked the work I did on the Denny's tumbler, and they wanted me to help other brands, you know, have that, you know, experience the same experience.
I don't know, I want to like explore this idea that feels so bizarre and I would have killed for a job like yours.
I'm sure so many people would say that.
But you're being yourself essentially, but you're also being Denny's, the restaurant.
Chains, right, right?
How do you navigate that?
Were there?
Ever?
Like moments of this feels weird?
Like what is this?
Like you said, you know, we were being we were we were being on the internet as the Internet's meant to be, but at the same time, we're running a brand account for a corporation and like we would have to take care of customer service questions like or like people would this is disgusting, but people would send us like pos of themselves in the bathroom after going like after eating. You totally don't have to include this, but.
Like, no, that's the people need to know.
Like that's that was the life of a community manager for a quick service restaurant, you know, or just like people complaining, which is normal. The job was fun, but it was also work.
And let me know if you experienced any version of this, how emotionally draining a job like that can be where you know, you don't necessarily always have to be on, but there's a part of you that like, like you're saying posting it too in the morning, like I should always be on.
Yeah, that's exactly it. Though at the time it did not feel like I was draining, but I was definitely pushing myself to an extent that I didn't necessarily have to. It was so much a part of my life at the time. Like I had just moved to New York City. I didn't know that many people the only people I knew were people who I met through Twitter, on social
media or other social media platforms. So I was so used to being always on, you know, now looking back at it, I created an entire company around self care because I did not take care of myself back in the day, and it all led up to, like a couple, you know, massive burnout periods. And I feel like we're so used to talking about burnout these days, but back then,
we didn't have the word doom scrolling. We didn't have anything that would allow people to just remember that they need to take you know, breaks, and that jobs, our jobs are not our entire lives.
Right, which is so American of us to do.
First, like, are there any like standout positive memories or like moments of recognition that you look back on fondly.
Also, we would we would do giveaways where we would give away, you know, Denny's gift car cards for doing fan art, for drawing fan art for Denny's. So those were really really cool. I can't remember any of the posts, but I remember at the time I was just like I would collect all the posts and bring them to my superior and be.
Like, look what they made us. Look at our fans made us like.
Oh my gosh, and it was just so sweet. At the time. I'm like getting teary eyed thinking about the community there. I was the voice of Denny's at the time, but I felt like the community had large voices within it that I could talk to and be friendly with. I'll never forget.
Did anyone at the time sort of figure out who you as an individual were?
Yeah, some people. Some people did, and most of them were people who are also living in New York City as well and were part of like New York City Twitter Attie. I guess you could call it okay, Like I don't know if it still exists, but like, you know, people who worked in media or worked on social media brand accounts, we all kind of knew each other. And
I was known as the Denny's Girl. It's really common for social media managers who are you know, public facing, to like have haters, and they don't just don't deserve it.
Just the idea that, oh, if you're receiving some sort of hate or harassment online, that's actually a sign that you're doing a good job. Yeah.
Always, I would get told that too, But I'm very like, I'm very like Emo and so I get it, like it really affects me. So I would like, you know, be sad and people be like, don't don't worry, They're just Internet trolls. I'm like, I know, but why is my mental health like failing me? Right now?
We will be back with more Serenity.
Welcome back to sixteenth minute.
I always want Jack in the Box to be good, but it simply.
Never is good.
I had an argument with both of my producers, Sophie and Ian, and they're from southern California, so they think that Jack in the Box is good.
It's not good.
Here's the rest of my interview with Serenity Disco.
What led you to decide to move on? Were you cognizant of any degree of burnout at this time?
I think it was just the opportunity. You know, they definitely offered me more money there, and I was just getting started. Like you said, I was a twenty three, twenty four year old in New York City and runt's not cheap, so you know, you got to go where the money gotta go where the money is. And like, I love Tumblr as a platform, and the people I worked with at Tumblr were really awesome as well. And I just wanted a different experience, and they hired me
as a creative strategist. I would get to like travel around the country and do these things called Tumblr road shows, where I think, yeah, it's basically like a Tumblr one oh one, like you know how to use Tumblr and got I got to talk about all different awesome communities on Tumblr, like back in the day. I don't know if it still exists, but like there's a sink fandom, like washing your hands sinc. Fandom, Like people were obsessed with sinks, I know, And I just thought that was
so kooky and like fun. But just to show that there's a community for everything on Tumblr.
You've worked in so many areas of the internet, because is it from Tumblr? At what point do you switch over to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign?
So Hillary Clinton. That was a couple years after Tumblr. I actually launched a small median article organization called fums plain that was for short and long form content personal essays for women and fem identifying individuals. And I did that for a few years before we shut it down because of not being able to fund it. It was fun. I knew a lot of people who worked in the media field at the time, and I wanted to be a part of it because it sounded so interesting and impactful,
and I wanted to do something impactful. I was like, Okay, brands being weird on social media, check time to do something and you know that. I know that was impactful too, but you know, I wanted to do something in the media space as well.
It seems like you're sort of chasing more of your powers.
And yes, like fmsplain was definitely a passion. And then I was like, Okay, I need I need a real I need a not a real job because that was a real job. I needed a job that's going to pay me money to keep living in the great state of New York. I got hired actually at Rock Nation, the record label, where I worked on celebrity accounts doing their social media. I'm not under nda with them, but I just don't like to say because I don't know
if it's appropriate. While I was working there, they were kind enough to let me go work on the Hillary Clinton campaign back in twenty.
Sixteen when you were there.
Yeah, I got recruited to work for her doing voter registration and influencer management. Work with influencers to create like help them create content that they could share in their social media channels to get people to register to vote using the I Will Vote website.
I think it is fascinating, and because I wasn't sure what like a social media job at rock Nation would even entail, But it is fascinating that, like celebrities are brands of their own.
Basically, and they have their they have their own campaigns. You know, like when an album comes out, there's so many there's so many pieces to promotion of the album. Not only are they promoting the album, they're promoting themselves as a person.
Was it meaningfully different managing a celebrities account versus a restaurant's account?
I will. You know, Denny's has such a special spot in my heart. You know, it was my first job. It was my first time interacting with a community that was so large. I met so many wonderful people through it. Today, like I have, we're on this podcast talking about what I did when I was twenty three years old and I'm now thirty five.
My last question about sort of this period of your work. It was twenty sixteen election, Yes, quite contentious. Oh, by the way people interact with the celebrities that they think around the other side of the account. Quite contentious for you working in those spaces, especially simultaneously. What kind of like energy are you having to absorb from people who are who think they're talking to whomever but actually aren't well.
I will say when I was doing social media for the Hillary campaign, I had to be quite public facing, and so I got a ton of hate and trolls from the opposing side. I don't even know how to describe it, like it's like these people don't believe that someone exists on the other side of the screen. Shout. They're just shouting, and I don't know what they think they're shouting at because someone there and I'm doing a job and I'm doing a job that I actually believe in.
I believed in her. It was really upsetting. I remember the day of the election. It was heartbreaking, like people were messaging me in my direct messages saying like, hey, I'm looking at the results and they're not they're not doing well, Like we're not doing well. What are we going to do? And I just I couldn't say anything.
And it was so it was so many people reaching out to me privately and publicly because I had to be so public facing during the three months that I worked there, there were some people who were very sympathetic and supportive, who were like, you know, we're rooting for you. You did your best. As the clock got closer to the announcements who won, and even the day after it
was like a funeral. So I had so many messages, you know, of support, and it really shows that even though there are trolls on the internet, you know, the community that you have is much louder, can be louder than that, you know, focusing on that positivity and utilizing the mute and black button.
Working on the Hillary campaign, was that the first time that you were in a big social media position as yourself. Yes.
Because I never publicly shared who I was on Denny's, people just kind of found out. I don't know how, and I didn't really expect going into the Hillary Clinton campaign that I would be so public facing, but it just sort of happened that way, and you know, I don't regret any of it. It was a really great experience, and I again worked with some really amazing people.
So you experienced signific I can't burn out. Oh yes, can you tell me more about that?
Oh yes, it hit me like a thousand bricks. The day after the election, I couldn't get out of bed. I was supposed to go to the concession speech and I just could not get myself unable to move. And during the campaign I wasn't taking care of myself. I wasn't eating very well. I was eating Chipotle almost every night because it was there, and I wasn't drinking enough water. The inspiration for my current company, Alabud, came from working
on the campaign. A coworker would post on post it notes like really nice reminders and then post it into her cubicle, and I was like, that's really sweet. I should, you know, do more reminders for myself. Yeah, so I went back to Rock Nation. I worked there for a couple of months before deciding to quit because I couldn't keep up with the work. I was so burnt out and I didn't feel like I was putting my best self out there. And then a few months later I started working on Alabud, and yeah.
I'm just like, I'm happy for you that you were able to be like, no, we're calling it. Your next project was about addressing that. Yeah, when you were putting Alobud together, how you build something like that out.
Yeah.
So initially it was a worksheet that I had someone designed where you know, we listed out hydrate, fuel, refresh, things like that, and then you know, you check off that you did it Monday through Monday through Sunday. We created a digital version of the worksheet on type form. It got thousands of people using it, and I was like, Wow,
there's definitely a need for a self care checklist slash reminders. Luckily, I had a friend who owns their own design studio for app development that I used to work with at Tumblr. They were like, if you can fundraise X amount of dollars, you know we can make this for you. And so we went to Kickstarter and fundraise fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, we have one point four million users now and we've been around for I think eight years.
On the whole, since you were tweeting at two am from the Denny's account to now. How has your relationship with the Internet changed.
I definitely use social media a lot less than I did previously. Like I was someone who is always on, but now I have a very healthy relationship with my phone and social media. I basically only check it like once or twice a day, and I use scheduling software to schedule all my content for Alobud. I hate to say it, but I'm I use LinkedIn now more than I do Twitter. I definitely have been connecting with folks
like face to face. I've been getting virtual coffee with friends and just catching up because I really miss seeing people's faces. I feel very content with my career and I'm I'm happy to be focusing on something that really helps folks with their mental health and their well being. I guess I would say to my younger self, put the phone down and not touch grasps. I hate I hate that uh saying.
It's so patronizing.
Yeah, and you don't know what it's like to be to have like all of your communities and everything be all, but put the phone down for a little bit and know that it's always going to be there for you when you're ready for it.
Thank you so much to Serenity, and you can follow their work and learn more about their app at the links in the description. Okay, I hope you're locked in because we've got a lot to cover in this series. Because we've made it a whole episode without circling back to the pool full of dua Lipa's piss. We will get there next week, but for your moment of fun seems like a stretch. In this case, here is the
concluding thought of the century of the self. And next week we will talk to the person who translated online shit posting out of raw human rage to selling cheeseburgers, Amy Brown of the Wendy's Twitter account next Tuesday.
It's not that the people are in charge, but that the people's desires are in charge. The people are not in charge. The people exercise no decision making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to something which now increasingly is predicated on the idea of the public as passive consumers, the public as people who essentially what you're delivering them are doggy truths.
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fol Zone Media and Iheartradim.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamielostis.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickterman 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 shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my katz Flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbert, who will outlive us all.
Bye.