The Brands have discovered "horny," and all is lost
For as much as sex and marketing are linked in the public mind, the Brands—that sentient collective of banal Twitter identities sniping back and forth at each other endlessly in in an effort to make us all eat Moon Pies while watching Netflix at a Wendy’s—typically shy away from the naughtier side of the street. Sure, you’ll get a dip into subtext here or there—and the occasional trip to whatever dark well the horrors of the Arby Waifu once crawled out of—but for the most part, it’s just good business sense to keep things kid friendly online.(Give or take the occasional jar of piss.) And yet, if there’s one thing no self-not-all-that-respecting Brand can resist, it’s a fresh meme. Like, say, the “What’s something you can say during sex and also when you [x]” construction, a bit of lighthearted ribaldry that has now led to, well…
This:
And look: We get that when brand social media managers sign off for the day, taking off those big foam mascot heads we like to imagine them all wearing, they’re all people too. And yet the introduction of horniness and innuendo into this ecosystem has had some predictably awful effects on these ever-present conversations, because once the ball starts rolling, nobody—TV networks, airlines, book publishers, hotel chains, breaded meat pockets—wants to be left out of the “fun.” Which is how we get shit like this:
If some of the text in this article seems disjointed or out of place, it’s only because we’ve been dying every 40 seconds for the last few minutes every time we look at this stuff, and a kindly EMT is on hand to glumly bring us back to life. It is barely metaphorical to describe this as an orgy of online badness, and that’s not even getting into the stuff that people had the sense to delete. Like, this screenshot of a Magic: The Gathering tweet might, of course, be completely fake, but as we now operate in a universe without shame, it would be impossible for us to definitively say:
We can only hope this particular permutation in online marketing represents some kind of nadir, rather than a new step evolution, and that our various streaming services and fast food chains will stop trying to fuck each other in public. That being said, there was at least one silver lining from this whole unseemly/steamy debacle; it did produce this, one of the sickest burns we’ve seen online in some time: