Greet The Food Memers Livin' The Meme Dream

I'm assuming it's not just me, but every time I see a jokey tweet from a big food brand, I always wonder who's actually behind it. Is it a hipster with funny glasses and an interesting haircut? Perhaps it's a giant group of advisors behind a mega advertising corporation? Is it a sentient artificially intelligent robot living in...The Matrix?!

Well, it turns out it's mostly just young individuals who are really, really, good at their jobs. And those Internet-clout saddled jobs are extremely coveted, but they come with the perils of being underpaid and uninsured. In this fascinating feature from Vox, the story delves into the lives of content makers who create cheeky content around stuff like chicken wings, beer, and dating apps.

It feels a little strange reading about brands creating meme-worthy content in the language of Internet shitposting in order to get us to buy things like Dunkin' coffee. But slowly, brands are letting the meme creators use their own voices to churn out content designed to make you chuckle or briefly respect a joke about buffalo wings, and many of them are coming to terms with the fact that this is just now an accepted part of advertising.

This recent story about Sherwin Williams reflects that some brands just aren't that interested in joining the bandwagon. They fired an employee, Tony Piloseno, who had 1.2 million TikTok followers running an account about mixing paint colors together. He'd reached out to corporate headquarters to try and show that this type of marketing was good for business, but they seemed to think otherwise, and fired him. Anyway, the Vox article is totally worth taking a gander over, and when you see branded food memes that briefly light up your Twitter feed, you'll know there's a young social media marketer out there doing a good job cracking jokes about your favorite snack.