Brands Who Stan: How Entertainment Companies Started Tweeting in the First Person

Here are some things you might know about Netflix from following the company on Twitter: It loves teen star Joey King and thinks Steve Carell is hot. It freaks out at the prospect of a new Game of Thrones trailer, and will recommend The Americans to anyone who’ll listen. And, occasionally, it will have one too many drinks in the name of binge-worthy content.

I attribute these tastes to a lifeless streaming platform because they are expressed not with the all-encompassing pronoun “we,” but in a jarringly intimate “I.” “Every day I become more and more convinced that Jan Levinson was a psychic,” Netflix tweeted the night of the Golden Globes, alongside an attractive photo of former Office lead Carell. “I believe people should watch quality films and shows, no matter what network or service houses them. Quality is quality :),” it wrote the same night, in defense of an enthusiastic recommendation for Killing Eve, which streams for free on the platform of its competitor, Hulu. “hello im drunk,” it declared at 2:10 p.m. on a Wednesday, in response to another user’s description of a seasonal Netflix-themed drinking game. Netflix isn’t the only sentient entertainment company on Twitter. HBO recently handed out Sopranos-themed nicknames on the fly to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary, while MTV gossiped about Harry Styles’s love life. All the legal scholars tirelessly debating whether corporations are people may be dismayed to learn that, on social media, a powerful billion-dollar tech company can quite effectively wrap itself in the personality, cadence, and sexual desires of an extremely online 20-something.

The seeds for first-person corporate accounts were planted years ago, when brands were still saying “bae,” and has since evolved into a conscious strategy to mold an online feed the same way a novelist might develop a character. “I think when most people think of brands, they think they’re very calculated and have this heavy approval process,” Greg Baroth, a digital brand strategist who’s worked with Verne Troyer and Logan Paul, told me. “So when brands started being more off the cuff, like [Wendy’s] going off on someone, as if they were a person, that really shocked people. We weren’t used to that, and they created a trend.” Nathan Allebach, the mind behind the weird, wry Steak-umm Twitter account, saw an immediate benefit from adopting a personal tone for the company’s online persona in 2017. “When you’re trying to actually build a brand from the ground up, it’s a lot easier to do that when you’re speaking as first person because people who are interacting, connecting with the brand itself, they feel connected to the people or the person behind it,” he told me. “So we found early on that the best way to go about it was just to humanize and be as real as we could, break down the fourth wall often as we could and make people feel like this wasn’t some vanilla corporate strategy.”

The ever-evolving realm of digital advertising has produced many offshoots of this strategy. Entities from MoonPie to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have painted themselves as quirky, charismatic, effusive individuals, when in reality they are vast money-making or killing operations. (Who can forget the time the U.S. Air Force found a way to link the Yanny/Laurel meme to the Afghanistan war?) Now, entertainment companies are using a more personalized social media approach to blur the line between streaming platform and recommendation service. While traditional entertainment behemoths like Disney still take pains to disclose the occasional “account takeover,” more nimble operations have leaned into the ambiguity that comes with tweeting from an individual’s perspective. (Netflix did not respond to interview requests, and HBO declined to comment for this story.) Whereas it was once standard practice for a company’s Twitter bio to credit its social media managers’ handles, that space is now occupied with an inside joke that helps with the dual goal of content marketing and character building.

The personae of major entertainment companies, in particular, have coalesced around one powerful online subcategory: fandom. Since the early days of grassroots fan forums and Tumblr, the love of celebrity and pop culture has been a driving force in online conversations. Self-proclaimed stans have the enthusiasm and the manpower to command attention, whether that comes in the form of a Billboard chart boost or the passionate defense of Beyoncé’s honor. More recently, the distance between the worshipers and the worshiped has shrunk. And that evolution has been directly illustrated in major networks’ digital marketing strategies. Around 2013, for instance, MTV began experimenting with first-person posts on its accounts, according to Jacqueline Parkes, chief marketing officer and executive vice president at MTV, VH1, CMT, and Logo’s digital studios. “Originally, our focus was to be the cool older sibling for our audience, but it [has] evolved into a space of being your friend who knows everything about the topics that you care most about,” Parkes told me via email.

The MTV feed, run primarily by Kaitlyn Vella, has benefited from this approach by both homing in on fan discussions and building more personal relationships with the pop stars it’s meant to promote. (Camila Cabello has wished the MTV account a happy 33rd birthday, for instance.) As their followers’ expectations evolved, the company eventually grew into the life of full-time stan, well versed in both the material it was selling and the fickle online language required to sell it.

“We stay fully immersed in the communities of interest that matter most to our fans, and genuinely live and breathe these topics as fans first,” Parkes said. “If you’re not a legitimate fan and understand how that fandom communicates, you’ll immediately get called out for a lack of authenticity.”

Nudging along online fervor has proved to successfully turn even the most mediocre projects into blockbuster hits. But having a distinct identity online also makes for awkward public interactions when real controversies come knocking. In response to a December 2018 New York Times tweet that said Facebook gave Netflix and other tech giants far more intrusive access to users’ private inboxes than previously thought, Netflix switched to the royal “we” but maintained its cutesy tone: “Netflix never asked for, or accessed, anyone’s private messages. We’re not the type to slide into your DMs.” The company was subsequently lambasted for its dismissive attitude toward user privacy—especially after its denial turned out to be misleading. The platform’s constant pop culture chattering makes its silence on serious topics far more noticeable. After news broke that Netflix had pulled an episode of Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia, activists and journalists addressed the platform on Twitter but received no response.

Even if a company isn’t caught in a controversy, its newfound self-awareness can be jarring for a generation of people who grew up with clear boundaries between brands and the people who advertise for them—call it a tonal uncanny valley. The night that Netflix was tweeting exuberantly about content available only on Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime, a handful of followers expressed confusion as to why a publicly traded corporation would promote the content of one of its main competitors. “It’s getting weird, folks,” one confused onlooker tweeted in response.

The threat of a looming online controversy being a little too raw is often the largest barrier for major brands to take the dive into a personalized voice. Joey Piazza, the director of marketing at Quaker Maid Meats, recalls executives’ hesitation when he first pitched Steak-umm as a strange, beleaguered millennial who enjoys starting beef online (pun intended).

“It was uncomfortable and it was difficult for a while to explain to them what we were trying to do,” he told me. “So the fact that we’ve been able to be successful has given me a lot more leeway.”

Now, in a little over a year, he says the brand has upped its sales by about 15 percent, is slowly expanding its markets from outside the Pennsylvania area, and has amassed a group of international fans who clamor for new Steak-umm merchandise. If a frozen meat product can ride a first-person account to higher sales and niche fandom, imagine what a company with access to years’ worth of exclusive entertainment can do.

Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.