If you logged onto Twitter in 2017, you likely saw something baffling: Denny's Diner posting existential dread about pancakes. MoonPie starting a blood feud with Hostess. Wendy's viciously roasting teenagers who asked for free food.
For nearly a century, billion-dollar corporations spent billions of dollars meticulously managing their public image to appear professional, flawless, and subservient to the consumer.
Then, over the course of about three years, the largest brands in the world collectively decided to act like depressed, sarcastic, hyper-literate teenagers.
This movement is often referred to as "Corporate Weird Twitter." It wasn't an accident, and it wasn't a mistake. It was a calculated, brilliant, and ultimately exhausting marketing strategy driven entirely by the economics of the internet.
The Death of the Banner Ad
To understand why brands started acting weird, you have to understand why they stopped acting normal.
By the mid-2010s, traditional digital advertising was dying. Millennials and Gen Z were developing "banner blindness"—the psychological ability to completely ignore any image that looked like an advertisement. Furthermore, ad-blocker usage was skyrocketing.
Brands realized they could no longer interrupt the content consumers wanted to see. They had to become the content consumers wanted to see.
The Wendy's Paradigm Shift
The shift began in earnest with Wendy's. The fast-food chain's social media managers realized that replying to complaints with polite corporate speak ("We're sorry to hear that, please DM us") generated zero engagement.
However, when Wendy's started using the aggressive, sarcastic language native to Twitter to mock their competitors (like McDonald's frozen beef) or playfully roast their own followers, the internet exploded.
- The Metric of Success: A standard, produced commercial on Twitter might get a few hundred likes. A single, ruthless, unedited tweet from Wendy's comparing a user to a trash can would get 300,000 retweets and make national news.
Wendy's cracked the code: Authenticity on the internet doesn't mean being honest; it means being fluent in the local culture. And the local culture of Twitter is sarcasm.
The Core Tropes of Corporate Weird Twitter
Once the Wendy's strategy was proven successful, every ad agency in the world scrambled to replicate the "sassy brand" voice. This led to a rigidly defined set of tropes:
1. The Existential Dread
Brands realized that Gen Z humor was heavily rooted in nihilism and anxiety. So, accounts like Denny's and SunnyD started posting bizarre, vaguely depressing tweets about the meaningless of life, juxtaposed against their sugary products. (e.g., SunnyD tweeting: "I can't do this anymore.")
2. The "Silence, Brand" Antagonism
Brands leaned into the fact that people hate brands. They began fighting with each other for clout. Skittles would insult M&Ms. Netflix would mock Hulu. This manufactured drama provided free entertainment for the timeline.
3. Deep-Fried Memes and Shitposting
Instead of posting high-quality photos of burgers, brands hired 22-year-old social media managers to create aggressive, low-quality "shitposts" (see our previous article on the subject) that looked functionally identical to the content created by anonymous teenagers.
The Oversaturation and the Pushback
Like all internet trends, Corporate Weird Twitter burned too bright and died quickly.
By 2019, the timeline was exhausting. When every brand is a sassy, depressed teenager, no one stands out. Consumers began to recognize the manipulation behind the irony. They realized that a brand tweeting about depression wasn't a relatable cry for help; it was a cynical tactic to sell orange juice.
This realization birthed the ultimate counter-meme: "Silence, Brand." Users began aggressively rejecting corporate attempts to act human, responding to sassy tweets with images of laser-eyed crabs telling the corporation to shut up and make the product.
The Legacy
Today, the era of the overly aggressive, desperately weird corporate Twitter account is largely over. Brands have dialed back the existential dread and the insults.
However, the legacy remains. The "Voice of God" corporate broadcasting model is dead. Brands now understand they must speak the language of the platform they are on, even if it means sacrificing polished professionalism for a messy, authentic laugh.