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- [00:00]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible beverage items like Red Bull and sparkling ice, or breakfast favorites like Kellogg's Pop Tarts, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and Kellogg's Eggo Waffles, plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more restrictions applied. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [00:28]
Serenity Disco
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- [00:58]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:23]
Serenity Disco
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Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:31]
Serenity Disco
Car or a house. It's the four wheels that get you where you're going and the four walls that welcome you home. When you combine auto and home insurance with Amica, we'll help protect it all. The more you cover, the more you can save. Amica Empathy is our best policy. Coal Zone Media in the late 1950s, 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 II just a decade earlier. Children never raises her voice and never screams at them.
- [02:27]
Jamie Loftus
Any mother who can get through a.
- [02:28]
Serenity Disco
Day with children without exploding is a saint.
- [02:32]
Jamie Loftus
Well, of course I don't believe in screaming.
- [02:34]
Serenity Disco
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 and the 70 year Chinese exclusion act just being rolled back earlier in the 50s, you'd be hard pressed to see anyone but a white woman in American media. The 50s 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 Mr. Clean.
- [03:38]
Ryan Seacrest
Gets rid of dirt and grime and.
- [03:40]
Jamie Loftus
Grease in just a minute, Mr. Clean will clean your whole house and everything that's in it.
- [03:46]
Serenity Disco
Mr. Hottie himself, the brawny paper towel guy, wishes the Mr. Clean advertising has been strikingly consistent since his debut back in the 1950s. If you live under a rock, he's a bald guy with white eyebrows, huge arms, a white shirt and a single earring. Hello. Sorry to say it, no one wants to hear it. But he is Daddy and he always has been. And from his very inception, Mr. Clean has been turning on the housewives he's been consistently marketed to. In fact, in that first jingle, a cartoon 50s housewife with a fuck ass, little Bob is overwhelmed by the tall, hunky Mr. 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, Mr. Clean would appear as either a sexy cartoon or a sexy human man who would power 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 really seem to love the guy in their own unique, horny little ways. For the record, do I think that Mr. 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 Mr. Clean's weirder moments came pretty early in his story in 1962 when a magazine contest was held to give Mr. Clean a first name. The ad came with suggestive images for Mr. Clean's new Persona, including at least one racist option, if you're being generous. Others included Mr. Clean's take on pirates, weightlifters, knights, and even just a Mr. 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 Mr. Clean has the might that makes right of the toughest cleaning jobs. The power to overpower any kind of dirt. Alvin. Alvin is beloved by all men and ladies, brides and babies, recluses, chanteuses, the complete who hooses Everybody loves Mr. 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 Mr. Clean. The original minuteman. Guys, I think Mr. 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. New mean Mr. Clean.
- [06:56]
Jamie Loftus
What made Mr. Clean so mean?
- [06:58]
Serenity Disco
Dirt.
- [06:59]
Jamie Loftus
He hates dirt.
- [07:01]
Serenity Disco
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 2016, parent company Procter and Gamble hired former Twilight hunk Kellen Lutz to promote a Mr. 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 2017, Mr. 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. During the 2017 Super bowl, in lieu of booking Elvis Presto as their musical act again like they should have, the brand aired an ad that featured CGI Mr. Clean doing a seductive cleaning dance with a woman in her home, culminating with. And it's moments like these where I simply can't stand working in an audio medium. It culminates in this unbelievably detailed shot of Mr. Clean's toned ass in those white little pants. It's wild. And the clickbait media responded in kind, saying, the next day, Mr. Clean's erotic Super bowl ad makes us uncomfortable.
- [08:34]
Ryan Seacrest
The Mr. Clean Super bowl commercial was too damn sexy.
- [08:37]
Serenity Disco
And people loved it. Moms everywhere are losing their minds over the Mr. Clean Super bowl commercial. And Mr. Clean's social media team was fast to react to this attention. The next day, they posted an old school meme of a shy Mr. Clean bashfully covering his face with the writing.
- [08:58]
Ryan Seacrest
That look when you realize your mom.
- [09:01]
Serenity Disco
Will see your sexy super bowl ad. But while Mr. Clean was making hay of this big moment, the brand was far from alone. By the time this 2017 burst of web activity happened. The Mr. Clean brand or the Mr. Clean man, the lines were getting hazier. Was following a carefully developed playbook in which beloved 20th 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 Mr. Cream, right? Sorry. Sentient Sometimes Horny brands on social media. Your 16th minute starts now. Welcome back to 16th 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've come to interact with brands on social media from the 2010s 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 orange juice beverage Sunny Delight threatening suicide. There's actually quite a bit of history that got us there, and even more history since that makes me suspect that if Sunny 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, Mr. Clean Deep. Oh my God. On how, if you dare look close enough, the duolingo owl begging pop star Dua Lipa 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 2010s to become a part of the Web2 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 whose 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 2010s 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 future installments of this miniseries, 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 StakeMS 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 Duolingo 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 20 something Internet natives working check to check. So come with me if you dare to World War I I am so sorry. You know, World War I Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot trench foot. Remember that? My public schooling was such that it took me a second to remember who fought in World War I, but I vividly remember the pictures that my teacher showed us of trench foot. Good stuff. Thank you Mr. Cates. 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 2002 BBC docuseries the Century of the Self, which traces how Sigmund Freud's ideas went on to deeply impact American marketing, and the 2017 book the Attention 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 I 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 1890s, modeled after the battle for attention of New Yorkers between rival newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the moment that news became readily accessible and monetized, the integrity of that news came into question. And in the event of that particular flame war, it's commonly thought to have pushed the US into the Spanish American War of 1898. 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 I 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 ad men who could convince a bunch of teenage boys to go get themselves killed in order to make President Wilson look awesome. And they did, very effectively in the form of the relentless George Creel, 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 Creel was a man who would go on to declare himself the father of public relations, Edward Bernays. So the century of the self sips the Bernays 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. Research. However, Edward Bernays 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 Bernays 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 20th century proceeded as if it were true. This meant that advertising, especially headed by lil nephew Eddie Bernays, was designed to appeal to the latent violence and horniness within every prospective consumer. Freudian psychology is centered around repression and Bernays took this idea and offered up a product to solve a problem that very often consumers were just told they had. Bernays blended Freud's theories of unconscious desires with herd theory and crowd psychology, equally disputable works that allowed Bernays 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 Eddy, 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 Creel and Bernays on their vision board of propagandistic destruction. If you can believe that Bernays 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 Bernays 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, Propaganda, Public Relations and most famously 1955'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 Bernays selling feminist suffragettes on cigarettes, famously rebranding Lucky Strikes as torches of freedom and having feminists march in the New York Easter Day parade ripping cigs 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. Bernays later Ran a campaign for disposable Dixie cups in the 1930s that was predicated on the idea that reusable glasses would give you venereal 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 1940s, 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 too, or gargle with Listerine to make sure that you're married before 30. An actual campaign. But this Bernaysian 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 60s and 70s. 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's 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 Amos 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, Mr. Clean reflects what social media marketing would become by the 2010s. The product is mimicking the audience in order to gain their trust. So in the 60s 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 Bernays. 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 free love approach to consumption to former Freud friend, eventual Freud enemy William Reich, who claimed that any neurosis could easily be attributed to 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.
- [25:38]
Jamie Loftus
It 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.
- [25:51]
Serenity Disco
That's the whole joke. I think it's funny.
- [25:55]
Jamie Loftus
I think it's funny because people spend.
- [25:58]
Serenity Disco
So much of their 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.
- [26:45]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's Stock up Savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible cleaning items from ALL and Cotton L and dinner essentials from Daisy, Skippy, Hellman's and Barilla, plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [27:13]
Serenity Disco
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- [28:13]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [28:44]
Serenity Disco
Insurance we know it's more than just a house. It's your home. The place that's filled with memories. The early days of figuring it out to the later years of still figuring it out for the place you've put down roots. Trust Amica Home Insurance Ameca Empathy is our best policy. Welcome back to 16th minute. Thank you for attending my TED talk on advertising. So we're gonna jump ahead a little bit in the timeline through the Reagan and Thatcher era, 1980s 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.
- [29:51]
Jamie Loftus
Against the conformity imposed by consumerism now embraced it because it helped them to be themselves.
- [29:58]
Serenity Disco
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 flooded 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 hardwired 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 ad. With Due respect to iHeartRadio, it was to make you trust in the product and have your self 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 are Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed fame and Mr. Zucky 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 shuttering 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 promise. 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 16% of his workforce, he published a somewhat regretful post on Buzzfeed in February 2025 about how you guys he's realizing this AI slop is a bunch of bullshit. He writes about this as if he's discovered it himself, even going so far as to make a cringy millennial shorthand for what he's talking about.
- [32:34]
Ryan Seacrest
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.
- [32:48]
Serenity Disco
Spin content as unprecedented and unique. A is for anger, manipulate people's anger to drive engagement via outrage.
- [32:58]
Ryan Seacrest
R is for protection, retention retention hacks.
- [33:02]
Serenity Disco
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? Tangent over Back in Peretti's ingenue days, he had a pretty solid handle on the attention economy as it existed in the 2000s and 2000s, 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 Paretti'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 bag from there all the way up to snarf. Damn, that just made me snarf, yo. I cannot believe snarf. And then of course there's Mark Zuckerberg who famously I am the colleague. You can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life. Hahaha. In 2007. 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 hypebeast 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 AI slop. 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. Facebook in a way that made the site more popular, because instead of overwhelming users with Bernays 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're subsumed by late capitalism entirely. How are we feeling? Do we need a Mr. 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 sponsors sponsored 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 this pivot in the 2000s, 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 platforms 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 Mr. Clean in your horny fantasies, but you could DM Mr. 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 Web2 in marketing, the early 2010s, just shy of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that would lose Zuckerberg the last few fanboys he had after the social network, the era where Tumblr and Pinterest were considered femme 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 20 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 decades 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 figurehead 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 dead 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 the one and only Serenity Disco. Serenity's work on the Denny's Tumblr 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 into an extremely online emo teenager. The same kind of customer that might roll up to the diner 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. And like 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 hyper bonded mostly queer and femme 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 Hour pancakes doing it. And Serenity was damn good at it. And like they and every other social media manager singled out for a brand account success has told me in the research for this series, this was not something that they did alone. Serenity credits their graphic 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 hellaspookyking 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 candlelit 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 Tumblrs 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 we'll repost did seem to draw a lot of younger people to the restaurant, predicated on a combination of wanting their image seen 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, were 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 21st birthday. Back to Pancakes. Serenity's work was routinely written up on clickbait websites with headlines like 28 weirdly wonderful images from the Denny's Tumblr 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 experiences of other people I speak speak with later in this series. Serenity was in their early 20s 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's 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 2010s. As in generations past, advertising to 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.
- [46:42]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for store wide deals and earn four times the point. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible snacks like lay's chips, garden veggie straws and planters nuts or sweet treats from M&MS. And Oreo plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [47:08]
Serenity Disco
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Ryan Seacrest
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Serenity Disco
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Serenity Disco
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- [48:04]
Ryan Seacrest
Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.
- [48:08]
Serenity Disco
Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for Families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance and keep an eye on what your kids are spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place, try Greenlight risk free today@greenlight.com iheartra welcome back to 16th Minute. I'm so sleepy. Here's my interview with Serenity Disco.
- [48:56]
Jamie Loftus
My name is Serenity Disco. I'm the founder of Aloebud, which is a self care app. But I also do freelance consulting on the side.
- [49:04]
Serenity Disco
I mean, 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?
- [49:21]
Jamie Loftus
I love the question of like, where did you grow up? Because I can't like pinpoint one place that I. Because I moved so many times, I've probably moved like 20 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, you know, 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.
- [50:12]
Serenity Disco
What a sentence.
- [50:13]
Jamie Loftus
Yes.
- [50:15]
Serenity Disco
If you've learned about Jeffree Star in the last five years, that may seem actually quite terrifying. However, there was a time where it was a sign that you have made it on MySpace specifically.
- [50:26]
Jamie Loftus
Exactly. Being someone who moved so many times, 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 Neopets, took that to creating my own forums for people. One was called Rebel MB Message Boards.
- [50:50]
Serenity Disco
What was the theme?
- [50:52]
Jamie Loftus
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.
- [51:31]
Serenity Disco
When did you start working for Denny's?
- [51:33]
Jamie Loftus
I'm pretty sure it was back in 2012, 2013. 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 Arielle Calderon and she was the current social media manager at Denny's. I came into my interview and I showed them my tweets.
- [52:18]
Serenity Disco
I would love to hear more about the interview. Well, here's. Here's my little joke.
- [52:22]
Jamie Loftus
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 24 7. 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 24 7, 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 a initiative with Brand New, the band for a long time.
- [53:21]
Serenity Disco
Really, I don't think I knew that.
- [53:22]
Jamie Loftus
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. It didn't feel as larger than life than, you know, they 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 Tumblr 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, Denny's, I'm here. Like my. My friend Denny's.
- [54:27]
Serenity Disco
And you are like, a lot of power for a 23 year old. Yeah. Like, shaping the image of this.
- [54:34]
Jamie Loftus
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. 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 having personalities online is just so common and everyone's using social media.
- [55:03]
Serenity Disco
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.
- [55:12]
Jamie Loftus
Yes, Wendy's and Denny's were like, very early on in the brand Persona. You know, they let me have free rein. 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 2 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 timestamp. This was before, like, buffer existed where you could schedule posts. Seeing Denny's up at 2am 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.
- [56:10]
Serenity Disco
Were you running all of the social media?
- [56:12]
Jamie Loftus
Yeah, I was running all of the social media accounts. Oh. And I just want to mention that the. The fact that I was given this free reign is because I had an amazing team 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. It fit together so perfectly.
- [56:40]
Serenity Disco
Was there a moment where you're like, oh, this is, like, really working?
- [56:45]
Jamie Loftus
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 300,000 notes on it. I just love 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 hired at Tumblr directly after Denny's. They.
- [57:27]
Serenity Disco
Okay, that's what I thought.
- [57:27]
Jamie Loftus
They poached me because they liked the work I did on the Denny's Tumblr and they wanted me to help other brands, you know, have that, you know, experiences. Same experience.
- [57:38]
Serenity Disco
I don't know. I want to explore this idea that feels so bizarre. And I would have, like, 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 chain.
- [57:52]
Jamie Loftus
Right, right.
- [57:53]
Serenity Disco
How do you navigate that? Were there ever, like, moments of this feels weird. Like, what is this?
- [58:01]
Jamie Loftus
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. Oh, this is disgusting. But people would send us, like, photos of themselves in the bathroom after going, like, after eating. You totally don't have to include this, but, like, no, that's the.
- [58:31]
Serenity Disco
The people need to know.
- [58:32]
Jamie Loftus
Like, that's, 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.
- [58:44]
Serenity Disco
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's like. Like you're saying, posting at 2 in the morning, like, I should always be on.
- [58:58]
Jamie Loftus
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, like on 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, 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.
- [60:02]
Serenity Disco
Right. Which is so American of us to date. USA First. Like, are there any like, standout positive memories or like moments of recognition that you look back on fondly?
- [60:17]
Jamie Loftus
Also, we would do giveaways where we would give away, you know, Denny's gift 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, I would collect all the posts and bring them to my superior and be like, look what they made us. Look what 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, that I could talk to and be friendly with. I'll never forget.
- [61:09]
Serenity Disco
Did anyone at the time sort of figure out who you as an individual were?
- [61:15]
Jamie Loftus
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 Twitterati 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.
- [61:52]
Serenity Disco
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 always.
- [62:01]
Jamie Loftus
I would get told that too. And I, 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?
- [62:21]
Serenity Disco
We will be back with more serenity.
- [62:28]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. For Albertsons and Safeway, it's stock up savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times a point. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible snacks like lay's chips, garden veggie straws and planters nuts or sweet treats From M&MS. And Oreo plus many then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings stack up those rewards to save even more restrictions applied. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [62:56]
Serenity Disco
Every day our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.
- [63:09]
Jamie Loftus
Thank you for calling Amica Insurance.
- [63:11]
Serenity Disco
Hey, I was just in an accident.
- [63:13]
Jamie Loftus
Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of.
- [63:14]
Serenity Disco
At ama, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amica empathy is our best policy.
- [63:27]
Ryan Seacrest
Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook.
- [63:29]
Serenity Disco
Experience has arrived@legends.com with thousands of the.
- [63:33]
Ryan Seacrest
Best free to play casino style games.
- [63:34]
Serenity Disco
Chances to earn millions of bonus coins and win in real money, Legends is revolutionizing the Vegas experience wherever you are. If you love winning, then you'll love playing at L E G-E-N-D Z.com Legends is a free to play social casino void. We're prohibited play responsibly. Visit legends.com for more information.
- [63:51]
Ryan Seacrest
Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.
- [63:57]
Serenity Disco
Hey everybody. So when you get asked, what is Odoo? What comes to mind? Well, I'll tell you. Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say that Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. Oh, but then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks.
- [64:26]
Jamie Loftus
Whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.
- [64:33]
Serenity Disco
So what is Odoo? Well, Odoo is a bit of everything.
- [64:36]
Jamie Loftus
Odoo is a fertilizer.
- [64:38]
Serenity Disco
Magic beanstalk. Building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up now@odoo.com. that's O-O-O.com welcome back to 16th 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?
- [65:30]
Jamie Loftus
I think it was just the, the, the opportunity, you know, they definitely offered me more money there and I was just getting started. Like you said, I was a 23, 24 year old in New York City and rent's not cheap, so, you know.
- [65:45]
Serenity Disco
You got to go where the money.
- [65:46]
Jamie Loftus
Got to go where the money is. And also, 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 roadshows where I, yeah, it's, it's basically like a Tumblr one on one, like you know how to use Tumblr. And I 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 sink fandom. Like people were obsessed with things. 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.
- [66:41]
Serenity Disco
So 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?
- [66:52]
Jamie Loftus
So Hillary Clinton, that was a couple years after Tumblr. I, I actually launched a small media article organization called femsplain that was for and long form content, personal essays for women and femme 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 sounds 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, I know that was impactful too, but you know, I wanted to do something in the media space as well.
- [67:45]
Serenity Disco
It seems like you're sort of chasing more of your passions and yeah, like.
- [67:50]
Jamie Loftus
Femme splain 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 Roc 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 Clinton campaign back in 2016.
- [68:30]
Serenity Disco
Oh, while you were there?
- [68:31]
Jamie Loftus
Yeah, I got recruited to, to work for her doing photo registration and influencer management work with influencers to create, like, help them create content that they could share on their social media channels to get people to register to vote using the iwillvote.com website.
- [68:50]
Serenity Disco
I think it is fascinating because I wasn't sure what like social media job at Roc Nation would even entail, but it is fascinating that like celebrities are brands of their own and they have.
- [69:03]
Jamie Loftus
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.
- [69:19]
Serenity Disco
Was it meaningfully different managing a celebrity's account versus a restaurant's account?
- [69:26]
Jamie Loftus
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, we're on this podcast talking about what I did when I was 23 years old and I'm, I'm now 35.
- [69:49]
Serenity Disco
So my last question about sort of this period of your work, the 2016 election.
- [69:56]
Jamie Loftus
Yes.
- [69:57]
Serenity Disco
Quite contentious.
- [69:58]
Jamie Loftus
Oh boy.
- [69:59]
Serenity Disco
The way people interact with celebrities that they think are on 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?
- [70:19]
Jamie Loftus
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 there's someone there and I'm doing a job and I'm. I'm doing a job that I actually believed in. I believed in her. It was really upsetting. I remember the, the day of the election, it was heartbreaking. Like, people were messaging me in, 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 gonna 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 block button.
- [72:13]
Serenity Disco
Working on the Hillary campaign, was that the first time that you were in a big social media position as yourself?
- [72:19]
Jamie Loftus
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, it just sort of happened that way. And, you know, I don't regret any, any of it. It was a really great experience and I again worked with some really amazing people.
- [72:46]
Serenity Disco
So you experienced significant burnout?
- [72:50]
Jamie Loftus
Oh, yes, yes.
- [72:51]
Serenity Disco
Can you, can you tell me more about that?
- [72:53]
Jamie Loftus
Oh, yes. It hit me like a thousand bricks. The day after the, 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, it was there and I wasn't drinking enough water. The, the inspiration for my current company, Aloe Bud, came from working on the campaign. A co worker would, would post on post it notes, like really nice reminders and then post 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 ROC Nation. I worked there for a couple months before deciding to, 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 Alibud. And yeah, I'm just like, I'm happy.
- [74:01]
Serenity Disco
For you that you were able to be like, no, we're calling it. Your next project was about addressing that. So when you're putting aloe bud together, how you build something like that out.
- [74:12]
Jamie Loftus
Yeah, so initially it was a worksheet that I had someone design where, you know, we listed out hydrate, fuel, refresh things, 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 Typeform. 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, we can make this for you. And so we went to Kickstarter and fundraised $50,000. Yeah, we have 1.4 million users now and we've been around for, I think eight years.
- [75:18]
Serenity Disco
On the whole, since you were tweeting at 2am from the Denny's account to now, how has your relationship with the Internet changed?
- [75:29]
Jamie Loftus
I definitely use social media a lot less than I did previously. Like, I was, I was someone who was 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 a 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 grass because I hate, I hate that saying.
- [76:39]
Serenity Disco
It's so patronizing.
- [76:41]
Jamie Loftus
Yeah. And you don't know what it's like to be, to have like all of your communities and everything be digital, 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.
- [76:57]
Serenity Disco
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 shitposting 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.
- [77:48]
Jamie Loftus
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 treats.
- [78:16]
Serenity Disco
16Th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and pet shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cats Flea and Casper and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye.
- [78:48]
Ryan Seacrest
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Serenity Disco
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Jamie Loftus
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Serenity Disco
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Jamie Loftus
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Serenity Disco
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Jamie Loftus
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Serenity Disco
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Jamie Loftus
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Serenity Disco
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Serenity Disco
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