Brands Saying Bae
December 29, 2014 11:08 AM   Subscribe

It's cool when a corporation tweets like a teenager. It makes me want to buy the corporation's products. Brands Saying Bae.
posted by naju (130 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Bae?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:14 AM on December 29, 2014 [7 favorites]


I've been calling my girlfriends that. I'm not a teen but I find it fun and funny.

BaeSystems is, like, ugh. Go home!
posted by discopolo at 11:18 AM on December 29, 2014


time to say Bye! to Bae.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:18 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Wrong byline.

It's cool when a corporation tweets like a teenager. It makes me want to buy the corporation's products.

Right byline:

All your bae are belong to us.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:18 AM on December 29, 2014 [22 favorites]




Oy bae.
posted by gwint at 11:20 AM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


These are awful, but I still think this remains the gold standard of corporate tweeter fuckups.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 at 11:22 AM on December 29, 2014 [43 favorites]


Another metafilter post that has made me dumber.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:23 AM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Pfft. Old and busted. New hotness is "Brands got tweets on fleek".
posted by Rock Steady at 11:23 AM on December 29, 2014


Pfft. Old and busted. New hotness is "Brands got tweets on fleek".

This is not my steeze. I'm still not over calling things "on point."
posted by discopolo at 11:25 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Bae" is Danish for "poop."

Not in Icelandic, bae, and not in Cool-land.
posted by discopolo at 11:26 AM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Stop trying to make Corporate Bae happen. It's not going to happen.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 11:27 AM on December 29, 2014 [10 favorites]


I like the thought of Twitter accounts being sentient restaurants.

sry abt the salmonella bae <3
posted by Spatch at 11:28 AM on December 29, 2014 [17 favorites]


Bae Watch.
posted by Kabanos at 11:29 AM on December 29, 2014 [12 favorites]


discopolo: "This is not my steeze. I'm still not over calling things "on point.""

Sounds pretty darb.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:30 AM on December 29, 2014


Ugh, can corporations just not with this anymore? I really can't even.
posted by bonje at 11:31 AM on December 29, 2014 [18 favorites]


eBae
posted by louche mustachio at 11:32 AM on December 29, 2014 [11 favorites]


So, uh, what is a bae? And why would I want to be one or make fun of others for wanting to be one? So confused. So very confused.
posted by fremen at 11:33 AM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


Now that's streets ahead.
posted by BrashTech at 11:35 AM on December 29, 2014 [31 favorites]


I'm totally going to steal the term "brandsterpiece".
posted by graphnerd at 11:37 AM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


Dirty prescriptivists, all of you.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:39 AM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


They're apparently getting all their "what the kids are saying" data from Time magazine.

All the cool kids read Time, right?
posted by Sys Rq at 11:39 AM on December 29, 2014


Pepsi Bae.
posted by droplet at 11:43 AM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


They do, although they generally refer to it by its affectionate nickname, Ti Ti.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:43 AM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


All the cool kids read Time, right?

Dude, we're reading Life! The old copies!
posted by discopolo at 11:44 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


How do you do, fellow kids?
posted by Admiral Haddock at 11:44 AM on December 29, 2014 [36 favorites]


Weird racial component to this too, I think. Like much of this stuff is AAVE slang and it's especially embarrassing to see it used by e.g. the Whole Foods social presence.
posted by naju at 11:45 AM on December 29, 2014 [18 favorites]


Bae? Not on my watch. Bae. Watch. Get it? Get it?
posted by Splunge at 11:46 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


(You guys are killing me and IT with the Community and Steve Bucemi on 30 Rock quotes.)
posted by discopolo at 11:46 AM on December 29, 2014


#MeetMeInTemecula, corporations.
posted by sallybrown at 11:47 AM on December 29, 2014 [7 favorites]


Weird racial component to this too, I think. Like much of this stuff is AAVE slang and it's especially embarrassing to see it used by e.g. the Whole Foods social presence.

It should be: if corporations are cooler than the typical anglo dad, something is fucked.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:47 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Another metafilter post that has made me dumber.

I'm sorry it's so easy to do, bae. You should see a doctor.
posted by discopolo at 11:48 AM on December 29, 2014 [7 favorites]


I love making fun of the way black people talk! Then I wait a year or two, and talk the way they talked a year or two -- only ironically! After doing that for a few months, I just start talking the way black people did a couple years ago with no sense of irony at all! It's awesome!
posted by flarbuse at 11:55 AM on December 29, 2014 [23 favorites]


Like much of this stuff is AAVE slang

[citation needed]
posted by sparklemotion at 12:02 PM on December 29, 2014


Corporate brands: You love us the same way you love your loved ones.
posted by bleep at 12:04 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]




This word, why do I find it so nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating?
posted by The Legit Republic of Blanketsburg at 12:07 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


My Spidey-sense tells me that this partially is Buzzfeed's doing, and is just an updated version of Mailer's "White Negro" thing, which of course black people discussed amongst themselves long before 1948.

Anyway, I would not be at all surprised if Buzzfeed has someone on the Black Twitter/Instagram/Kik/whatever beat, scrolling through and looking for the coolness via retweeted/favorited posts, and on the other end there is a social media kid in marketing at some company hired to read these also, as well as Buzzfeed, and pass along these "learnings" to the brand guys.

What used to take a year or more for a company to co-opt is now almost instantly captured and distributed to everyone in service of seeming hip and cool to egg the kids into buying some stuff.

I have no cites, and I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised.
posted by droplet at 12:08 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Sounds pretty darb.

You mean darb?
posted by Slothrup at 12:08 PM on December 29, 2014


Brandstur-bae-ting.
posted by misterpatrick at 12:09 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


This word, why do I find it so nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating?

'Cause it is?

And also because it's being used in a desperate (and utterly, utterly, so very utterly futile) attempt at "with it"-ness to sell pancakes and laundry detergent to the 18-30 demographic.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:15 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


The New Inquiry: Weird Corporate Twitter
posted by naju at 12:15 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


Ugh. This, for me, is the flipside of the horrible faux-kid script that brands use when they want to depict childhood. You know, the backwards, scrawly letters on the "lemon-aid" stand. All the more useless given that children are no longer able to write in print or cursive hands.
posted by the sobsister at 12:17 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


Bae an' switch

(helps if you use a glottal stop)
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:18 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


[citation needed]
Like boo, bae originates in African American English. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that boo might come from beau, but ultimately judges its origin uncertain. Bae, on the other hand, has a pretty straightforward etymology: It started as a clipped form of baby or babe. Or did it? (More on that later.) The earliest evidence I've found for the existence of bae is a chart generated on the website Rap Genius, which indicates that bae has been turning up in rap songs since 2005, although their search interface makes it hard to confirm.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:19 PM on December 29, 2014 [19 favorites]


This reminds me of when I found out what "rolling" meant from watching Dateline NBC.
posted by spilon at 12:19 PM on December 29, 2014


2014, the year columbusing went super saiyan.
posted by RedShrek at 12:21 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


This is entertaining.

It's not just someone roleplaying as a sentient restaurant.

Hah! This is one of the many things about marketing that I find so stupid and so baffling. There's so much talk in the industry about "authenticity", yet the entire premise of the enterprise is inherently inauthentic.

When you craft a made-up "persona" and "voice" through hours of painstaking statistical research, creepy data mining, customer profiling, spreadsheets, meetings, 60-page Word documents, and multiple rounds of review and debate and focus-grouping? When you pay some employee to play-act on social media as an anthropomorphized version of the "brand identity" you thusly constructed? That's the fuckin' opposite of authentic. That's like sociopath-level inauthenticity.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:25 PM on December 29, 2014 [31 favorites]


It's such a harsh realm when some cob nobbler tries to swing on the flippity-flop with contemporary youth culture. Don't you get it, Corporate America? You'll always be in the tom-tom club.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:30 PM on December 29, 2014 [28 favorites]


Bae is actually related to the mogi post a few doors down.
posted by clvrmnky at 12:37 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


That's the fuckin' opposite of authentic.

But what gets me about advertising is that the people involved in crafting ads and social media presences are, well, people -- at least some of the time. Hired cheap and young, they might actually use the lingo they're aping on the corporate twitter in their non-work lives.

This is something that's always bugged me about the music in car commercials. Sometimes it's really good music and not from the top 40. The people who decided that this would make good music for a car ad might have been listening to it in their spare time. Or music like it.

It's not so easy to separate corporate advertising culture from culture. And that's part of what's so very unsettling about it. I think it actually exposes how much of a questionable concept "authenticity" is, even though I instinctively feel like there must be a meaningful distinction there.

That's not to say I have no problem with this kind of advertising. It seems so pathetic to me. And it's a sign of relentless, cynical corporations injecting their presence into goddamn everything. I just wonder about the people, that's all -- do they think they're "inauthentic"?
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:41 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


Corporate culture is America's authentic culture.
posted by The Whelk at 12:43 PM on December 29, 2014 [23 favorites]


The only cool BAE
posted by fullerine at 12:45 PM on December 29, 2014


Reminds me of a Vice article from the late 90s about the increasing nonsense language used in ads. The predicted eventual phrase that I still remember 15 years later is airlines running ads saying "We be flossin' and flying our mofos all over this beeyotch." We're not quite there yet but so. close.
posted by yellowbinder at 12:57 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


Great. First corporations have religions, now they have an awkward teen phase.
posted by Clueless in Crocodilopolis at 1:01 PM on December 29, 2014 [7 favorites]


Well just to give the Devil his due, this Prilosec® for sure got me on fleek!
posted by Divine_Wino at 1:05 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Walmart is extremely thirsty.
posted by book 'em dano at 1:09 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


The whole corporate-use-of-bae thing has kind of crystallized my theory that it's actually bored twentysomethings running this 'social media engagement' or whateverthefuck it's called and just flat-out fucking with their corporate masters.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:14 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


Bae is so March 2014. Nice try, grandpa!

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you, too!" - Bae Simpson
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:16 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


This whole day has been really Kafka-esque; or as Kafka would say, "Me-esque."

KthxBai Bae.
posted by Mister_A at 1:20 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


The thing I genuinely enjoy about Twitter (other than pictures of horses who look like Todd Rundgren and updates on a pond in Tampa) are the posters who write tweets that are perfectly balanced between irony and earnestness.
posted by winna at 1:26 PM on December 29, 2014


The whole corporate-use-of-bae thing has kind of crystallized my theory that it's actually bored twentysomethings running this 'social media engagement' or whateverthefuck it's called and just flat-out fucking with their corporate masters.

I think you're at least half right. The people composing these tweets are most likely young, and most likely not WalMart employees. They're agency social media people and a big part of their job is keeping current with repugnant new terms like bae, etc., which, if you use social media a lot, esp. with young adults, just sort of happens anyway. I don't think they're fucking with their corporate masters though; I think this is exactly the kind of "authenticity" said masters are paying truckloads of money to their agencies to create, in the hopes of "creating meaningful engagement" with their target audiences.
posted by Mister_A at 1:28 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


This vintage Boondocks comic features the all-time champion in marketing gone wrong.
posted by dr_dank at 1:32 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


I think this is exactly the kind of "authenticity" said masters are paying truckloads of money to their agencies to create, in the hopes of "creating meaningful engagement" with their target audiences.

I see where you're coming from. My theory is more that these people who are aware of the trends and stuff know full well that most people are going to look at MegaCorp saying 'bae' and be unimpressed and/or outright scoff. And if these trends people aren't aware of this, why the actual hell are you paying them?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:36 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


The whole corporate-use-of-bae thing has kind of crystallized my theory that it's actually bored twentysomethings running this 'social media engagement' or whateverthefuck it's called and just flat-out fucking with their corporate masters.

This is precisely the story behind the denny's tumblr account though.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:38 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Mister_A: "repugnant new terms like bae"

Repugnant?
posted by invitapriore at 1:38 PM on December 29, 2014


What's repugnant about "bae"?

(In general, I mean. Obviously it's stupid when co-opted by marketers.)
posted by kmz at 1:38 PM on December 29, 2014


escape from the potato planet: That's the fuckin' opposite of authentic.
I've got some bad news for you, and you're probably going to have to sit down for this.

Ready?

"Authentic" doesn't mean a goddamned thing. It's less meaningful than the word "homemade" printed on the packaging of something in won't-ever-spoil section of your grocery story. It makes corporate mottos seem like the Rosetta Stone.

Sorry. I know you believed in "authentic"'s authenticity, but it turns out... it has none.
posted by IAmBroom at 1:39 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


It's worth noting that this twitter account is being run by boring_as_heck, who is just wonderful!

boring_as_heck, previously and also previously
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:40 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Another metafilter post that has made me dumber.

Perhaps the post made you dumber, but the comments and the linked articles (thank you Naju) in the thread, per usual, are intelligent and thought provoking.
posted by nikoniko at 1:44 PM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


> They're apparently getting all their "what the kids are saying" data from Time magazine.

All the cool kids read Time, right?


All I know is, I'm not in a position to make fun of any of this because I had to google "bae" to learn what it meant, and the first thing I clicked on was that Time article.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:46 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


Needs more slippin'™.
posted by tommasz at 1:47 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


The repugnance is in the co-opting, yes. And I get where you're coming from, 3FM, but I also think that we here at MeFi are solidly NOT the target demo. Some people may find this clever, or fun, or may attribute some other vague positive quality to this. There is no accounting for taste—I mean, hello, Thomas Kinkade! Right? Need I say more?
posted by Mister_A at 1:49 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


The Card Cheat, me too
posted by tippiedog at 1:49 PM on December 29, 2014


overthinking a plate of bae
posted by The Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas at 1:51 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


This whole day has been really Kafka-esque; or as Kafka would say, "Me-esque."

When u wake up & bae has turned into a gigantic insect

[reaction.gif]
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:52 PM on December 29, 2014 [11 favorites]


Well, on the ride to work in the Quiet Car I am constantly disturbed by cries of, "Go 'way, I'm readin' Time, brah," or, "You see the pope got person of the year? Shit is tight!" and so forth.*


*This story is only partly true.
posted by Mister_A at 1:53 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


They're agency social media people and a big part of their job is keeping current with repugnant new terms like bae

Wait what? Repugnant? Why? It's just an innocuous little term of endearment.
posted by jason_steakums at 1:56 PM on December 29, 2014


when u can't get any work done

[the_emperors_messenger_running_and_running.gif]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:57 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


It's like those seamless web ads in the subway boldly using the hot new terms of roughly ten months ago.
posted by The Whelk at 2:15 PM on December 29, 2014


Mister_A: I think this is exactly the kind of "authenticity" said masters are paying truckloads of money to their agencies to create, in the hopes of "creating meaningful engagement" with their target audiences.

Having some background in the marketing industry myself...my bets are on this one.

poffin boffin: This is precisely the story behind the denny's tumblr account though.

Uh? That does not appear to be the case at all. It's certainly an unconventional marketing tactic, but it's a far cry from "bored twentysomethings ... just flat-out fucking with their corporate masters".

IAmBroom: "Authentic" doesn't mean a goddamned thing. It's less meaningful than the word "homemade" printed on the packaging of something in won't-ever-spoil section of your grocery story. It makes corporate mottos seem like the Rosetta Stone.

DUDE, YOU JUST BLEW MY MIND is something I did not think after reading the above-cited comment. The word "authentic" has multiple meanings, and I'm well aware that it's currently fashionable to be all postmodern and say that authenticity doesn't exist or is a meaningless concept, and I even agree with much of that criticism (depending on the context).

There's still a gulf of difference between 1. someone expressing their sincere thoughts about Chili's, in their own, natural language and with a modicum of good faith; and 2. a paid employee following a script to push the emotional buttons that extensive market research indicates is most likely to get people to eat shitty Tex-Mex food.

If you choose to call the continuum along which that difference exists something other than "authenticity", no one can stop you, but you're unlikely to impress anyone by jumping into conversations and saying "PSYCH, AUTHENTICITY DOESN'T EVEN EXIST BRO, QED". If you choose to deny the existence of that difference – well, that's one well of cynicism that even I have yet to plumb.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 2:35 PM on December 29, 2014 [14 favorites]


Bae just bounces right off my stain-proof wrinkle-free dockers.
posted by srboisvert at 2:45 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


bonje: "Ugh, can corporations just not with this anymore? I really can't even."

NOT!
posted by symbioid at 2:50 PM on December 29, 2014


Sorry - to further clarify what I meant...

Like - I've heard about white people appropriating "bae". Honestly I hate that term, so I could give two shits, except that I see it all the time. People make it sound like it's some ancient secret codeword in black culture that's been around forever and then BAM there it is - white folk appropriated R&B and then Hip-Hop and now it goes to the oldest on the books "bae" but of course, the origin (at least online) seems to be around 2003-2005. I'm not even gonna talk more about that, it just annoys me as if this is the reason to get upset about it.

We have "dope" and "fresh" and "funk" and "ill" and that is straight from hip-hop, "yo"... And I'm glad we have them. But bae? It's like it really is just trying to be so twee or something.

So - I'm not offended about white people stealing it or whatever, cuz that shit happens all the time, cultural code-words gonna be ganked and all. But goddamned if this corporate shit ain't sad as all hell. I mean, like, it's like those parents who knew Wayne's World was what all the kids liked, so they started saying "Not" to be cool with the kids, and it was funny for like, a month, but they didn't know that at some point, that shit gets stale. Usually, once all the old people start doing it.

Well, now that the corps are doing it, we've hit that point and we can drop it like it's "NOT"!
posted by symbioid at 2:58 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Like boo, bae originates in African American English. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that boo might come from beau, but ultimately judges its origin uncertain. Bae, on the other hand, has a pretty straightforward etymology: It started as a clipped form of baby or babe. Or did it? (More on that later.)

In an interesting form of columbusing, I hear DJs on a top 40s station proudly pronounce that "bae" means "before anyone else". It must be so much easier to reduce it to a simple acronym instead of figuring out a way to make fun of AAVE without offending a portion of their audience.

I love making fun of the way black people talk! Then I wait a year or two, and talk the way they talked a year or two -- only ironically! After doing that for a few months, I just start talking the way black people did a couple years ago with no sense of irony at all! It's awesome!

Yeah, I suspect this is Clear Channel's (now called iHeartMedia) M.O. for those radio stations that mix in some of the "safer" hip-hop music in with the pop stuff.
posted by fuse theorem at 3:18 PM on December 29, 2014


Oh my god I didn't click the FPP link until just now it's actually horrifying
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:21 PM on December 29, 2014


@brandssayingbae is the angry and bitter snark that will kill this industry.

I wish I shared his optimism.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:38 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


From the Four Pins article naju linked to:
We’ve weathered the storms of “it me,” “my anaconda don’t,” “bitch you guessed it,” people holding non-phone objects up to their heads and pretending they’re phones, A$AP Rocky commanding children to burn all of their Been Trill and Hood By Air, pigeons dropping the hottest mixtape of 2014, Kermit sipping his tea, Bobby Shmurda’s disappearing hat and Pharrell’s gigantic hat just to name a few more than few.

Oh goodness, this sounds like one of those term dropping paragraphs science fiction authors use to give an impression of craziness to their future Society.
I have never heard of a single one of these and find it hard to believe this isn't just fictional!
posted by Omnomnom at 4:12 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


I think, just by how it obscures the use of the words "babe" or "baby", I actually like "bae" a lot better than those terms because it has always been super weird to me to affectionately call an adult a baby.
posted by jason_steakums at 4:13 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


> ...my theory that it's actually bored twentysomethings running this 'social media engagement' or whateverthefuck it's called and just flat-out fucking with their corporate masters.

In the earliest days of the commercialized WWW, it was sufficient to get your company online in some form. Nah, I'm kidding. It was a guaranteed promotion, or three. And you could really do anything you wanted -- partly because there was barely fuckall technology available in 1995, and the all-singing, all-talking, all-dancing website was some years in the future, so expectations were easy to meet -- and partly because there were no benchmarks to compare your website to.

Later came the benchmarks. Ways to measure the performance of your site. The number of visitors, the most popular pages, the most requested pages in search results, and so on... You couldn't do anything you wanted any more, you had to produce something that met performance goals, and if you didn't, there were plenty of marketing groups in line behind you willing to try.

These social media accounts are going the same way. The wild and wooly say-whatever days are passing. They're figuring out how to gauge successful Twitter accounts and Facebook sites. The product management overlords can watch your work in real-time -- they don't care to literally watch what you do; they're watching the pie charts and line graphs that twitch on the fly every time you win a retweet. They're going to hold you to getting more social market share, and if you aren't incrementing upward by the required number of points every month, there are plenty of social media experts behind you who say they can.

If the job of managing the Twitter account of the brand management department of the J.C. Humpanut Restaurant Franchise Inc., LLC isn't already ten hours a day of marketing meetings and coordination sessions with the other social media leads, interspersed with rushed sessions of churning out perky, impertinent-sounding (but not too irreverent, per the VP's WebEx last week!) Tweets and interacting with your brand's fans, I'm sure it will be soon.

At least (for the time being, anyway) you're not being paid by piecework.
posted by ardgedee at 4:17 PM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


Oh goodness, this sounds like one of those term dropping paragraphs science fiction authors use to give an impression of craziness to their future Society.
I have never heard of a single one of these and find it hard to believe this isn't just fictional!
posted by Omnomnom at 6:12 PM on December 29 [+] [!]


and yet your username.
posted by srboisvert at 4:18 PM on December 29, 2014 [12 favorites]


We’ve weathered the storms of “it me,” “my anaconda don’t,” “bitch you guessed it,” people holding non-phone objects up to their heads and pretending they’re phones, A$AP Rocky commanding children to burn all of their Been Trill and Hood By Air, pigeons dropping the hottest mixtape of 2014, Kermit sipping his tea, Bobby Shmurda’s disappearing hat and Pharrell’s gigantic hat just to name a few more than few.

All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
posted by naju at 4:47 PM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


These social media accounts are going the same way. The wild and wooly say-whatever days are passing. They're figuring out how to gauge successful Twitter accounts and Facebook sites. The product management overlords can watch your work in real-time -- they don't care to literally watch what you do; they're watching the pie charts and line graphs that twitch on the fly every time you win a retweet. They're going to hold you to getting more social market share, and if you aren't incrementing upward by the required number of points every month, there are plenty of social media experts behind you who say they can.

I just very recently (as in a few weeks ago) just got out of a job doing exactly this, and I can promise you that no one has figured any of this out. It's an industry dominated by the Shingies (Shingys? Shingæ?) of the world.

It might not matter to your point that they only think that they know what they're doing. But they absolutely do not.
posted by graphnerd at 4:48 PM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]




It's an industry dominated by the Shingies (Shingys? Shingæ?) of the world.

what the actual...what is that. I swear I got hives every time they quoted something he said.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:04 PM on December 29, 2014 [3 favorites]


A friend (who's usually pretty in-the-know on pop-culture) told me bae comes from "bey," which is what Kanye West calls Beyonce for short.
posted by hjo3 at 5:08 PM on December 29, 2014


I have never heard of a single one of these and find it hard to believe this isn't just fictional!

Almost everything referenced in this thread is like those trendsploitation laugh lines written for Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock.
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:25 PM on December 29, 2014


A friend (who's usually pretty in-the-know on pop-culture) told me bae comes from "bey," which is what Kanye West calls Beyonce for short.

Your friend may have been having you on (or doesn't know better).

(BTW, Beyonce's mother's maiden name is Beyince. The similarity is deliberate.)
posted by fuse theorem at 5:57 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Bae" is Danish for "poop."

and my friends think it's so clever to bring this up like, once a week whenever someone talks about this phrase. over and over. all year.
posted by emptythought at 6:11 PM on December 29, 2014 [10 favorites]


Ask them if they know Danish is American for Shitty Donut.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:26 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Thank goodness in Canadian 'Shitty Doughnut' doesn't mean Timmy's, as one might think, but GET THEE INTO MY GOB YE DELIGHT OF BUTTER AND CHEESE AND ALL GOOD THINGS.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 6:35 PM on December 29, 2014


The most recent tweet is almost like a form of blackface. "Pancakes. Errybody got time fo' dat."
posted by naju at 6:56 PM on December 29, 2014 [5 favorites]


Yup. The Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor prophesy is pretty much here.
posted by mintcake! at 7:05 PM on December 29, 2014 [6 favorites]


> It might not matter to your point that they only think that they know what they're doing. But they absolutely do not.

Inasmuch as brand-oriented marketing is advertising as a statistics-led discipline, the ideal process is one of rationalizing approaches, trying them out, and throwing them away for other approaches, with a pretty hard streak of empiricism under it all.

The executives might act on a whim, led by the guru huckster types, but their staff still have to account for the results on a hard schedule, and that's where, maybe, the freewheeling adventure of wacky public conversations with a brand is going to be ground down to steady utterances of forced cheer as deadlines are met and performance quotas are reported.
posted by ardgedee at 7:09 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Err, propheCy. Sorry, I just drank a whole lot of Rocket Fuel. (Damn.)
posted by mintcake! at 7:15 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


Dude, come on.
posted by breadbox at 7:24 PM on December 29, 2014


I normally notify Ms. Breadbox by saying, "I'm making Danish." when taking a poop.
posted by breadbox at 7:28 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]


It's like cool hunting except it's more like that time with your cousin when you went out in the woods with a pellet gun and then he shot a little innocent bird because he didn't know any better, and then you were sad and went home.
posted by sneebler at 9:02 PM on December 29, 2014 [4 favorites]


Kutstuwamushi: It's not so easy to separate corporate advertising culture from culture. And that's part of what's so very unsettling about it. I think it actually exposes how much of a questionable concept "authenticity" is, even though I instinctively feel like there must be a meaningful distinction there.

OMG, I was thinking about that in the wake of watching Black Mirror, how something can start authentic and then be shifted and warped out of your control - and you can go with it, or be left behind, but there's a point where other people are reacting to what they think your reaction means and it gets weird really quickly.

Authenticity is huge in therapeutic terms (I think of it as integrity, but Carl Rogers used authenticity) and the hardest thing to come to terms with is how messy and ragged it often is, and how rage and pain and joy and hope all get munged up in a ball and has to be felt and worked through. We live in a world which discourages mess, which rhetorically claims individuation but it really talking about unfettered success, and marketing is, like, the shining beacon of that. "I'm as authentic as six months of focus groups can make me."
posted by Deoridhe at 10:07 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


I'm 29, and I never felt old until corporate twitter accounts demonstrated a better hold on slang than I possessed.

I'm still not really sure what "fleek" means.
posted by ZaphodB at 11:27 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


Bae of...of...pigs?
posted by threeants at 12:14 AM on December 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


Invasion?
posted by threeants at 12:14 AM on December 30, 2014


guyz?
posted by threeants at 12:14 AM on December 30, 2014


sittin' on the dock with my bae
watching the Tide roll away
posted by threeants at 12:15 AM on December 30, 2014 [6 favorites]


Baewatch, because multiple interpretations have meaning.
posted by clavdivs at 2:02 AM on December 30, 2014


What? What about my username?
posted by Omnomnom at 3:40 AM on December 30, 2014


Heh, I've never felt this out of touch. I'm old, it's official.
posted by Omnomnom at 3:41 AM on December 30, 2014


Baebae
posted by blue_beetle at 6:29 AM on December 30, 2014


Well, how is this any worse for the average teen than the slog of legalese found in standard terms and conditions? I mean, contractually binding obligations surely are more impactful on a person than a tweet. I say that all terms and conditions marketed towards teens should be offered in the same vernacular so as to effectively communicate the stipulations of engaging in a business relationship with an entity.

1. If you upload your on fleek shit to us, that be ours... sho nuff. You may see Dat shit on some site someday, but too bad Fo you.
2. You late on your green for us, no plastic for you for like, 7 years, dog.
3. Fo erry hunnert you pay, a 20-spot don't even go to your bill, son. That be interest, and we jack that shit for doling you Dat money in the first place.
4. By agreeing to dis shit up here, we do whatevs, whenevs. And y'all just gotta deal wit dat.
posted by Debaser626 at 7:37 AM on December 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


The bae's knees, err, nays.

(Neighs?)


Hey, just wait til YOU get old!
posted by Chitownfats at 7:51 AM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Bey. I think we should all pretend that people who use the term (which I have no problem with aside from corporate nonsense) are actually addressing each other as Turkic chieftains.
posted by languagehat at 9:15 AM on December 30, 2014 [6 favorites]


Note: You can also pretend you are Turkish people addressing an older and respected Turkish man, languagehat bey.
posted by Mister_A at 12:48 PM on December 30, 2014


*gives dignified nod, murmurs incomprehensibly in Ottoman*
posted by languagehat at 1:01 PM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Bae...not since 'za.
posted by telstar at 4:46 PM on December 30, 2014


What? What about my username?
posted by Omnomnom at 3:40 AM on December 30 [+] [!]

It reminds me of Cookie Monster, so all good in my book.

Why didn't anyone make a Tickle Me Cookie Monster?
posted by SpacemanStix at 5:58 PM on December 30, 2014


I think the problem isn't that brands are trying to be hip and with it so much as brands are trying to be a part of social media in general. I am not in a social relationship with coke, I buy it and it makes me feel better. It's business. So stop trying to act like my friend, coke!
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:15 PM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


while i agree with you, the dennys twitter is honestly hilarious enough that i'm willing to forgive a lot of other corporations embarassing twitters. it almost reaches horse_ebooks levels of obtuse at times.

sometimes it's tryhard or facepalmy, but most of the time i'm just like "goddammit, you beautiful fucker, you get to sit in a cubicle stoned out of your gourd and get paid to post stupid shit all day".
posted by emptythought at 6:22 PM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


There goes my best Khitan limerick.
posted by clavdivs at 6:48 PM on December 30, 2014


that Denny's twitter is GOLD.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:23 PM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


The secret to Denny's pulling it off is that being a try-hard obnoxious awkard teen making dumb loud jokes with friends in public at a Denny's is almost a universal experience and they didn't give a fuck when we did it, so they get a pass
posted by jason_steakums at 10:33 PM on December 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


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