How Many Nuggets Does Your Soul Cost? If you’ve been on the internet this month, you’ve definitely been exposed to the most successful ad in the history of Twitter. Millions of people and countless media outlets have propagated the heartwarming story of a giant corporation buying a priceless amount of advertising for close to free. If you, like me, are one of the apparently few people who thinks it’s gross to willingly help a multibillion- dollar company expand its brand reach without them even paying you to do it, then I have some good news: You actually don’t have to do that.

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If you’ve been on the internet this month, you’ve definitely been exposed to the most successful ad in the history of Twitter. Millions of people and countless.

On Tuesday, Nevada teen Carter Wilkerson was finally rewarded for his incredibly successful efforts to spread awareness of and goodwill toward multinational fast food chain Wendy’s. Some cheeky Twitter banter between Wilkerson and the brand’s account a month ago led to this tweet in which the then- anonymous Wilkerson sought help from his fellow Twitter users to reach the 1.

Wendy’s had demanded in exchange for a year’s worth of free chicken nuggets. Just over a month later, Wendy’s awarded Wilkerson his year of nuggets right around the time the tweet became the most retweeted tweet in the history of Twitterdom—surpassing Ellen De. Generes’s three- year record- holding, star- studded Oscars selfie that featured some of the most famous people in the world. More than three and a half million accounts have retweeted Wilkerson’s message, which put it into exponentially more timelines—including, I bet, yours.

News organizations from the New York Times to the Verge covered the story, pushing it out to even more potential consumers. In exchange for an ad with that kind of reach, a year’s worth of chicken nuggets—let’s say Wilkerson actually orders some every day, which he won’t but would still have a value under $1,0. Wilkerson and Wendy’s are not alone. This kind of native viral advertising is all the rage now. Just check out a recent article from Indy.

Upworthy- esque content farm cousin of respectable British paper the Independent, about a similarly cheeky if lower stakes back- and- forth between one Twitter user and a number of brand accounts. Social media seems to be the new way to get free things,” the article starts, right away stating the issue in the exactly wrong way.

These people #engaging with the #content of a #brand aren’t getting free things; they are being paid (poorly) to advertise those products. And everyone—from the people tweeting the brands, to those liking and sharing those tweets, and the outlets earnestly covering the ads in search of cheap traffic—is complicit. Let’s look at the ads Indy. And let’s not mince words: these are ads. What else is a publicly shared message featuring a consumable product positioned in an effort to make that product and, by extension, the brand look good if not an ad?) That story started with this tweet by artist and social media presence Hector Janse van Rensburg, also known as Shitty Watercolour: This is either a funny tweeter’s sendup of the very phenomenon at hand—that social media is not always what it appears or purports to be, and is overflowing with pseudo- candid pictures and messages that in reality are unlabeled paid advertisements, playing off that strange mix of authenticity and commercialism endemic to this kind of internet microcelebrity—or it is a calculated attempt by a man fluent in paid brand strategizing. It can be both; it doesn’t matter either way. What does matter is that the soap brand reached out to van Rensburg, sent him some “free” products, no doubt out of appreciation for his trenchant satire, which led van Rensburg to do another, even more popular tweet playing off the same gag, this time incorporating an additional brand: The soap brand engaged with the car brand, and the car brand sent van Rensburg a comedic gift—he asked for a car so they sent him a toy one, ha- ha!—happy to carpool on this viral motorway.

All of this cost each company, what, 2. To reach millions of potential consumers. No traditional ad has ever had that kind of return.

Man tweets at brand. Brand sends man product. This, you may be saying, is not a story. Or at least not one anyone would want to read.

So, in an effort to juice the return on their coverage of this at best mildly entertaining scenario, Indy. This artist got a free car thanks to Twitter and some shower gel.” I’m sure the writer needed a whole bottle of Hip Brand’s Super Sudsy Shower Gel to wash away the shame—a bottle which Hip Brand would be all too willing to provide for free, naturally. This whole nasty business is a perfect reflection of the online sharing economy that is fucked up and stacked against you. It’s wild how readily real live human beings—often smart ones, too, who would generally express skepticism for this exact kind of corporate intrusion—will accept the presence of and even participate with brands on social media. The only requirement is that the brand be savvy enough to mask the corporate interests driving them with effective internet- speak. Watch Complicity Online Complicity Full Movie Online.

It was fun to laugh at at and shame inept brands tweeting about how their pancakes are “on fleek,” or Wendy’s itself tweeting Pepe memes, back before brands learned how to effectively engage with regular Twitter users. The “How do you do, fellow kids?” nature of it all provided an easy target for ridicule. But only the bad guys seemed to have learned any kind of a lesson from all of this. In this day and age, the hip trend is for fast food restaurants to take ownership of their…Read more Read. A subtle, with- it meme reference here, a jokey reply to a customer there, and a few random freebies sent every once in awhile to incentivize user engagement with the added bonus that the story might blow up into the next #Nuggs.

For. Carter viral hit, and you’ve got yourself an effective, nationwide advertising strategy for just the cost of a couple cheap social media managers. Once scorned for their tone- deaf social media presences, the brands have adapted and are swim undisturbed alongside the real people online. People on the internet, meanwhile, haven’t learned a thing. Though these sorts of engaged social media users skew young and nominally leftward, they don’t actually distrust corporations, or understand that those corporations’ interests are not their own. What the average person is most put off by isn’t naked revenue maximization, but instead by failed imaging. Most people using and writing about the internet desire nothing more than to be successfully marketed to. This is not a worldview that believes Brands Are Bad.

Instead, it’s one where there are Good Brands and Bad Brands, and when a Good Brand that you root for does something cute and shareable it’s perfectly fine to join in on the fun, but when a Bad Brand does something similar, only then is it time to be critical and assail the brand for the same shameless self- interest that the Good Brand gets away with thanks to its prettier packaging. Case in point: Aston Martin is seen as smart and cool for piggybacking off Radox’s ad with van Rensburg; United Airlines is immediately called out for being dumb and bad for doing the exact same thing with the Wendy’s campaign. How do you do, fellow kids?” is funny not only because it’s a cop trying to infiltrate a high school—a horrific thought on its own—but because he’s incompetent at it. There is the objectionable act itself and the presentation of the act.

The internet welcomes the invasion of cops into their inner circles, just so long as the cops give them a knowing wink. So who benefits from this?

The brands, obviously; they get free exposure and permission to lower their ad spends. Wilkerson won, too, in his smaller way; he gets his nuggets and a cool story. But that’s it. Consumers should remember well that when they’re not paying for a service—reading blogs or using social media—they are the product. Ultimately, it’s the media’s role in this process that’s the most disturbing and self- defeating.