Wu-Tang and Steak-umm: A tale of two brands

While every last brand and their mother has jumped on the repetitive   k  e  e  p      y  o  u  r     d  i  s  t  a  n  c  e  bandwagon, some are doing so in a relevant way, and Wu Tang is one of the few "brands" to get it right.

On March 15th they posted and pinned to their Twitter account a simple mnemonic to help you remember how to mitigate.

This has been shared  more than fifty-eight thousand times, and liked more than a hundred thousand times. 

Compare this to frozen sliced meat brand Steak-umm, who has thrown out its goofy memes and tiktok videos. This was the usual kind of messaging from Steak-umm on March 4th.

Now they've gone full-on ponderous, and meandering, telling us not to believe anecdotal evidence or conspiracies.

Everyone is going through some really hard times right now and while the keyboard warrior wants to tell everyone that some victims are more victims than others, there is no such thing as mental health "privilege." This is damaging to all of us in one way or another, and to believe or say otherwise is insulting.

 Everyone feels lost right now, and all of us wish we could do something to make it better. Time will tell of Steak-umm's epistle to humanity in thread form will do any good for the world, let alone its brand. It certainly won't harm either. And unless you're a journalist scrolling through years of Tweets to play the gotcha game, Twitter is ephemeral by nature.

Of these two brands, I think Wu-Tang is more effective for several reasons. One, their message came in one, pinned tweet. Two, they took their message offline into the real world, where it actually matters.

I'm sure whoever runs Steak-umm's social media account decided to use the platform other than their personal account to reach as many people as possible, but a long thread about models, anecdotal evidence and conspiracies isn't succinct enough to be remembered and meanders from mental health to support the working class, to being nice to each other and listening to credible experts and only at the very end of the twelve tweet thread does it get to any semblance of a tangible call to action. In this case, a link to Feeding America.

Again, very admirable and probably should have gone first. It could have also gone on their website along with their COVID-19 here's what we're doing to keep you safe" messaging, especially because they have a list of supported charities on their site..

Again, while a message from some anonymous person behind a social media account is nice, as an actual piece of advertising, it isn't, "Just what we need right now." to use click bait parlance. It's just more noise in a sea of noise, from a sea of lost people who are whole holed up and wanting to make a difference somehow.

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 5 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.