Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,51
“We’re in. How about you, Amazon and Google? #NuggsForCarter.” Both conglomerates, along with the Apple Music and Twitter accounts, retweeted in kind. “Live your best life, Carter,” Amazon wrote. “Follow your dreams.” In a tweet, United offered to fly Wilkerson to a Wendy’s anywhere in the world if he hit his target. After Wilkerson’s tweet reached seven digits in just two days, Wendy’s gave the plea new life with a retweet of its own: “1 Million?!?! Officially SHOOK.”
Soon enough, Wilkerson’s lonely request for nuggs approached striking distance of the most retweeted tweet of all time: Ellen DeGeneres’s record-making tweet, a selfie taken live in the middle of the 2014 Oscars telecast, which had been viewed by 43 million people. As DeGeneres had explained in the moment to a bemused Meryl Streep, her hope had been that the selfie of herself with a hastily assembled crew of celebrities would become the most retweeted photo of all time. And backed by the wattage of nearly a dozen A-listers, including Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, and predivorce Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, DeGeneres’s post was retweeted over 3 million times. It not only broke the standing Twitter record—a tweet featuring a picture of Barack Obama hugging his wife, Michelle, following his 2012 reelection—in roughly half an hour, it even briefly knocked down Twitter’s server.
What Ellen’s tweet showcased was the rare power of a monocultural moment, such as a presidential election, where a disparate population’s shaky attention span is briefly fixed on one thing. But nothing, not the Super Bowl, the presidency, or the entire Hollywood apparatus stood a chance against the most fixed, basic, and all-encompassing station in the order—humanity’s weakness for the perfectly calibrated siren song of fast food.
As Wilkerson’s numbers drew closer, DeGeneres did not take the development lying down. Within the course of a week, she cycled through the entire Kübler-Ross spectrum of grief. Mentioning Wilkerson’s tweet on her talk show, at first she downplayed its significance. Next, she brought out the actor and Oscar-selfie snapper Bradley Cooper to implore her viewers to retweet the Oscar photo to hold off this challenge to its supremacy. “Not today nugget boy,” she declared on her Twitter account. But when she failed to stunt Wilkerson’s momentum, DeGeneres brought him on her show as a guest to size him up. In a studio segment she asked him point-blank why he was trying to “sabotage my selfie.” To the delight of the audience, he replied with a verbal shrug: “You know, honestly, I just want chicken nuggets.” Next, a production assistant brought out a fifty-five-inch television and a year’s worth of branded Ellen underwear as part of a proposed pact: Wilkerson could continue promoting his own tweet but only if everyone also retweeted her Oscar selfie. “If somehow you pass me,” she warned, “I will come to your house. I will take that TV back, I will take the underwear back, and do more.”
But in the following days, nugget fate won out and Wilkerson’s tweet surpassed Ellen’s with over 3.4 million retweets. Wendy’s, no doubt pleased by this insane surfeit of free publicity, announced that Carter would get his free year of nuggs and honored his record-breaking tweet with a $100,000 donation to the company’s preferred charity, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.
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Carter Wilkerson’s journey to digital sainthood offers just a nugget, if you will, of how technology and social media have entwined themselves with fast-food branding and identity. About forty miles southwest from where Ellen DeGeneres was selfieing at the Oscars in 2014, Taco Bell was preparing for the audacious launch of its national breakfast service. To gin up excitement, the company had created a menu item with the capacity for attention-grabbing internet virality. The Waffle Taco, a hybrid concoction of a waffle shell studded with eggs, cheese, sausage or bacon, and topped with syrup, was designed to deliver the exact kind of frenzy that Taco Bell needed to provoke intrigue and disgust.
As part of the company’s largest marketing campaign in history, Taco Bell coordinated a massive publicity stunt in which the company mailed out a thousand chunky small old-school burner phones to Taco Bell loyalists, professional social media stars, and various high-profile creatives across the country. The phones were sent out via UPS with Taco Bell–branded packaging marked URGENT and accompanied by a set of serious-seeming directives. Recipients had to keep their Breakfast Phones on their person at all times. They should expect that it might ring or buzz at any