Occasionally I take a break from doing game reviews to discuss other things, be it an ill fated election campaign, terrible, horrible ideas, expensive lies, or just weird magazine covers. I do have a review of the recently 1.0'd Prison Architect that I'll be posting real soon, but in the mean time I received a message on Facebook that sent me down a weird, weird path:
When I get a message like this I need to investigate. Aside from playing/reviewing games, my greatest joy in life is uncovering the worst things mankind hase ever created, be it bad movies, books, or yes, even games. Bad things make me happier because:
1) I believe we can learn more from the bad things then the good; and
2) my life sucks, so seeing shittier things then my life makes me feel good, even for a moment
With that in mind, I clicked the link, wondering to myself "Why would Denny's, home of the Grand Slam and overall mediocre breakfast food need a blog?". That question was soon replaced with so, so many more.
The Madness begins
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| the very first thing you see. It goes only downhill from here. |
The first thing you see when you load up Denny's blog is a wall of incomprehensible madness. Denny's has opted to use Tumblr to host their blog. There's only two things I know about Tumblr, first is that it's fucking full of moronic feminists and Social Justice Warriors that hate white, straight men. The second thing I know about Tumblr is that it's layout is a fucking affront to the eyes and completely non-sensical. There's no rhyme or reason to it, it's just a random mash of images puked out in a vague grid.
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| average |
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| Fucking explain any of this, I dare you |
Give in to the darkness
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| I stared for 20 minutes, and I still don't get it. |
Some of the images on offer were oddly sexual. I've had Denny's before, there's nothing sexy about their food. The most emotion I've ever gleamed from a meal was bursting into tears eating authentic Amish steak on my father's birthday, nothing near orgasm from sub-par breakfast sausages and syrup-soaked flapjacks.
Some of the images reached Tim and Eric levels of confusing, but where Tim and Eric have mastered surreal humour and made it an art form, Denny's seems to just be throwing shit, or rather spaghetti, at the wall and hoping it sticks. I honestly can't tell what was an actual attempt at humour, and what was just nonsensical shitposting.
The memes become to dank, my will to live stripped away
A recent trend in marketing and PR is attempting to subvert youth culture on the internet and use it to sell a product. There are a few issues with this tactic, listed below:
1) It never fucking works, not once.
2) Your company becomes a laughing stock, since most of the internet doesn't take itself that seriously
3) The people running these campaigns are so completely out of touch, and internet culture moves at a million miles a minute that any campaign is out-of-date the second it begins anyway.
Ignoring all these facts. Denny's went ahead with their dankest home cooked memes, trying so hard to become relevant.
This image might be their worst idea. The Pepe frog meme has exploded in pop-culture lately, really for no reason other then it's simple and mailable to fit your needs. Pepe the frog is the bastardization of a comic book character and the unofficial mascot of 4Chan's Robot 9000 board, an autism awareness board (?). Considering that R9K and Pepe have both been connected to a recent string of school shootings as part of a perceived "beta uprising", the use of the Pepe imagery comes off as somewhat insensitive.
God I hope that's the weirdest paragraph I ever write.
Denny's use of word play is approximately on par with my five year old niece. They take a word, make minor changes to it, then say it's a joke. The difference is my niece is a five year old, and Denny's is a multi-billion(?) dollar company that, presumably, has an entire PR department making these jokes. The picture above isn't even wordplay, it's Senpai, the Japanese word for someone you look up to, but they spelled it like pie the food. You know what? fuck you, because the fucking caption explains that, meaning that they killed their own joke.
Fuck.
When not misusing wordplay, there's stupid jokes about things the internet loves, such as skeletons and, while not pictured, you better believe bacon. This is the saddest attempt at PR I've ever seen, the only thing that could be worse is Denny's asking people to send in funny pictures of themselves at Denny's
FUCK.
As I give in, I begin to embrace eternity beyond
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| Fry shadow. Gross. |
Denny's unfortunately isn't the first company to attempt this type of viral marketing, and they won't be the last. I've only seen this shit work once, and even then it's arguable, but the strange case of the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter PR account seems to fly in the face of all logic, but let's face it, Sonic's PR couldn't get any worse then it already was.
I guess, to their credit, Denny's attempt at marketing sort of worked, insofar as it got me to look at their content, and I hate them for it. It probably won't go very far, in fact if I hadn't been told about it, the whole thing would've flown under my radar. But it's there, and it's real, and it's awful.
