Arby’s in the US sent sandwiches and a puppy to its biggest troll
How Arby’s made peace with the man behind the dark parody Twitter account Nihilist Arby’s
By Richard Feloni
On January 14, 2015, a Twitter account named Nihilist Arby’s was born, and it didn’t take long for Arby’s corporate office to notice.
With a double beef and cheese as its avatar, the angst-ridden account confronted followers with a negation of everything they held dear in life and offered they fill that void with a sandwich and curly fries.
By mid-February, Nihilist Arby’s had 13,000 followers and, as Adweek noted, a significantly better engagement rate than the real Arby’s account, which had nearly 400,000 followers.
At the same time, Arby’s was receiving praise in the press and on Twitter for acknowledging years of being the butt of “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart’s jokes with a clever joke of its own on the day Stewart announced he would retire from the show that year. A year earlier, an Arby’s tweet reacting to the musician Pharrell Williams’ Arby’s-logo-esque hat worn in a Grammys performance went viral.
Arby’s was now a “cool” brand on Twitter. If it overreacted to Nihilist Arby’s, no matter how dark or raunchy the tweets got, it would risk becoming just another lame corporate account. The Arby’s team let it be.
Then, in August, Adweek revealed that the man behind the account was Brendan Kelly, an adman from Chicago and longtime punk-band frontman.