One of the things that I’ve done historically
when I’m building up content
is just use different personas.
You know, a couple of articles published,
we got caught for being a fake author.
Oops.
“On our third date, we eventually got around to politics.
We’d skirted the subject before, but not in any detail.
Moments later, we were in a heated debate,
initially about healthcare
but quickly escalating into other areas.
I felt my fantasy slipping away.
I was confronted with a cold, hard reality—
the man I was falling in love with was a Republican.”
It was a man that wrote those articles,
but it wasn’t an all-male writing team.
There was a woman on the team.
At least one.
[Fake Blogger]
My name’s Kenny Hyder.
I run a digital marketing consultancy
and help clients run their digital ad campaigns,
Google, Facebook, Instagram ads.
We built
a review of dating websites and apps and all that sort of stuff
so that we could get people to sign up for the dating sites
and then make commissions on them.
And to support that advertising model,
you know, you can’t say that you’re a review site
without actually having the reviews.
And one of the things that I’ve done historically
when I’m building up content
is just use different personas.
The site was profiting about $2,000 a day,
so it was, you know, it was doing pretty well.
We had a TJ Farhadi, who we had created,
and he was kind of like a douchey guy
that had all the s****y takes on how to game women
and be a douchebag, you know what I mean?
And he was getting published on all those clickbait-style articles
that are geared towards men,
like “Top Ten Ways to Get a Chick” and things like that.
So I decided, well, we need to start a woman
and have a woman that’s a “dating expert.”
And that’s what we were trying to mimic with Rachel Brewson was
let’s make her an expert
so that our website for dating reviews will have some merit.
You know, there was kind of like this little niche of
these up-and-coming kind of, I don’t know what you call them,
you know, op-ed gossip-type blogs or whatever.
And, you know, there was xoJane.com,
there was brobible.com.
There’s a bunch of these sites that are kind of similar in nature.
And after xoJane had, I think,
published two of our articles from a different author,
one of my writers pitched this idea of,
“Hey, what if we wrote an article
and just went off of all the Trump fury that’s going on?”
because this was right during the election cycle
when Trump got elected.
Believe me, women, if it’s got to be a woman,
which I’m all in favor of someday,
it shouldn’t be Hillary.
And there was this hashtag circulating the internet,
which was #VoteTrumpGetDumped.
And this was like a huge phenomenon.
People were up in arms about it,
and we’re like, “Great, well, we can play into that.
Let’s write an article about
a liberal woman getting in a relationship
with a guy that ends up voting for Trump.”
And it worked.
And that first article, I think, got 3,000-something comments,
and people were just enraged.
You know, they’re like, “How could you?
This guy is a chauvinist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,”
and just every bad thing about the story.
And it was just kind of like,
“Oh, wow,” people were really receptive.
You know, we thought it’d get published and whatnot,
but I didn’t expect it necessarily to become somewhat viral
and really take off in eyeballs.
You know, as soon as that took off, it was,
“OK, well, what do we write next?”
But the next article was, “Oh, he’s voting for Trump,”
and we used Trump’s name in the headline,
and, you know, “I dumped him,”
and that just kind of tailed into the whole #VoteTrumpGetDumped
and just gave the audience what they wanted.
Went viral, you know, it got a lot of comments on xoJane,
but there were several other places where it was linked to.
And then, a couple of days later, that’s when ABC emailed me
and asked, “We know Rachel Brewson works for you.
We'd like to get in touch with her. Can we please speak to her?
We want to do an interview.”
The problem was the avatar photo that we used for Rachel Brewson.
We had permission of the actual person whose likeness it was,
but it was a woman in Russia that didn’t speak English.
And so I kind of started figuring out who could I use in place?
Who do I know?
It was a friend of mine who played Rachel Brewson.
And then it was my cousin, actually, who played her ex-boyfriend
because I needed a guy to be the ex-boyfriend,
and I didn’t want to do it, you know what I mean?
But it just all worked out.
And they actually came,
they came here and filmed that whole thing here.
And it was really interesting.
If you’re sensing a bit of tension in the air,
it’s because this former couple is seeing each other for the first time
since breaking up over another man.
Some of the pundits, they’re starting to like me.
I can’t believe it.
I would say Trump ended the relationship.
Right after it had aired,
someone who had commented on the xoJane articles saw it
and went back into the comments
and started blowing up the comments with,
“Here’s the avatar of the girl, and here’s the girl on camera.
They’re not the same girl.”
You know what I mean?
And then it just started kind of becoming chaos.
And the whole comment section of that second article was just like,
everyone was just, you know, outraged.
They’re like, “What’s going on? What is this?” You know?
And then it just kind of furled out.
And then we kind of had to give up on
It was like, “Oh, well, now this is tarnished and trash,” you know?
Like, “Now there’s nothing else to do here.”
So...
You know, it was a fun ride,
but it was kind of sad to see it just kind of get dropped
because it continued to pick up traffic
for the several years following when we stopped working on it.
And it worked. The strategy worked.
It just wasn’t liked by everyone.
I didn’t really understand why people would get so mad,
but, you know, they did.