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Dear brands: stop remembering 9/11

Dear brands: stop remembering 9/11

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It's not your job, and you're bad at it

By T.C. Sottek, executive editor who has obsessed over headlines and internet speeds since 2011. He previously worked as an advocate for the National Park System.

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Brands have had it really tough since Mitt Romney declared they're people just like us; now they have to act human! Apparently the first step towards personhood is to be really sad on Twitter every year even though we're now more than a decade beyond 9/11. So you get tweets like this one from Weber, a company that makes grills:

Notice the perfect framing in this shot. The sadly drooping but still upright American flag, a backyard from Anytown USA, and finally, in the distance, the Summit® Grill Center Series grill with a Dual-Ring Side Burner, a Sear Station® Burner, and Adjustable Stainless Steel Shelving. It sure would be great to pop that sucker open and roast some flesh on this day of sadness and remembrance.

Dear brands: it's okay to forget 9/11

The real lesson — the one brands never truly forget — is that brands never really learn their lesson. Last year AT&T had to apologize because its Tweet Of Remembrance was even more crass than Weber's, featuring a guy looking at the remains of Lower Manhattan through a smartphone that was surely connected to The Nation's Fastest And Most Reliable Network.

Dear brands: it's okay to forget 9/11. In fact, we insist that you do. Some of us are trying to forget, knowing that a president who campaigned on the idea that he wasn't the guy who took the United States to war all over the planet is about to take us to war in the same places for the same reasons. Brands are not obligated to have feelings, let alone express grief that's not really theirs. Nobody is standing in the aisle at Target and stopping to think "oh, gee, I wonder if Huggies, maker of diapers my baby will shit in later, paused today to recognize a horrendous terrorist attack that happened a dozen years ago."

On the other hand, if you need a good place to go drown your sorrows today, head on down to Applebee's: your neighborhood bar and grill. They may not have TGI Fridays' endless mozzarella sticks, but today they're offering bottomless grief.

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