for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
Update: Campbell’s Soup denies that they have a verified Twitter account for Pace Foods. The entire Twitter “meltdown” appears to be a hoax, perpetrated on Kinane by comedian Randy Liedtke. We got had, too. Apologies.
Things got a little caliente under the collar yesterday for Pace Foods, the brand most known for its Pace Picante sauce. A series of private messages were ultimately made public resulting in the apparent firing of a Pace employee and the suspension of the company’s Twitter feed.
It began in the morning when Pace Food’s Twitter account favorited offensive tweets written by comedian Kyle Kinane. The weird thing? His insulting tweets had been written written 10 months ago. Kinane, noticing that the account was favoriting any tweet he used mentioning the brand, took advantage of the situation, and made a few jokes at Pace Food’s expense.
As Kinane continued to tweet about Pace’s presumed Twitterbots, a person named “Eric” representing Pace sent Kinane a private direct message, asking him to remove all mentions of Pace from his account. What follows is a highly unusual (and fairly humorous) private exchange in which at least two other Pace associates chime in. Kinane made the entire exchange public with the following screenshots:
The direct messaging continued between Kinane and Pace, and gets a bit weirder.
Another Pace associate, “Miles,” becomes involved.
It almost seems as though the episode had come to an end, until a third associate, “Sharon,” steps in.
Next, “Sharon” tries to continue the conversation with Kinane in direct messages.
Miles apparently returns…
…and tweets offensive things from his personal account to Kinane.
Pace then publicly issued a cryptic Twitter apology, and suspended the account.
More in Marketing
X upgrades its ad platform in long overdue overhaul
This is the platform’s biggest update in its history, having previously been criticized for not keeping up with peers on performance.
Possible Day 2: Breaking down agentic’s impact on marketing, including multicultural
Day 2’s interviews featured Molly Battin of The Home Depot, Kirk McDonald of Sundial Media Group, and Omnicom Media’s Joanna O’Connell.
Meta opens its ad ecosystem to third-party AI tools
The platform is introducing Meta ads AI connectors, as part of its broader AI push to make campaign management easier.