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Meet the Geeks: It’s Brittney!
Meet the Geeks is back with a convo with Brittney Wittmer, our social media and content manager. Born and raised on Long Island (but currently Boise-based and Virginia-bound – woo, remote work!), Brittney told us about her favorite social media posts, her prolific fanfiction oeuvre, and how her love of Teen Wolf led her to marketing. Read on!
What do you geek out about?
I am and always have been very geeky about my television and my movies. I have always been the kind of person to internalize the stories that I’m obsessing with. Pretty much from middle school through adulthood, it’s been like collecting one new obsession every year. I can track years of my life being like, “That’s the year I got into Criminal Minds.” Right now, major aspects of my personality are probably just horror movies and Halloween as a whole, the television show Supernatural, and Stranger Things.
Oh, and there’s Teen Wolf on MTV. I won’t go down this tangent because it’ll be long, but I do feel like the success of that show is in some part responsible for the fact that we had to endure Riverdale.*
That being said, if I hadn’t been obsessed with Teen Wolf, I wouldn’t be in marketing the way I am now. When I was 19, I started a YouTube channel where me and my best friend recorded ourselves watching the episodes. We started doing it just for fun, but by the end of one of the seasons, people were actively asking for the next video. Somehow, that’s how I became a low-tier YouTuber for three or four years. I was very blessed to have people who subscribed to that, and it opened up my mentality to realize I could do this for a living. I have teenage werewolves to thank for that.
That is fascinating. You don’t always see that direct connection between one’s geekery and how they end up working here. Can I include a link to that channel?
Sure, it’s “BrittWitt16.” I can tell you, whether or not I ever try to hide this part of my personality, it will never go away. I used to make videos for my previous job’s YouTube channel, and on a video about SpiderMan comics trivia, we received a completely unprompted comment that said, “Oh hey, that’s BrittWitt, who used to do the Teen Wolf videos!” I had to explain that comment to all of my coworkers.
I’ve searched up your handle, and now I have to ask about FanFiction.net.
Yeah, it’s all interconnected. I can never run for president, because all of my social accounts are inexorably linked. For what it’s worth, I think fanfiction gets a really bad rap. It’s portrayed as this incredibly trashy and raunchy hobby, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s an aspect of fandom culture that’s dominated by women and cannot be capitalized on by capitalism. I have written thousands upon thousands of words of fanfiction. I love doing it, and you know that “10,000 hours” rule? I’ve done that just by writing about my little “blorbos,” as the internet would call them.
[Note: Brittney is not exaggerating. She’s written over 1.8 MILLION words on FanFiction.net, and that’s not counting the original versions of two of her longest series, which she’s since rewritten. That’s just a skosh longer than War and Peace, Les Misérables, and the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy combined.]
I might be moving to Virginia, and the girl that I’m going to move in with is actually one of my best friends who I met through writing Teen Wolf fanfiction. As terrible and crazy as the internet can be sometimes, I think we have to remember it’s also an incredibly beautiful place.
That’s awesome. To engage in a property that you love in a way that is beyond mere fandom but is fully creative – very cool. Raw geek bona fides.
I can tell you, when I told my family and my friends, “Hey, I just got this interview, it’s for a company called Geeks Who Drink,” I had to convince them this was a real company. Everybody heard that name and they were like, “It doesn’t matter what the job is or what they’re paying you, you have to work for that company.” So I feel very connected to our brand identity and our audience, because I have always been so plugged into the traditional geek scene of fandom and fiction and fantasy.
How did you find the job? Did you come in with a trivia background, or going to quiz, or something else?
I came in completely blind. I found the listing online, I saw the name of the company and was like, “I have to apply to this on a whim just to learn more and see how it pans out.” In my thank you emails to Bernadette and Bryan after my interviews, I sent them cocktail recipes from my horror-inspired cocktail book.
Tell me about your role.
Being a social media and content manager requires many hats. It’s not just bouncing between TikTok and Threads and Instagram and Facebook. If I get to all four of those websites in one day, it’s a miracle. It’s going through all our a-la-carte quizzes, coming up with social copy and social assets that venues can use to promote. It’s reposting any promotion that our venues post. It’s coming up with blog articles like case studies, where I connect with venue owners. That’s on top of making Pedro Pascal memes that help us reach a new audience, and allow me to inflict my interests on our followers.
I totally hear you about “inflicting interests.” When I put together image hints for Small Batch Trivia, I definitely put in more references to SpongeBob and Nintendo games than I probably should. Anyway, how do you like to spend your days when you’re off the clock?
It’s a blurry line when you work in social media, because I can justify scrolling through TikTok for five hours because I’m “researching the trends” and “staying hip with the kids.” I like going to the movies by myself, I used to work for an escape room and I still love going to those. And I love going to concerts, I’ve been to 48. I’ve also been spending a lot of my time planning the wedding of my childhood best friends. I go all in on any kind of theme-based party, so organizing their bachelorette party has been a blast!
Finally, what kind of trivia speaks to you?
I find that less than individual fun facts, my knowledge tends to present itself in like encyclopedic knowledge of certain things. I’m really good at theme trivia, but when I’m in the editorial meetings twice a week, I’m terrible. But when it comes to theme trivia, I’ve gotten first place in Jurassic Park and You trivia. I’m good at, like, hyper-focused PowerPoint presentations.
Hey, I can’t hack it at theme trivia, I’m definitely more of a generalist. It sounds like you build “tall,” I build “wide,” to put it in terms of the Civilization video game series. Maybe we’d make a good team!
One hundred percent!
Here’s Brittney’s thesis on the Teen Wolf to Riverdale pipeline, if you were wondering:
MTV’s Teen Wolf (2012) was one of the first in this new era of “edgy teen reboots” like Riverdale (2017), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018), Nancy Drew (2019), the failed Powerpuff Girls reboot, etc. Obviously there’s always been edgy teen shows and dark fantasy dramas, but I AM of the opinion that the abject popularity of Teen Wolf led to a deeper focus on dated television reboots with an unnecessary edge. i.e. “Let’s take this dated concept, make these teenagers unrealistically hot with abs, make it really gritty and dark, and add sex and murder.” However, since a lot of that comes from the marketing decisions of The CW, I’m not gonna die on the hill that Teen Wolf was a cause of the trend and not just an early, incidental success.