The guy behind @Vice_Is_Hip is getting paid to tweet for one of Uber’s biggest rivals
Jimmy Avis
Jimmy Avis, the man behind @Vice_Is_Hip
The man behind Vice parody Twitter account @Vice_Is_Hip has been hired by ridesharing company Gett to run its own Twitter account. It’s part of a move to make the taxi app sound more “edgy” on social media.
Jimmy Avis is a former London bike courier who started the Vice Is Hip account to amuse his friends.
“I only ever set it up to make my mate laugh, and it’s just grown and grown,” Avis told The Kernel in 2013.
The Vice Is Hip account parodied Vice’s counter-culture coverage, mocking the tone of its stories. Here are some examples:
Meet the defrocked priest taking the sport of fencing to knife gangs in the Nairobi slums
— VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 24, 2013
The Basque gangsters teaching amputees how to twerk
— VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 24, 2013
Find out what happened when we played 24 hours of Need For Speed with Nicaragua’s youngest sex-pest
— VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 22, 2013
Mocking Vice came naturally to Avis. He used to be a member of Babyshambles, Pete Doherty’s band. But that didn’t last long. Avis quit after two months, blaming Doherty’s drug problems.
Avis hadn’t planned to tweet for a living, but he received an email from Gett, the taxi app. The company wanted someone to run its Twitter account, sharing news about the app as well as “edgy” tweets.
Gett styles itself as an ethically superior version of Uber, offering cheap rides and higher driver wages in four countries: Russia, the US, UK, and Israel.
Sure enough, Avis has made Gett’s Twitter account slightly more interesting:
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights (to get a flat rate anywhere in Manhattan) ➳ http://t.co/TepGdiQ64j
— Gett (@gett) February 10, 2015
Why flat prices are the new flat whites ➳ http://t.co/LwWEsamaDn #gettsuper
— Gett (@gett) February 3, 2015
Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.