Hamburger Helper launched its pasta-in-a-box in 1971 and has been a familiar addition to the family dinner table ever since. The brand’s mascot, Lefty the “helping hand,” made quite a stir on social media when a Twitter user contemplated the cartoon glove’s anatomy.

https://twitter.com/soongrowtired/status/919246458494255106

The ensuing lighthearted debate—and speculative drawings—ranged from the comical to the downright disturbing. Hamburger Helper finally chimed in from the brand’s official Twitter account two days later. The Twitter exchange earned the General Mills-brand some welcome attention, timed perfectly with Helper’s fourtieth anniversary and Halloween.

https://twitter.com/literallycondom/status/920026389260070912

To calculate how much marketing General Mills would’ve had to invest to receive similar marketing results, we calculated the earned media value from posts about Hamburger Helper from October 14 to 21.

“Earned media” is the value of engagements a brand receives across channels as a result of their marketing efforts. To help quantify what the value of those engagements is worth, Ayzenberg Group established the Ayzenberg Earned Media Value Index (AEMVI) and assigned a quantifiable dollar amount for marketing gains a brand receives from a campaign or individual engagement that includes social media networks and similar digital properties. (Editor’s note: AListDaily is the publishing arm of Ayzenberg Group. To read the updated AEMVI report reflecting the rapid changes in social, click here.)

Over the span of one week, the original post by Twitter user @soongrowtired was retweeted over 51,000 times and received more than 128,000 times. The official response from Hamburger Helper was retweeted over 15,000 times and liked more than 44,000 times, especially when news outlets picked up the story.

This isn’t the first time Lefty got a little sassy on Twitter. For the past several years, the brand has built a reputation for making witty comments. On April Fool’s Day last year, Hamburger Helper dropped a rap album called “Watch the Stove,” a riff on “Watch the Throne” by Jay-Z and Kanye West.

“Doing anything with millennials is always like walking a tightrope,” Liana Miller, a marketing communications planner at General Mills, told Forbes when speaking about the rap album’s success. “Is this going to be cool, or is this going to be something that they’ll totally roast us for? That was something that was on all of our minds during the entire process, up until the morning we released it. This is either going to go really well or really bad.”

Lefty’s skeleton debate arrived just weeks after Hamburger Helper brutally roasted a Twitter user for making a sexist comment.

Hamburger Helper joins brands like Wendy’s and Moon Pie who use humor and self-awareness instead of sterile PR messages. Brands are joining the conversation when it comes to its competitors, fans and even the haters. As Hamburger Helper said, “All my haters salty. I’m too seasoned for ’em.”

Not all sarcastic tweets have a fiery ending, however. When a user tried to recreate the success of Wendy’s #NuggsForCarter incident, Hamburger Helper mocked her spelling. Then actually mailed her a ton of food, no retweets required.

What’s next for the helpful hand? Figuring out how Lefty would wear pants.