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Day in the Life: How Brittani Warrick Turned Auntie Dionne Warwick Into an Internet Sensation

That's what nieces are for. Brittani Warrick turned musical icon Dionne Warwick into a must-follow on Twitter—now, policing her aunt's feed is a regular part of her day. She shares all with E! News.

By Sarah Grossbart Apr 22, 2021 1:00 PMTags
Watch: Dionne Warwick's Advice to New Artists: "Be Only Who You Are"

Some people have jobs so cool we'd actually enjoy attending their marathon Zoom meetings. Even the ones that could totally have been an email. 

Not to say we don't cherish our all-important responsibility of bringing you every last piece of need-to-know information about the casts of Bridgerton and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but we don't have our own glam squad or a Rolodex filled with famous names, now do we? 

But the impossibly cool people we'll be profiling in E! News' latest series totally do. Plus access to things like private drivers, designer garb and the type of professional titles we'd drop with wild abandon at parties, dinner dates or while chatting with the barista at Starbucks. Welcome to A Day in the Life...

After more than a decade working in marketing and social media and months helming her own digital agency, it was Brittani Warrick's Auntie Dionne (as in Warwick) wondering aloud the things we were all thinking that thrust her into Twitter's glaring, fickle spotlight. 

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The branding specialist wasn't the one who had crafted the music icon's queries about Chance the Rapper ("If you are very obviously a rapper why did you put it in your stage name? I cannot stop thinking about this") or The Weeknd ("Why? It's not even spelled correctly?") but she had pushed the legendary singer to try her hand at some 140-character witticisms. 

The results were equal parts earnest and hilarious, so 100 percent something your auntie would say (if, you know, she was one of the most-charted female vocalists of all time), that the Internet did the unthinkable: Came together in agreement that we all needed more

Twitter erected a billboard in New York City's Bryant Park paying homage to one of Dionne's missives, outlets rushed to get the "That's What Friends Are For" singer's take on pretty much everything and Saturday Night Live satirized the whole thing with a hilarious sketch. 

Brittani Warwick; E! Illustration

Which is about when Brittani realized that her relatively quiet life as Dionne's longtime creative director wasn't ever going to be the same. "If she had never mentioned me in an interview, I'd still be doing all this stuff, you just wouldn't know that it was me doing this," the 31-year-old explains to E! News of her life-changing few months. "Like, I'm a character on SNL, which is wild."

But while policing Dionne's Twitter feed is absolutely part of the job (more on that later), it's just one little snapshot on Brittani's overall feed. "I have this whole other life where I'm somebody's boss, like I'm running a company and I'm doing this, that and this, but everybody knows me for, you know, working with Aunt Dionne," says the Web Net 1 president. "I feel like I'm juggling two different lives."

On a recent Monday, she offered E! News an unfiltered look at both of them. 

8:00 a.m. Come at me, Monday. Though Brittani's alarm starts blaring right at 8, "I hit the snooze button three times," she admits. "Like, I just wasn't doing it. I just kept going back to sleep." 

9:00 a.m. Rise and scroll: Finally rolling out of bed, she grabs her phone to check email. "That's, like, the first thing I do," she says of her day. "That's probably unhealthy now that I'm thinking about it..."

With no fires to extinguish nor the energy to brew her own java, the L.A. resident hops in her car to take a spin through the Starbucks' drive-thru. Her typical order is mood-dependent, but lately she's been feeling Christmas in April.

"I'll get an iced venti quad peppermint mocha with, like, half of a syrup shot so the caffeine goes straight to my veins," she explains. "But then also I feel like it's Christmas time when I'm drinking it—that's the whole vibe that I'm going for." Then it's straight back home to prepare for back-to-back-to-back Zoom meetings. "The coffee was important," she notes of the unplanned detour, "so we made it work." 

10:00 a.m. Makeup perfected and hair done ("It's expected your camera is on," she notes), she has "some cool meetings with Cameo and then a livestream service, which went really well," Brittani shares. In between, "I also have to go to Aunt Dionne's Twitter to make sure she wasn't starting any drama with people. I periodically go on and make sure that everything's okay." 

There are definitely times, she continues, "Where I'm like, 'Ma'am, we have to delete this. What are you doing?' Because she'll get carried away and respond to a troll or someone like that." But on this particular weekday, it's just some banter with Netflix and a call for snack ideas. 

Brittani Warwick; E! Illustration

2:00 p.m. Still, it never hurts to check in, so Brittani sets up a quick Zoom chat with Dionne. "Because the way the strategy works," she explains, "is we have these meetings. I just go in and read through: This is what's current right now and this is what's trending and have fun." 

But while Dionne certainly knows her way around a Twitter feed, other technological advancements are a work in progress. So when Brittani emails over a Zoom link for the meeting, it kind of becomes a "whole thing," she notes. 

Brittani Warwick; E! Illustration

2:45 p.m. Though chats with her aunt never fail to entertain, post-meeting, "I just needed to stare off into space for a second," she explains. It isn't so much her workload as it is the heaviness of the day, news breaking that Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man in Minnesota, had been fatally shot while the state was in the midst of a trial to determine the fate of the police officer involved in the killing of George Floyd. "It feels like it's happening all the time," she laments. "So it's just one of those days where I have to get my work done, but I'm so upset. I really had to just push through."

6:00 p.m. Following lunch ("I hadn't eaten at that point, just running on caffeine") she decides to indulge in a spot of self-care. Her favorite way to unwind is "I go to a place that's comforting and just hang out for a second," she reveals. On this particular afternoon, that's Barnes & Noble. "I go in and just smell the pages," she says. "And I have nephews, so I'll check out the kids' section and get them some books or whatever."

Brittani Warwick; E! Illustration

7:00 p.m. Her soul recharged, it's time for a little polish. "I so needed it," she says of her scheduled manicure appointment. "There was a lot going on. Aunt Dionne, she has this upcoming Mother's Day show and I'm working with the company, doing some tandem marketing, cross-promotional efforts. And, also, producing a new series with her called Nobody Asked For This." 

Throw in the mental stress of processing another unnecessary death and, "I really needed to take some time to not think about stuff."

Brittani Warwick; E! Illustration

9:00 p.m. Break's over! Back at home, she crawls into bed with some mozzarella sticks and a new episode of American Dad before diving in to edit the next morning's episode of Nobody Asked For This. "It's one of those things where I am the creative director and I'm making sure that the content reads correctly and it's edited the right way," she says of the Facebook series that sees Dionne explaining her love of Netflix's Luther and why she went "completely bonkers" about news that Regé-Jean Page was leaving Bridgerton. "I'm doing all the things myself. I don't really outsource that to my team." 

While it's time-consuming, it's one of the most satisfying parts of her day. "I just like the direction that it's going because literally nobody asked for it, which is why it's so funny," she notes. "I'm really excited about that."

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1:00 a.m. Brittani's stoked enough with the finish product to not mind the late bedtime. "It's definitely a full-time job, but I think it's rewarding because it's entertaining people and that's where my heart is," she explains of her work. "I want to make sure that people are having fun on the Internet. And the things that I'm creating, if it makes someone smile, or it makes someone's day, that's enough for me. I feel like I'm really doing what I'm supposed to be doing in life."

She goes off to sleep dreaming about a potential new venture inspired by her aunt's social media resurgence. "I think it's nice to have, as she calls it, a grownup on the Internet," she says. "A lot of her colleagues are on the Internet and they're doing stuff on socials, but it's not the same. And I would love for it to be the same. Think about how fun it would be if, like, Gladys Knight were doing this. You know what I'm saying? It would be so funny." 

We have no doubt. Our "like" buttons are at the ready.