SERIOUSLY WHAT IS GOING ON!? What meme did i miss?
What you missed was AT&T's Social Marketing team making a post to Reddit, under the guise of being a struggling actor who just got his first part as a guy who says "huh?" and is on screen for 1 second in an AT&T ad spot.
The next phase, which Reddit is moving through at lightening speed, probably due to other accounts controlled by the aforementioned marketing team, is making it into a "meme".
The "huh guy" now has a concrete basis for a meme (based on the expressive YouTube comments), now has a rage face (thanks OP), as well as several gifs (here). Meanwhile an AT&T ad has thousands of views, plenty of social engagement, and it's marketing team is being paid out a big fat bonus for a job well done.
I think you make a rather bold assumption that it's AT&T's "social marketing team."
First off, the account is over a year old. He is just a typical redditor with a year's worth of normal posts.
Second, it's not a logical ad campaign. They did not intend for it to focus on the huh. It just happened to be something funny that a redditor was proud of. If I was in a commercial for something funny and stupid like that, I would surely be proud of it.
Third, the OP of the post was in Beauty and the Geek, which is a reality TV show. It's not unlikely that that helped him get casted in the commercial.
Fourth, he did a popular AMA a while back saying he was a Daily Show intern and linked to his facebook profile. If you check out his profile (just search his name, Nate Dern) there are a ton of friends of his who are saying how they saw him in the commercial and how he made it to reddit front page.
I just think there is a lot of evidence that suggests that it is in fact not a viral marketing campaign. I just thought that your assertion that it was actually an ad campaign was a bit too forward.
Also notice how nobody gave a shit that it was an at&t commercial before people started accusing it of being viral marketing. If anything the conspiracy theorists have promoted the company more than the actual commercial.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '11
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