The video ”Fenton,” depicting a man chasing after his dog, received over seven million hits in 2011 and became a Reddit meme. Now, EE, a European broadband firm, is using the video in a new ad.
Mashable’s Todd Wasserman reports, “Instead of a handful of red deer, Fenton is now chasing a whole herd of them plus a dinosaur. The scene ends with the caption, ‘YouTube is Epic on Superfast #4GEE.’”
Reddit users took the video and placed Fenton in different situations. Sometimes he’d be running after dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park,” and other times he would be featured chasing wild animals in a field.
Wasserman points out that EE was not the first company to use a meme in an ad. Samsung’s newest ad stars Overly Attached Girlfriend, another Reddit meme, of a girl with a crazed look on her face. Users put insane captions on it; So far, there are 105 on the site. Uploaded earlier this week, it has more than two million hits.
Earlier this year, VitaminWater tapped into the popularity of several viral memes in its “grab it by the horns” ad.
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