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One giant boing for mankind

During the Superbowl, Pepsi ran an ad called “Pop the Music”, which technically was supposed to be a spot for its iTunes tie-in. But the commercial inadvertantly made a star out of a Mandy Amano, a woman who appears in the ad for about three or four seconds. Geeks swooned over her and began posting frantic mash notes on discussion boards planetwide.
But perhaps the most fervent admirer is Justin, some dude in Michigan who set up an entire blog devoted to tracking every last media-mention and photo of Amano. Justin is so crazily devoted that some bloggers have began to wonder whether he’s actually a secret viral-marketing campaign run by Pepsi — or maybe just an extraordinarily creepy stalker. The thing is, Justin liberally quotes from all of these critics, which could either mean that he’s nothing of the sort … or perhaps all the more of the sort. When someone who has been accused of being a piece of viral marketing winds up actively discussing the perception that he might be a piece of viral marketing, we have clearly arrived at the end of history: Please remove your brain and pack it in the closet, folks; won’t be needing that any more!
Interestingly, Justin also quotes from other Amano-stalkers who seem even more devoted yet. Consider this note, which he cobbled from a blogger who analyzed Amano’s listing on the Internet Movie Database:
Her filmography is rather short, and I think she only shows up for about 4 seconds in Coyote Ugly (if she’s one of the short-haired girls dancing on the bar). If you have the DVD (and I identified her properly), her first scene is at time point 1:05:39 for two seconds (under the ceiling fan) and her second and last scene is at 1:05:49 (at the left of the screen). There’s going to be a special unrated edition released in June, but only 7 minutes of restored footage, who knows what is in those scenes.
(Thanks to Morgan for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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