| Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
09:33 - Hey, congratulations, Apple! You've made a meme!
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,54333,00.html
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Why, look. Ellen Feiss, the "stoned" high-school girl in the online-only Switch ad that was released at MacWorld, has risen above the petty ranks of "Stupid advertising shills" and entered the rarefied stratum of "Web-wide underground obsession". She joins such hallowed figures as "WTC Tourist Man" and "Colin Mochrie" and "Domokun" as preferred clip-art at Fark.com and in the inevitable "animutation" videos that make me giggle so helplessly.
In the last couple of weeks, a number of fan sites have popped up, created by besotted devotees who think she deserves a higher profile in American pop culture.
Feiss is not yet as famous as Mahir or the "all your base" phenomenon, but her fan base is growing -- and not just among Mac users. She has unique appeal to people who use Windows PCs.
There is Ellen Feiss, the fan site and the Ellen Fan Club: beep beep beep, which has set up a Cafépress Web store to sell T-shirts, coffee mugs and flying discs adorned with her image.
The domains ellenfeis.com and ellenfeissfanclub.com have also been registered but are currently empty.
Feiss has been turned into a set of computer icons that, curiously, can be converted to display on machines running Windows XP. She is also the subject of some wallpaper pictures that decorate a computer's desktop.
Isn't advertising weird? You spend millions trying to establish an image in customers' minds, and they filter it out; but do one little throwaway clip like this, only post it online (don't even broadcast it), and suddenly your logo-- for good or for ill-- is in front of millions and millions of potential laughing customers. (After all, whether they start out liking or hating Apple, the people making Ellen Feiss fan sites will have positive thoughts and memories about her meme-- and therefore about Apple.)
Genius, or inscrutable Dame Fortune?
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