As I was hunting around on Google+ for something interesting, I can across a post about a teen from Kensington, UK who snapped a picture of an unknown good-looking kid who was working at a Target store which quickly took off as a trending sensation online.
If you don’t already know, but the young fellow pictured below is Alex. To be specific, this is #AlexFromTarget. It seems that his internet stardom has risen due to the below picture being taken due to a hormonal teen who decided to snap a quick pic of Alex as he worked in the checkout line.
@alannapage12 pic.twitter.com/fWcV68a9N7
— b (@brooklynjreiff) October 26, 2014
This makes you wonder if the #AlexFromTarget phenomenon rose due simply to honest organic searches and trends, or was there more to it than that? For those who would love to hear that this entire thing was due to organics, I’m here to tell you it isn’t. It seems that a company calling themselves Breakr has stepped up and has taken credit for the stunt.
To be clear, yes, a teen had really taken this picture of Alex, and posted it on Twitter, but in a LinkedIn posts, Breakr CEO Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares explained that it was he and his associates who turned this simple photo of the Target employee into a world-wide trend on Twitter. Due to their efforts, the #AlexFromTarget hashtag has been tweeted more than just a few times…about a million more times in fact…over the last several days. All they did was activate a network of “Fangirls.”
Leonares described in his LinkedIn post:
“We wanted to see how powerful the fangirl demographic was by taking a unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral internet sensation. Abbie (@auscalum), one of our fangirls from Kensington, UK posted this picture of Alex Lee (@acl163) on Twitter. After spreading the word amongst our fangirl followers to trend #AlexFromTarget, we started adding fuel to the fire by tweeting about it to our bigger YouTube influencers.”
But like any good story or drama, it doesn’t end there. Martin Beck has the rest of the story in a post on Marketing Land. Check it out below.
Marketing Land: Is The Company Claiming Credit For #AlexFromTarget Really Behind It?