The Strange Inevitability Of The Amazon Ad That Never Was

The TikTok algorithm is known to work in mysterious ways. The For You Page (FYP) can be home to some baffling things only explained by it having a conversation with the worms in your brain, but usually, you can rely on an ad break to interrupt that stream of consciousness. However, that was not the case last week when an advert purporting to be from Amazon caught the attention of the wider internet.

Amazon, whose reputation for advertising has previously not stretched much further than cringeworthy publicity for Amazon Echo seemed to have taken a radical new direction with their marketing strategy.

Their latest ad featured a screen recording of Roblox as two automated voices berated each other about grades and dead grandmas, which was only paused when the visual cutaway to a slow-motion dance to part of the chorus of Flo-Rida’s “Low.” So far, so abstract, with a minimal link to online commerce — before the popup at the end that leads to a homeware range on the Amazon website.

The TikTok provided shitposting of the highest low quality, and the Apple Bottom Jeans ad, as it soon became known, attracted its fair share of attention elsewhere.

When users began to take to Twitter to share recordings of the odd commercial, it attracted its fair share of attention. Although everyone was baffled at this avant-garde reimagining of salesmanship, many complimented its strangely hypnotic quality. Its humor mixed the post-ironic TikTok memer with the soullessness of technological choice. While it had absolutely nothing to do with what it was supposed to be selling, it had a kind of subliminal quality.

To no one’s surprise, it was also fake. Shortly after going viral, Amazon officials confirmed they were investigating with TikTok as to what had caused the video to spread. Nonetheless, it left a real impression and acted as a reminder of the storied history of advertising that has become a (not so) accidental meme.

While the actual content of the Amazon ad may have been a departure from what we are used to, the high profile it has enjoyed has come from a precedent set by ads that have unintentionally moved into the meme sphere. The tackiness of many commercials has made them ripe for parody through memes in a way that offers a near-endless source of material. It is exemplified in the melodrama of infomercials, which were for a long time a popular target for ad-related memes.

This ridiculousness is not only pointed out through memeification, but it also holds a certain admiration for it. This can be seen even more clearly in the series of Doctors Hate Him memes, a tribute to the allure of cheap internet clickbait and its legendary place in internet culture. It went hand in hand with the OC parody of things like Extreme Advertising, which combined this in-your-face spam quality with humorous intent.

While Brand Twitter / TikTok / Instagram may be slick enough to be an integral part of our social media experience, judgmental errors have sent many commercials to the internet hall of fame, such as the bewildering insensitivity of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.

Linked to that is the most insidious ad-to-meme pipeline: in which a catchphrase, sound or visual from an advert is memeified in an apparently unintentional way. There are countless examples of this phenomenon, and they range from contemporary successes (e.g. Wanna Sprite Cranberry) to nostalgia trips (the Shirley Temple Boxset, aka one of the most potent shared memories of any American born in the early 2000s onwards).

This amalgamation of weirdness, varying levels of self-awareness and meme culture’s taste for making a pastiche of being sold to have all led to this attitude where advertising that does not make any sense is a strangely logical next step in selling products. This is a generation of memers for whom chaos reigns to a level that eclipses all that has come previously and courting a Gen Z audience can be a complex task.

There has almost always been mutual admiration between memes and advertising, as both depend on memorability and memeability for their success. At the same time, they are constantly building upon what constitutes these factors. Given the increasingly sophisticated context of brands online and the decreasingly sophisticated state of memes, it was not entirely implausible that the Amazon shitpost ad could have been legitimate. It may only be a matter of time before the symbiotic relationship between the two is taken to the next level.

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