Well I guess it was only a matter of time before the latest internet fad, LOLcatz, was hijacked for use in an ad campaign.
For
the uninitiated, the idea behind LOLcatz is simple. Take a picture of a
cat in a funny situation and add a caption of the cat talking in leet
(or |_337, if you prefer). For the even less initiated, leet is a
written dialect popular among network gamers, now becoming commonplace
(and a little evolved) via text, instant messaging and social network
sites. Common leet traits include using numbers and other keyboard
characters in the place of letters, acronyms (LOL, lmao etc.) and purposeful typos (“teh” in place of “the”). Still with me? Good.
There
are no set themes when creating a LOL cat, people can caption the
pictures however they want. Generally the humour tends to lean towards
the geeky and there are three main recurring categories (pardon the
pun):
I haz/ I can haz…
OK, it’s really geeky, but for every fad, there is an ad.
The popularity of LOLcatz has been used as “inspiration” for a viral campaign for a brand new dating/social networking site Geek Flirt.
As the name suggests the subject matter fits well with the target
demographic. In addition, the campaign is timed well – LOLcatz has
generated a decent head of steam and is well known on the blogosphere:
it even has its own facebook application.
My guess is that for many self-proclaimed geeks, this represents the jumping of the shark
and no doubt they are looking for the next way to subvert internet
culture. And so the cycle continues: niche in-joke starts, niche
in-joke becomes popular, niche in-joke is no longer niche, joke becomes
saturated, new niche in-joke starts.
So the question is, as always, what will be the next big thing… and how can we use it?
4 Comments
The language used in LOLCat captions is mainly internet/forum slang such as ROFL, LOL, ZOMG, WTF, FTW combined with spelling words as they sound rather than their correct spelling such as malfuncshun, kitteh, posishun etc. Traditional elite speak (1337) is made up entirely with numbers substituted for letters such as w31c0m3 70 my w3b5i73 411 4b0u7 1337 5p33k!
I iz on ur websiyte postin ur commentz!
but do you like the ads i made?
I think that lolcatz carries with it so many different variations and suchg a varied history that it would be nigh on impossible to nail any sort of intellectual property rights on the concept.
As such, despite there being a creator, there is no one owner.
Iz in ur garden pizzin on ur bonfire…
@Andrew P – I see you are a 1337 purist. Wikipedia (the source of most of my (mis)information) seems to acknowledge the evolution of leet to incorporate aspects of forum/gaming slang. But I take your point that some spellings (kitteh) are unique to LOLcats.
@Dan Zarrella – I like the Kelbasa one. What I am really interested in is how successful your campaign is. Best of luck to you.