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UPDATE: read the comments. Feed likes to point out some things...

Levi's Jeans


Ray-Ban Big O'glasses


So neat! So shareable! So worth the million views the three-day-old clip already earned! But I could tell instantly (and I have no idea why no one else did) that this was a stealth ad — because it's a direct copy of a stealth ad that got over 3 million views last year.

Virals are launched to market a product without actually naming it, by appealing to the public's love of Internet stunt videos.

While Ray-Ban's ad was launched anonymously, the creative team behind it soon came forward. Josh Warner, president of The Feed Company, explained how he promoted this viral video to Adweek. The team posted more videos, now more obviously advertising Ray-Ban though still without using a traditional ad format, to the YouTube account that hosted the original viral ad.

Blogs like Laughing Squid and Neatorama posted the video with no guess about the creators (though political blog Hot Air guessed this might be a Levi's ad). Even G4TV's Attack Of The Show discussed the ad, crediting it to an unnamed group of gymnasts and making no mention of Levi's.

Note the line at 0:36 of the Levi's ad: "At least there's no zipper." That's what clinched it for me: Levi's is the only jeans brand to actively advertise its zipperless buttoned jeans. The user name "unbuttonedfilms" corroborates this.

It was created by Cutwater, the newly launched Omnicom darlings, with feeding and marketing by Josh Warner’s FeedCompany

But that was last year, now we have:

Viral for Gatorade


Ball Girl Makes Incredible Catch - Watch more free videos
1,756,975 views > Featured: 8 days ago !!!

Agency: Element 79 Partners
Director: Baker Smith