The Internet was buzzing with a photo of a teenage Target worker named Alex. It was one of those moments when you stopped to wonder if the company had orchestrated the whole thing or if the photo had actually gone viral.
Leslie Kaufman wrote for The New York Times that many are confused about whether Alex’s rise was legitimate or a marketing stunt:
Alex is Alex Laboeuf, a 16-year-old from Texas with Justin Bieber-ish looks. He became the latest Internet sensation after a photo of him working at a Target checkout counter went viral this week and teenagers — both girls and boys — started gushing over him. By Tuesday, he was flown to Los Angeles for an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
But why did he thunder to online stardom? Was it a marketing stunt by Target? A hoax by a couple of bored teenagers? Or was it absolutely nothing at all?
“There is a whole attempt at making sense of this now,” said Andrew Lih, a journalism professor at the American University School of Communication. “But I can’t find any. The Internet is more and more like your local high school where inexplicably the crowd picks something that is not that interesting and elevates it to popularity status.”
Social media pandemonium over Alex started last Sunday when a young woman named Abbie posted the photograph on Twitter. The image acquired its own hashtag —#alexfromtarget — and Alex, who started with 144 Twitter followers, now has more than 600,000.
The Alex phenomenon became the subject of news articles on the websites of Time, The Washington Post and CNN over the last two days. The Dallas Morning News tried furiously to confirm just which Target he worked for.
The Washington Post story by Caitlin Dewey said Alex’s popularity was solely a Twitter phenomenon:
In fact, while it’s difficult, from a distance, to look at an inexplicably viral phenomenon like “Alex” and figure out how it happened, this sort of thing plays out within the teen fandom space more or less every week. These fandoms have enormous power over what goes viral. But because they’re usually trending things like One Direction’s latest video, or some new heartthrob’s name, the mainstream Internet tends not to take them seriously. That is, quite obviously, a mistake: The fangirl faction isn’t just young, connected, and highly motivated to tweet about its causes; it’s also enormously savvy about the way Internet communities work and what mechanisms control visibility within them.
Fandoms have become legendary for the power they exert over Twitter’s trending topics, a list of hashtags that should represent the most popular subjects worldwide — but that, frequently, represent the interests of a dedicated group tweeting the same thing over and over. A quarter of Twitter’s top trending topics in the past month involved boy band fandoms, four of them for One Direction alone.
CNET’s Chris Matyszcyzk reported that a social media company had “rallied the fan girls” to create Alex’s buzz:
And then on Tuesday a new company called Breakr claimed that it was behind his sudden rise to fame.
Breakr, you see, is a company that claims to connect “fans with their fandom.” I hadn’t been aware that fans had felt disconnected from their fandom. So I allowed myself to be enlightened by Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, Breakr’s CEO.
Leonares told me that his company, which is still in beta, has been helping small content creators spread their content.
In the case of Alex Lee (for that is Alex from Target’s name), Leonares beamed Tuesday: “Truly, we never thought it’d go this far, but it proved that with a strong fan base — [if you] rally the fan girls, you can translate that following into a career.”
This is all about the fan girls, you see. They are powerful. They are strong. They spread the word. When they took one look at Alex from Target’s visage, they targeted him for stardom. Leonares had claimed in a LinkedIn post that he and his fan girls were allegedly able to observe the Alex-lovers and the Alex-don’t-lovers and see how it all contributed to making Alex from Target so famous.
Mashable’s Patrick Kulp said that Alex was simply confused by the attention and had never heard of Breakr:
Alex also said on Twitter he had not heard of Breakr.
If Leonares’ claims are at all true, it of course wouldn’t be the first time a viral Internet sensation turned out to be a marketing stunt. In September, KLM Airplanes admitted that a dog featured in a viral video released by the company does not actually sniff out passengers’ misplaced possessions as the video purports. Another viral video that shows a girl falling down while twerking then catching on fire that made the Internet rounds in 2012 was just a prank started by the Jimmy Kimmel Show.
Leonares’ theory, though, has not been confirmed by anyone involved, and the company did not initially appear to hold a lot of social weight. The Breakr app only has 32 reviews in the iTunes App store. Other Twitter and YouTube users that Breakr’s Twitter account claims are also part of its heavyweight network have less than 1,000 followers.
So all of these stories don’t actually clear up how Alex from Target became an Internet sensation. Was it actually a Tweet that went viral or a paid marketing campaign? People like social media because it feels personal and authentic. But as more companies move into content marketing and using alternative media channels, the line is blurred. And reporters haven’t been able to definitively determine if it was a campaign or not, which casts some doubt on other popular Internet trends as well. It appears that Alex is just as confused as the rest of us, tweeting “Am I famous now?” No one really knows.
