Wednesday, July 18, 2007

IM IN UR ADZ WITH MY LOLCATZ


OK, I admit: I think some LOLCats are funny. I thought they were funny three years ago, before the rest of the Internet discovered them.

What the fuck is an LOLCat? Chances are you've seen one but didn't know it had an "official" name. In short, according to the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit:

A lolcat is an image macro featuring a photograph of a cat with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption
But yeah, some LOLCats are pretty funny. They're even LOL funny. But so far, I've only really seen them on SA. And, of course, the LOLCat-specific Blog "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER," which I may or may not have as a feed in my Google reader.

So imagine my surprise as I'm browsing the classified ads today and run across the LOLCat-inspired ad attached to this post. Is there a term for a phenomenon that crosses over from obscure Internet joke into something that an advertising agency is using as a banner ad on a major newspaper's website?

If not, there should be.

1 comment:

Seth Johnson said...

I'm guessing that it's something like "leveraged consumer-tuned memetics", or at least that's what I'd call it on the bill.