Ryan MacMillan

This is the sort of thing that I love about the internet. A guy goes travelling, and decides to use a blog to keep his family & friends up to date with what he’s doing. Someone he meets while travelling suggests that he should video himself dancing wherever he went.

This, he says,

turned out to be a very good idea. Now Matt is quasi-famous as “That guy who dances on the internet. No, not that guy. The other one. No, not him either. I’ll send you the link.

It’s curiously uplifting, watching a hefty bloke dance his way (badly) around the world. But what is this? There’s a message to Stride gum at the end: “Thanks to Stride Gum for making all this possible.”

It appears that Stride picked up on the original video, and sent him off on another trip. Nice bit of exploitation, there. He’s quite open and honest about it too - for me, Stride comes out of this really well (80K views over three weeks). An exemplary piece of sponsorship - I’d love to have this to my name.

Years ago, I tried to book Mahir Cagri for Tango, the Britvic-owned soft drink. The deal wasn’t easy to put together, as Mahir didn’t speak a whole lot of English. Nor, indeed, did his business manager cousin.

I don’t know what I hoped to achieve. I had visions of putting Mahir on an open-topped bus and filming him going round London. I was going to help him meet a nice English girl. I don’t know. All I know is that it wasn’t going to cost all that much, and I was somehow going to get a web campaign that could jump the barrier into broadcast.

And then the viral thing went even more viral, and Mahir started getting offers from production companies. Offers of parts in films. Of presenting roles. A biopic. And then eTour flew Mahir to San Francisco.

eTour later went under in 2002, having blown $45m of investors’ money. I could have told them he’d have done it for less. Tango’s not doing so well these days either; the supermarket chain Somerfields has dropped most of their products from their shelves. I’m not saying that my Mahir-comes-to-London campaign would have prevented this.

Back to Matt. Like all good memes, others have caught the bug (YouTube does make this easy), with varying degrees of success. After I’d watched all the obligatory machinima versions, I found this poor Hungarian guy never gets out of Budapest - a biting piece of cultural commentary on the West’s casual approach to global travel, or just a clumsy attempt to join in? The internet has spoken:

WarrenK2
such a rip off, the original where the hell is matt is much more inspiring and had way more effort involved. He actually went all around the world, this looks like it was done in one night….pretty week dude.

ifeeltoast
Yes.

mrgreengimp
matts was better

DaJek
what an idiot