How To Smoke Smarties
Beth Snyder Bulik, AdAge: What happens when people use your brand in unconventional ways? Sometimes you end up with the Diet Coke and Mentos experiments. Sometimes you get “How to Smoke Smarties.”
In the latest example of a social-media world where any 10-year-old with a half-baked idea, your product and a cheap webcam can seek his or her 15 minutes of online fame, dozens of YouTubers — mostly junior-high-school kids, it seems — are posting videos of themselves and their friends crushing up the cellophane-wrapped, pressed-sugar candies, sucking the candy dust out and puffing it into the air in mock-smoking style.
It’s not a new fad. Most of the videos are fairly old, including one that goes back at least two years. The big hit so far — this week’s runaway “How to Smoke Smarties” video filmed by YouTube youngster “baller4life,” aka Titus — was created in December 2007.
But suddenly the fad is getting attention. The video now appears near the top of the Google results page in a more general search for just “Smarties.”
