By Raffaela Kenny-Cincotta, News Correspondent
Earlier this month, to celebrate one-billion users, the social media powerhouse Facebook premiered its first-ever television commercial using the tagline “Chairs are like Facebook.”
Albeit an odd comparison, the 90-second spot claims that like chairs, Facebook brings people together: “Chairs are made so people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair and if the chair is large enough they can sit down together and tell jokes or make up stories or just listen. Chairs are for people, and that is why chairs are like Facebook,”
Seeing an opportunity for satire, Andrew Zenn, a fourth-year marketing major at Northeastern, made his own commercial, “Toilets are Like Facebook.” The comedic video pokes fun at the absurd seriousness of the original ad, and proves that Facebook can be compared to just about anything if someone tries hard enough.
With sarcastic gravity, the narrator in Zenn’s film states, “Handle toilets are just like Facebook. Button toilets, just like Facebook. Self-flush toilets just like Facebook. No-flush toilets: Facebook. We all want to connect, sometimes we don’t know how, that’s why we have toilets … and Facebook.”
Zenn is on co-op this semester as a production intern at a Los Angeles-based production company.
“It’s definitely ridiculous,” he said. “We tried to copy the style and aesthetic of the real commercial even with the voice over and the style in which it was shot. It was really just something that hit me and I had to do.”
The “Toilets” video had more than 130,000 views on YouTube as of Wednesday night. Explaining the success of the short film, Zenn cites the simple appeal of parody.
“People like to watch people make fun of things,” he said.
Zenn has previously produced online videos garnering viewership in the hundreds of thousands, and with “Toilets are like Facebook” receiving attention from several blogs, websites and publications like All Things D and TechCrunch, it appears he may have the viral video formula figured out.
“[A viral video] has to be something people can watch quickly,” he said. “With the rise of Internet and people watching videos on YouTube, people’s attention spans are super short and you can’t really have a video longer than a couple of minutes go viral because people aren’t going to watch it or share it. t’s all about communicating things really clearly and in a simple way.”
Although Zenn seems to have a talent for humor, his independent production company, Andrew Zenn Films, has created everything from commercials for Tide and Old Spice to one-on-one interviews with music heavy-hitters such as Avicii and Mac Miller.
As of last week, Zenn had not heard from Facebook regarding the parody, although he is interested to find out what company thinks of “Toilets Are Like Facebook.”
As for the young billionaire who started it all?
“Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will see this, and maybe he’ll laugh and maybe he won’t,” Zenn said. “Hopefully my profile doesn’t get shut down.”
