Walmart Fruitcake Meme Gives Facebook Commentary
Walmart has launched a new social media brand personality, a talking holiday fruitcake. The Internet meme is a series of viral YouTube videos and a character that can be uploaded to your Facebook page to give running commentary. Frank The Fruitcake is cast as a deliberately obnoxious, under-appreciated yuletide character, much like an unwanted relative during the holiday season. To activate, users upload Frank to their Walls via Frankthefruitcake.com and then unwrap him from his packaging. Humorously, when you try to send him away, the character starts singing ad nauseam.
In a surprising move for a big business, the Walmart brand name hardly appears in the featurettes, and isn’t connected to a larger campaign. Instead, the tongue-and-cheek social media character appears to be part of a larger marketing trend among major brands. Here, we see Walmart creating a humours viral ad that doesn’t initially look like an advertisement. Frank the Fruitcake was developed by the Virginia-based team, The Martin Agency.
Recent Articles By Graham Jones 
Graham Jones is a regular contributor for PSFK. He is interested in the future of non-traditional advertising, trends that pose as anti-trends, how consumers communicate with brands, and where you can get a reasonable haircut in this town. Graham is from Kentucky, lives in New York, and you can follow him on Twitter: @callmegraham
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| TOPICS: | Advertising, Branding & Marketing, Media & Publishing, Work & Business |
| TAGS: | brand character, Facebook, frank the fruitcake, holiday, social media, The Martin Agency, Walmart |
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