On this wonderful playground we call the Internet, there are a lot of ways one can have his share of entertainment. Endless Facebook scrolling, doing stupid things on Snapchat, reading about the life of someone famous on Wikipedia, watching fluffy cats do feline things on YouTube, you name it, procrastination material abounds. In this story, the focus is on the sad side of memes.
For the uninitiated, Internet culture defines memes as any form of media (image, GIF, video, hashtag) with a bit of humor to it. 9GAG is the largest source for memes for most people who are connected to the WWW. Curiously enough, someone at Audi also has a thing for memes, especially the one with the sad little T-Rex’s short arms.
As a creature who finds it hard to carry out simple manual tasks, the T-Rex would also find it hard to live life in accordance to modern age challenges. If he were humanoid, this dinosaur couldn’t flip a burger, send a text, applause or do anything at all with his arms.
Audi’s interactive agency, Razorfish, took this Internet meme to a new level with “The Comeback,” an ad in which the Tyrannosaurus Rex is portrayed as a depressed soul living an empty life due to his annoyingly short hands. To make a long story short, the T-Rex got happy again when he got behind the wheel of a very special Audi RS7, a piloted vehicle that doesn’t need a driver’s input to take one from point A to point B.
This isn’t the first time an automaker has used pop culture to garner attention. Think Volkswagen and the Darth Vader ad, Jean-Claude Van Damme and the epic split on a Volvo truck, the cat that doesn’t mind getting hurt to get a ride in the backseat of a Toyota, and the list goes on and on.
What Audi had tried to prove with giving sad T-Rex a happy ending isn’t that Audi is a hip brand that tries to blend in with millennials. What Audi had created here is social media relevance. It had also turned attention to the hottest trend in the automotive industry: autonomous and piloted driving.
What's more, improving the lives of the less fortunate earns Audi and Razorfish a big thumbs up from the entire autoevolution team.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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