It. Does. Not. Compute. Or does it?
Laina Morris, who became an overnight sensation with the Overly Attached Girlfriend video she made for Justin Bieber, stares wide-eyed and creepy from your screen and raps as an "Overly Attached Computer" in this Viral Factory ad for Samsung's SSD 840 drive, designed to encrypt and protect user data.
In her earlier song, Morris promised/threatened, among other things, "If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall/Question who you're with, yeah I'd always call and call/I wouldn't call it jealousy, just lookin' out for you/Readin' all your texts, watching everything you do." Ah, true love. Here, Morris plays a possessive PC that knows all its user's secrets—naughty Web-search history, passwords, bank-account numbers—and has no qualms about letting such info leak or erasing crucial data if it doesn't get enough user attention. She drones: "Remember all those things we shared?/Illegal downloads, I didn't care/I kept them safely for you/Played them when you asked me to/I'd hate to see you get all heated/If suddenly they got deleted/Love me again … Love me again." With that attitude, she must be a Dell. Mac's don't play that.
With nearly 1.8 million YouTube views in four days, the clip has clearly gone viral, which isn't so surprising given Morris' (spurious and fleeting) celebrity, but pretty darn good for a niche product and audience. Some detractors are whining about her "selling out" (like they wish they could, no doubt) or that the ad is confusing, which it is, initially, as the pitch doesn't come until the end, but makes sense once you get there. What I find especially savvy about the meme is its retro vibe. Note the old-style music store and vinyl records that pop into view as Morris drones on about "illegal downloads." And the lyrics appear in a font considered techie-futuristic in a bygone era. It all harkens back to a time when folks actually worried about the over-mechanization of society and feared we'd all one day be enslaved by digital boxes that would make us do their bidding. Thank goodness that never happened! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to buy an SSD and gas dusters for the precious. I'll be shopping online, naturally.
