It's not that often that a billboard is so absurd that it invites widespread mockery and goes viral in the process. But this one has—a full six years after it was made.
The ad, from the Netherlands, was made by a Dutch agency called Etcetera for the Predictor pregnancy-test brand. With a quick glance, it's clear something isn't quite right. The man and woman seem extremely surprised by the reading on the pregnancy test. But wouldn't they … have already guessed they're pregnant?
Or maybe that's the joke?!
shes shocked about being pregnant? LMAO pic.twitter.com/9N5gmYWnSY
— alex romero (@whosalexander) January 24, 2017
Twitter has been having a field day with the ad, after it was posted by user Alex Romero. Below is a sampling of the reactions:
@whosalexander@Lushchicken She thought she had swallowed a watermelon seed.
— HelenFrances (@hepzibah59) January 24, 2017
@whosalexander id be shocked too, sometimes i eat to much and assume that that's a food bump
— LitSoul (@i_aim_tyga) January 24, 2017
@whosalexander@danthat Well, she wanted to make sure it wasn't just that bowling ball she swallowed whole.
— SuicidePrinny (@SuicidePrinny) January 24, 2017
@whosalexander pffft! They already knew she was pregnant. They were testing to see if he was pregnant too!
— Charon (@codeofthedamned) January 24, 2017
The ad was actually made in 2011. It was posted to Ads of the World back then, and was met with a similarly bemused reaction from commenters—but wasn't noticed widely at the time.
We reached out to several of the creatives who worked on the billboard, and received a reply from Chris Sant, who was the art director on it. (He's now a senior creative at J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam.)
"We didn't know our ad would go viral after six years! Great!" he tells AdFreak.
And what about the dissonant image? Some have suggested perhaps the couple have just learned the gender of the baby. But nope. This is just your regular old pregnancy test—though an extremely good one, according to Sant.
"Since Predictor is 99.9 percent accurate, you'd rather depend on the test than your belly," Sant says, adding that the agency did engage in a little "advertising exaggeration."