Much atenshun, many views: Doge appears in mysterious newspaper ad

7 Feb 2014

Readers of the hard-copy version of The Guardian newspaper have been baffled after one of the internet’s most popular memes, Doge, appeared on page 27 with no explanation.

Taking up a significant portion of the page, the picture showed Doge doing what he does best; speaking broken English in comic sans.

In what could prove to be a genius piece of advertising, a start-up company called DueDil had won the space in a competition run by The Guardian’s own small business network.

As part of its prize, the company received the ad space in the newspaper but decided to take it in a completely different direction.

Saying things like ‘so print’, ‘pls red’ and ‘much 4mal’, the meme that has become an online phenomenon has made that rare breakout from the digital to the physical.

Explaining its decision to the online version of The Guardian, DueDil’s chief executive, Damian Kimmelman, really didn’t expect the newspaper to allow the meme be published: “We got the £50,000 [of advertising space, the prize in the competition] and we were like: ‘Oh crap, how are we going to spend this money?’

“We debated, and decided on Friday we were going to do something funny. We don’t really need the advertising anymore, we get enough traffic as it is. I personally thought that Doge was hilarious.”

The team has since gone on to say it intends to create its own competition to give away the next two agreed advertising spaces allocated to them as part of their original Guardian competition win.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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