Dive summary:
- Vitaminwater's new video campain, #makeboringbrilliant, sets up pranks with CollegeHumor to elicit interesting responses from the pranks' victims; the latest installment involves a fake panhandler in New York subways.
- The idea for the panhandler videos was to take a scene New Yorkers are familiar with, the subway panhandler, and give it a twist; instead of the panhandler telling a sob story, he instead starts bragging about how great his life is.
- The idea sprung from the overwhelming description of boredom on social meda; on Twitter alone there were nearly 5 million posts with the word "boring" as a hashtag, so Vitaminwater set out to find out what users consider boring and then make that boring "brilliant."
From the article:
"Take Panhandler Pranks Entire Subway. During the clip, a subway passenger starts what appears to be a long sob story aimed at getting people to hand over money (something many New Yorkers would be familiar with). But rather than relay a sad tale of lost employment and life on the streets, the passenger actually goes into a long-winded boast about how well his life is going, to the surprise of the other riders. 'I used to live in a two-bedroom apartment in a great neighborhood, until my family was forced to move, because we wanted more space. We recently bought a house in the suburbs with a pool and a yard ...'”