Known as ‘Alex From Target,’ Teenage Clerk Rises to Star on Twitter and Talk Shows
Social media pandemonium over #Alexfromtarget started with a photo of teenage Target employee named Alex Laboeuf. Alex, who started with 144 Twitter followers, now has more than 600,000. Video by Caitlin Prentke on Publish Date November 6, 2014.
While political analysts spent Wednesday interpreting the significance of the midterm elections, social media pundits obsessed over the meaning of Alex from Target.
Alex is Alex Laboeuf, a 16-year-old from Texas with Justin Bieber-ish looks. He became the latest Internet sensation after a photo of him working at a Target checkout counter went viral this week and teenagers — both girls and boys — started gushing over him. By Tuesday, he was flown to Los Angeles for an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
But why did he thunder to online stardom? Was it a marketing stunt by Target? A hoax by a couple of bored teenagers? Or was it absolutely nothing at all?
“There is a whole attempt at making sense of this now,” said Andrew Lih, a journalism professor at the American University School of Communication. “But I can’t find any. The Internet is more and more like your local high school where inexplicably the crowd picks something that is not that interesting and elevates it to popularity status.”
Social media pandemonium over Alex started last Sunday when a young woman named Abbie posted the photograph on Twitter. The image acquired its own hashtag — #alexfromtarget — and Alex, who started with 144 Twitter followers, now has more than 600,000.
The Alex phenomenon became the subject of news articles on the websites of Time, The Washington Post and CNN over the last two days. The Dallas Morning News tried furiously to confirm just which Target he worked for.
Various Internet memes ensued. Some began snapping photos of other teenagers in jobs, for example: Kel from Good Burger and Kieran from T-Mobile. There were Alex imitators posted on the video service Vine.
Ms. DeGeneres was confused as everyone else by Alex’s popularity. Do you have any skills like singing and dancing, she asked?
“I can apparently bag groceries pretty well,” he said.
Late Tuesday, CNET reported that a marketing start-up, Breakr, was taking credit for Alex’s rise. On its web page, Breakr offers this opaque definition for its business: “helping connect fans to their fandom.” In a post on Tuesday on LinkedIn, the company’s chief executive, Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, wrote: “We wanted to see how powerful the fan girl demographic was by taking an unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral Internet sensation.”
Breakr’s claim then set off a whole new round of articles suggesting that the whole Alex phenomenon was the product of these crafty marketers.
It also compelled Target to issue a statement.
“We value Alex as a team member and from the first moment we saw this photo beginning to circulate, we shared that the Target team was as surprised as anyone,” the company said. “That remains the truth today. Let us be completely clear, we had absolutely nothing to do with the creation, listing or distribution of the photo. And we have no affiliation whatsoever with the company that is taking credit for its results.”
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Alex and Abbie, the young woman who supposedly first posted the photo of Alex, also disputed Breakr’s account and denied they were part of any publicity stunt. This caused Breakr to “update” its LinkedIn post to say that neither Alex nor Abbie were part of any scheme, that it occurred organically and the company “jumped on it” to draw attention to its services.
“I didn’t know the pic was taken or tweeted until my store manager showed me,” Alex wrote on Twitter late Tuesday. Alex is hardly the first pretty face to be plucked out of obscurity, though in olden days being spotted could lead to a movie contract, as opposed to a talk-show appearance. A photo of a teenage Janet Leigh, later the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” was spotted by the MGM actress Norma Shearer at the ski lodge where her parents worked. Soon after, she took a screen test and was signed to MGM.
Modern-day Internet viral sensations should be so lucky. Jeremy Meeks, whose handsome photograph received more than 100,000 likes on the Facebook page of the Stockton, Calif., police department, which had arrested him on gun charges, landed an agent, but his legal entanglements may be a problem.
While working at the front desk of a gym, Jen Selter posted photographs of her exercising — with a focus on her posterior. She now has more than four million followers on Instagram.
“This just shows you it is another Tuesday on the Internet,” said Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There is all these important things going on like the election, but some portion of the Internet is paying attention to something else.”
www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/business/media/teenage-clerk-rises-from-target-to-star-on-twitter-and-talk-shows-.html?_r=0