If we were advising major brands on new promo campaigns, we would generally discourage them from jumping on six-month-old web memes to hype their newest product rollouts. But what if that meme were “McKayla Maroney is not impressed” and the brand were the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group?

Yeah, we’d probably still tell them to stay away. We figured that, once the President himself gets in on a joke, the public will never see it as clever, hip or edgy again. But the soda giant has decided to revive the summer’s biggest social micro-media trend in order to get the public excited about a truly impressive new product…a ten-calorie soda! (You can hold your applause for now.)

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Nothing puts the fickle, unpredictable and compelling nature of public opinion into perspective quite like the online celebrity phenomenon. Together we scour YouTube and pluck people from obscurity, elevating them to a state of international fame that is both instant and ephemeral. From the cute and the quirky to the talented and the straight-up freakish, the public loves online celebrities.

Now Samsung hopes to leverage the power of this phenomenon by recruiting one Laina. She’s famous for her “Overly Attached Girlfriend” videos–you know, the ones where she and her wacky eyes convey an unsettling but hilarious message to an undisclosed boyfriend. The videos have accumulated 13 million views to date, so something about her gag clearly connects with the public.

Online celebrities are, of course, a little different than your traditional stars. They were just like us mere moments ago– regular people sitting in their regular bedrooms beside their regular closets. The thought can be a little inspiring.

We say Samsung made a wise move by hiring Laina to sell its SSD840 drive, thereby demonstrating its sense of humor and its awareness of the fact that memes=marketing gold. Remember that McKayla Maroney had a meme–and she was a world-class athlete who won a gold medal at the summer Olympics.

Laina is just another one of your friend’s funny sisters.

Today in The Serpent Eats Its Tail news: I think we can all express some relief that McKayla Maroney has a sense of humor and hope that the “McKayla Is Not Impressed” meme will quietly resign itself to eternal rest after a very short and fitfully amusing life.

Bonus question for theater majors: We can’t be sure about this, but we think Maroney may have just broken the fifth wall. Thoughts?

We think it’s safe to say that last week was a great one for McKayla Maroney. Not only did she bring home the gold as part of the US Gymnastics Fab Five (that’s “Fierce Five” if you ask them); she also won silver in the women’s vault competition. Not too shabby!

And yet, Maroney’s been making waves all over social media this week as part of a clever meme based on a single photo that speaks volumes: After placing second in the vault event because of a last-minute slip, the gymnast looks a little…disappointed. You might even say that McKayla is not impressed with winning the silver.

Maroney cleared the air during an appearance on The TODAY Show yesterday, stating that she was “just disappointed in what happened and how I performed” rather than the silver medal itself.

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