Winnipegger’s viral tweet prompts product name change

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This article was published 07/01/2022 (1040 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadians may have a newly-named house hippo in their living rooms, thanks to a Winnipegger’s tweet going viral.

University of Manitoba assistant professor Dylan MacKay came across a Leon’s furniture store ad for a brown polyester hippopotamus-shaped ottoman, named the “Hippo Storage Ottoman,” while scrolling through his phone with his wife.

They were drawn to the ungulate footrest and MacKay noted there was a missed opportunity in the complementary vowels between the two words — why didn’t the company call it the “Hippopottoman?”

“We were laughing at the idea and we just sort of turned it into a joke — I went and told my kids, and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s a lame joke,’ so I put it on social media,” MacKay told the Free Press Saturday.

He took his wordplay to Twitter, sharing a photo of the ottoman with the caption “The fact that this is not called a hippopottoman is a huge failure…”

MacKay uses Twitter quite a bit and isn’t one to shy away from posting a joke or two, but wasn’t expecting the tweet to blow up like it did — after just a few days, the tweet gained thousands of likes and retweets. As of Saturday, it has 7,000 retweets and nearly 60,000 likes.

“Twitter’s great for science and that kind of stuff, and lately I use it all the time for COVID numbers and the news, so it’s my main social media platform, but I’ve never truly gone viral like this before,” he said.

That response — and a direct tweet from MacKay suggesting they change the name — convinced Leon’s to change the name and send MacKay and his wife a Hippopottoman of their own. Leon’s also sells a “Cow Storage Ottoman” and a “Dinosaur Storage Ottoman” (“Look I am not going to say Triceratottoman isn’t a better name,” MacKay noted on Twitter), along with the newly renamed Hippopottoman.

“Yesterday, I actually had a socially distant in-person tour, and two of the people were like, ‘Oh, I saw you on the news,’ or ‘Oh, I saw you on Twitter,’ and started making Hippopottoman jokes,” MacKay said.

Going viral is a new experience for MacKay, who said the hundreds of new followers he’s gained will be met with “politics, bad jokes and nutritional science” — and probably not many hippopotamuses.

“It’s been a lot of Hippopottoman content lately, and I’m kind of done with it now,” he joked.

“But I’m glad that lots of people are finding it funny and making their own jokes and extending it, the kind of stuff that happens on the internet. It’s non-COVID content, and that’s great. Everyone needs a bit of a distraction from the current situation we’re in, I think.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca