After the Grammys, social media were awash in Hamilton and Kendrick Lamar shares, but cats took the Web like they owned it. In a 30-second ad, house cats sent a chilling memo to smokers: The health of the Internet is at stake.
The montage of cat videos (cat riding Roomba, cat weeping silently) and secondhand smoke facts boldly states that cats living with smokers are twice as likely to get cancer. Ergo smoking kills cats. And if there are no more cats? Then no more cat videos on the Internet!
Despite this somewhat faulty logic (house cats will not go extinct from secondhand smoke), people have been tweeting the campaign using the panic-inducing #catmageddon tag.
The Internet is about to become pointless if #CATmageddon happens. Save our cat videos and watch this cool #ad https://t.co/sXedRD0t9M
— Rachel Levin (@rclbeauty101) February 16, 2016
I'm a dog guy but I don't want to live in a world without cat videos. Check the new #ad and prevent #CATmageddon https://t.co/kmnpWxenUD
— Harley Morenstein (@HarleyPlays) February 16, 2016
To say this ad is different from traditional public health campaigns might be an understatement.,
"It's nothing like any anti-smoking ad that's been out," says Sherry Emery, the director of the University of Illinois, Chicago's Health Media Collaboratory. "This is the first time I think [anti-smoking campaigns] have gone after the health effects for animals. And people care so much about their animals."