'Mark Zuckerberg' Is Desperate for Friends in a WeChat Ad

What's This?

By Todd Wasserman2014-04-24 17:00:24 UTC

In a South African ad for Chinese social networking giant WeChat, a guy named Mark who started a social network visits a therapist. The ad never explicitly states that the "Mark" in the ad is supposed to be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but the clues are all there, including the wavy brown hair and what look like Adidas flip-flops.

"I invented the social network and now my friends — they're unfriending me," the Mark in the WeChat ad tells his therapist.

See also: Facebook Passes 1 Billion Monthly Mobile Users

The therapist suggests a cure: Using WeChat's "Friends Radar" function, which locates your nearby friends. Facebook just launched a similar feature last week called Nearby Friends.

WeChat has about 355 million monthly users, and as The Wall Street Journal notes, the service's big rival in South Africa is WhatsApp, a messaging app that Facebook is in the process of buying for $19 billion.

While the ad might win some users over in that country, for the rest of us, it provides a glimpse into what a vastly inferior The Social Network sequel might look like.

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Topics: Advertising, Business, mark zuckerberg, wechat, WhatsApp?

Video: YouTube, WeChat