Iceland makes fun of Mark Zuckerberg – and advertises tourists
At the end of October, Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of the so-called Metaverse with a full-length promotional video. In the future, this should blur the boundaries between the virtual and the real world and thus turn our whole life inside out. Whether Zuckerberg himself is the best person to present these plans for his company, which he has therefore already renamed from Facebook to Meta, remains to be seen. In any case, the group boss in the video with his unmistakable style and slightly cramped gestures offers plenty of attack surface for parodies.
One of them now comes from an unexpected corner: An Icelandic tourism association has published a new advertising video that mercilessly pulls the Facebook announcement – sorry, Meta – through the cocoa.
A perfect Zuckerberg blend called Zack Mossbergsson greets you with a familiar short haircut, long-sleeved shirt and a perfect parody of the meta boss’s body language. However, he doesn’t want to sell us a brave new world, just the beautiful landscape of Iceland.
“Hello and welcome to this completely natural situation,” says the fake Zuckerberg in the video. “Today I would like to talk about a revolutionary approach to how we can feel connected to our world without being super weird.”
The video gets really strange when Mossbergsson shows us the world you can immerse yourself in here. There is “water that is wet” as well as “skies that you can look at with your eyeballs” or “volcanic stones that you can caress”, he explains with a snow-white face – a swipe at former holiday pictures of Zuckerberg, on which he had creamed with plenty of sun block.
And what does Iceland call this new chapter in human connectivity? “The Icelandic verse,” explains Mossbergsson. Or to put it another way: “Enhanced, real reality without the goofy-looking headsets.”
A direct comparison with the original video from Meta shows how perfectly the parody actually succeeded.
However, this is not the first time Iceland has used humor to attract tourists. In past videos, the country used a grim-looking male model to explain why you shouldn’t wear high heels in Iceland. In 2017, “World’s Hardest Karaoke Song” went viral with increasingly unpronounceable Icelandic words.
