A local car site received a lot of flak today from netizens when a (apparently) “familiar” face was spotted on their ads, both virtually and out-of-home. One such advertising medium was first spotted by TV presenter and radio announcer Sarimah Ibrahim.
She took a picture of the bus ad and uploaded it on her Twitter account with the following caption:
why on earth is this happening..? pic.twitter.com/sFo5PyZXHI
— Sarimah™ (@sarimahi) July 31, 2014
The news then spread like wildfire, as quickly as you would expect a tweet to. Within just a few hours, netizens got word of the ad, with many believing that the woman in the picture was indeed Kiki Kamaruddin. As such, a public backlash ensued, with retweets and harsh comments coming from Malaysian Twitter-ers. Some with thousands of Twitter followers, even.
TV presenter and radio announcer Sarimah Ibrahim has about 244k Twitter followers while Malaysian politician Nurul Izzah, who also picked up on the “Kiki ad”, has 369k Twitter followers.
Nurul Izzah too, expressed her disbelief:
Seriously Malaysia! “@sarimahi: why on earth is this happening..? pic.twitter.com/VRkiaJtwn7” — Nurul Izzah (@n_izzah) July 31, 2014
However, the people behind the car site has just come out to confirm that it isn’t Kiki, but an employee in the company. In fact, they’ve since released an official statement on their Facebook page to debunk the rumours:
Source: Carlist Malaysia’s Facebook page
Some Facebook users have also come out to defend the site, confirming that they’ve seen the ads even before the Kiki video went viral.
Moral of the story? Perhaps we all shouldn’t always be too quick to judge and above all, keep calm.