Bryan Theunissen, an advertising sales executive at publisher Ramsay, Son & Parker, says a picture of Cassie Booyse, the real man behind Vernon Koekemoer, landed on his desk by accident and he decided to have some fun with it. “The picture was sent to me by a friend and I wanted to experiment with the power of such a campaign. I didn’t do it to make money, so when it blew up I didn’t know how to cash in on it.”
href=”/themedia/view/themedia/en/page1353?oid=7903&sn=Detail” target=_blank mce_href=”/themedia/view/themedia/en/page1353?oid=7903&sn=Detail”TheMediaOnline previously reported Booyse, who hails from Boksburg on the East Rand, said a woman approached him at the club H2O, took a picture of him and told him to look out for his photograph.
Since photo-shopped versions of Booyse’s picture started doing the rounds on email, his alter ego has made it into a Vodacom TV advertisement.
Says Theunissen, “I haven’t made a thing out of Koekemoer’s success. I tried contacting Dave Forbes (the owner of H20 and Booyse’s manager) but he hasn’t gotten back to me.”
Booyse, who says he feels like Paris Hilton, makes appearances at parties as Koekemoer for between R5,000 and R15,000.
Theunissen plans to try more “experiments”. “I am looking around for something interesting as I plan to do more campaigns. However, this time I’ll do it properly.”
Booyse and Forbes previously told TheMediaOnline that Koekemoer’s overnight fame was not the result of a viral marketing campaign. Theunissen confirmed this: “The Koekemoer craze is something that just happened.”
