The above video for Drenched is a masterpiece of comic advertising which has enjoyed massively viral dissemination over the past few days. It's not even on TV yet and already the company that made the ad has been flooded with feedback and press enquiries (including our own). Why the popularity? Anthropomorphic stunts have been grabbing the public's attention for centuries, but in our more contemporary age those stunts are as popular as ever, if not more so. SHN set about finding out how the hamster jazz band formed and why they've enjoyed such unbridled success.

I wondered, initially, if the advert had been inspired by this set of photographs by Ellen van Deelen. The makers of the film, however, denied this. Creative partner Wayne Robinson said the idea had instead come from "sitting down and thinking hard." A pure coincidence, then, which is in fact all the more intriguing. On the success of her photographs, van Deelen said, "I don't know why they are so popular. Maybe people can see that I really like my animals, or they just look cute in the photo. They are very sweet and intelligent animals I must say." The plot thickened.

Next stop was the production company that made the ad, Infinity Productions. I asked director Alex Turner how they had filmed the piece and he responded by saying, "It was brilliant fun actually. It was a bit of a steep learning curve since we'd never worked with hamsters before. Obviously they're nocturnal so they don't do anything until about 10 o'clock at night. There was a lot of hanging around the set. In the end, the shoot day went on a lot longer than everyone expected."

It turns out that the hamsters in the ad are real pets which were 'auditioned' by owners responding to advertisements in the press (and who were presumably taking on a kind of anthropomorphic publicity rep role). The equally fantastic auditions are also on YouTube, by the way, if you want to check them out, too.

I wasn't any closer to discovering the psychological impact or motivation behind any of this, however, so I got in touch with Hal Herzog, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Carolina. Herzog watched the advert and said, "The video is charming and it says a lot about our ambivalent attitudes towards animals.
The hamsters are adorable because they trigger the 'cute response' in us - this is the idea that creatures with soft features and dark eyes share enough characteristics of human infants that they evoke emotions that originally evolved to make us fall in love as human infants."

"In addition," he continued, "the fact that the hamsters are playing musical instruments reflects our tendency to want to think that animals are like us and that they have amazing abilities. You see this all the time in newspaper reports touting recent (factual) scientific discoveries that 'crows use tools,' 'dogs are as smart as two year-olds,' and 'parrots can do math.' The problem is that while we want to attribute higher mental states to cute animals and ones that look like us, the vast majority of people also want to eat animals and do not feel guilty about snap-trapping or glue-boarding the mice that live in their kitchens."

Well that's as good an explanation as you're likely to get as to why these sorts of viral videos have gained the popularity they have. The skateboarding dog (link above) has received over 9.5million views, by the way, so we're not talking trivial figures here. Along with Cadbury's drumming gorilla and this terrifying dancing parrot, which Hal Herzog assures us "is not a fake and has been analyzed by ethnologists," anthropomorphic indulgences have safely secured a role in the new media age. In fact, I wonder if the very nature of viral videos and the virtual x-factor have increased our interest in things like this. As technology makes us less and less beast-like in what we accomplish day to day, we're compelled to look to animals for a point of emotional reference. Don't forget that funny round thing with a long tail that's attached to your home PC, either. After all, where would we be without that mouse?