Is This Creepy Sculpture An Ad For Soylent?

Is This Creepy Sculpture An Ad For Soylent?

Welcome to “Is This an Ad?” — a column in which we take a celebrity’s social media post about a brand or product and find out if they’re getting paid to post about it or what. Even though the FTC recently came out with rules on this, it’s not always clear. Send a tip for ambiguous tweets or ’grams to [email protected]



Did someone actually somehow dry out the meal replacement drink Soylent and turn it into modeling clay? I wanted to know, so I called the phone number on the flyer and at the bottom of the website. It’s has long outgoing voicemail message from a man named “Bo” asking if you want the sculpture and then also talking about his girlfriend.

Weird, right? What the hell!


When I asked Soylent, they sent me this image:


I tried some obvious things: reverse searching the images (nothing), the phone number (nothing), the URL registration (private). The mystery deepened.

In the subreddit r/Soylent where the photo of the flyer was posted, fans of the meal-in-a-bottle drink speculated it was some sort of viral marketing. One Redditor said he was sure it was an ad, and it was similar to another flyer about Soylent he had posted in the past.

In the comments, a tech savvy Redditor looked at the source code for the URL and said it was pretty sophisticated – a sign it was probably a professional job. They also noticed that the site was created by something called “Imakesites” – when they searched that, only three sites came up, and they were all related to Soylent.


And then…. Aha! Someone on the thread linked to a guy named Alan Wagner’s Instagram account, saying this was the person who had made it.




At this point, I was really unsure whether this was an ad or not. On one hand, the Law Of Spon says that if something smells like an ad, it probably is.

But on the other hand, these aren’t particularly “good” ads. All three are kind of making fun of Soylent and making it seems weird and gross and something only a creepy weirdo drinks. This is definitely not the brand image Soylent wants to project, right?

Yes, the flyer seemed “fake” in the sense a man probably hadn’t actually sculpted his girlfriend out of Soylent. But it if was just a joke, did Alan Wagner just do it for fun? Or was Soylent paying for it?









Contact Katie Notopoulos at [email protected].

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.


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