He's been mocked by Russell Howard, he's been at the school protest, he's been spotted at the news report of a building fire in Peckham, he's been seen laying down flowers at the memorial of victims of the 7/7 attack. People thought he might be viral marketing for something - after all, we're used to it now with faceless people and such. Maybe he was like the Observer pointing to the pattern in Fringe - this might even explain why the man only owns one pale skin-colored shirt. Blogs like Fidgetwith collected screenshots of his appearances.

Well, his name is Paul Yarrow and he's now been interviewed in London Evening Standard, by the BBC and even become the star of the flash game "Kick the news stalker".

What I find most interesting about Paul's stunt, was that so many people honestly thought it that it was viral advertising of some sort. I've been telling y'all for years that this is the danger when doing stunts for stunts sake... It reminded me about something Ernie Schenck said in one of his (as usual) heavily commented posts here on adland an eon ago (well, five years, and that's an eon in internet time).

People are so saturated with all the virally, bzzzagenty, who-knows-whoto-trust-anymore stuff, they actually long for the days when ads were just ads.

I think we might soon reach that point, if we haven't already.