Social Media Case Study: #WhereHasRyanBeen

You may be familiar with the work of local actor, Ryan Beil. He’s a funny dude–you’ll often find him performing, for example, at Vancouver Theatre Sports or at The Sunday Service, treading the boards of local theatres, like Bard on the Beach, or appearing in locally-shot TV shows (he just had bit part on Motive last week). Ryan’s also a writer.

But everyone knows Ryan best for his role as Ryan the (bumbling) Trainee on the A&W commercials.

Like this one:

Ryan and his co-star, Allen Lulu, have pretty fun chemistry.

It’s been a while since we saw Ryan in an A&W commercial, however, but that might be about to change.

A few weeks back, a new social media campaign emerged, called #WhereHasRyanBeen. There was a whole hashtag campaign, and even a very simple website: www.wherehasryanbeen.com. There’s even a new, separate twitter handle (from Ryan’s actual handle, @ryanbeil) @wemissryan.

The whole focus of the campaign is to bring Ryan back to A&W–Ryan the Trainee to his “job” at A&W, and, I assume, Ryan Beil to the role of Ryan the Trainee in the commercials (whew! that gets a little meta, hey?).

It’s not clear who’s behind the campaign. Ostensibly, it would seem that Ryan himself is behind it, but is it a publicity stunt on A&W’s behalf? Who knows.

Either way, it’s been a very successful campaign. And there were some pretty hilarious responses, as well.