As we all known, Jia Junpeng (贾君鹏) is an popular Internet phenomenon in China in terms of a catchphrase “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner”.

From Wikipedia:

The post with the title “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner” appeared on the Chinese portal Baidu WoW (World of Warcraft) forum at 10:59 a.m. on July 16.

Amazingly, after only six hours, it attracted more than 400,000 viewers and 17,000 replies, most of which were posted by young people. Some who posted replies pretended to be Jia’s relatives, teachers or friends. Netizens who replied to the post even changed their user names to be “Jia Junpeng’s aunt”, “Jia Junpeng’s grandpa”, “Jia Junpeng’s sister” etc. formed a huge Jia family. They doctored photos and started cyberhunts, posting several thousands of replies per second.

From chinaSMACK:

This post attracted hundreds of thousands of netizens’ attention, with many netizens on the thread questioning just who is Jia Junpeng, and hoping that someone could explain the cause of the “Jia Junpeng, your mom wants you to go home to eat” matter. However, there has yet to be an insider to come forth to explain.

Today, mass Internet portals report that Huang Lianghua (黄亮华), 27-years-old CEO of the Beijing-based KPMEDIA, has revealed that it is the agency behind this matter and he calls himself as “Jia Junpeng’s father”.

Huang Lianghua said it took them 2 months to work out the Jia Junpeng viral marketing plan. During the process, 800 online marketing members with 20,000 registered IDs totally generated 100,000 replies to the post. All the members were divided into four execution teams. They took turns to monitor the progress and reported back every two hours via phone call.

Huang Lianghua did not disclose who hired him, but he acknowledged that it was a gaming company, “World of Warcraft operation has been stopped for a period of time in China, all the WoW players have nothing to do. We targeted WoW payers on the Baidu WoW forum, created this meme, let them don’t feel bored. Also hope to attract other people pay more attention to WoW.”

Huang Lianghua also disclosed that the agency earned 6 digits income for this case. KPMEDIA currently has 10 formal employees and handles 3-5 similar online marketing / viral marketing project in a year.

Is it the fact or a marketing hype? I hold the suspicious attitude towards this news. So I describe it as a “rumor” now. What’s your idea on it? Please feel free to comment.