From Dub the Dew to Boaty McBoatface: What Happens When Brands Let the Internet Vote

In August 2012, Mountain Dew put up a website and asked the internet to do its marketing. The brand was launching a green-apple flavour, and the “Dub the Dew” promotion invited users to submit name ideas and vote on them, as Wikipedia’s account of the campaign records. What happened next has been retold so many times that it has become a parable.

The poll, in that account, was “infamously hijacked by users, particularly those originating from the imageboard 4chan”. The entries that rose to the top were not names a soft-drink company could print on a bottle. “Diabeetus” was one. Variations of “Gushing Granny” were another. The entry that led the vote was “Hitler did nothing wrong”. A company representative, the record shows, offered to “help clean up” the site.

The episode was covered at the time by Adweek, Time, the Huffington Post and the New York Daily News, and it has been compared to another hijacked campaign, the one that sent the musician Pitbull to a Walmart in Kodiak, Alaska. Both are remembered for the same reason. A company handed a microphone to an audience it did not know, and the audience did what audiences do when nobody is watching them: it went for the biggest laugh in the room.

The ship that was not called Boaty

Four years later, a British public body did the same thing on a larger scale and with a better ending.

In March 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council opened an online poll, under the hashtag #NameOurShip, to name a £200 million polar research vessel being built at the Cammell Laird yard in Birkenhead. James Hand, a presenter at BBC Radio Jersey, suggested “Boaty McBoatface”. The name, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the vote, “quickly became the most popular choice by far, with 33% of the vote to 11% for the second choice”.

In October 2016, Jo Johnson, then the Minister for Universities and Science, announced that the ship would be named RRS Sir David Attenborough. Attenborough’s name had come fifth in the poll. Boaty McBoatface, “despite receiving more than ten times the number of votes of Sir David Attenborough”, was given instead to one of the autonomous underwater vehicles the ship would carry. NERC’s Duncan Wingham told Parliament it was an “eloquent compromise”, called the row an “astoundingly good outcome for public interest in science”, and said it had “put a smile” on people’s faces.

That is the version everyone remembers, and it is why the second episode is told more fondly than the first. Mountain Dew got a poll it could not use. NERC got a submarine with a famous name, a ship named after the country’s best-loved broadcaster, and more attention for a research vessel than any press office could have bought.

What the two votes have in common

Strip away the branding and the two stories are the same story.

An institution opens a vote. The vote is free to enter, anonymous, and unlimited. The prize means everything to the host and nothing to the voters, who have no stake in the flavour or the ship and every stake in the joke. Under those conditions the internet does not behave like a focus group. It behaves like a crowd at a concert that has just been handed the microphone, and it optimises for the one thing a crowd can agree on in seconds, which is the funniest possible answer.

The design flaw is not that people are cruel. In the Boaty case they were not; the winning name is affectionate. The flaw is that an open poll turns the act of voting into content. The moment “Boaty McBoatface” was on the leaderboard, voting for it was a way of taking part in a story that was already being told, and every share made the story bigger. The same mechanism, pointed at a soft drink by a forum that enjoys shock for its own sake, produced the Dub the Dew leaderboard.

Institutions have learned the lesson in the narrowest way possible, by adding moderation, shortlists and a final say for the committee. NERC kept its final say and used it. The wider lesson is the one the internet learned, and it is less comfortable for anyone running a campaign: the poll is the content. Whatever you are trying to name, the audience is there for the vote.

Why these stories keep getting retold

Both episodes have a second life as short-form video. The Dub the Dew story is the single most watched video on PopcornTheory, the Belgian YouTube Shorts channel The Platform Post profiled this week: a 33-second retelling posted in May 2025 that has been viewed 48.6 million times. It opens the way the genre always opens, with a date and a company, and it ends the way the genre always ends, with the institution discovering what it has done.

There is a reason the format loves these stories. They have a setup anyone can follow, a turn that arrives in one sentence, and a moral that flatters the audience, which is that the crowd is cleverer, or at least faster, than the people in charge of it. Boaty McBoatface has an extra ingredient, the consolation prize, and it is telling that the submarine is the detail every retelling keeps.

Fourteen years on, Dub the Dew is still the example marketers cite when someone proposes an open vote, and Boaty McBoatface is still the example the public cites when a committee overrules one. Neither institution set out to make a parable. Both did, and the internet has been telling them ever since.