An Immersive Experience Gone Very Wrong: Listing to the Conversations Around the Not So Sweet Willy’s Chocolate Experience Event in Glasgow, Scotland.

What do Vincent van Gogh, Friends, and ice cream all have in common? They all have some form of immersive experience modeled after them to capitalize on the craze of taking audiences and placing them into their respective worlds, whatever that might look like. Recently, one new immersive experience started make rounds on social media but for all the wrong reasons. In Glasgow, Scotland, a company known as “House of Illuminati” advertised their new immersive experience called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” an unlicensed event aimed at capitalizing on the Willy Wonka IP. What was advertised as a magical and candy filled experience turned out to be much less according to some attendees on social media, and the immersive experience quickly became a viral meme.

Most social media users have been referring to the event as the “Willy Wonka Experience” which has been mentioned almost 500 thousand times since February 22^nd, just days before the event which took place the weekend of February 24^th. Further, this topic has reached almost 2 billion users across social media with the most prominent platform being X which is where the jokes and memes really took off followed by Reddit which is where the story first started gaining traction on the day of the event. Relevant conversations continued to increase the during the following week and peaked on February 29^th with over 17 thousand mentions. Sprinklr rates the sentiment of these conversations at about 61% negative and 39% positive which makes sense as many users took to speaking on how poorly the experience was executed while simultaneously making fun of it. Top themes of discussion include “AI Art,” which describes how all of the promotional material for the experience was created, “kids with the Krabby Land,” a reference to a joke from SpongeBob SquarePants, and “bad people called the cops Lmao,” which is a line from one viral post that noted the experience was so poorly received that attendees called the police to the scene.

While the “immersive” experience took place in Scotland, the United Kingdom was the second most vocal country in the social media discussions on the topic at just over 31 thousand mentions behind the United States which had just over 71 thousand mentions. American accounts began to circulate more and more pictures from the experience to crack jokes at just how underwhelming it turned out to be as well as mixing it with other recently popular memes.

Influencers in the discussions include some pop culture and news outlet accounts such as Culture Crave and The Guardian as well as other various influencers whose tweets have been sampled above.

What this story shows is that viral moments can come from anywhere. The AI generated advertisements for the experience raised little to no eyebrows across social media prior to the event taking place, but once Redditors began sharing the story and users on X got ahold of it, it blew up to a now canon social media meme. From the sad Oompa Loompa to the AI created villain “The Unknown,” this story is likely to linger in social media users’ minds for years to come simply because it was just so ridiculous and unexpected. 

Author: Ben Katarzynski