"GTA6"-Style Fishing? Megan Fox’s Posted Number Has the Comments Section Going Wild

Compared with the gaming industry's familiar “hiding clues in trailers” tactic, Megan Fox’s “half-revealed phone number” in this ad is essentially a very familiar form of interactive marketing. The difference is that game publishers usually drop Easter eggs, while this time what was thrown out was a phone-number hook that seemed to offer a direct way to contact her, so the spread felt more like the mass puzzle-solving under the GTA6 trailer than the one-way messaging of a typical brand ad.

The incident itself is not complicated. In a recent promo video for the men’s grooming brand Dr Squatch, Megan Fox looks into the camera and says she wants to give viewers her phone number. In the video, she says “32349...” and later the ending “...15,” but before she can finish the crucial middle digits, the brand’s Bigfoot mascot barges in and interrupts her. Heavy metal music kicks in on the spot, abruptly cutting off the whole “revealing the number” bit.

Compared with similar marketing campaigns, this trick is not exactly new; its strength lies in how well it understands the psychology of internet audiences. The ad gives just enough information to make people feel like “they’re one step away from figuring it out,” while deliberately leaving a gap that naturally pushes the comments section into meme-making and guessing mode. That line in the original text—“Hi, boys! This is probably a bad idea, but I’m going to give you my phone number.”—is a classic bait line. It sounds like an unscripted moment spiraling out of control, but in reality it feels more like a precisely designed pause point.

By contrast, the problem with many brand ads is that they give away everything, so users just scroll past after watching. This kind of half-hidden, half-revealed design, however, feels more like the sliced teaser drops game companies often use during hype-building. Give players an incomplete set of coordinates, and they will fill in the rest themselves. As a result, the comments section quickly became lively: some joked about brute-forcing the number by calling every possibility one by one, while others actually started calculating the remaining digit combinations, trying to reconstruct the full number. Even though everyone more or less understood that this was probably just a marketing gimmick, the sense of participation had already been successfully activated.

Looking at it from another angle, this method of spreading also shows one thing: these days, it’s not just the gaming industry—even broader entertainment advertising is increasingly starting to resemble a “community event.” Companies are no longer satisfied with you seeing something once; they want you to guess, share, comment, and ideally bring your friends into the discussion as well. Compared with the appointment countdowns common in mobile games or the mysterious short teasers often used for big console titles, this ad may not have cost more, but its interactive payoff is clearly not low.

My take is that this kind of tactic will only become more common. The reason is simple: on platforms with extremely high information density, a complete answer is often less compelling than the suspense of being “one step away.” For viewers, it’s a lightweight spectacle; for brands, it works better than force-feeding selling points. If there is a downside, it’s that this套路 loses value quickly when overused—just like some games that rely on cryptic teaser tricks every single time: the first time feels fresh, by the third time people are already fatigued. But in this case, Dr Squatch at least got the rhythm right, and the buzz in the comments section already shows the stunt was not performed in vain.