Wichita car dealer’s silly ‘Nae Nae’ video goes viral

A used car dealer pitching his vehicles on an attention-grabbing commercial where he purposely acts like a spastic goofball.

Hip-hop star Silento’s catchy dance craze “Watch Me (Whip, Nae Nae)” – the one spontaneously demonstrated (and demonstrated and demonstrated) at concerts, festivals, sporting events and parties for the last several months.

Both are pretty tired. Neither is particularly noteworthy.

Unless, that is, you put them together.

Local car dealership owner Jeff Horning, who owns Priority Motorsports at 5817 E. Kellogg, is the accidental star of a video that went viral after it was posted by his digital marketing manager a week ago. It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since then, likely more.

“Is it ridiculous or what?” Horning said Wednesday.

The 46-second clip starts out just like any of the commercials that Horning stars in twice a month. He lets car buyers know they need to come in right away to see the best selection of pre-owned vehicles they’ll find in the entire state. They’ll pay zero money, zero interest and zero payments for 90 days, he promises.

Then, 18 seconds in, it starts.

Horning begins to sing. And dance. Sort of.

“Pick out your whip. So you can nae nae,” he sings, wildly moving his body but in no way re-creating the popular dance craze.

It doesn’t stop.

“And do the stanky leg. Do the stanky leg. Throw a little stanky leg. Do the broken leg. Do the broken leg.”

His movements are Elvis meets River Dance with a dash of Michael Jackson. He grows increasingly out of breath. (And the lyric, for the record, is “Now break your legs.”)

Horning said he never intended for the commercial to go public. It was really just a joke, something he hoped would give his sales staff a laugh.

During the shoot, he told the cameraman to humor him. When he finished the usual sales pitch, he slapped his sunglasses on and began his performance.

He based it on the song by Silento that his two teenage sons like. “That Cilantro guy. Or something like that. It’s his song,” Horning said.

Horning was at the National Baseball Congress Tournament this summer when the crowd broke into dance, doing the whip, the nae nae, the stanky leg and a few other things he could only sort of recall.

“It was like synchronized swimming,” Horning said. “I looked around the stadium, and girls were doing it. Young kids were doing it. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And she said, ‘I have no idea.’”

Horning never got a much better idea, he admits, but he couldn’t get the song or the dance out of his head, especially since back in the day, people used to call cars “whips,” he said. Doing his version of it would surely surprise his sales staff at the next meeting.

It did.

“The ad starts off very professional, then it just snaps,” he said. “I’m sitting there, watching my whole staff, and they all started dying laughing.”

Horning said he intended to leave it there. But his new customer service manager, Jenine Loving Drake, has a background in digital media. She immediately recognized the video as potential viral material and persuaded Horning to let her post it on the business’s Facebook page.

Fine, he said. But nowhere else.

The video caught on almost immediately. It was shared, and shared and shared again. The phone started ringing with calls from all around the world. People in other states wanted to know if Horning had a dealership anywhere else. People from other countries called to inquire about cars. Some people just wanted to tell him how funny he was.

“At one point, I was watching it get 10,000 views a second, and I said, ‘This can’t be real.’ When I think of viral, I think of an antibiotic,” he said.

A reporter from New York Daily News called on Tuesday and published an online article about Horning’s dance.

Four versions of the video on YouTube had been viewed more than 200,000 times by Wednesday morning, but the clip has likely been viewed millions of times. Websites including reddit.com, thechive.com, dishnation.com and thehollywoodgossip.com and dozens of radio stations have shared the video during the past several days.

It’s also blown up on Twitter, with people all over the country sharing the link – and their own snarky commentary.

People have been telling Horning that he should capitalize on his fame and base his television commercials on his dance skills. But he’s not sure it’d play as well for a local crowd as it does for a national one. It’s really not his style, he said, though he hasn’t ruled anything out.

Horning insists he was not trying to mock “Cilantro,” nor was he poking fun at his competitor, Super Car Guys, whose spastic spokesman behaves all sorts of tongue-in-cheek ridiculous in their commercials.

He wanted only to get a giggle out of his sales staff.

“I was just trying to be fun and act a little squirrely,” he said.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 6:34 AM with the headline "Wichita car dealer’s silly ‘Nae Nae’ video goes viral."