There are a lot of ways for marketing companies to grab the attention of consumers. They might strive to associate client brands with eye-catching artwork or to convey something meaningful about them through humor. Marketing companies can go for the heart with socially relevant or personally sympathetic advertising. They can even work to trick a customer into hearing a brand message by hiding it in the form of product placement or content that isn’t obviously commercial.

On rare occasions, marketing companies might come up with something that checks off all the boxes. That was arguably accomplished recently by an advertising company whose name, Stink, is indicative of its commitment to a tongue-in-cheek approach to marketing work. The advertisement in question was apparently produced in 2016, but it’s not clear whether or where it was actually distributed. But it received a signal boost from Twitter user and video director Ryan Simmons on Wednesday when he tweeted the video and identified it as “another capitalism greatest hit.”

For its entire two minute 20 second runtime, the commercial depicts the ups and downs of a human life, spanning from birth to young adulthood. The production can reasonably be described as a work of art, and some of the responses on Twitter compared it favorably to the films of Terrence Malick and Richard Linklater. It could have stood on its own, without any brand attached, as a testament to the artistry that marketing companies can create for clients.

But with its final seconds, the short film demonstrated how that same artistry can be used to subvert viewers’ expectations and compel them to sit up and taken notice of a brand name specifically because they weren’t expecting it. As the emotional strains of the commercial’s string music reach their final crescendo, a voiceover tells the viewers, “Every day, life asks you the same question.” The camera zooms in on an as-yet unseen figure as the film’s protagonist approaches her. She comes into focus slowly as the narrator concludes: “What are you going to try today.” The figure wears a hat, and on it is one word: Subway.

Simmons’ tweet came with a bet: 100,000 dollars to anyone who could guess the brand before the end of the commercial. With more than 12,000 tweets over just eight hours, no one seems to have come close. But everyone seems to share an appreciation of the baffling incongruity between the tone of the advertisement and the nature of what it is trying to sell. I can only conclude that that is the point, and I’m happy to view it as a brilliant challenge for other marketing companies.

Many of those companies tend to take a similar approach to all of their work. Many have come close to perfecting one thing, be it aesthetic productions or dramatic narratives or funny concepts. Some marketing companies are able to navigate among a few different styles in order to serve a broader range of clients and campaigns. But I doubt that very many of them can accomplish what this commercial did: take a funny concept, execute it with dead-pan seriousness, and make it something beautiful to look at along the way.

The product of all that overlap might come across as insane. Stink’s Subway ad sure does. But in the era of social media marketing, insanity attracts the public’s gaze, and sales are likely to follow.