A TikToker went to extreme lengths to sneak his photo on a billboard. Weeks later, no one seemed to notice — he's shocked it's still intact.

• A TikToker covered a billboard on the side of a store with a photo of himself as the model.
• His videos documenting it received a combined 8.5 million views as viewers applauded the stunt.

A TikToker who sneakily replaced a billboard image with a photo of himself in the dead of night was baffled no one caught onto the stunt after six weeks.

On June 13, a TikToker who goes by Michael Drake posted a video where he said in a voiceover he'd always wanted to be on a billboard, so he decided to try to sneak himself onto an existing one "without anyone noticing."

In the clip, Drake selected a large billboard attached to the Australian outdoor and camping store Anaconda, which featured a model posing in a river. He then showed himself measuring the existing sign and attempted to "recreate the exact same photo" by setting up a photoshoot in a similar-looking location.

He said the process of printing the image to the correct size wasn't cheap, and showed a heavily censored screen-recording that appeared to show an estimate of the cost was $244.35. The sign then arrived in three separate pieces "because of how big it was."

Drake could then be seen on camera asking "what are we doing with our lives" as he and a team of several others completed the final step of sticking the billboard over the original at night. At the end of the video he said he returned the next day and celebrated the fact it was still up, and pondered how long it would take for someone to remove it.

Drake has over 200,000 followers on TikTok where he regularly posts a variety of pranks and stunts, many of which receive hundreds of thousands of views. His billboard video went especially viral though, with 7.3 million views and over 900 comments commending the effort the TikToker put into the sign. "Your photo is better than the original," one viewer wrote in a top comment that received over 7,300 likes.

Others suggested Drake should attempt to score free items from the store as his face was now on the building, and multiple others wrote they would keep an eye out for the real thing as they drove past the building.

The official Anaconda store TikTok account caught wind of the stunt and commented to say they were impressed, and would be in touch with Drake. They also posted a video response on June 15 which showed multiple members of staff looking at the TikToker's viral video, and said they planned to get it in front of the CEO.

On the same day, Drake responded to Anaconda's comment with a follow-up video which received a further 1.2 million views, where he could be seen re-visiting the billboard multiple times, and said he expected it to stay up for one night, but it had now been up for six weeks.

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