Ed Sheeran look-alike gives local media outlet a social media shout-out.

The MoCo Show posted what appeared to be four-time Grammy Award winner Ed Sheeran giving the local website a full-throttle shout out on both its Instagram and Twitter feeds Sunday.

Oh, but it wasn’t. The mustachioed red head promoting the site dedicated to Montgomery County news and entertainment was actually an Ed Sheeran look-alike. MoCo Show founder Alex Tsironis paid the faux-Sheeran to make a quick video on Cameo, a service that provides personalized video shout-outs from celebrities (or celebrity look-alikes) to fans.

“With so many people bored at home. I figured this would be a great time to make something go locally viral,” Tsironis tells DCist.

And it seems to be working. In just a day, it has gotten more than 17,000 views on Instagram, higher than average for the account’s posted videos.

“I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money. And this guy looks a lot like Ed Sheeran for 20 bucks,” says Tsironis, “When I did research on him … he had fooled a whole bunch of people [before]. So, I thought ‘All right. Let’s make it happen.’”

The look-alike is actually a British man named Ty Jones. While he nails Sheeran’s aesthetic, his voice is also a bit off from the singer’s sweet vocal stylings.

The video isn’t “perfect”: For one, Jones gave Montgomery County its independence, calling the Maryland jurisdiction a “country.”

“He messed up,” laughs Tsironis, who said he wrote a script for Jones, “It’s actually pretty funny.”

Tsironis has been a public school teacher in Montgomery County for 14 years, and this isn’t the first time that Tsironis has used Cameo to promote his local news offerings.

In 2015, he got the wrestler Jim “Hacksaw” Duggan to hawk MoCoSnow, a related website and social media handle where Tsironis predicts winter weather and school closings. Dugan also messed up the script given to him, providing the web address as “Moscow Now dot com.” (To be fair, that’s sorta close to “MoCo Snow dot com.”)

This didn’t deter Tsironis from using the service again. In February 2017, he got a Gordon Ramsey look-alike to do a video.

A year later, the real Ramsey retweeted it. Tsironis credits that fateful retweet with the video’s more than hundred thousand views.

Then, in October 2017, he paid actor Thomas Ian Nicholas, star of the 1993 baseball comedy Rookie of the Year and Kevin from the American Pie trilogy, to promote MoCo Snow. “He knocked it out of the park. His Cameo was amazing,” says Tsironis.

The MoCoShow founder said he would absolutely consider doing this again. Overall, it’s been a successful tool for him and his hyper-local outlet even if most of the people who saw it and commented on it weren’t from here.

“Because we’re so specific to Montgomery County, it didn’t really gain me a lot of followers,” says Tsironis. “But what it did was just kind of, like, make people aware locally that we exist.”

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