Memeification of advertising
Visual language of the internet grabs attention to grow mobile acquisition, reach and influence
It’s no secret memes have become a huge part of our digital lives, and brands are increasingly seeing the power in harnessing internet culture. Memes and viral content can snatch attention in the infinite scroll. A great meme or well-played internet culture reference keeps audiences entertained and provokes engagement. Through cultural currency you hack attention; these ads can bypass ‘banner blindness’ — the way our eyes are trained to filter and ignore traditional online advertising. And it’s important to get creative in reaching Gen Z, who are notably ad adverse, especially when it comes to interruptive online and mobile formats.
Our ‘community post’ assets create a loophole in the attention economy. They harness the familiarity we have with technology and recognising visual cues, such as notifications on a phone lock screen or a chat flow between two people. Users don’t know they’re looking at ads, and they’re genuinely engaged. By tapping into the mindset of an audience, we can use their language to both communicate the features of the app and create a sense of community around it.
Co-opting internet culture can be a powerful tool — if you get it right. The best memes are irreverent, relatable and, crucially, funny. Creating memes which aren’t, well, tragic, isn’t always easy — there’s nothing more embarrassing than failing to land a joke. After years of stuffy articles talking at ‘GenZennials’ rather than to them, they’re turned off by anything out of touch quicker than you can say ‘OK boomer’. As memes and trends fly across platforms at warp speed, they’re also discarded and replaced at a disorienting rate. To successfully secure a seat at the table — and stay there — you need digital natives who can tap into your audience’s psyche and react to trends at a rapid pace.
At Paintgun, we’ve found the formula, and take it one step further. We’re internet culture fanatics whose work resonates with a broad section of potential users, with an understanding of what they will respond to and what they will ignore. We flip the online vernacular of your audience and their visual language into ads — generating memes with social currency and posts camouflaged as user-generated content. And we can play with internet culture across various platforms — TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and more.
By working in creative sprints and churning out volume of creative content, we find outliers that land with our target audience — we create ads at a rapid rate and shower users with them until we get a winner. As these creatives are tested weekly, we adjust our approach to winning formulas and current internet trends and consistently refine. This systemised performance methodology really works to reach users and grow acquisition. Which might explain why we were able to drop CPA by 44% for one client in 2019, now the “fastest growing fintech app in history”
