Meme Marketing: The Next Generation of Advertising
How brands are using humorous images, video clips and gifs to engage with their communities and drive new business
What faster way to grow than with humor?
Early on in 2019, a picture of an egg uploaded on January 4th surpassed a record previously held by Kylie Jenner for the most likes on Instagram. Now at over 54 million red hearts strong, world_record_egg has tripled the amount of likes as when it originally surpassed Kylie’s post (then at 18 million for those of us who suck at math), and boasts 3 million #EggGang comments to boot.
While you can certainly claim this Internet buzz was nothing more than short-lived commotion, the occurrence itself is indicative of a rising online trend. There is nothing inherently special about this egg, yet quite humorously, the post circled the internet and received massive attention and engagement.
“Did you know that millennials spend over 200 minutes online every day? Memes are so prolific that there’s a good chance millennials and Gen Zers are laughing at and sharing memes while online. This gives brands plenty of opportunities to engage with their audience.”
Aidan Cole, More Than a Trend: Meme Marketing is Here to Stay
Although the egg page was made by an anonymous individual, many real brands are making use of memes across various social media platforms to reach younger, more connected audiences ready to share the memes that resonate with them.
Meme marketing might seem like a laughable matter — and it is — though the return on investment is no joke. Whereas an ad campaign or a tv commercial could run you anywhere from several hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars, meme marketing is free (if you do it yourself) and can generate even more engagement.
Still, there is an inherent danger to meme marketing: as with all forms of marketing, making mistakes makes your brand look disconnected from the world, and the internet of all places is known for showing no mercy.
Getting memes wrong can be as dangerous to a brand’s reputation as getting them right is uplifting — despite their low production and distribution costs, they should still be treated with the creativity, focus and care that you would put into any other ad.
But First, Wtf is a Meme?
A meme is formally defined as “a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme” (yes, we’re quoting Wikipedia, this isn’t exactly a Stanford Medical paper). The term was however coined more credibly by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, to describe the spreading of cultural information.
In this digital age, memes have come to mean something almost entirely different — almost. Humorous images, video, text, or GIFs distributed on social media, almost always as a derivative of other media. Over the course of its life, a successful meme will have changed dozens of times to potentially embody new meaning altogether. Still, a meme will always maintain some defining quality, some pattern or structure that makes it identifiable.
Before we continue, a word of caution… Its important to note that meme marketing is not effective for all brands, as it heavily relies on the context of your industry. If your brand’s success relies on maintaining a serious disposition in the market, steer clear of memes.
How to Get Meme Marketing Right:
Making a ‘good’ meme requires the creator to understand the meme they plan on reproducing. By nature, memes are derivative, meaning they make a joke that follows a certain structure. Here’s an example using the “Bad Luck Brian” meme:
Whereas Brian’s worst luck must have been waking up one day to discover he’d been made into a meme, “Condescending Wonka” prefers to ridicule the reader instead.
Memes can get quite meta. Creating one that resonates with people on the Internet means referencing the defining elements of each meme, but putting a unique twist that sets it apart. Its for this reason that one must understand the structure of the meme they plan on using and keep a pulse on what memes are trending to get their marketing endeavors right.
Many of the best memes draw on contemporary situations, such as events around the world, certain tv shows and celebrity news. Coupled with the fast-paced nature of internet content, memes quickly phase in and out of relevance, so timing is a key ingredient to getting it right.
From a branding perspective, it’s important to find a balance between being promotional and relatable to your audience. You want to present a positive image of your brand without being ‘in your face’ about it, and comical without being offensive. The goal here isn’t to sell, its to promote indirectly.
Of course, since the internet is quite vast, there are countless memes which some may find funny and others won’t. Knowing your audience goes a long way in picking a reproducible meme with cultural significance.
And that’s really what this is about at the end of the day: culture hacking.
Its keeping a pulse on whats trending, striking at the right time, balancing promotion with relate-ability, knowing your audience, and of course, actually being funny.
Check out this hilarious example of Oldspice getting it right:
A fast growing account on Instagram, dudewithsign, isn’t being all too mysterious at face value. His bio, “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything” kind of says it all…
His latest post on Instagram features him alongside an Oldspice actor. It’s probably better if I show you than try to explain it…
