Not a promise for a president, the Meme claims a new identity in the digital market.
A review of the article, “Actually Meme 2020 wins”, written by Pamela Chen
Main idea:
To begin with, the author Chen raised the question of Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign and doubted whether the meme 2020 helps Bloomberg to win and its impact on the political side and other tech-platforms. She went to the details of four aspects of memes applied in the Bloomberg Campaign. Briefly, the first is the meme account, which Bloomberg paid creators to post contents. The second is a format, which is a meme-like style aiming to win the attention; the third is the network powered by the algorithm to ramp up more followers, and the last one is the culture that achieves a high level of recognition and awareness at a social scale. In the latter part, Chen evaluates the Meme 2020. As a new form of digital operation, several issues come to mind: what the level of effectiveness in the campaign? How some tech-giant, such as Facebook, regulate such existence with election law for social media? The ending leaves readers to contemplate: With the uprising of creativity and digitalization, how each brand accommodates the change, and how policymakers react to achieve a healthy online-environment.
Response:
A quick glimpse at Meme 2020 before getting into the deep dive. Meme 2020 is a new company that consists of people behind influential accounts. The company mainly works with the Bloomberg campaign in 2020 and creates meme-like content to win the run. As a new content of the advertisement, it is somehow tongue-in-cheek but entertaining. Its initial round of posts was made as face direct-message conversation between the account users who usually have a high volume of fans and Bloomberg himself. He provided the pay got meme to make him “look cool for the upcoming democratic primary and the promise “I’ll give you a billion-dollar” in return. Although it seems to be an unserious and tricky method for the election campaign, the application of the meme tactics interests me. Here are a couple of things I learned from the wittiness of memes in Meme 2020.
Humorous:
Unlike a well-organized layout of paper and words, the meme absolutely an exception. The content can be erratic and intruding but still make people laugh and relax since everyone recognized that it is merely a joke. However, such a sense of humor and thumb-stopping post could make people more comfortable to remember the words, since it resonates with viewers and the content might comply with what they think and expect.
Due to the limitation of space, content creators have few words to touch the critical point. In this case, it requires content makes fully understand their subjects, know the audience, and have the most useful messages to convey. Thus, such clarity can inevitably grab the attention of “OUR PEOPLE.”
Creative:
The meme is combined with pictures and words, giving the rein to the individual’s imagination. It can be a package for amoral and vulgar ideas, but it disclosures some desire and facts confronting people’s daily life. The meme, in its attempt, visualizes the complexity of some issues and translates the messages more direct but compelling.
To sum up, Bloomberg’s Instagram strategy certainly helped him to win part of likes to some extent. But such content-making might not be appropriate or sufficient to drive long-term engagement, due to the lack of depth and breadth of his inspiration. Notably, it was essential to begin the start-up, which claimed that Bloomberg is going to run the president. Still, more information regarding his policy in health care, climate change and immigrant, etc., is needed. Considering the case of Bloomberg’s Meme plan, marketers should embrace the unconventional meme strategy in the marketplace, practice how to optimize its use under the different circumstances, and create the most appealing contexts to the target audience.
