A Picture is Worth over $30,000 When You’re @FuckJerry
FuckJerry, which was once a meager Tumblr account, is now an extremely profitable, multifaceted company that has creatively taken advantage of the recent social media disruption of the advertising industry. Using mainly macro and video memes, FuckJerry has accumulated an impressive 13.5 million followers on Instagram. Internet memes are a part of life for young people, and while extremely relatable among their followers, they are fairly exclusive to older generations. You need to know to know, you know?
Elliot Tebele (one of the founders, the creative lead, and now the face of the company) gets it. As one of the first accounts making memes on Instagram, FuckJerry now has vertical media Instagram accounts like @BeigeCardigan, @KanyeDoingThings, and @Pizza — a joint-venture with food blog Infatuation. The beauty of this platform is that hardly any of the content is created by the company, it is mostly curated from the internet. Tebele insists that the ratio is now 60 to 40 curated vs created, but even so, being able to make $30,000 per sponsored post through engagement with an audience he earned through mostly curated content is pretty impressive. FuckJerry’s accounts are part of the leisure class, which is an advantage for them as influencers. They don’t always create productive content, but they partake in conspicuous consumption that propagates ideals and tells us what we want. While mostly known for and definitely owing to their Instagram page, FuckJerry, now a team of 20 employees, has transcended their original success.
FuckJerry as an influencer generates millions of dollars in sales annually with their Instagram accounts as well as an online merchandise store called Jerry’s World, and a meme-themed game called What Do You Meme which is the number one best-selling game on Amazon. What really makes FuckJerry so interesting, however, is how they’ve accumulated all of this into Jerry Media. Jerry Media offers services like social media branding, campaign strategy and implementation, content production, influencer marketing, account growth, market setting, experiential marketing, community management, and social analysis. Jerry Media has worked with brands and companies like Subway, Burger King, Malibu Rum, Paramount Pictures, and Tinder.
Taking inspiration from social media brand management superstars like Wendy’s and Denny’s, FuckJerry’s media company has found a way to harness the speedy transmission of memes for the use of their clients’ messages. They create content that people will share over and over across social media. With a total following of over 40 million across all their social media, FuckJerry has a leg up over many other media agencies. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that in order to spread, memes must retain a certain amount of “truth”; be transmitted to a certain minimum number of people; and need to last long enough to propagate in order to ensure continued survival or, for the purposes of Jerry Media, in order to ensure profitable engagement. FuckJerry can easily achieve these three steps because they are young people speaking to young people with an enormous audience and they have multiple influencers under the brand of FuckJerry which can keep their content going around for as long as they need. FuckJerry understands the four key drivers of sharing their content: social currency, emotions, usefulness, and storytelling, and seamlessly incorporates them into their content.
FuckJerry has gathered a deep understanding of their platforms and their audience. They will post 10–20 times a day on Facebook while only posting a few posts on each of their Instagram accounts every day because they understand the expectations and the culture of the differing platforms. When promoting a company’s product, they are able to meet customer needs through customized methods which show consumers that they understand the struggle. FuckJerry is able to do this because they themselves have been using Instagram and the other platforms in the same way for almost a decade. Memes are also an extremely casual way of interacting with people, and research shows that one tends to have more influence when speaking casually. Traditional advertising is often too formal to relate to the consumers and too obvious with it’s intentions of persuading us to buy something. FuckJerry’s advantage is that it grew with the phenomenon of internet memes and social media and even had a hand in shaping it’s evolution thus far.
FuckJerry’s success isn’t only thanks to their extremely well-run command centre and Tebele’s innate comedic talent. What really sets FuckJerry apart from their competitors is that Tebele did not attach himself to the brand of the company. Very few of FuckJerry’s followers know who Tebele or any of the other founders are. There is hardly a face to the brand, except for Tebele occasionally for necessities like press releases and interviews. This isn’t done in a sketchy way like they’re trying to hide their identity, you can easily find co-founders Elie Ballas and Ben Kaplan on the internet. It is done in a way that keeps the company versatile.
Without having a face and a personality attached, FuckJerry can easily work with almost any brand and it doesn’t seem out of character. This flexibility is a huge advantage over celebrity influencers. Someone like Kim Kardashian is limited to endorsing companies that align with her brand. As co-founder Kaplan said in an article for Inc., “If Kim Kardashian were promoting fantasy football, it would feel [unnatural], because we’re constantly surfacing funny stuff from around the Internet, it’s not unnatural to post something about different brands.” If Kim K started promoting fantasy football even though she has never showed interest in it before, everyone would be confused and the endorsement would feel dishonest, therefore being ineffective. With FuckJerry, there is no characteristics attached except for being relatable and funny. FuckJerry feels like a member of our peer group and provides the authority, knowledge, position, and relationship with us that gives them the influence to affect our purchasing decisions, without needing a defined personality. Fantasy Football would not look out of place on a FuckJerry page and neither would a nail polish endorsement, because FuckJerry is all-encompassing of youth culture.
This trust and reputation that FuckJerry has built with the internet generation is the reason for their success, but also can inhibit their ability to work with many companies. As a sacrifice for being so relatable, funny, and shocking, FuckJerry, as you must have figured out by now, can be rather “inappropriate”. Their content can often be polarizing, but that’s what makes it so relatable, and with so much content being posted, everyone will relate to something. Additionally, it is almost never over a serious matter so the polarizing effect is more lighthearted and has less of a negative impact. Still, FuckJerry is too risky for a lot of brands, especially with a swear word in its name. Regardless, with its impressive portfolio and statistics, Jerry Media isn’t having any trouble finding clients.
The pool of clients looking for social media agencies is huge. Social media has become the most important part of advertising to millennials, and yet plenty of companies still don’t quite get understand it and need to hire experts. According to statistics from Brand Watch, there is a new social media user in the world every 15 seconds. $40 billion was spent on social network advertising in 2016, and that number is only growing. 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles, meaning there is a significant need for social media influencers in advertising. According to Bazaarvoice, 84% of millennials report that user generated content on company websites at least somewhat influences what they buy and according to Hubspot, the same percentage don’t trust traditional advertising. Clearly, social media advertising is becoming as important to a company as HR or Legal, if not more important.
FuckJerry is a trailblazer in the social media advertising industry. It’s natural evolution from hobby account to million dollar organization was one of the first of its kind, and a unicorn among its peers. Jerry Media differentiates itself from other social media agencies by having been born from social media itself. It is in the unique position of having been the customer, the creator, the influencer, and now the consultant. And it continues to act as all these integral parts of social media, giving them the knowledge and reputation that is required to influence social media users. As the social media integrates itself deeper and deeper into the fabric of everyday life, advertisement and media companies will be evolving faster than we can imagine. FuckJerry;s forward-thinking and adaptability will allow it to be amongst the fit that will survive.
