How to Turn a Meme into a Career (#CREATE)
Born June 22, 1991 in Denton, Texas, Laina Morris would have never known that at the age of 21, she would become a meme. She was just an average girl living her life when she decided to enter a contest held by Justin Bieber, challenging fans to create a “Girlfriend” counterpart to his hit song, “Boyfriend”. She posted a video on Youtube on June 6, 2012 untitled “JB Fanvideo”.
The next day, she woke up to her video featured on Reddit and over 17,000 views on Youtube. With the success of her video, she later noticed that her face in the video had turned into a image macro, now widely known as ‘a meme’. With multiple renditions of this picture, most are captioned with stalker, jealous girlfriend quotes. Famously known as the “Overly Attached Girlfriend” meme, this screen grab is still popular on the Internet and was considered one of the best memes of 2012.
After this widely successful video, Laina decided to take advantage of this high by posting a second video a week later featuring the same crazy girlfriend character, this time singing to “Call Me Maybe”. This video again gained a lot of attention, bringing her subscribers up to 605,000. With this overnight fame, she continued releasing parody videos of popular songs on her Youtube channel.
A year later, Laina appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and was eventually featured in commercials for Samsung, AutoTrader.com and many more. Her social media platforms blew up so much that she was able to quit her job to pursue Youtube as a full-time career. Her iconic look became a viral hit to the public.
Fast forward to 2018: Laina’s Youtube channel now has over 1.2M subscribers and has posted over 50 videos ranging from skits, vlogs, as well as advice videos. She quickly started showing her real self instead of her “Overly Attached Girlfriend” character as she said on IMDb that “I think most people understand that it’s just a character, and I’ll come back to it every once in a while.”
This is perfect example of an individual who took advantage of her popularity to boost her social media presence. If it wasn’t for that one video, she would had never had the leverage to boost her career to the public. But she was able to take this opportunity to build her brand instead of leaving it be and letting her popularity fade away. People such as ‘Damn Daniel’ was one person who wasn’t able to create more content that captured his audience in the same way (ex. his lame LG commercial). However, Laina Morris took it into her own hands to create more content that satisfies her fans and kept the ball rolling.
With the online meme culture, there is no scientific formula as trends are quite unpredictable. Internet memes only become memes when they are spread rapidly by other Internet users and shared to the mass (Hamza, 2018). I believe the best memes are the ones that are relatable to the public or extremely outrageous such as the “Overly Attached Girlfriend”. The reason why this meme blew up so quick was because it was low-key relatable even though no one wants to admit it. We all have a side of us who is always wondering what our boyfriend is up to, it just doesn’t comes out too often.
Laina understood that her meme would not last forever, so she decided to keep on producing content to keep her relevant in the eye of the public. She features a diverse range of content that never leaves the viewers bored. Despite her overly popular character, she knows that crowding her Youtube channel with that same character can get quite boring at times. Switching her videos up gives her viewers a wide variety of content to watch and gives Laina a chance to show the world her real self.
An individual such as Laina Morris has took her overnight fame to the next level by creating something out of herself and leveraging her popular meme status. Not everyone can do it, yet she succeeded. Laina is now working as a full-time Youtube creator, and earns enough to live a comfortable life. She even decided in 2012 to give money to a different charity each month, what a sweetheart!
If you want to see more into Laina Morris’s life, feel free to check out her social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and of course, Youtube.
