Meme Marketing: What's It All About?
To some users, the internet is strange and culturally exclusive landscape, moving too quickly to keep up with. Broad terms such as a ‘meme’ can describe everything from a host of different things from grumpy cat or shark cat to the harlem shake, chocolate rain or autotune the news.
Access to internet, knowledge and being up-to-date with the latest trends can often alienate people from interacting with content such as memes. Yet, internet culture has become increasingly prominent in the real world. Marketing agencies and brands are using it as a driving force to promote their products taking popular memes and reusing them for their brand TV and out of home advertising. It’s the vast reach and cost effectiveness of using internet culture that has helped brands make the move towards meme marketing.
What is a meme?
What started out as a word coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’ has morphed into a rapidly evolving method of transporting opinions and ideas to millions of people in a short space of time. Popular memes can be applied to a broad range of subjects, from on-topic news stories like political elections, to the strange and wonderful, or even just cats.
In the early days of the internet they were used on message boards and newsgroups to quickly share information to a diverse population of internet users. The ease of sharing and popularity of memes has allowed people search and interact with even the most obscure memes due to most of them existing on search engines.
Unfortunately, unless the meme is unique their expected life is short and they become detached and overused from their original message. Therefore, due to these risks, to succeed in meme marketing, brands and agencies must be able to keep up to date with popular memes and act quickly. We’ve put together some good examples of meme marketing:
Milk Matters – Cravendale
Cats rule the internet, it’s true, including everything from keyboard cat to nyan cat. The trend of cats on the internet is staggering and Cravendale have taken advantage of this popularity within their TV campaign by looking what would happen if cats had opposable thumbs. Everything from cats that scheme and plot, to cats working together to secure all the milk. This add is an extension of their popular campaign ‘so good the Cow’s want it back’ but focusing on a more up-to-date trend. If you’re looking for other examples of cat usage within modern day media O2’s ‘Be more dog’ campaign is a great example of this.
Dumb Ways To Die – Metro Australia
Created as a public service announcement by McCann Melbourne and meant to promote train safety, it was a huge success with over 81,000,000 views (as of 28th May) on Youtube and went viral through shares and social media overnight. Within a week, the ad had generated at least $50 million in media value.
It portrays a variety of illustrated characters dying in strange ways and approaches the typically rather graphic public service announcements with a friendly song and illustrations. The video became its own meme with a host of parodies from ‘Cool ways to find’ featuring the Curiosity Rover and “Grand Theft Auto V: Dumb Ways to Die’ and further to its success, an iOS and Android game and a song.
Why use memes?
Memes are an excellent way of quickly and easily reaching vast audiences across the internet due to their popularity and simplicity to create. Generally if memes are already successful you can build on how viral the original meme is, something Virgin Media managed to do with their ‘Success Kid’ billboards. Also, they’re typically a cost effective way of gathering followers and shares on social media. Due to the speed that you can create them with generally little or no knowledge of Photoshop (many websites offer generators), you can create simple memes such as ‘What people think I do vs. What I actually do’ relatively quickly.
Takeaways
- Understand and research the meme you’re going to ‘memejack’ by heading over to Know Your Meme and check its recent popularity. Also check the connotations it holds and the parodies around that meme. Memes such as ‘Do you even lift?’ for example are often used by internet trolls and should probably be avoided unless that is your intended outcome.
- Be quick! In the time it’s taken to read this your meme could have spread across the internet, been spoken about, shared and had parodies created. The life span of a meme is one downside. Their ability to get old quickly due to being remade over and over by anyone with access to the internet is high.
- Pick memes that closely resemble and relate to your brand or what you’re trying to convey. Hipchat are a good example of where the meme they have used works extremely well. Their ‘Y U NO USE HIPCHAT’ advertising billboard was a huge success, originally created because they were sick of seeing the same typical billboards everyday.
- Seek the authors permission for use of the image and do your research, it’s much riskier to use memes for commercial purposes due to copyright laws. As brands such as Nike, McDonalds and Cisco are starting to use them these rules may be tightened in the future to specifically target meme use. Make sure the images you’re using are free for commercial use or have been licensed to do so.
- Plan effectively where you’re going to start sharing it. For example, don’t place it on Pinterest or Google+ if you have little or no followers on there, place it somewhere where you hold significant presence. It will no doubt eventually get shared on somewhere like Reddit anyway.
Want to know more about innovative ways to market your brand or business? Give us a shout, we’d love to have a chat with you.