Memes and Marketing

With the recent advent of marketing executives attempting to infiltrate meme culture in order to promote products to larger and younger audiences we have been left with the question, does this new form of marketing actually work?

I think that an important distinction in this discussion is the origin of the memes. Have the company made a meme and released it on their social media platforms, was it created by paid influencers or did it come about ‘naturally’ produced by free agent meme pages with no loyalties or allegiance. Depending on how it was made and who it is shared by means everything when it comes to a meme’s ‘success’ online and whether it benefits or harms the product it features. Most of the time I a meme is produced by a company it often feels out of touch, outdated and forced; people know when they are being targeted or pandered to and end up negatively associating the product with the older generation; the exact opposite to the intended affect. A good example of this is the 2015 Wendy’s ad which featured a character called ‘the memer’, an ad which inspired a vine which far outgrew the reach of the original commercial and gained even more hate for the company.

On the other side of this, as an example of when memes made by online creators can positively influence marketing of a product is ‘Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse’ This is a film that has a target audience that are very active online and so something that would be quickly popular and highly shareable. Very quickly its release a popular meme template emerged using a screenshot from the film in a common meme format.

This and other memes based off screenshots from the film became hugely popular and spread across twitter and instagram ‘meme communities’ very quickly meaning way more people were talking about the film and creating hype, it’s actually how I found out about it’s release. This kind of quick, easy to consume content is perfect advertising for the film industry; it doesn’t ask for a huge amount of your attention, it entertains and it makes you want to find out what its’s all about- ‘why is everyone sharing this all of a sudden?’, ‘where can I find out about it’.

This Spiderverse meme, however, owes part of its popularity to its predecessor which uses essentially the same joke with a screenshot from the original 1960’s animated Spiderman cartoon which gained mass popularity in early 2017.

And all of these online, meta jokes eventually led to Sony including this at the end of their film…

A post credits scene which has actually been hugely popular with fans, because rather than seeming like it was included by someone so out of touch that they are somehow five or six year late on a joke, it is referencing a joke made by the community and adding upon it, it’s self referential and is not taking itself too seriously; this was the final piece of the puzzle, people were making memes of this, even using pictures that had been taken on phones in cinemas weeks after the film came out. This combination of Sony getting lucky with the online community and their perfectly timed and toned joke created a perfect storm of meta jokes that I have no doubt brought in a much wider audience to their film.