Viral Verities: Themes, Memes and the Other Secrets to Differentiation

Once upon a time, when, depending on the country in which you lived there were one, two or three TV channels, a couple of radio stations per market that played the music you liked and a morning and evening newspaper, advertisers created the overarching themes and memes (an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture) that defined popular attitudes.

And just like those stories about great-grandparents walking six miles through the snow to get to school, we can sort of imagine what that was like. Not that we would particularly like to replicate the experience.

Now, as the following article explains, advertisers and their agencies are more likely to surf the memes being created online, rather than invest in creating them, because they dont have the time or the resources to establish their own anymore. In the era of do-it-yourself stardom, concepts can get huge overnight and then disappear. Hard to capture that on an Excel spreadsheet for the CFO.

But the emancipation of popularity is made more effective and efficient by the fact that there appear to be certain components essential to explosive growth which you, too, can concoct in the privacy of your own shared three person one-bedroom in Brooklyn or Moscow or Sao Paolo or Shanghai or wherever.

Ordinary people, humor, repetitiveness (and more repetitiveness) are the essential elements. A sense of style or at least a rudimentary familiarity with design is helpful, but may not be crucial. The point is that there is a method to what appears to be madness. It is manageable, measurable, merchandisable and, until it becomes too manifest to be popular, memorable. JL

Julia Kirby comments in Harvard Business Review:

Advertising creatives have always known the power of memes, even if they didn't always use the term. For decades major marketers, with their command of the airwaves and commitment to repetition, were often the ones to launch memes. Consider Alka-Seltzer's "I can't believe I ate the whole thing":
Or Wendy's "Where's the beef?" ...

... which got picked up and repurposed from preschools to presidential debates:

The splintering of media channels has made it hard to claim that kind of mindshare by brute force. Add the democratization of publishing and the premium people place on discovering the new, and you have a situation where memes can start anywhere, take off like rockets, and fizzle out a week later. Whereas advertisers once spawned memes, now the better strategy may be to surf them.

So expect to see more creative in the mode of the Wonderful Pistachios campaign, which is simple enough to cycle through executions quickly and cheaply. The campaign started out conventionally, using celebrities, and was highly successful: National TV spots in its first year yielded a 233% increase in sales, and double-digit gains have followed in the years since. But now the ads include memes, such as YouTube's infamous Honey Badger.

And Secret Service agents partying with prostitutes.

In her paper "An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme," Limor Shifman of Hebrew University analyzes 30 videos that went viral and finds major commonalities: ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content. It's the perfect recipe, Shifman concludes, for "invoking further creative dialogue." Much of that dialogue comes in the form of clever redos designed to delight particular constituencies. Thus the ridiculously catchy dance video "Gangnam Style" ...

... was tweaked for robot lovers by a Transformers reenactment:

... and infiltrated political circles as "Romney Style." True to form, Wonderful Pistachios debuted an ad featuring Psy during this year's Super Bowl:

A major advertiser with a big budget should be more reliably able to nail the execution for its constituency — snack eaters, for example, or Lego fans. This is the opportunity revealed by the newest pistachios ads. Expect more advertisers to follow suit.