Internet virality and internet meme status has become something to aspire for businesses that have any level of online presence in today’s day and age. There are even expensive courses offering to teach novices the tricks of the trade when it comes to achieving brand virality. And yet there are marketing interns left in charge of corporate twitter accounts who are arguably better at garnering audience engagement than those who have followed these courses. But what are memes, and what relation do memes bear to internet virality? Are the two concepts one and the same? Can businesses only use memes, or can memes become businesses of their own?
With regards to the last question at least, there are plenty of memes that became businesses, but few that went on to have a life of their own beyond its initial 15 seconds of fame.
Businesses that did manage to embark on a longer journey under its own steam generally managed to do so when the subject of the meme was a living, breathing, individual. When an individual achieved meme status, the situation gave them a personal branding opportunity, an opportunity that could allow them to launch their own career capitalising off internet fame. Products and services that became memes rarely had this opportunity, as they generally achieved this status due to their laughable inadequacy in catering to their customer’s needs. The fate of Marvel’s ‘Morbius’ is one such example.
To understand how a meme could become a business, it is first necessary to understand what a meme is.
What’s in a meme?
Despite what some may think, memes are not the product of the internet: memes have existed for as long as humans have been sentient. Although opinion is divided, the use of the word ‘meme’ in the sense that it is used today is attributed to Richard Dawkins, the author of ‘The Selfish Gene’. Dawkins likened the ‘meme’ to a phoneme, which is the smallest unit of sound in speech, or a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of a word. The meme is the phoneme of culture, the smallest unit of information which can be replicated and distributed. The opening theme of a childhood cartoon that you never quite got out of your head, a particularly catchy advertising campaign, the very first handprint on a cave wall by primal man, are all memes. The popular understanding of memes is that they are images with text superimposed. However, memes are not limited to images: as implied above, memes can be sounds and tunes, images, videos, gifs, text or any other medium which can be construed as a unit of cultural information. It is as long, or as short, as simple or as complex as need be, as long as it is the shortest form of itself while sacrificing none of its meaning.
Memes, virality, and business
Memes are cultural units of information that have a life of its own. Anyone encountering a particularly funny one in the wilds of the world wide web are compelled to share it with those they know would appreciate the humour. Others go a step further to modify it: adding text, adding sound effects, to enhance the original message or emotion of the meme or to subvert it completely. Either way, the meme lives on to travel to yet another individual. Almost as if it was contagious – practically viral in nature. The viral nature of memes, then, is self-explanatory: like viral illness, memes too circulate rapidly between those who are exposed to it. In the case of memes, these are often internet users, although memes have been known to transcend boundaries to make appearances on other media. One recent, popular example is the ‘spiderman pointing meme’.
This image, a popular meme template, is a still from the Spiderman Animated series that was broadcasted in as far back as 1967. Current generations of Spiderman fans may not even be familiar with the animated series, and yet the image is still in circulation on the internet. Internet users added a third spiderman to the original image as far back as in 2011 – and the final version was deemed culturally significant enough that it was recreated in the movie ‘Spiderman No Way Home’.
The commercial significance of memes is made clear through this evolution alone. Businesses spend thousands, even millions of dollars to garner the same traction and engagement for their brands that memes do by virtue of their cultural popularity. This is why businesses devote considerable resources to use memes as a vehicle for their brands. The ‘meme value’ of any marketing campaign has the potential to launch even a local brand into global fame.
Memes that became businesses
As was initially mentioned, individuals who became memes have always had the greatest potential in capitalising off of the potential the opportunity it offered. However, there have been individuals and their businesses that have achieved both. One such example is Cody Ko, and the app he developed, ‘I’d Cap That’
I’d Cap That
‘I’d Cap That’ is a photo editing mobile application that allows users to add text, or captions on to their images, themselves. The captions are generated automatically and are typically crude or inappropriate in nature, often creating memes of the everyday photos uploaded by users. With over four million users when it was first launched in 2012, the app was quick to achieve viral status. So lucrative was the app in its virality, at a moment when image captioning was reaching its peak as a meme format that it was acquired by another company only a few months after its launch, leaving its founder Cody Kolodziejzyk (professional name: Cody Ko), all the richer for it.
Cody Ko
A Canadian-born Duke alumni, Cody Ko himself therefore had personal experience in how internet fame could be capitalised on for commercial success. Often described as an inherently comedic individual, Cody Ko went on to personally achieve internet meme status through the now-defunct content creation/social media platform, Vine. He first began uploading in 2013, and quickly shot to fame for his mastery of the format to create humour. By 2015, he had close to two million followers on the platform. When the platform became defunct in 2017, Cody Ko capitalised on his meme status in the cultural zeitgeist to shift his audience to YouTube, the world’s number one video content creating and sharing platform, even back then.
(The most popular memes associated with Cody Ko)
Cody Ko’s internet experience taught him to focus on whatever meme was most prominent at the time to maintain his relevance with his audience. This naturally directed him in the direction of the commentary genre on YouTube, which he is often credited as having helped pioneer. Cody Ko started reacting and commenting to internet and other media content that he thought made little sense or were ridiculous in nature, often with his friend Noel Miller, who shared his sense for comedic timing and delivery, on his channel. What started out as a video series on Cody Ko’s YouTube channel is now well on its way to becoming a media empire.
Cody and Noel started referring to themselves as ‘The Tiny Meat Gang’, a shared inside joke with their audience (interestingly, this makes the name of their partnership alone a meme). The Tiny Meat Gang would go on to perform in standup show tours throughout the US, create the popular podcast ‘The TMG podcast’, and produce two music albums. The Tiny Meat Gang has now gone on to become The Tiny Meat Gang Studios, a comedy podcast network that hosts seven different podcasts. The two flagship YouTube channels of the network, ‘TMG Studios’ and ‘Insanely Chill’ have a shared subscriber count of 1.322 million subscribers and a combined view count of 225.36 million. Cody Ko’s personal net worth is now estimated to be anywhere between 6-8 million US dollars – all from the power of memeing online.
Memes therefore have great commercial potential – as a vehicle for business communication as well as businesses themselves. Unlike other commercial ventures however, meme-status is not something that is easily and deliberately created or purchased. In this sense at least the commercial potential of memes is remarkably democratic. However, much like its almost miraculous nature, it is also sporadic. Anyone succeeding in building a successful, sustainable, business model off of the popularity that follows is perhaps even rarer.
(Theruni Liyanage)