Meme Marketing

Watching this latest political campaign and, more than ever, watching youth internet memes be a part of the narratives of the campaign, not just on tumblr, but in the news and in the campaigns itself is really interesting. 

Mostly it’s really interesting watching candidates try to take control of the memes, try to make their own memes, and so on. And not understanding why it doesn’t work. 

Bernie Sanders gets a fun bird meme while Tud Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Why? I mean, is it just down to luck. Would anyone have gotten disney princess and chosen one jokes if a bird had landed on their podium? Did these inexplicable millennials just pick a candidate at random to call the Zodiac Killer and it stuck?

And the fundamental mistake I see being made about millennials, and the youth vote, and memes, over and over, is one of causality. 

This isn’t just true in the recent political campaign, by the way, it’s also true in corporate marketing and so on. 

They seem to think the causality is that a great meme creates a narrative which creates youth opinion and youth vote. That the kids see a meme, they laugh at the meme, and from that meme they form their opinion. 

Where the real causality is that the kids have an opinion and then they create the memes themselves around what they already think.

So the trick isn’t to get the memes on your side and then you’ll get the youth on your side. The trick is to treat the youth like intelligent humans with real concerns and stakes and listen to them and then when you get the youth on your side they’ll make memes for you.