Memetic Advertisement
Popular memes in advertisement | Case studies from marketing
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Every year the Movember Foundation drives men around the world to let grow a moustache. This shall erase the attention for prostate cancer. Besides that the moustache became a very popular meme to express the force of a man to beat cancer. Moustaches also “are universally accepted as the most superior form of facial hair”. This year even a brand starts to engage users on Facebook with the moustache meme - Wilkinson Sword. They created a Facebook application with a voting for the best “mo-style” between Hamburg and Berlin. There is even a “Mo Gallery” with images of people who upload their moustache pictures. On YouTube the brand publishes videos about the campaign. A really good example of how a brand can really involve people for charity!
Date: Nov 2012
Brand: Wilkinson Sword
Media: Facebook, YouTube
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The famous music video of Carly Rae Jepsen`s “Call Me Maybe” got viral around the globe in the last months. On YouTube there are nearly 700.000 videos that remix, cover or re-interpret the original. Now also one of the big brands - Abercrombie & Fitch - released a remake of the song using their A&F guys. The A&F “Call Me Maybe” video has more than 16 million views on YouTube, incredible 19.000 YouTube comments and over 90% of the ratings are positive. Right song at the right time!
Date: June 2012
Brand: Abercrombie & Fitch
Media: YouTube
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An Austrian brewery had a great idea. Their marketers liked the famous “Push to add drama” video by TNT Belgium. The original of the video gained over 40 million views on YouTube since its release. Now the brewery Privatbrauerei Trumer created their “Push to add Trumer” spot and put it on YouTube. The spot follows the idea of the original video but with its own meaning. Currently there were more than 25.000 people which saw the video on YouTube - this is a remarkable number of views as the brand has only 8.000 fans on Facebook and didn`t use any professional paid viral seeding.
Date: Sep 2012
Brand: Privatbrauerei Trumer
Media: YouTube, Facebook
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Adobe wants to promote its products among younger targets like students. Therefore they cooperated with memesite Cheezburger.com and started to present famous collegememes. Adobe adds its brand logo to images with collegememes. The Adobe collegememes are also collected on a dedicated microsite.
Date: Oct 2012
Brand: Adobe
Media: memebase.cheezburger.com
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Toyota New Zealand promoted their new Corolla 2013 with a TV-commercial. The funny thing about the video is that Toyota`s agency used the meme of cute cates and made a cat the main actor of the spot. The video was released also on YouTube and Toyota`s Facebook page. Great done!
Date: Oct 2012
Brand: Toyota Corolla
Media: TV, YouTube, Facebook
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Sometimes brands use memes for advertisement. Sometimes ads for brands start to be considered as a meme by the online community. The second happend to Panda, a product from Arab Dairy company in Egypt.
The brand created several spots with the title “Never say No to the Panda”. According to Knowyourmeme.com the three different spots reached 17 million views on YouTube within a few months. Today the most popular spot has nearly 19 million views.
Soon after the release of the video dozens of people started to duplicate and modify the video. Currently there are about 4.000 search results for “Never say No to Panda” on YouTube. That means the spot started to be a meme itself soon after its release. Great done!
Date: May 2010
Brand: Panda
Media: YouTube, TV
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Lufthansa recently started their second attempt to use popular internet memes in TV ads. This time it`s not about lovely owls but about planking. Planking emerged in March 2011 and has gone viral until the interest of people declined from October 2011 on. Now with the help of memes Lufthansa published a TV to promote their new business class. But the interest of the target group seems to be on a fair low level. The video only gained 9.000 views within one week. Google Insights for Search shows that the meme already peaked in July 2011. So the idea to use planking in their TV ad is great but came one year too late.
Date: Aug 2012
Brand: Lufthansa
Media: YouTube, TV
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How brands can fail when stepping into meme-communication shows the example of Chevrolet`s Chevy Sonic. The marketers understood that the younger target group of Chevy Sonice loves to create and share memes. So they partnered with Memebase.com and set up a sonic.memebase landing page. Also on Knowyourmeme.com the Chevy Sonic is now listed as a meme where they modified some memes and turned the funny content like Nyan Cat or Forever Alone into advertisement. The comments below the images show how users think about this memetic advertisement: they hate it. They state the content of Chevy Sonic would be lame and just simple ads. Also the amount of views on the Knowyourmeme-channel for Chevy Sonic is very low with 3.700 views within the last 9 months.
Date: Dec 2011
Brand: Chevrolet Sonic
Media: Knowyourmeme.com
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In 2011 Toyota came up with the “It`s a car” campaign for their brand Yaris. To push social media engagement Toyota also became partner of the memebase I Can Has Cheezburger? and created a microsite: http://yari.is. The aim of the microsite is to create content which is based on popular memes like LOLcats or Success Kid. From November 2011 until January 2012 Toyota published a bunch of images that were modified by using the Yaris. Although the amount of shares and likes is very low and some users even stated that the Yaris memes would be lame the company understood that people love to share memes on social media. The idea of Yar.is website is great.
Date: Dec 2011
Brand: Toyota Yaris
Media: Microsite/ Partnership
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Hans Sarpei, an ex-kicker of FC Schalke 04, is not yet a confirmed internet meme but within the last 12 months Hans Sarpei scored as the most viral personality on German social media. Users in Germany use to refer to Hans Sarpei in a very similar context like users do when they mention Chuck Norris. Example: “Hans Sarpei can do …”
On Facebook Hans Sarpei currently has about 200.000 Fans, there are dozens of fan groups and Jung von Matt even published a case study about the success of the Hans Sarpei phenomenon on the internet.
Now Nappo, a chocolate brand, uses Hans Sarpei for their latest YouTube commercial. In the video the brand refers to all kind of things Hans Sarpei can do. In the end of the video the kicker even bits a Nappo bar. The video is part of the viral strategy of Nappo which is a brand with a low awareness level in Germany. Within one week the video reached 3.500 views on YouTube.
Date: July 2012
Brand: Nappo
Media: Facebook, YouTube
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The German party “Piratenpartei” published a picture on their Facebook page which follows the grammar of the Difference Between memes. The picture shows the difference in politics between what people learn in school and how it really works in reality. Within one week the picture received nearly 800 Facebook shares, 800 likes and 60 comments.
Date: July 2012
Brand: Piratenpartei
Media: Facebook
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What happens if brands use memes unintentionally? Nestlé`s brand for chocolate bars, KitKat, used a brown-coloured bear to promote KitKat`s new Instagr.am channel. The picture which shows a bear costume that plays the drums with KitKat bars was posted on KitKat`s Facebook wall. Promptly users related the bear to one of the most popular memes - Pedobear. On social media users often use the Pedobear to indicate pedophiliac content. Several online magazines published the case. Nestlé promptly hided the picture from their Facebook wall.
Date: July 2012
Brand: Nestlé KitKat
Media: Facebook, Instagr.am
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Another example how brands use memes to create commercials is Smart Water`s spot with Jennifer Aniston from the year 2011. Smart Water produced a spot with nods to famous memes like the Double Rainbow, animated dancing babies, talking parrot, lip-syncing kids or even YouTube stars like Justin Theroux. The original video is not on YouTube anymore but views hit the number of 100.000 soon after the video`s release in 2011. Currently there is one copy of the video on YouTube.
Date: March 2011
Brand: Smart Water
Media: YouTube
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VitaminWater embraced several viral memes for their latest commercial. In the 30 seconds of the spot a young guy walks through his neighbourhood with a bottle of VitaminWater in his hands. Viral characters like the Sexy Sax Guy, Triumphant Babies or Limecat cross his way. The video on YouTube has more than 450.000 views and about 3.000 user comments - but the ratings and tonality of users towards the commercial isn`t always positive.
Date: March 2012
Brand: VitaminWater
Media: YouTube, TV
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Pizza Hut partnerships with BuzzFeed, one of the worlds most popular websites for viral content. The websites presents the world`s most shared viral videos, pictures and texts. The best rated content receives badges. One of the badges for “hottest content” is Pizza Hut`s “Garlic Bread Pizza”-button. BuzzFeed attaches the Pizza Hut badge to popular pictures and videos. In this way thousands of users get in contact with the new “Garlic Bread Pizza” of Pizza Hut. As a partner the brand even has a landing page on BuzzFeed that directs users to Pizza Hut`s Facebook page.
Date: July 2012
Brand: Pizza Hut
Media: BuzzFeed, Website, Facebook
