1. Why memes are the new video
Memes are internet themes. They are a spark of culture that form inexplicably and catch fire less explicably. Wikipedia calls them neologisms, fancy talk for things that are specific to a moment in time and are specifically not mainstream.
Let's repeat that point: Memes are not mainstream. The long tail is not going away.
Memes can be videos, but they are not necessarily medium-specific. But regardless of the medium, they can end up causing massive video waves.
So, you many ask, where do memes come from? No one really knows, but some of them come from a place called 4chan -- specifically, its popular /b/ board. But proceed with caution. Seriously. (Start by reading the Wikipedia entry and this great interview with 4chan's founder).
4chan is a meme factory. "Chocolate Rain " started there, went to YouTube, wound up with more than 30 million views, got licensed to Comedy Central, and finally wound up as a Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper music video with 7 million views.
Rickrolling also started at 4chan. I first saw the phenomenon last April Fool's when all the videos on YouTube's homepage got Rickrolled.
Why does this matter? If memes were waves in the ocean, they'd all be little waves headed in different directions. They come and go too quickly to plan media around them. They're unscalable because of aforementioned qualities, and, thus, it is a savvy digital marketer's responsibility to spot a good, brand-relevant meme, surf it, and move on. You could argue that Dr. Pepper both augmented the "Chocolate Rain" meme and rode it out as it was troughing.
Think your brand is too Martha Stewart to engage with memes? Wrong. If Nancy Pelosi can do it, you can too.
Nancy Pelosi, bless her, had a channel on YouTube four months before Barack Obama started his in 2006. Her average video gets a couple hundred to a couple thousand views. She (or her digitally savvy interns, more likely) posted a video that is itself a parody on the Bush administration's Barneycam. It shows her with her cats, and it's quite boring -- until the video feed abruptly switches to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
You have just been Rickrolled by Nancy Pelosi. It feels a little dirty. She left comments open on the video, so you can imagine what brand-inappropriate UGC vomit follows.
She also got about 300 times her usual YouTube audience. Pelosi caught a meme and rode it to new brand visibility. (Good brand strategy? Leave that for the political marketers to decide.)
