Problem: your agency, the one specializing in making things
“viral,” is kinda sucking. There’s been a bump here and there
whenever you threw contesting into the mix, or gave stuff away.
But otherwise, zilch.
You want the uptake of Lolcats, the irresistible appropriation
of Sad Keanu, or, if you’re after the hard sell, a bright-pink “Bike Riding
Pinko” button.
The tiny, $3 protest to the surreal coronation of Toronto’s car-loving new mayor, during which hockey commentator Don Cherry equated cycling to communism, sold 10,000 units in just three days. “Not one cent was spent on marketing. This was just good old-fashioned word of mouth. And social media,” says Matthew Blackett, the publisher and creative director of Toronto-based Spacing (spacing.ca), the seven-year-old magazine, blog network and prolifi c merchandiser behind this and many other displays of urban awareness, including declarations of surviving last summer’s earthquake and appreciation of subway station typography. So what’s his secret sauce for spurring audiences into buying bizarre concepts that can only be classifi ed as very inside jokes?
“We seem to have been able to master the art of meme—take a slightly galvanizing topic and turn it into money,” he says. Memes, of course, are everywhere online (the Old Spice man) and off (“I’m on a horse” T-shirts). So how can marketers harness memes—essentially shorthand packets of culture—to boost engagement and affi nity? “At the most basic level, we take a current event that is important to our readers and provide them with an opportunity to purchase a product that makes them feel as if they are playing a part in the dissemination of the meme,” Blackett says, advising that audience knowledge is vital. “It is very hard to make a viral campaign out of nothing; the best ones come from the reaction to a person, an event, or a movement. If I lived in Cleveland when LeBron James made his ‘Decision,’ I would’ve been making matchbooks to set his jersey on fire.”
