Memeifying Marketing: Why Brands Have Embraced the Meme, Flooding Our Feeds With Cringe for the Sake of Being Memorable

We've all seen them:brand-heavy memes haunting our timelines, creeping into our feeds, and plaguing the Internet with preposterous imagery of the strangely threatening mascots of big corpo companies, Hollywood movies, or even just a simple language-learning app. But these memes aren't just some funny clicks and relatable chuckles—they're sleeper agent advertisements created solely to be memorable. 

Back in the day, companies sought to seem reputable, long-standing, and ultimately appealing, but in 2024, audiences have been inundated with so much boring content, forcing brands to bombard the market with cringe and weirdness, thus standing out from the competition by memeifying their marketing.

Square Patties and Humble Beginnings

You could say that memeified marketing started back in 2016 when comedian Matt Keck took over the Wendy’s Twitter account. You know, Wendy’s, the fast food burger joint that openly insulted people in the comment section, posted wildly inappropriate jests, and completely strayed away from traditional burger marketing? That Wendy’s. 

What started out as a funny concept turned into a full-blown marketing scheme as this blue-check-certified social media account of a burger company grilled the general public. It turned out to be a marketing revelation, putting memes and virality on the map as a viable source of outreach. Despite some backlash, folks generally thought it was hilarious, which brought eyeballs (and business) to the square-patty restaurant. You know what they say–‘All press is good press’–and as Matt put strangers on blast, he actually was increasing engagement, outreach, and inadvertent brand exposure concurrently. 

via u/minikim2012 and u/Wendys

Mythical Shareholders Find Value in Virality

This bold new strategy was immediately noticed. Like the moment injury lawyers realized they could advertise on hideously distracting roadside billboards, the newfound frontier of memeified marketing was born. The Internet was a playground of low-cost advertising avenues and all companies had to do was seize the humor by the horns and let a witty comedian take control of the reins. Cancel-culture cautions were thrown to the wind along with traditionally ‘pleasing’ marketing tactics, and thus, the meme ad was born. 

We didn’t know it back then, but the collective consciousness was sharing and resharing carefully placed ads, creating a self-propelling system of sleeper agent propaganda under the guise of an organic post. And in classic meme fashion, the more clever the joke, the more cringey the message, and the more shocking the brand, the more the tendrils of marketing manifestation reached into our subconscious. 

According to Jason Levin, author of Memes Make Millions and a reporter for Hubspot’s latest marketing initiatives, “Memes are the highest leverage marketing on earth… [They’re] free to make, fast to make, and an easy way to go viral”. For a marketer, being memorable in the collective consciousness like that is completely invaluable, especially if it costs nothing. Not only are you getting your company’s name out there, but your virality is virtually sewing your brand into the fabric of modern anthropology—like Camel cigarettes did in the 1950s or Pepsi in the late ‘90s. 

Memeification of Marketing

You’ve seen the Duolingo owl, the Barbenheimer release, and Bark Box use memes for years to advertise their product, but did you ever realize that you were being inundated with a paid ad? Historically, paid advertising was pretty obvious, showing up during the commercial breaks of your TV sports programs and playing between songs on the radio, but now that every consumer is perpetually online, advertisers had to switch gears to stay relevant and in the foreground of everyone’s eyeballs. Because when it comes to ads, exposure is half of the battle and when we’re not listening to jingles every day, something’s got to make a company name stick in our memories.

Forbes Councils Member Aidan Cole writes that “[Meme marketing] goes past gag-inducing branded content and shares something of value to the audience… they make people laugh with a casual reference to your brand.” This positive association is keeping meme marketing alive while guerilla meme makers flood our feeds with jokes that may seem lackadaisical but are actually carefully crafted by a comedian behind the curtain. 

Similarly, the next time I consider learning a new language, I’ll rack my brain for a company I’ve heard of, and even though I’ve had my life threatened by the Duolingo owl for years with weirdly creepy memes, that will still be the first company that comes to mind. So while the green owl of doom lurks in my closet to remind me to study Spanish every morning, Duolingo is racking up the customers because they’ve laid into the memeified marketing angle. 

via u/duolingo

Not Your Grandma’s Advertising

Younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha can sniff out an ad from a mile away–and they run the other way. So, while youngsters online grew up actively avoiding advertisements with ad-blockers by scrolling quickly past paid influencers and rolling their eyes at traditional ‘dad ads,’ they’re also rapidly becoming a large part of consumer culture. So how’s a company supposed to reach them? Cringe-worthy content, of course. 

Collective humors have shifted from wholesome to silly to cringe in a matter of decades, landing advertisers in 2024 in a puzzling dilemma: Do you associate your brand with cringe for the sake of reaching a younger audience? Or do you lean into trad-marketing for the sake of pleasantries? Surprisingly, Nutter Butter, one of the oldest cookie companies in America, has decided to cater to the younger generation who is being raised on Skibidi toilet and Ohio rizz, creating a cringey labyrinth of confusing lore through their social media pages that’s more akin to a fever dream than a cookie advertisement. 

via u/nutterbutter

Nutter Butter’s online persona has drastically changed in the last year as a younger intern took over the page. Similar to the originally memeified marketing scheme of Wendy’s almost a decade ago, the shock factor of Nutter Butter’s posts led to a huge rise in followership, views, and engagement. With each new meme video (which seems inspired by the cursed scrawling on the walls of a padded asylum cell), millions of online users are reached–and those are not rookie numbers. But alas, the meme still perpetuates brand familiarity and we may all be thinking of a Nutey Nuter next time we’re grabbing snacks at the gas station. 

_{via u/officialnutterbutter}

But Does it Actually Work? 

A cleverly placed ad almost always ‘works.’ 

If you catch your audience at the right time and in the right headspace, a company almost inevitably becomes memorable in some way. So, while brands in 2024 are using cringe and memeification to increase their clout, we’ve been able to observe the rise of the anti-ad, which taunts the aesthetic, reputable, and wholesome ads of the past. In an effort to create content unlike an advertisement, advertisers have embraced memeification and when it’s done right, it can propel a company further than the Geico lizard, the Apple Jacks Cinna-man, and Ronald McDonald could ever dream. 

Because when it comes down to it and consumers are faced with a billion options, we’re going to pick something familiar, especially if it made us laugh once or twice online.