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KETCHUM'S ONLINE MAGAZINE YEAR 2008    ISSUE 5

BREAKING THROUGH: GETTING YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE

Messaging Through Memes:
An IM Discussion on the Most Powerful Voice in Marketing: Consumers

The underlying goal of nearly every PR program is this: to tap into what matters to consumers. To do that, PR practitioners typically rely on focus groups, secondary research, past behavior and experiences, and sometimes plain old hunches. But what if it were a lot more streamlined?

In the age of new media, perhaps it is. Web technology has enabled people to connect in ways that they never could before, including gathering around common interests and concerns. Any given subject can attract large groups of people who are not only reading blog postings but also actively contributing to public discourse. These people openly share what matters to them with anyone who has an Internet connection. Simply put, they are the voice of the Web.

Ketchum's Interactive Strategies Group believes its job is to help clients hear and respond to that voice. Rather than asking consumers to join a brand's conversation, they steer brands into joining consumers' conversations. They call that process "messaging through memes."

Perspectives recently gathered three members of the group for a roundtable discussion to talk about this idea. The discussion was conducted through instant messaging and appears here in that format.




IM Roundtable Participants:
Jonathan Bellinger, Interactive Strategist, Ketchum, Chicago
Chris Kooluris, Senior Media Specialist, Ketchum, New York
Fernando Rizo, Interactive Strategist, Ketchum, New York
Calmetta Coleman, Senior Editor, Perspectives (moderator)

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Let's start by defining what we mean by messaging through memes. Can one or each of you explain?

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: so before we talk about communicating through memes, we should probably define memes first. memes are self-propagating ideas

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: generated organically by a community

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: exactly

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: they pass from one community to another, or just stay in one community

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and I think it's worth saying up front that it's extremely, exceptionally rare that a meme comes from a brand or a PR / advertising agency

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: almost never

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: What do you mean by that?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: well, whenever a PR agency or an advertising agency sits down to come up with a program idea, what they're really trying to do is create a new meme

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: something that's so culturally resonant with a specific audience that it gets propagated and shared

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: how many clients have you had that asked for a "viral video"? it doesn't work very well that way

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: let's say you try to create a meme, spend money creating a video and a website. Once you put the video out, it's a dice roll to see if it catches on

from C Kooluris to All Participants: The meme story is the primary message, it's popular, people care about it. Our client message is often predictable and expected... But because a meme is a story, there are times when a brand can create a message that becomes part of that story. Sort of like those small fish that attach themselves to a great white shark, you know they are part of a (popular) movement, even if they are just cleaning the teeth

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: memes that arise organically online are actually the web's way of telling you what it's already interested in

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: our approach is to find memes that are already popular, and hitch brands to them

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Is it easy to get clients to understand the importance of connecting with existing ideas?

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: no

from C Kooluris to All Participants: they are used to ad agencies maintaining creative control and PR agencies delivering well-constructed stories

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: they don't understand why consumers won't be as interested in their product launch as they are

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: what helps a lot is showing clients hard data supporting the fact that their target is crazy-interested in a meme, and that a meme is poised to spill over from a niche group into the mainstream

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: sometimes a meme will start super-niche, but often it can spill over into the mainstream

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: There's this meme out there now--the large hadron collider destroying the world--that started with super-geeks only, but now the NY Times and USA Today are covering it

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Once you've identified a meme, is there any way to tell just how big the target audience is for that particular issue or subject?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: For example, a meme surrounding politics might have 200 million potential fans

from C Kooluris to All Participants: where as a meme about Uwe Boll (the German film director) will relate only to hardcore gamers

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: we look at Google Trends data to see how many people are searching for specific meme-related keywords

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: you can identify massive spikes indicating that something is catching fire

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: we also look at certain target-right forums to see what people are talking about and read the tonality to estimate if something is going to explode

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: we also pay attention to important message boards and forums -- reddit, digg, something awful

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: You know what's funny too, we use the web to source all this stuff, but when we actually execute on a meme we use traditional PR tools...it's nothing very special that requires special knowledge...we just actually pay attention to what consumers like

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Identifying a brand with issues people already care about sounds smart enough, but how does it really work? Can you talk about the typical process for connecting a client to a meme?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: we have some examples – bridesmaid, Guns N Roses

from C Kooluris to All Participants: Jon, want to discuss bridesmaid?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: 1. our group consumes a LOT of online content, so we see little blurbs and emerging stories that catch our interest

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: 2. once we find something that just screams for a brand to do something interesting around (e.g., a bride auctioning off a spot in her wedding on ebay), we do a quick, informal brainstorm to come up with what we might do

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: 3. in the bridesmaid case, we decided we needed to find a brand to place the winning bid

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: 4. we take it to the brands we think have relevant products/ brand positioning / brand characters...

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Does that mean that the action often starts with the meme? Rather than a brand seeking out a meme?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: absolutely. we find memes first and then try to figure out what the next page of the story could be if a brand got involved

from C Kooluris to All Participants: it's like chicken or the egg though

from C Kooluris to All Participants: memes come to us at the same time we are looking for them

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: memes are ephemeral

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: they show up, get popular and go away, sometimes all in a day or two

from C Kooluris to All Participants: the key is this

from C Kooluris to All Participants: Clients need to respond quickly

from C Kooluris to All Participants: We need to know within 24 hours if a client wants to be part of a hot story

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and i think it's important to note, too, we're not saying we can't plan ahead

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: sometimes we'll get a client with a product coming out that we know has a specific brand identity--Venom energy drink, for example

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: we know that with a brand like that, we want to hijack something completely over-the-top

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: so we might suggest to the client that they give us a chunk of budget we'll set aside while we look for a meme that fits what we want to do

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Explain what you mean by hijacking.

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: hijack: inserting our brands into existing memes to tell the next page of the story

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and it's important that we be first

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Why?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: because then you own it

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: and memes get played out quickly

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: that basically ensures that our brand becomes a permanent part of the headline

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: take bridesmaid for example--that was a story about a bride that was in the news cycle for 2 days

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: after we got involved, it was a story about a brand helping a bride that dominated the news cycle for the next two weeks

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Are some clients hesitant to sign on to memes because they play out so quickly?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: a lot of them just can't get approvals fast enough

from C Kooluris to All Participants: there are some concerns about sustainability

from C Kooluris to All Participants: and that's why we look to attach a brand's platform to a meme

from C Kooluris to All Participants: so for example

from C Kooluris to All Participants: if Alka Seltzer attaches to a meme around the plaform of RELIEF

from C Kooluris to All Participants: then we'd look for other memes that share that platform

from C Kooluris to All Participants: having a consistent brand voice is so important but clients need to be flexible

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: yeah, they'll already have invested $ in an ad platform

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and they want that to dominate everything we do

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: that's just not always feasible with memes

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: they need to be able to adjust across multiple memes

from C Kooluris to All Participants: it's not about being associated with a million memes. that's pointless if each story has a different voice and brand platform

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Does that mean a brand should only seek out say, one meme a year or something?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: you can do a few

from C Kooluris to All Participants: depends on the brand

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: you can do a few memes and hit different audiences so they don't interfere with each other

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Can you share other successes like bridesmaids?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: for example, Dr Pepper hit women and everyone else with bridesmaid, and hit music fans with Guns N' Roses

from C Kooluris to All Participants: this year, they are Guns N' Roses fans, everything is behind that

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: that raises a good point

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: whenever a brand gets involved with a meme

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: they can't behave like marketers

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: they need to show sincerity

from C Kooluris to All Participants: so true

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: they need to illustrate that they get why people love a meme

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and behave like their audience

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: perfect example: when Chris wrote the release we put out for Guns n' Roses, he used allusions to lyrics from GNR songs

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: How do you know when it's working well?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: when Axl Rose thanks you

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: watch the reaction online

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: bloggers come to you, instead of the other way around

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: watch the tonality

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: see the pickup

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: for example--for bridesmaid, we barely lifted the phones to pitch

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and the coverage kept rolling in

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: the basic underlying idea behind all of this is that communications come from the people now – the consumers

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: twenty years ago

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: there were three broadcast TV networks

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: now there's a million cable networks

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: a million glossy magazines

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: and who knows how many websites

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: nothing brands come up with will be more interesting than what people come up with on their own

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: In some ways, shouldn't this make marketing easier for brands?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: Yes! The meme is the organic intersection point between what brands want to tell people and what people actually want to talk about. Marketing should take into account what people want to talk about, right?

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: it makes niche marketing easier for us

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: the line between PR and marketing has totally blurred

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Have you seen any brands that really do this well?

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: it blows my mind that this isn't more common, actually

from C Kooluris to All Participants: Taco Bell

from C Kooluris to All Participants: They have been doing it since day one

from C Kooluris to All Participants: like when that Satellite was crashing into the earth

from C Kooluris to All Participants: they put a big bullseye in the ocean that read

from C Kooluris to All Participants: HIT HERE

from C Kooluris to All Participants: if it hit, everyone in the world got a free taco

from C Kooluris to All Participants: brilliant

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: so simple

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: that was beautiful

from C Kooluris to All Participants: here is something that's KEY

from C Kooluris to All Participants: ideas need to be one sentence additions to a meme

from C Kooluris to All Participants: you can't tell complex stories

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: one sentence, tops

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: a headline

from C Kooluris to All Participants: be a welcomed addition to that story

from C Kooluris to All Participants: not an ad plastered against it

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: its about adding value for the people involved in a meme

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: and that almost never comes from talking about yourself

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: I know you all need to wrap up. Any summary comments?

from C Kooluris to All Participants: I like to say I work for Ketchum, I work for clients, but I really work for the people out there, for they will ultimately decide if I am succeeding in PR...my paycheck stays the same, the hours I have to bill are always the same, the only change I can make is in the minds of people.

from Fernando Rizo to All Participants: your product launch is not a holiday.

from Jonathan Bellinger to All Participants: PR doesn't have to be so complicated. It's so easy to find stuff people are interested in, and clients don't lose out by talking less about themselves and going along for the ride once in a while.

from Calmetta Coleman to All Participants: Thanks, all!