The nature of internet culture—especially the spread of memes—doesn’t always lend itself to easy marketing solutions. However, it does provide a rich resource for learning about effective messaging and imagery. In other words, here are some key takeaways.

Memes are a reflection of the center of attention

If you’re trying to grab people’s attention, you need to do it quickly. The types of memes people share vary depending on the group in question and the platform they’re shared on. However, what they all have in common is that they’re designed to be quick to hit people’s attention before they continue to change or scroll.

It’s been known for some time that the vast majority of people only read headlines or the first few lines of news articles or blogs. Long-form copy, long video ads, and text-dense images have their place, but short and sweet is really what makes an impact on the modern attention span.

Source: Small Business Heroes

Memes have a short shelf life

A satirical Reddit community called “memeeconomy” caught the attention of Forbes last year, when the popular business magazine created a real-world quantitative analysis of meme value predictions from the aforementioned subreddits. Memeeconomy tracks the rise and fall of popular memes, while advising users to “buy” or “sell.” There is no currency, fictitious or otherwise, exchanged on memeeconomy. It’s really just meta commentary with a hint of satire.

The point is that these images appear out of nowhere and usually fade back email list into obscurity. A meme image that spreads like wildfire today is forever tomorrow. This is where the risk of including memes in your marketing campaign lies. It’s easy to appear out of touch by using an image macro that fits your brand perfectly but happens to be no longer used.

Fortunately, social media marketing is designed to hit people now. The occasional meme on an Instagram account can connect as long as your social media person spends enough time giggling online — hopefully outside of work. The broader implication for marketing campaigns is that the accelerating pace of cultural trends requires a rapid shift in messaging.

Source: Pinterest

In many ways, meme culture mirrors the impulse of Dadaism how to create an efficient workflow? in its insistence on remaining defiant, nonsensical, and deconstructive in nature. It’s common for memes to be surreal, absurd, and dark. These are all risky hindirectory tones to adopt from a marketing perspective, but if you’re going to go that route, you better do it right.

This has been reposted a little under a hundred and seventy thousand times, and now you’re thinking about pancakes. It doesn’t make sense. That’s kind of the point.

In short, memes are a risky element to include in brand messaging, but they speak to modern tastes.