How Mike Bloomberg’s meme blitz was engineered to go viral

Joe Gagliese, co-founder and CEO of agency Viral Nation, said pages like @F***Jerry are considered “premium publishers” in their space and tend to be the most expensive. He said a sponsored post and “story” would typically run between $50,000 and $100,000.

Gagliese noted that the Bloomberg posts have made waves in the meme world, but not all in a positive way, noting that some users were making memes to criticize Bloomberg’s past policies.

“They don’t see it as authentic,” he said. “They’re fighting back by taking those memes and turning it into negative memes.”

Gagliese also said it could be risky for the Bloomberg campaign to use accounts that might have poked fun at one of his campaign platforms or seemed out-of-sync with his beliefs.

“It’s all fun, but it’s not on-brand with what you would expect Mr. Bloomberg to be,” he said.

Jason Wong, the CEO of Wonghaus Ventures who also created Tumblr meme account asian.tumblr.com and created the “Holy Meme Bible,” said the entire campaign was “perfectly formulated to go viral.”

Wong said the very phrasing of the disclosure of the memes (the “yes, this was really sponsored”) created some confusion and prompted conversation about whether the posts were in fact sponsored.

“They essentially made it seem like, ‘It’s a joke, they didn’t [run a sponsored post]. But maybe they did…’ So people start making content to that similar to that on their own,” he said.

The format of the meme, making it look like a direct-message conversation, can be replicated easily, Wong said. And that’s certainly happening.

“It’s a lot of free earned media for Mike Bloomberg,” he said.

As for those negative memes, Wong doesn’t think Bloomberg should be concerned.

“At this point, even if people make negative stuff about it, they’re still talking about it,” he said.

As for what’s next, “For this campaign, they’re not trying to push any sort of message. It’s really about softening his image as a fun guy … These memes are so cringey and it is intentional. They don’t want it to seem too native or too [much like an] ad. People know that it will be cringe if he makes memes about himself. But let’s do it anyway to soften his image.”

He said future messaging would likely be more focused on policy or the campaign itself.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/13/how-mike-bloombergs-meme-blitz-was-engineered-to-go-viral.html