EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (19 page)

The post has 16 stickers and one comment: “dude your post rocks. long live canv.as!” The next post remixes the essay with a giant “TL;DR” plastered on top. (Too long; didn’t read, a common 4chan dismissal for anything longer than a few sentences.) The next remixer answers the question, “What is canvas?” with a picture of actual canvas, the kind painters use.

I think this thing’s going to be huge.

The News Media

Today there is a tremendous pressure on journalists to “create” viral content. When I was writing about memes for an Internet culture blog called Urlesque, I spent a lot of time tracking how the mainstream media picked up on memes, and over the course of 2010 I noticed that reporters were increasingly relying on Reddit to find news.

In January 2011, a Cleveland man took a video of a local homeless guy named Ted Williams, who happened to have a trained “golden radio voice,” and posted the footage on YouTube. The video eventually found its way to Reddit, with the poster hoping that maybe a fellow user might be able to offer Williams some voice work. The footage of this down-on-his-luck, scraggly homeless guy juxtaposed with his sonorous voice shocked the community, and dozens came forward to help out. One offered to buy Williams a phone, another a suit, another studio time, and still more offered producing and editing services. Over a dozen Redditors specifically offered work in the Cleveland area. This outpouring of generosity is par for the course on Reddit, a mirror image of 4chan’s collaborative destruction.

Within a day, Williams started getting coverage and interviews at every major news outlet. One particular story caught my eye. Indianapolis’s Fox affiliate wanted a piece of that “homeless person with an unexpected talent” pie, so they sent a reporter out in the dead of winter and asked various homeless people if they had any special talents. The reporter asked them if they’d seen the footage of Ted Williams (what?) and told them that he was given a new house and job for his talents. One woman’s eyes lit up with the realization that this could be her ticket out of destitution and she sang a soulful gospel tune. It was an unsettling display of the worst kind of bandwagon journalism, showing just how desperate the media is to be a part of the meme of the day. The video has since been taken down.

The Entertainment Industry

The relationship between show business and the web is strained. Only very recently have entertainment execs come to view the web as a unique platform for interactive content rather than just another channel to cram their existing products into. The influence of the memesphere can be seen moving in both directions. Cable TV shows like Tosh.0 and Best Week Ever focus heavily on the viral content of the moment. Late-night TV hosts joke about viral sensations. Morning talk shows bring on victims of trolling and YouTube microcelebrities.

Stephen Colbert gave a nod to Anonymous in February 2011, having previously flirted with Reddit on his show. For a split second, a Guy Fawkes mask (the Anonymous calling card) was superimposed over Colbert’s face, leading many to believe that Anonymous had hacked into the broadcast and was sending a subliminal message to viewers. Others speculated that it was a winking recognition of the hacktivist group, expressing solidarity with their aims. It turned out to be a joke coming from inside the Colbert camp, which was used as a setup for a segment later that week.

On the other side, we see mainstream entertainment dipping its toes into the web. Celebrities now interact directly with their fan bases through Twitter. Conan O’Brien harnesses his vast network of Facebook fans with Team Coco. Bands signed to mainstream labels, such as OK Go, court YouTube audiences with videos produced with clever gimmickry engineered for viral success. Rocker Andrew W.K. recently did a live Q&A with 4chan, the first of its kind.

In strict terms, not much has changed but the technology. Entertainers have always wanted to create memes. The Internet just allows them to do so much more rapidly, cheaply, and to greater effect.

The Advertising Industry

Advertisers are increasingly recognizing the power of Internet memes. For example, Jennifer Aniston recently did a spot for smartwater featuring a host of Internet microcelebrities and cute cats in an attempt to jokingly reference the advertising industry’s recent obsession with memetic culture.

I talked to Rick Webb, co-founder of the Barbarian Group, a digital ad agency based in NYC, about a viral project he helped conceive back in 2001 for Crispin Porter + Bogusky client Burger King. Streaming video had only recently become available to a majority of households, and ad agencies were beginning to take notice. That year, BMW had unleashed
The Hire
, a short film series produced, directed, and starring Hollywood A-listers. It was hugely successful, and opened up streaming video as a viable advertising platform.

But the Internet isn’t just another visual channel. It allows for interactive content, and BMW’s films, while innovatively placed, did little to take advantage of the Internet’s core competencies.

Rick Webb was drawn to the web at an early age, when he discovered Usenet, a good way to connect with like-minded folks from outside his native Alaska. Webb’s interests ran toward the countercultural, and the Internet fed his passions. Rick eventually found his way to Manhattan, where he now manages digital campaigns for global clients.

Before the blog era, a grassroots marketing strategy was, in Webb’s words, “horrible and no fun.”

It generally involved commenting on message boards, IM and email spamming, astroturfing [drumming up interest in a product or service by creating the illusion of an extant grassroots movement], and the like. We didn’t do it. We focused on making great things and using what tools we had at the time—email, IM, traditional PR and maybe a little LiveJournal—to get it in front of people and get it to spread. But for those who wanted to pay to catalyze a meme, it was generally pretty sketchy. Lots of pretending to be enthusiasts on message boards.

Webb spends a lot of time coming up with memes for clients. Today he doesn’t have to start from square one every time because the social web allows the Barbarian Group to maintain a constant identity on Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs of its employees. And they don’t just blog about marketing stuff. Webb himself maintains a Tumblr blog dedicated mostly to the indie rock of his youth. His followers recognize that he represents an ad agency, but he’s also a real human being. People who have no interest in “the biz” follow him because he’s interesting, and he doesn’t use his various platforms to jam marketing messaging down their throats.

When we did the chicken, the meme was initially propagated almost exclusively via email and some IM. Now we have all these tools and technologies that foster meme propagation. Twitter, Facebook Like, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and Buzzfeed are the big ones. None of those existed before.

When Webb wants to launch a viral campaign, he knows he can get it in front of ten or twenty thousand people (some of whom are journalists and powerful tastemakers) without spending a single media dollar.

So what’s this “chicken” all about? Burger King had a longtime tagline, “Have it Your Way,” and was trying to promote a new chicken sandwich. CP+B partnered with the Barbarian Group to create the Subservient Chicken, a campaign that would almost immediately go down as a classic advertising case study in every college marketing textbook.

Here’s how it worked. If you went to Burger King’s website and clicked on the appropriate link, you’d see a loading screen that read, “Contacting Chicken.” Then a small Flash window appeared featuring a man in a chicken suit and a text field reading, “Get chicken just the way you like it. Type in your command here.”

The first thing I typed back in 2001 was
fight
. To my delight, the chicken adopted a sword-fighting stance and began to parry and thrust at the camera. I typed in a naughty word. The chicken put his hands on his hips, walked to the camera, and shook his head disapprovingly.

Wait, what? Did they actually hire a guy to stand there all day performing commands?

Of course they didn’t. They polled their agencies internally, asking, “What would you tell the chicken to do?” They pared thousands of responses down to the four hundred most common commands, and filmed responses for them all.

Trying to create an Internet meme was new territory for ad agencies. How were they able to convince the burger giant to run with such a wacky idea?

Luck. Small budget. Couldn’t hurt. Amazing sales on the part of CP + B. Marketers were also learning about the concept of viral marketing at that time via think pieces in AdAge and were willing to experiment with very small amounts of their budgets.

Webb says that smart marketing departments have experimental budgets that they devote to playing with emerging trends. The Barbarian Group subsisted on those small experimental budgets until the chicken changed everything. The campaign was a raging success, one of the earliest examples of an agency harnessing the power of viral content. It cost almost nothing, and generated loads of traffic for the client. It was the first of its kind, establishing proof that viral marketing could work. “After that,” says Webb, “the floodgates opened.”

Advertisers have been trying to replicate the success of Subservient Chicken ever since. Webb says that brands are now more willing to be authentic and honest than they were before the rise of the Internet. In order to achieve success in the memesphere, they have to be able to create something that’s interesting enough to watch or experience, but also something people will want to share.

When I showed Webb the Jennifer Aniston video, he had to laugh.

What you see here, is that the divide between paid media and viral is blurring. This is not, technically, a viral video in the old sense, because a lot of money was spent getting the initial word out (never mind the budget that allowed them to pay for Jennifer Aniston).

It might be smarter, but compared to Subservient Chicken, the costs-to-results ratio is way higher. They paid a bundle to use Aniston. It guaranteed them a million views, but was it worth it? Not necessarily. A good idea is a lot cheaper than a celeb tacked onto some ad exec’s idea of what memes are.

Just ask Portland’s Wieden + Kennedy, who produced the legendary “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice, which, like the Subservient Chicken, holds up the industry press as being a game-changing campaign that took advantage of the Internet’s core competencies in a way that hadn’t been done before.

The original spot was simple. A hunky guy addressing the camera with a suave “Hello Ladies,” followed by a goofy spiel about how showering with Old Spice body wash would turn the viewer’s man into the kind of dreamboat that would buy you tickets “to that thing you love.” The hunk, played by former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa, moved seamlessly from his bathroom shower to a beach in a single take, with the camera zooming out to reveal that Mustafa was, inexplicably, riding bareback on a mighty steed. The spot ended with a hilarious absurdism, “I’m on a horse,” that became a mini-meme in its own right.

The ad would have been huge had W+K left it at that, but they followed up the TV spots with an interactive YouTube and Twitter experience that left many ad execs smacking their foreheads, wondering why they hadn’t thought of something so simple (and cost-effective) years ago. They filmed Mustafa answering questions that came in from Twitter and YouTube, focusing on tech-savvy celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s Biz Stone, Alyssa Milano, and Digg founder Kevin Rose. But the Old Spice Guy also responded to everyday people, like a random teenage girl named Lindsey.

The thirty-second responses were simply shot in the Old Spice Guy’s bathroom, complete with props. All two hundred responses felt carefully crafted. Especially the response to anonymous.

Hello anonymous. I’m glad at least some of most of you are liking my new Old Spice commercial.

Random crown [holds up crown].

And that means a lot.

Large book [holds up book].

Because you’re important to me.

Jewel-encrusted scepter [holds up scepter].

And I want to make you proud.

Freshwater fish [holds up fish].

So I always try my best.

Delicious cake [holds up cake].

Because you deserve the best.

The fish again [holds up fish].

So that’s what I give you.

Thank you friends, you’re my everything.

Expensive magnifying glass [holds up magnifying glass].

If you haven’t guessed, the random objects are of course clever references to 4chan’s random /b/ board. And delicious cake is a more direct reference to the aforementioned “get the cake” game. As you can imagine, /b/ freaked out and fell in love with Mustafa, which is interesting, because any less witty message would likely have been met with a massive trolling effort. The video response was smart, and seemed more like a friendly wink than a shallow attempt at generating buzz. This campaign marks the first time any corporate entity has actively courted 4chan, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Old Spice was able to garner social media points by courting Digg and Reddit simultaneously, exploiting their longtime rivalry. Sales of Old Spice went up more than 100 percent.