Having sat through today's lecture on copyright and the laws protecting intellectual property, what caught my attention was the smart and hilarious 'Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being removed from Youtube' video.
The creator of the video made a great point in that the fat cats in suits working for the studio companies do not appear to understand the bigger picture, that these spinoff memes actually possess great marketing value for the programmes/or movies that the memes parody.
Scanning through my newsfeed on the great time-waster that we all know as Facebook, it would appear that Breaking Bad comic memes are trending (For the uninitiated, spoiler alert!) based on the fact that 5 friends from different social circles shared the following image.
Walter White exercises some tough love Source: Knowyourmeme
Prior to me watching Breaking Bad and becoming a fan (only managed to get through 3 seasons though), whenever I saw the comics, it gave me a general idea of the premise of the show. What got me to actually watch the show was the frequency of these memes being shared and me wanting to know what the fuss was all about.
Linking this back to the notion that memes have the power to provide an audience with awareness of a television programme/movie/product, it would be interesting to see if the corporates manage to catch on to the idea that meme production, if anything, should be encouraged rather than suppressed like the examples we saw in lecture.
2 comments:
A great point Caleb. I think memes have much social currency and definitely the power to compel someone to watch something/ buy something.
I used to be an avid Tumblr user and after seeing people of similar interests constantly reblogging screencaps, gifs and memes of certain TV shows - it's made me curious and want to see what the fuss is all about (happened to me with Parks & Recreation and Community).
I too wonder whether more marketers will see value in creating something viral/ meme- like - certainly Old Spice is a testament to that.
What's also extremely interesting is the increasing use of memes or trending topics for marketing purposes by the television networks themselves. The popular TV series Suits showed Twitter hashtags such as "#littup" directly during the broadcast, as well as promoting these tags using Twitter and Facebook. Community did something similar, with the hashtag "#sixseasonsandamovie" appearing at the end of an episode last season. I think we have said before that we need to explore the commercial use of memes as a form of marketing, and it's definitely a growing area to examine.
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