Beware the Meme

The fundamental difference between economics and marketing is that while economics assumes that all individuals are rational, marketing assumes that all individuals are stupid. This explains 90% of the advertising that you see today. This is quite acceptable, given that 90% of movies, TV shows, music and most other forms of popular entertainment today are not much better. But what’s more dangerous is the sort of thing that Coca-Cola has been trying to achieve with its new “Brrrrr” ad campaign. As an ordinary lay person, you might wonder how an ad campaign that makes no sense and sounds like an overworked electric motor could possibly be dangerous for you. After all, as an ordinary lay person, I would’ve wondered the same.

However, as a person with some level of exposure to how advertising agencies work, I can guess, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what the jhola-clad ad agency fellows had in mind when pitching this whole idea of “Brrrrr” to the business suit-clad marketing fellows at Coca Cola. “Brrrr” was not just another nonsensical ad campaign that would take the cola wars to a new level of inanity. “Brrrr” would’ve been pitched as a “meme”. According to the official definition, a meme is a unit of social information for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In English, this means that a meme is a fad.

In advertising, this means a lot of money. I can imagine how the ad agency chaps would’ve gone on for two hours, explaining over a dozen slides the phenomena of ‘memes’. They would’ve quoted Richard Dawkins (the British biologist who coined the term) to sound intelligent and highbrow, and quoted their five-year old offspring’s latest school fad to sound “street” and “with it”. They would’ve droned about phenomena like the rituals accompanying tequila shots and the latest email forward to emphasize the power of memes. And then they would’ve landed the killer blow about how the emergence of social networks and new media has meant that memes, when exploited well, can just take off on their own and all the company would need to do would be to sit back, laugh maniacally and watch as the world went mad and purchased Coca Cola everywhere.

“Brrrr” would, therefore, not be another in a series of forgotten ad campaigns. Instead, “Brrrr” would take the shape of a social movement, a fad that is picked up by ‘new media’ and regurgitated endlessly until everyone from upscale Manhattan bars to roadside Dar es Salaam stalls are shaking their bodies in odd ways for no apparent reason. “Brrrr” would be tweeted and re-tweeted countless times on twitter; “Brrrr” would be the new Facebook phenomena that would cause uproar in the social networking world; “Brrrr” would be played by DJs at nightclubs to get the crowd at its feet; “Brrrr” would receive 200,000 hits a day on YouTube and you would be praying for the day when space travel is economical enough to help you get the hell away from all this.

Now, a lot of you might think that I’m making this sound far more sinister than it actually is; that I’ve painted a greatly exaggerated picture; that ad agency mandarins cannot possibly be THAT diabolical and that the crisis would never take on such drastic proportions. Well, I have one word for you - Macarena! I still shudder/wake up in a cold sweat/feel a shiver down my spine/pray for economical space travel when I think of the days when you couldn’t switch on the TV or the radio without listening to the Macarena, when you couldn’t go to a party without being subjected to those ludicrous dance steps that looked like everyone was touching various body parts to check if anything was missing. And this was before the era of social networking and new media, so you can imagine how apocalyptic things can get now.

The good news though is that Coca Cola seems to have wholeheartedly bought the idea and decided to sink millions into ensuring its success. This usually means that it will not succeed. While fads may be stupid, annoying and give you genocidal thoughts, the one good thing about them is that they cannot be controlled. Despite a lot of people spending years researching the phenomena of fads and countless books being written about fads and how you can cash in on them, the truth is that you cannot. Fads are still gloriously unpredictable and the harder you try to control them, the less likely you are to succeed.

And right now Coca Cola, to my great relief, is trying desperately hard to make this whole “Brrrr” thing succeed. Whenever I switch on the TV, every second ad seems to be “Brrrr”. When I browse the net or log on to Facebook, a Coca Cola ad/pop-up asks me to post my “Brrrr” video and share it with the world. While it’s annoying temporarily, I can put up with it safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t really take off beyond the world of advertising; that people wouldn’t forward me links to their “Brrrr” videos, set “Brrrr” as their status update or start dancing to “Brrrr” at parties. In fact, if I were to be all Navjot Singh Sidhu over this whole affair, what I’d say is “My dear friend, you might need a tank of gasoline to set a cottage on fire, but all it takes to start a forest fire is a matchstick! So how could Coca Cola succeed when they’ve used up an entire offshore oil rig?”

Doesn't Quite Ad Up, Does it?

It’s a strange sort of effect that advertisements can have on you: you either feel that you don’t belong to this planet, or that the people who create the ads are from another planet. Take, for example, the latest ad campaign from Idea Cellular, “Walk and Talk”. A lot of people walk while they’re talking on their phones, but I think just about everyone would agree that they don’t see this as the route to a healthy lifestyle. I mean, you’d definitely never come across a conversation such as this on planet earth:

You: Good Lord, look at you! I would never have recognized you! You looked like a blue whale the last time we met; your physique stretched across time-zones! And now you’re thinner than graph paper! Wow – whatever happened? Did you stop eating altogether? Underwent a gruelling weight-loss regime? Were you run over by a road-roller?

Ex Blue-Whale Lookalike: Nonsense, nothing of that sort. I just spoke a lot on my cell phone – it’s the Idea network, you see!

Or if you take a look at any of the hair gel ads, you might wonder why anyone really needs an ad agency – all you need to do is just get hold of a hot girl and a guy who applies so much gel that it looks like he has a wet porcupine on his head. Well, to be honest, this is exactly what an ad agency does, but only in case the ad budget is really low. If the ad budget is higher, then the ad agency is automatically expected to do something extra. So the ad agency scouts around all over the world, finds a suitably exotic foreign location, and then gets hold of a hot girl and a guy who applies so much gel that it looks like he has a wet porcupine on his head.

Now a lot of ad agency professionals might object to the previous paragraph as demeaning to their profession, and I have to agree that they’re absolutely correct. Not all ad agencies blindly get hold of a hot girl and a guy who applies so much gel that it looks like he has a wet porcupine on his head. Many of them undertake a thorough branding exercise where they study the market and the consumers, define the target audience, create a differentiated brand proposition for the product, test these propositions with the consumers, and THEN get hold of a hot girl and a guy who applies so much gel that it looks like he has a wet porcupine on his head. In addition, many of them get hold of a hot girl and a guy who applies deodorant, and create a deo ad out of it. Or they get hold of a hot girl and a guy who rides a bike and create a bike ad out of it. The point I’m trying to make is that a lot of thought has clearly gone into it, and we should not be dismissive of such advertisements.

What would be interesting, though, is if there were ads for concepts or ideas instead of products and companies. This is what some of them could be like:

So what is the toughest thing to do on Earth? Understand women? Achieve world peace? Score lower than Paris Hilton on an IQ test? Resolve the Kashmir dispute? Sure, all of these are incredibly tough things to do...but for the man who wants a real challenge, for the man who wishes to push himself beyond all limits of human endurance, there is only one answer – Differential Calculus! Created by the all-time great, legendary mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, Differential Calculus is a technique using which you can solve complex mathematical equations by making it even more complex and incomprehensible! Some of you might think that Differential Calculus is not exactly your cup of tea, but as any marketing guru will tell you these days: Differentiate or die! DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS: DIFFERENTIATE OR DIE!

Which particle do you think plays the most important role in nuclear reactions? Which particle do you think generates radioactive isotopes useful for a variety of purposes? Yes, we’re sure you would’ve guessed protons or electrons. After all, they’re the ones with all the charge; they’re the ones who get all the attention. But you’re wrong!!! The answer, dear reader, is NEUTRONS! So we’re not positively charged! Neither are we negatively charged! Big Deal! Goddamnit, there’s nothing wrong in being neutral. Neutrons today are being used in a wide variety of applications and research on neutrons is throwing up new uses every single day. Neutrons are the only particle to have a star named after them. So they next time you disparagingly dismiss neutrons as being fence-sitters, think again! NEUTRONS: PROUD TO BE NEUTRAL

Jargon™ Inc Blue-sky thinking, touch base, going forward, take this discussion offline, EOD, FYI, PFA, synergy, alignment, paradigm shift, etc. How many times have you heard management-types use these words? Indeed, Jargon has successfully established itself as the preferred language of the corporate world. The greater your command over this language, the higher you’re bound to climb up the corporate ladder! Jargon™ Inc presents to you its new Crash Courses in Jargon™. In two weeks time, we’ll teach you to talk the corporate talk. Accidents shall turn into unintentional vehicular impacts, problems shall turn into challenging assignments, car owners shall turn into vehicularly empowered people and plain old you shall turn into corporate-ready you! Join now, and avail of our special introductory offer of a free Jargon™ Handbook!

PUBLIC NOTICE ISSUED IN PUBLIC INTEREST BY THE GOVT OF INDIA Dear Citizens This is your government speaking. Since independence, we have consistently been against alcohol and have insisted that it is bad for you. However, recent surveys indicate that alcohol, when consumed in moderation, actually reduces the risk of heart failure and prolongs your life span. Apparently, wine also contains antioxidants, which is one of the things that are damn good for your health these days. To be very honest, we are very confused now and do not really know what stand to take regarding alcohol. In the meantime, we guess it’s perfectly fine if you’re drinking. Apologies for the last 60-odd years. Sincerely, Government

The last ad is one that I’d really love to see some day, but I guess the chances of that happening are about as high as Paris Hilton’s IQ. Finally, I’d like to propose a tagline for religion, which would ensure that, like movies and video games, religion is also among the list of activities considered harmful for impressionable young minds (although it's probably far more harmful, in my opinion):

Religion: Full of sects and violence!