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The Power Of Memes: Measuring The Impact Of Humor In Viral Content
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a meme is worth at least a thousand and one. They are everywhere online, excellent at grabbing attention and effective for communicating a wide variety of concepts and sentiments. But how powerful are they, and what does that power translate to in the real world?
Know Your Meme has crunched the numbers and surveyed the current state of research when it comes to the impact of memes. As it turns out, the evidence supports that memes actually do matter when it comes to promoting products, shaping conversations and spreading awareness.
Memes, you might even say, are the mitochondria of the internet. The "powerhouses of the cell." They hold real influence and produce palpable impacts.
Memes helped turn Barbenheimer into the summer’s biggest hit (and helped do the opposite for Sony’s rerelease of Morbius). They helped Ukraine fight back against Russia and fueled the WallStreetBets GameStop short squeeze, spawning the phenomenon of "meme stocks" in their wake.
But maybe most of all, memes give everyday people a set of tools to communicate what they think about the world and how they feel — and there’s nothing more powerful than thinking and feeling humans.
Memes vs. Non-Memes
A meme, like any work of art, can be a difficult thing to measure. Could you count how much a song means to you or represent in a chart what a painting does for a viewer? However, there is some data we can use to measure a meme's performance in the form of engagement statistics, and several studies have been conducted by researchers that have shown that memes appear to increase engagement.
Researchers associated with the Drug Enforcement Agency, of all places, ran a study about the impact of meme marketing in 2021. The DEA wanted to get medical practitioners to sign up for an eight-hour DEA X waiver training that would let them prescribe buprenorphine, a treatment for opioid addiction.
To do this, they ran two social media marketing campaigns, one using conventional posts and one using memes, and compared the two.
The DEA used formats that in 2021 (the period of the study) were very prevalent and well-known. The And I Took That Personally meme, based on a screencap of Michael Jordan from the documentary The Last Dance, originated in 2020 and was widely used as a reaction image for whenever users felt let down by a person or a situation.
The DEA's meme makers, who posted in the line of duty, found ways to match the situations in the memes they chose to their pitch for DEA X waiver trainings. Michael Jordan, in the DEA's take on "And I Took That Personally," was dressed in scrubs so he looked like a doctor or nurse (the target audience of the meme), so the "I" within the meme became a disappointed colleague (a possible outcome if people didn't sign up to do the training), and the post became a lighthearted call-out for those who hadn't done it yet.
The standard three-month sign-up campaign without memes was conducted from January to March 2021, and the three-month signup campaign with memes from April to July 2021. The research was carried out across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Success was measured by pageviews, the number of users and the number of sessions on the DEA’s site. The study found a statistically significant difference in each of these when the researchers used memes.
The most pageviews in a single day throughout the whole period of the study came after they posted a Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man meme on May 21st, 2021.
A classic meme format with roots reaching back to the early 2010s, Spider-Man Pointing gained wider popularity on Twitter around 2017 as an object-labeling format that depicted an eternal situation: The pot calling the kettle black, or Spider-Man calling "Spider-Man" a "Spider-Man."
The DEA's meme creators chose to highlight the variety of different options for getting X waiver training, including both in-person and online options, by picturing them as the Spider-Men pointing at each other in the format.
Using an essentially descriptive meme format like Spider-Man Pointing, which presents a set of positions and a relationship between them, memers can rapidly and memorably convey information. Many object-labeling or person-labeling formats (which were most popular in 2017 when Spider-Man Pointing trended on Twitter) serve this kind of descriptive role.
While these memes might cause a chuckle, the work they do is the same as any plain old sentence or diagram — describing how one thing relates to another thing in the world. Spider-Man Pointing's combination of words, cultural relevance and visual representation was a powerful tool for informing people about the X waiver trainings.
However, the DEA is not the only organization conducting meme research. Guolan Yang, a professor at Oakland University, studied a set of memes by watchmaker Gucci made in spring 2017’s #TFWGucci campaign, which saw the watchmaker collaborate with artists to make boutique memes that advertised its brand.
Dubbed a collaborative art project in the digital space, #TFWGucci paired surreal photographs of sculptures with Instagram meme-styled captions. The campaign was widely covered in the press at the time because of how it fused the worlds of memes and visual art.
The #TFWGucci campaign took already-iconic memes like Arthur's Fist (seen above) and hired digital artists and photographers to reimagine and to Guccify them. Arthur's Fist had already vaulted to meme stardom in 2016, with many using it on Reddit and Twitter to show what it was like to feel emotions they couldn't express out loud.
Arthur's Fist makes sense as a meme for Gucci to use because it prominently features a hand that it could put a watch on. In the original, of course, Arthur is not wearing a Gucci watch nor is he holding a bouquet, but it seems like #TFWGucci aimed not to make authentic memes, instead creating something that would land in the uncanny valley between fashion advertisement and meme.
In this way, the campaign illustrates Gucci's voice and brand identity trying to speak like the youth does, while still remaining recognizably Gucci. It's not a How Do You Do, Fellow Kids? moment, which is surely a fear of all brands that dabble in meme marketing, but a kind of high-fashion take on memes. #TFWGucci was met with a lot of coverage and mixed reviews in the press when it came out in 2017.
In “Using Funny Memes for Social Media Marketing: The Moderating Role of Bandwagon Cues,” Yang tested the performance of the #TFWGucci memes against non-meme posts, but also the significance of “bandwagon cues” (meaning the number of likes and interactions on a post).
In her research, Yang found that memes got more engagement than non-memes, but Yang also found that test subjects thought memes with a lot of likes were funnier than those with fewer likes, and the same was true of non-meme ads.
However, while funny memes made people feel more positive towards a brand and more likely to share the post, test subjects exposed to serious ads remembered the brand better.
Memes aren’t just about selling things to people though. They have also helped communities in non-commercial ways. A study carried out on meme consumption and traditional media consumption during the COVID-19 epidemic in Puerto Rico found that “social media becomes an alternate means of channeling stress that traditional media do not provide.”
The study found that memes were in some ways a better gauge of public opinion than traditional media, and were reported by some participants to better reflect the level of risk and stress they actually felt.
The importance of memes as a form of collective coping can be seen in how memes pop up for any tragedy. Whether it’s the dark humor of WWIII trending whenever global tensions rise or memes about the weather being too warm, they have often been a means of venting, complaining and relating to your fellow humans.
The Future Texting Exes meme commonly lands in feeds whenever a major world event occurs, with the words that rapper Future is typing getting rearranged to fit whatever the circumstance happens to be.
It started as a meme about the holidays in 2019, with Future using Thanksgiving and Christmas as an excuse to slide into the DMs of his ex, but with the coronavirus pandemic, the meme transformed into a commentary about anything in the headlines.
During the pandemic, when people were quarantined indoors with only their screens and sourdough starters to keep them company, memes became an important way of reaching others and feeling near to them. On online platforms, the humor of memes is used as a coping mechanism, but they also do more than that.
A meme like Future Texting Exes helps people giggle at an otherwise scary topic, but it also reminds them that they aren't alone in experiencing it and they're part of a bigger community of other people feeling the same things.
Memes point to serious emotions just as often as they point to jokes, and even if it’s under layers of irony and meta-humor, the emotional core is still there.
Speaking of COVID, memes about the pandemic were also helpful to brands. Researchers working out of the University of Agder in Norway conducted a study comparing brand-made posts appropriating the Shweta is Live memes from the days of COVID-19 to posts made by the same brands that didn’t have any memes involved at all. Likes and comments for both meme and non-meme posts were measured across a 12-hour period.
"Shweta Is Live" was a meme about the awkwardness of Zoom calls, something which many people were first introduced to during the pandemic's early days. A participant in a large group call forgot that her microphone was still on and accidentally told a room full of people a really revealing personal story. The audio was posted to Twitter, and reaction memes joking about the situation proliferated.
What happened to Shweta certainly happened to tons of other people on Zoom, and it was definitely an anxiety for everybody that it didn't happen to. The meme came about at a moment of adjustment to the new technology and situation.
It served both to warn people not to leave their microphones on during Zoom calls and to help them find humor in the awkwardness of virtual meetings. The deployment of the meme by brands showed that they were involved in the same process of adjustment as users, thus relating to them.
The researchers found that meme-based "Shweta Is Live" content posted by 15 brands outperformed similar non-meme content posted by those same brands in a similar timeframe.
Meme Marketing Impact
Arguably, we’re living in what historians may someday call the “golden age of meme marketing.” After a rocky start with companies joking about getting their interns to tweet for them, posting-while-corporate has matured into a career-making professional field, and brands wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.
Just ask McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, who saw 13 percent profit growth after Grimace Shake rocketed to virality, telling investors in May 2023, “This quarter, if I’m being honest, the theme was Grimace.”
In the summer of 2023, the Grimace Shake trend saw a number of creators make videos that vaulted into the millions of views on TikTok. The hashtag "#grimaceshake" currently has over 151,000 videos associated with it on TikTok, while "#grimace" has over 160,000. The trend kicked off with McDonald's unveiling a milkshake themed around Grimace and a social media campaign celebrating the character's birthday.
Grimace already had an ironic fandom online, which the summer of 2023 birthday promotion tapped into. A late-2000s Photoshop picture of Grimace apparently eating a child circulated widely on web forums at that time, while the McNuggies 4chan redraw meme of the character, which originated in 2012, demonstrated strong feelings for the character.
In the Grimace Shake trend, users posted TikToks of themselves trying the McDonald's product and then hard-cutting to the aftermath of consuming the product, typically depicting humorous examples of people on the ground and the shake spilled everywhere. The outlandish, surreal trend required users to first buy the Grimace Shake to do it and led viewers to wonder what it tasted like.
Burger King saw similar results with its "Whopper Whopper Song" campaign, which, according to YouTube, drove 100 million-plus views on related content, much of it surreal remixed memes of the jingle.
You could also ask Bank of America, which announced in a research report that a summer 2023 spike in consumer spending on entertainment was “likely partially driven by the release of the much-anticipated movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer.”
Or you could ask Josh Cellars. After the wine’s virality in January 2024, the brand saw 6.2 percent sales growth and a 79 percent increase in followers on social platforms, with the chief brand officer saying the memes were “creating valuable social credibility for the brand.”
The Josh Wine memes, which went viral in early 2024 with catchphrases like "last night we let the Josh talk," mostly centered around the wine's very human name. But the viral post that started off the trend might actually be read as an attack on Josh. The post suggested that Josh was to wine what Hyundai is to cars: A budget-friendly, mid-range table wine. As memers latched onto the name "Josh," this ironic appreciation turned increasingly sincere as the weeks went by.
It's a perennial internet pattern: Brands, slang and content creators are first appreciated ironically, but as time goes on, the terms rizzler and gyatt start slipping into your everyday speech and you find yourself on YouTube typing "Skibidi Toilet" into the search bar while calling what you find there the future of cinema. It's happened to almost everyone, in one way or another.
But memes aren’t just useful for brands. Following the virality of Dark Brandon, the Biden administration bragged to Axios that Dark Brandon-related merchandise drove 76 percent of all clicks and 44 percent of all store orders to the campaign website.
Memes like This Is Fine have also crossed over into the world of the arts, with fashion house Collina Strada creating a collection inspired by the iconic dog and the flames that menace him.
Actors’ responses to memes involving them have even evolved into an entire genre of late-night TV show question that routinely causes a resurgence of interest, while songs that become popularized via TikTok sounds can break sales records or propel small artists into the mainstream.
"Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac saw a 374 percent jump in sales and 89 percent increase in streams after a video created by TikToker 420doggface208 showing him chugging cranberry juice and commuting on a skateboard whilst vibing to the song went viral on the platform. Eventually, his song led Mick Fleetwood, drummer of Fleetwood Mac, to join the app and post a version of himself reenacting the video.
Lip-sync memes and dance trends on TikTok give listeners a chance to perform their love for a song in public, which means that when people consume music on TikTok, they're often not just consuming the song but also another person's funny, provocative or relatable reaction to that song. The trend inspired by "Dreams" led to many copycat postings and brought the song to smartphones across the world.
Memes are also working their way into our language. Every time the little cousin at the barbecue starts talking about a "Fanum Tax" or someone calls a movie "cringe," you can notch up another point for the power of memes.
Rizz was the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2023 "Word of The Year," and Goblin Mode was its 2022 "Word of The Year." The -ussy suffix was also honored by the American Dialect Society last year for its contributions to language.
The Meaning Of Meme Power
Memes are tonally different from the usual types of highly edited and highly produced media people encounter both online and offline. They’re more informal, plugged into pop culture and often push boundaries.
While some may want brands like Steak-Umm to stick to meat, others enjoy their memetic, internet-reference-filled social media content. Brands, through memes, are doing more than just selling their product — they’re becoming a part of their customers’ lives.
Nathan Allebach, the former social media manager of Steak-Umm, told Know Your Meme in an interview from 2021, "I think on a conceptual level, memes have always existed in advertising since advertising often hijacks cultural trends, so it makes sense to me that this would continue. I know a lot of meme purists hate seeing brands or politicians using them. I feel that too sometimes. But memes are like language. They’re constantly evolving with culture and we can’t stop the tide, all we can do is influence it."
Steak-Umm's Twitter account has certainly had an influence in social media marketing and brand voice, hailed as a thought leader by some for posting about the dangers of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and also for posting memes that garnered widespread praise.
Marketing research has found that making people laugh is one of the most effective tactics for selling a product. Whether it’s the Geico Gecko or viral Super Bowl commercials, when a company can make audiences chuckle in 30 seconds or less, there’s a good chance their ad is remembered and effective.
But memes aren’t just jokes. A meme format is a way for people to package a thought. Memes express preferences and feelings, signal connections and contradictions, make references and demonstrate arguments.
Memes also offer chances for interaction, interpretation and imaginative play to audiences and brands alike.
Any story about the 21st century is incomplete without a chapter on memes and their power to affect audiences and catalyze action.
In a way, this is what every Know Your Meme entry is about: How the power of memes is produced, how they spread and the effects they have on what you end up reading in the news or seeing in your favorite online spaces.
