Advertising and memes....

This is a reply to Garry Boyd's post below, "Tracking the Meme" http://www.sowpub.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl?read=11793

I moved my reply up here so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle!

Garry - I'm fascinated by memes too!

"Memes" are ideas or sayings that tend to become transmitted throughout society, similar to how a virus is transmitted. People repeat these memes to each other. As you can see, if you can harness the power of the "meme", it could be a very powerful marketing device.

I think advertising campaigns that become memes are fascinating.

One widespread meme is "Just do it!" When I hear that phrase, it's hard NOT to think of Nike! Another widespread meme from the '80s was "Where's the beef?" (from Wendy's ad campaign in North America).

However, these memes are in a sense not so remarkable, because they were backed by multi-million dollar ad campaigns. The "low budget" memes are actually even more fascinating.

A few months ago, my brother Thomas posted here about a new free online game, NationStates. This game was actually created by author/marketer Max Barry, to promote his new novel "Jennifer Government".

On Nov. 12, it only had about 20-30 "states" in the game (which roughly corresponds to the number of players)....

By Nov. 25, it had grown to about 1600 states....

(You can see one of my earlier posts which mentions this here http://www.sowpub.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl?read=10898 .)

Now - a few months later - Nationstates has grown to over 100,000 nations!

Max Barry has done NO advertising for his game, Nationstates. (You can see it at www.nationstates.net - sometimes the site is slow because it's so popular.) He essentially told about 30 friends about his game, and from there it's all been word of mouth.

Has this helped sales of Max Barry's book? "Jennifer Government" was released in January, and it quickly shot up to around number 30 in Amazon.com's best seller list, as many of the "Nationstates" players bought it. Now, it's ranked at number 596 - which is still very good for a fictional book from an essentially "unknown" author!

(In case you're interested - Max Barry actually has a background in marketing.... He's using his marketing savvy to promote his new career as a fiction author.)

Any other interesting advertising memes?

One interesting point is that the idea of a "meme" is itself a meme! That's because the idea of "memes" is being spread throughout society by "word of mouth"....

(Kind of weird, huh? :) )

- Dien