Meme-tastic Project

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

'a stitch in time saves nine'

'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.