Mediaboss Marketing

Instagram users may love memes, but the tide of internet opinion has started to turn against the platforms most famous content thieves. The backlash means that most brands attribute their borrowed jokes in some way. Not Pot includes Twitter users handles and avatars in the screenshots it posts on Instagram, as do Beyond Yoga, a sports-apparel company, and Ritual, a vitamin start-up. Drunk Elephant sometimes tags a jokes author in the caption of its Instagrams, but sometimes those links go to other meme aggregators who clearly didnt write the jokes themselves. Other times, the jokes have been recycled through the internet meme cycle so many times that divining their original source is impossible. Whats far less common is asking for permission to reuse someones work, according to Walia.

Kelly Collette, a stand-up comic from Ohio, says she wasnt contacted by Drunk Elephant before it posted her recent viral joke (I love when you hand a dog a treat and theyre like, thanks, Ill be having this in the other room. Excuse me), but it did tag her Instagram handle in the caption. I was flattered because I love their brand, Collette says. But then nothing happened, even though the Drunk Elephant account has nearly 800,000 followers. I really didnt get anything out of itI didnt get followers, I didnt get moisturizer. For people trying to make a living in creative fields or find an audience without many resources, posting their work online is an important part of getting by. But the idea that comics or writers might find fans or work because of the exposure brands provide them is mostly a fiction, and one thats very convenient for companies looking to keep their copywriting budget low.

Read: Memes are getting harder to monetize

Collette emphasizes that she isnt mad that one of her jokes made it onto the Drunk Elephant Instagram account, but that she just wishes the company would be a little more generous with credit when using others work, and that it would ask permission. Its not great that they took the joke, reformatted it into a different font, and presented it kind of like they wrote it, Collette says. She takes particular exception to the hashtag the brand uses on all its memes, #DEsays: They actually didnt say that. I did. I said that.

The larger question, of course, is why the people steering a high-end skin-care brand want to market their products with jokes about dog behavior, among other seemingly random topics. Walia says that beyond simple engagement, brands want to seem more human. It helps them as a thought exercise to think about who their brand would be as a person out in the world, Walia explains. But when that exercise turns outward and companies start what she calls cosplaying personhood, things can get awkwardor exploitative. Theres a lot of cases where rooms of marketers think something is just slang but it has a deeper history on the internet, she says. Walia cites Peaches Monroee, the young woman who invented the phrase Eyebrows on fleek, as a prime example of how companies mine the humor of marginalized people to bolster their own authenticity. The joke from Monroee, a black teenager, was quickly repurposed by beauty brands worldwide, almost none of which ever paid its de facto copywriter a single cent.

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Meme Thievery Goes Corporate - The Atlantic