Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is paying social media influencers to back him up by memeing his presidential campaign in hopes of reaching younger viewers.
In the last few months, Bloomberg campaign has partnered and paid popular meme accounts to create content based on his campaign. Surely this meme strategy was new to the presidential politics but it seems to be working as people have taken notice or reacted to the content on his campaign.
The campaign worked with Meme 2020, a project formed by people running some of the biggest social media accounts. For this campaign, they’re not trying to fish for votes by spending a lot. It’s really about softening his image as a fun guy, these memes are so cringy and it is intentional. They don’t want it to seem too native much like an ad.
Some of Instagram’s most popular meme accounts were targeted, with more than 60 million followers combined, several meme accounts have posted sponsored posts promoting Bloomberg’s campaign. Each account has posted screenshots of Instagram’s direct messages with Bloomberg, where he requests the accounts to post sponsored post or shares some dad jokes.
These posts drew a lot of immediate attention, with Mike Bloomberg’s Instagram account drawing in a lot of followers.
The Presedential candidate’s Twitter account made waves last month during his Democratic debate, where his campaign account tweeted “SPOT THE MEATBALL THAT LOOKS LIKE MIKE” with a photo of the candidate’s face photoshopped on to a meatball.
Mike Bloomgberg’s campaign is one of the most innovative digital strategy to reach out to the younger audiences. The Bloomberg team knows they won’t be able to gain the attention of this audience through ads as many of Gen- Z prefer snapchat, instagram etc.
A billionaire paying for memes might and might not engourage young people from voting for him. But even if they don’t vote for Mr Bloomberg maybe their parents or grandparents will vote for him if the Gen Z’s who saw his content would tell the oldies they thought it was cool.
As TV ads are losing dominace, it makes sense for candidates to try and reach potential voters where they are. As Trump’s campaign found a audience on Facebook in 2016, this is Bloomberg’s way of finding its audiences and trying to speak their language.
India is nowhere behind, We all saw the Political Meme War between parties during Delhi Election and without a doubt Aam Aadmi Party’s Meme Game was the strongest!
In a world where every piece of information is getting consumed in the form of Memes,
We believe there is a huge gap between the kind of communication that Brands practice VS the kind of communication that the youth is having and it’s high time we change that.
But WTF is Meme Marketing?
Read about it here
Article written by Gou Chinlam