New in town, new at your job, want to start a conversation and break the ice? Well, memes are your best bet!
Gone are the days when parents would hound their children to have goals that lead them to ‘highly reputable’ professions. Education for children meant that it needed to align with the end result of being a doctor, an engineer, or an IAS officer.
Slowly, things changed, and remarkably this decade has seen the most significant change when it comes to professions.
MBA, Mass Communication, IT professional and even Sports became an option, and as entertainment became more accessible via cable (the late ’90s & early ’20s); today, things are very different.
Mobile penetration and access to entertainment via mobile applications have painted a very different landscape, a landscape that is rich and is swarming with opportunities. These opportunities quell the thirst for being both creative as well as lucrative.
Meme–creation is a full-time job
Try typing ‘memes’ on job search platforms; it would lead one to a list of at least 100 openings, and this may come as a surprise, but meme–creation is actually a full-time job now, a career opportunity even in the corporate sector.
So what has lead to the creation of this job position, for one it has huge popularity, and this can solely be attributed to the internet.
Meme makers are paid well to promote products and even movies and shows, and a well-established pages can become the primary source of income for those in the content creation business.
In the early days of memes, they were solely for the purpose to make us laugh and thus confined to one social media pages, but today, the landscape is changing, companies have positions for creators and the youngsters today can view this as a career option.
What to expect in terms of salary?
Memes are not easy to create; it needs for the creator to have panache, a sense of humour and a streak of cleverness to dish out content that the audience is able to relate to, as they tend to stick to one’s consciousness and as per studies people tend to share more of them than regular social media posts.
A freelancer can make up to 7- 10 thousand rupees in a month, while a full-timer working in a company can draw a salary starting at 20 thousand rupees which can go up to 12 lakhs or more annually. It is according to the experience of the person and depends on the workplace.
Memes are here to stay – Corporate to Politics to Personal
Memes have now been officially adopted as one of the tools to express your opinion, and while you do that, you attract millions who support you if your opinion is there’s too.
It might surprise many when it comes to the actuality of it, but in today’s world, it is one tool that can be designed such that it can reach a specific target audience, hence over time, they have moved from the realm of entertainment to something more serious that can in all possibility lead to much awareness.
The potential has now been understood both by the corporate world as well as leaders in their respective domains, especially the politicians who take full advantage of the reach and the responsiveness that it creates about a particular topic even if it comes at the cost of making fun of someone!
They an essential marketing tool – Corporates
Meme marketing being adopted by corporates and brands using memes to attract attention and create awareness has become a separate division in itself.
The idea of this marketing is attributed to Jerry Media, an offshoot of a popular Instagram page, wherein it was born; it began using the platform to market hugely popular brands – Subway, Vogue and even popular artists such as Justin Bieber.
Even streaming services such as Netflix and Disney adopted the strategy of trolling their own content!
The companies now understand the untapped potential and their value which is why most content-producing firms have a position for a memer.
Many brands want their products and services to be meme’d, as it is a proven marketing tool that helps reach their intended target audience, mostly those who are phone savvy and belonging to the age group of 15 to 24.
An essential ‘say it all’ tool – Politicians
Never to shy away from any controversy; even the politicians (the not too educated once too) have understood the force that is memes.
It is highly relied upon by political parties, political leaders to generate mass hysteria and to target a specific topic and even their fellow leaders in the hopes of generating more favourable winds for themselves.
How was the it born?
The meme culture was the idea of Richard Dawkins in 1979 when he used the word for the first time in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’.
The meme was coined as a cultural equivalent of a gene – anything that gets passed on from one person to another, the heredity process that forms the very backbone of the evolution process.
Today they have become an integral way of expressing oneself and a form of communication that too without many words, just the thing in itself is enough to communicate one’s thought process.
Memes as communication starters
Memes have essentially become ice breakers, conversation starters; as a form of communication, it is so effective that it just needs one meme to crack into a group that you have been wanting to get into for a while.
One can even get the ‘best meme provider’ tag wherein your peers actually wait for you to provide the daily dose of their memes for their first cup of coffee or tea as they check on their phones for the latest.
Memes not only as jokes but for information too
If one thinks that the only thing that memes do is make us smile or laugh, well, that’s not entirely true.
Today increasingly, memes are being used to spread awareness and information. A meme isn’t just a joke; it requires a lot of research and proper planning such that the intended information goes out.
What is needed to be a meme maker?
First and foremost creative skills are the most essential, skills that enable one to write funny one-liners, needs to be abreast of the current affairs – politics, entertainment, business etc.
Most importantly, it is the timing; in a nutshell, there are four T’s that need to be followed –
Time
Trend
Topic
Target audience
Memes are here to stay, and the potential that one has to take it up as a profession is multiplying, also on the rise in the base salaries. Hence, in the coming years, memes would prove to be an effective tool that companies, brands and influencers could rely upon to create a market for themselves, generate awareness and in the process, make a solid base of brand loyalists.
