How To Fit In On The Internet
AKA, how to Goldilocks your campaign's content.
Everyone wants to “go viral,” but it isn’t easy to manufacture. The McDonald’s Grimace Shake trend is my favorite example of this. Last year, the McDonald’s social media team launched a campaign for the birthday of Grimace, the large purple furry mascot of the franchise. They released a new purple milkshake called the Grimace Shake along with social media posts in Grimace’s character.
Kids on TikTok ran with it and produced thousands of videos portraying the Grimace Shake as a sinister plot by the mascot to take over the world. The videos were objectively bizarre, and McDonald’s legal team was concerned about the videos depicting the shake “killing” teenagers. Their concerns were assuaged as the videos generated billions of views and drove $2 billion of additional revenue – McDonald’s global sales rose 11% that month. Many called it the world’s most successful online campaign, and it involved teens drinking a milkshake and submitting to the dark magic of a furry purple McDonald’s mascot. I’m not saying it made sense, but it did make a lot of money.
McDonald’s never advertised the campaign nor produced any content for this specific storyline. As their Director of Social Media said, all they did was give the internet the “tools to play with” and let audiences run with it.
Being “online” today means more than just a digital presence – it requires connecting with digital culture, speaking its language, and tapping into the zeitgeist. But this approach is risky; missing the mark can backfire. As political campaigns increasingly prioritize digital outreach, there are lessons to be learned from their successes and failures.
Normie Memes
You have to understand internet culture to connect with it. It’s obvious when someone tries to fake the funk and speak a language they clearly are not familiar with. It’s like a parent using new slang words in front of their kids; trying too hard can make you look out of touch, instantly killing the word’s cool factor. For brands or political campaigns, this is a delicate balance. Best case, you’re ignored or quickly forgotten. Worst case, you’re Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad.
If you want virality, you have to produce content that people not only like, but want to be part of. McDonald’s understood this; if you give the internet tools to use – tools that content creators think are useful for making their own engaging content – they will do the work for you. A campaign can plant a seed, step back, and watch it grow.
Instead, brands often end up producing what are known as “normie” memes, which internet culturalists consider mainstream and lame. They feel forced and stale, so certain content creators won’t engage with them. McDonald’s can’t purposefully induce a trend like the Grimace Shake videos because McDonald’s isn’t “cool.” It’s a massive global corporation, and there’s no authenticity in their voice. However, the marketing execs at McDonald’s understood internet culture enough to give content creators some interesting ideas to play with and then stay hands-off as the creators and influencers used their authentic culture fluency to spin digital gold.
Striking Internet Gold
The Harris campaign’s strategy has been to connect with the online community in a way that feels organic rather than forced. The campaign innately seems to understand how to play it cool; I’m guessing the digital strategy team average age is around 25. They’ve tapped into the current online climate effectively, using humor and irony to resonate with a younger, more digitally savvy audience. Their attacks calling opponents “weird” have resonated, fitting the snarky, irreverent style that gains traction online. Their TikToks, with ironically hyped-up music and distorted images, and hyper-niche Twitter/X references, have delighted a small but culturally influential audience.
Vice President Harris’ coconut memes are an interesting case study here. They were born naturally from her now-viral speech, and originally as a way to make fun of her; they were negative memes about her incoherence. Fast forward a year, and they’ve turned into her digital identity in wildly positive ways. The campaign embraces the coconuts now, but it’s an acknowledgment of a meme born from real internet culture. She couldn’t have started the joke herself and she could ruin it by being too heavy-handed with those acknowledgments; it would wear the humor out.
But, the campaign has managed to maintain the meme’s appeal across both online and mainstream audiences. It engages and activates the widest audience possible, with influencers producing content for you and downstream normie audiences consuming it. That is true virality.
Chronically Online Interns Gone Wild
However, there are downsides to being too online, extremely online or chronically online, as the chronically online (or critics) say. The internet is not real life, and some parts of its culture aren’t suitable for public-facing brands or politicians. It’s a problem for journalists who overweigh Twitter/X sentiment in their analysis, and it’s a problem for campaigns trying to engage with online culture. Some of it is dark, off-putting, or downright disturbing.
The DeSantis campaign got a lot of blowback during the GOP primary after a staffer personally made and shared a DeSantis-supporting video online. The video was the definition of “too online,” featuring imagery, references, and memes that are mainly popular in niche corners of the internet, like 4chan.
It also featured a Sonnenrad, an image commonly used by Nazis and used today by many white supremacists. It shows a similar slip into white supremacist territory by Wendy’s back in 2017. Whether or not the staffer did it deliberately, the fact is he either purposefully used Nazi imagery, or he ignorantly copied other content he’d seen online, erroneously thinking that it would be as well-received by the masses as it is in some deep, ugly corners of the internet. He was far too “online” and had lost touch with what the vast majority of people consider acceptable.
Take Away
As campaigns, brands and organizations look to make an impact and connect with broad American audiences, a certain level of internet literacy is increasingly essential. When creating content from an official account, there’s a goldilocks middle-ground where strategists can act as translators for “the normies”, while also appealing to those chronically online with a (brand-safe) secret handshake.
Ultimately, internet virality comes from content creators who have the space and freedom to create authentically and in the ever-evolving language of coolness. McDonald’s had no idea how the Grimace campaign would unfold, but by giving the creators the tools to play with, they ended up with a $2 billion success.