Attention can't be bought, so brands turn to memes

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The funniest post you saw this week may not have come from a friend; it may have come from a brand. Whether it is Kohl's, Wendy's, or Netflix, brands are behaving more like internet users than traditional advertisers.

This is no accident. Simply paying for advertising is no longer enough to capture people's attention when they scroll through thousands of posts every day. Brands are increasingly trying to join conversations that people are already having.

Memes, jokes and real-time reactions have become marketing tools. But why are brands investing so much in being culturally relevant rather than simply producing the perfect advertisement?

Advertising in the age of endless scrolling

Traditional marketing often worked through interruption. A television commercial, billboard or social media ad placed a message in front of people and hoped they would remember it.

That model still works. Major brands continue to spend heavily on it. But buying advertising space is no longer enough. A brand can reach more people when audiences find its content relatable enough to share.

This is the logic of the attention economy. Decades ago, economist Herbert Simon argued that when information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce.

Today, every social media feed is a competition for that scarce resource. Brands can buy reach, but they cannot buy people's willingness to share something.

A post that people voluntarily pass along becomes earned media: content that travels through audiences rather than through paid advertising.

Why do memes attract attention?

Humor is only part of the story. What makes content spread is often the emotion behind it.

A 2012 study on viral content found that content triggering high-arousal emotions, such as awe or anger, is more likely to be shared than content that produces little emotional response.

Amusement can work in much the same way. A good meme gives us a small emotional jolt that makes us want to send it to someone else.

Thus, a clever meme is a form of social currency: passing it on makes us look funny and in on the joke.

When brands successfully participate in that culture, they can feel less like distant corporations and more like another voice in the group chat.

That is the real reason memes work: they earn our attention instead of buying or interrupting it. And being chosen is worth far more than being seen.

Real-time marketing can make this especially powerful. During the recent World Cup, Levi's responded to its stadium name being covered up for the tournament by changing its social media profile pictures to mimic the concealed logo.

The 2013 Super Bowl blackout offers another famous example. During the unexpected power outage, Oreo posted its "You can still dunk in the dark" message.

The post worked because it was timely, simple and connected to what millions of people were already watching.

The line between funny and cringeworthy

For every brand that gets it right, many others get it wrong.

A meme that lands can make a brand feel human. One that misses can make it look as though the brand is desperately trying to be relevant.

Common mistakes include using outdated memes, forcing products into unrelated jokes or adopting a tone that does not fit the brand.

Gucci's 2017 #TFWGucci campaign, for example, was criticized for making memes feel forced and inconsistent with the luxury brand's identity.

IHOP faced a different problem in 2015 when it posted a stack of pancakes with the caption "flat but has a GREAT personality." The joke was widely criticized as sexist. IHOP deleted the post and apologized.

There is even a phrase for brands that try too hard to sound like internet users: "How do you do, fellow kids?."

Sometimes, the smartest marketing decision is not to join the conversation at all.

When the audience becomes the content

The shift is bigger than a fashion for funny posts. It reflects a change in what brands are competing for.

Reach can still be bought. Attention, however, increasingly has to be earned.

Some brands go further by making consumers part of the content itself. Spotify Wrapped gives users personalized summaries of their listening habits, which millions then share on social media.

Spotify provides the format; users provide the jokes. A listener might share their results alongside a joke about spending 200,000 minutes listening to the same artist. The company creates the template, while the audience turns it into something worth sharing.

Consumers are no longer simply receiving branded content. They are distributing, adapting and sometimes creating it.

That changes what marketers need to understand. The challenge is no longer simply how to communicate a message clearly, but whether the audience will find it relevant enough to pass on.

Every December millions share theirs unprompted, and the internet does the rest, like the screenshots claiming you spent 200,000 minutes overthinking. The brand supplies the canvas, the audience supplies the meme, and the listener becomes the medium either way.

That rewrites the job. The winning skill is no longer a bigger budget or a cleverer thirty-second script. It is cultural literacy: knowing what a community finds funny, what it finds tired, and when a brand has no business speaking at all.

For the next generation of marketers, the brief is moving from "how do we say this well" to "why would anyone pass this on."

Who's behind this story?

Sadie Harley

BSc Life Sciences & Ecology. Microbiology lab background with pharmaceutical news experience in oil, gas, and renewable industries. Full profile →

Robert Egan

Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →

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Citation: Attention can't be bought, so brands turn to memes (2026, October 5) retrieved 5 October 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-10-attention-bought-brands-memes.html

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