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Whales Revenge is a powerful meme in Australia |
The power of a good meme cannot be underestimated.
I received an email during the evening from some friends of mine, friends that certainly cannot be described as ‘tree huggers’ but who are still concerned about the environment, recycling, and so on. A good, solid, middle-class Aussie couple in other words.
Whaling as an industry and a practice has gotten a fair amount of negative airtime in all media outlets in Australia, with (it would be fair to say) the vast majority of Australians opposed to the practice and industry. As many pundits have said, just how many whales do you need to research, especially as the research purportedly conducted can be carried out by less aggressive and invasive methods.
But the object of this post is not to vent my spleen over whaling, but to point to the power of a well constructed, well targetted meme.
“Whales Revenge” is a Flash game you can play in your browser, whilst collecting email signatures as part of a petition campaign. You can even buy an exclusive t-shirt (only 1 million available) to display with pride your view on the issue (and donate funds to Greenpeace in the process).
By targetting the market carefully (young [or at heart], computer savvy, globally networked) and by possibly launching the campaign in key areas through selecting good first level ’sneezers’, the email has spread to the whale-aware Australian middle-class community very quickly.
As I checked my email inbox this morning, I had several other friends send me a similar email, none of them connected to each other (other than by knowing me). The meme has spread rapidly.
Why?
- Good use of colour
- Easy sign-up process
- Easy contact others process
- Easy game to play (where you move a whale back and fourth, dodging depth charges and blowing up whaling ships with your air bubbles)
- Easy to remember domain name (”whales revenge”) that ties in the fundamental proposition of the offering whilst generating an emotional response
I had thought that the contagious thought, propelled via clever net marketing, had died out due to over-exposure of the term and a glut of Flash-based games a few years ago. Maybe I was wrong.
Technorati: whales revenge, word of mouth marketing
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