📘 4 memes BANNED from social media

(Because they featured brands who wouldn't be happy with them)

Little foray into clickbait with that title. Felt gross ngl.

Last week I discussed how digital media brands make money. This week, let’s talk about the pitfalls.

A few years ago I was texting with my wife about what I should cook for dinner. I reallllly didn’t feel like cooking. So I tweeted at the official Chipotle account. Admittedly, I was 95% sure how this would play out. Brands love interacting with other verified accounts in this type of way.

Took them a while to respond so I sent a follow up…

It paid off:

An now, November 17 is National Laura Eats Chipotle. Give it a goog. It’s true.

This post went BONKERS. Millions of reach. Some people jumped in the DMs like “If that’s the type of advertising you do, sign me up. Advertise my company!” And a lot of cynics showed up in the comments complaining about a blatant (yet sneaky) paid ad.

Truth is: Chipotle got MILLIONS of impressions. MILLIONS. Their cost: the 2 free burrito codes they sent us. This was NOT a paid ad.

And it happens every year. This post from a couple months ago on my personal IG has 340k likes.

thejoelwillis

A post shared by Joel Willis (@thejoelwillis)

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising. They won the viral post lottery.

Another example. The video team created a really well done Fixer Upper parody called Fix Her Supper, which prominently featured Tyson…

The sales team was not happy. But Tyson was! They showed up in the comments and seem quite pleased. Ya just never know.

The truth is: we were given fairly strict caution about mentioning brands in our memes, articles, and videos.

A caution that I forgot about all the time and had to be checked on.

We’d go about our editorial day, creating and approving whatever we liked. And then I’d get an email from my boss, Paul, god bless him, with a subject line like:

“Posts including ad partner brands​“

And I’d be like, oh crap I forgot again.

I honestly just didn’t really think about it. And if you are anti-advertising like me, you’re probably rolling your eyes at the fact that we’d need to change our content for brands. But I’m not talking about some haughty capital J JOURNALISM endeavor. If we did a scathing takedown expose of a brand doing terrible things, of course that could stay. These were just dumb memes that were aggressively inappropriate for no real reason.

3 memes we deleted

Censored for “brand safety.”

The only one I even like at all is the last one. The other two are unnecessary and promotional of the “need-alcohol-to-parent” nonsense that I hate, especially these days.

Imagine being a salesperson working your butt of with one of these clients, trying to land a deal that could potentially secure The Dad’s existence and then one of these drops and the client is like “Yeah can we talk about the meme you just posted that’s a fake ad for our brand and contains the F word? Our lawyers are asking about it.” ← an exaggeration but you can imagine

I’d apologize sincerely and delete each time no question.

One time I created a meme that I knew I couldn’t get away with posting on The Dad. So I posted it on my on own Instagram. Then I got an email that said:

“Personal IG”

Oh no.

Allegedly people from Disney followed me and “expressed concern” with this meme.

I still feel like it was probably someone from our sales team working on Disney who didn’t like it, but still I was surprised to have to remove something from my personal Instagram. Such are the consequences of being a “public figure,” I was told. (I am still not verified on Instagram but that’s neither her nor there.)

Childhood alcohol consumption aside, I think that’s a decent meme.

And now that I’ve posted it here, this substack has zero chance of being sponsored by Disney.

I’M SACRIFICING THIS FOR YOU, DEAR READER.

Landing big time branded deals for such a young brand was unprecedented

We were lucky to have the opportunity, and being part of Some Spider helped make it happen.

I really should’ve known better than to risk deals over bad memes. It takes a lot of work to land a big branded content client. A LOT. For every client we’d land, there were dozens of others we pitched, either as part of a requested proposal (RFP) or an unprompted pitch.

And in the early days, Ally Probst and I were the ones creating alllll of these branded pitches too, in addition to the (“non-branded”) editorial work.

For the first several months, I was the only full time employee on The Dad’s non-video team. But as our audience growth exploded, we needed help in a big way.