Business
How Mike Bloomberg “Memed” His Presidential Candidacy
2020 has been an exciting year for politics. Notably, the upcoming election is proving itself to be one of the more exciting news topics around the country. However, while most candidates employed typical campaigning tactics, Mike Bloomberg took advantage of massive internet culture: meme pages. While his candidacy didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped, Mike utilized a brilliant tactic to earn popularity among younger voters.
During February of 2020, the former NYC mayor unveiled a new marketing campaign alongside a small company named “meme 2020,” a creation by the CEO of Jerry Media. Together, they would flood Instagram feeds with memes about Mike through some of the platform’s largest meme pages. The memes consisted of screenshotted direct messages from the official Mike Bloomberg Instagram account, in which he would make himself seem comedically out of touch with youth culture.
One prompt, promoted on the significant page “@F***Jerry” (with over 15 million followers) went like this:
Mike: “Hello Jerry. My granddaughter showed me this account. Your memes are very humorous. Can you post a meme that lets everyone know I’m the cool candidate?”
Jerry: “What do you have in mind?”
Mike proceeds to send a picture of himself wearing an orange sweater-vest captioned “when you’re the cool candidate”
Jerry: “Ooof that will cost like a billion dollars”
Mike: “What’s your Venmo?”
That post earned over 400,000 likes.
Another page, named @Tank.Sinatra (over 2.7 million fans), posted the following excerpt:
Mike: Mr.Tank: I’ve been waiting for my meme for so long that I learned how to make memes myself in photoshop. What do you think of this one?
Mike sends a picture of Bernie Sanders, captioned “I am once again asking you to make me look cool” with another text box saying “you to make me look cool” on the screen, indicating that Mike does NOT understand photoshop.
For days, the internet was FLOODED with these skits. The follower network of pages that posted them amassed over 60 million total fans. The Bloomberg campaign targeted large pages, as well as micro-influencers (smaller pages with active audiences). The humor was insulting to the Bloomberg campaign, as most of the memes mocked his outdated humor and sense of style. However, most people fail to see the value of a post like this. Using a “mocking” style was a clever tactic to make the promotion seem more natural. Obviously, nobody wants to see their favorite meme page post “Mike Bloomberg is an awesome candidate, and he has my vote!”
In the end, the endeavor would cost over $1 million. While this is a small amount compared to the total $350 million he spent on ads, Bloomberg was able to access millions of people in a relatively comedic way. He hoped to win the hearts of younger voters, and he capitalized on popular internet culture to do so.
Whether this tactic was valid or not, nobody knows for sure. Bloomberg would drop out of the running in March, paving the way for his endorsed candidate Joe Biden. While we’ll never truly understand how strong this ad campaign was, it sure was interesting.