Memes used to sit on the edges of advertising culture, treated as disposable internet clutter while “proper” campaigns got on with the serious business of scripts, media plans and expensive production. That distinction looks fairly antique now. If anything, memes have become one of the purest expressions of how modern communication works: fast, referential, communal, emotionally legible in half a second.
As TikTok and every other feed-based platform have made painfully clear, people don’t just consume culture now. They chop it up, caption it, remix it, weaponise it, sentimentalise it and fling it back at one another with frightening speed.
Harvard Business Review noted more than a decade ago that advertisers had long understood the power of memes, only back then they were often the ones launching them. The balance has shifted. Culture now bubbles up from audiences, creators and communities first, and brands have to earn the right to join in.
That matters because memes aren’t just cheap laughs. They’re a language. GWI’s research found that almost three quarters of millennials and Gen Z use memes to express themselves, and that Gen Z spend around three hours a day on social media, accounting for 41% of their overall online time.
Almost three quarters of millennials and Gen Z use memes to express themselves
Sprout Social’s 2026 research adds another useful wrinkle: Gen Z say they want brands to prioritise educational content, memes and skits, and highly produced episodic series, but they also want interaction and a sense that the brand actually understands the tone of the room. In other words, meme marketing works best when it feels like participation, not appropriation; like a brand knows the joke rather than a brand has just discovered the internet five minutes ago.
There’s another reason this subject matters right now. Kantar’s data shows that humour in advertising has dropped sharply over the past two decades, from 53% of ads globally in 2000 to 34% in 2024, even as social platforms remain dominated by funny, playful, lightly deranged content. That mismatch is one reason so much traditional advertising feels overcooked and underloved.
Meme culture, for all its chaos, reminds brands that entertainment still works, that wit still works, and that people are far more willing to spend time with a message if it gives them something in return beyond blunt persuasion. The best uses of memes in advertising succeed because they understand that truth. They don’t just borrow internet culture. They add to it.
Why meme marketing matters to modern brands
NIshant Bahukhandi
The phrase meme advertising still makes some people in adland twitch, usually because it conjures the image of a desperate intern pasting a logo onto a tired reaction image and calling it social strategy. Fair enough. There has been plenty of that. But properly understood, meme marketing is less about a particular format than about compression. A good meme says a lot, very quickly. It packages a feeling, a social cue, a point of view and a nod of recognition into something instantly shareable. That’s gold dust in a media ecosystem where attention is brutally contested and where short-form creative has to establish brand recognition almost immediately.
System1’s work with TikTok found that short-form ads need distinctive assets in the first two seconds, and that a fluent character can lift brand awareness by 57%. That’s why memes are so attractive to marketers: they are often built around instantly recognisable cues, rhythms and characters. The problem is that the format is seductive enough to tempt lazy work.
A good meme says a lot, very quickly
And lazy work gets punished. Adobe’s 2025 research on trend-chasing found that one in four marketers said they had gone viral with trend-driven content, with 79% of those gaining new followers, which is precisely the sort of result that keeps teams doom-refreshing trend dashboards and begging for same-day approvals. But the same study found 39% said their trend-led content had flopped because they rushed it.
That’s the real meme advertising equation in miniature. The upside can be dramatic. The downside is public, immediate and often embarrassing. A meme can make a brand look culturally sharp, but it can just as easily expose how little cultural literacy sits behind the post. This is why the best uses of memes in advertising aren’t the fastest or loudest ones. They are the ones that match speed with judgement.
The Best Meme Marketing Examples
EE: Fenton Gets a 4G Remaster
A useful dividing line in this conversation is the difference between copying a meme and translating it. Copying is lazy. Translating is creative. The classic example remains EE’s Fenton remaster from 2012.
Rather than merely reposting the original viral clip and hoping some borrowed internet affection rubbed off, EE rebuilt the whole thing in full HD as a knowingly overblown cinematic spectacle to demonstrate that people could stream high-definition YouTube video on the go over 4G. EE’s own announcement described the experience as an interactive video that let users switch between the original Fenton clip and the 4GEE Remaster, while Marketing Week framed the work as a Hollywood-style pastiche designed to demonstrate the speed of EE’s new 4G network.
That’s the difference between meme theft and creative adaptation. The cultural object remained recognisable, but the brand found a genuine product truth inside it and then produced something enjoyable enough to justify its own existence.
Rory Robinson, Creative Director at Joint, captures why the work still holds up: “Another one I always come back to (an oldie for sure but a goodie) is EE’s remastering of the ‘Fenton’ meme to advertise that customers could now watch HD videos on the go. By re-imagining the shaky mobile phone video as a big budget cinematic set-piece, it allowed fans of the meme to enjoy it in a whole new way. Putting big brand budget behind elevating what originated as a lo-fi capture of a spontaneous moment.”
That last point matters. Too many meme-led ads are built backwards: someone spots a trend, shouts “we should do that,” and only later tries to work out what the business relevance might be. With Fenton, the product demonstration came first. The joke landed because the execution was lavish and self-aware, yes, but also because the whole point of the remaster was to dramatise the improvement in viewing quality.
The brand wasn’t just hanging around the meme in the hope of looking cool by association. It was saying something about the service. That’s what makes the campaign still feel instructive. It respected the original internet moment, used proper ad craft and pushed the meme somewhere new.
IKEA: Meme Manuals
IKEA’s Meme Manuals offer a slightly different but equally smart model. Rather than borrowing an external meme template, the brand turned one of its own most recognisable assets, the assembly manual, into a real-time response format for trending topics and everyday cultural conversations.
That’s important because the idea begins with brand grammar. IKEA’s instruction manuals are already globally understood, visually distinctive and slightly comic in their own right. The Meme Manuals concept used that visual language as a way to comment on culture through pragmatic, stripped-back, knowingly deadpan diagrams.
The Shorty Awards case study says the work helped fan growth outperform other days by 38%, with nearly all posts beating IKEA Germany’s engagement KPI.
That result matters, but the more useful lesson is creative rather than statistical. The cleverest meme marketing often begins with a brand’s own assets. If you can make the meme feel like it could only have come from you, you’ve already escaped the worst trap.
Too many brands treat memes as borrowed costumes. IKEA treated the meme as a natural extension of its own visual system. That’s why it worked. It didn’t make IKEA look like it was pretending to be the internet. It made the internet look, briefly, like IKEA.
Duolingo: Duo the Owl Becomes the Meme
There’s an even stronger route available to brands, and it’s the one most worth studying: stop chasing memes and build a branded world that can generate memetic behaviour on its own. That’s essentially what Duolingo did with Duo the owl.
TikTok’s own case study reported that Duolingo reached more than 38 million unique users and generated over 90 million video views through its TikTok activity. The platform also credited the campaign with meeting KPIs around installs, cost per install, registrations, new users and retention.
But the real creative lesson is not just that Duolingo did well on TikTok. It’s that Duo became a fluent character. The owl wasn’t a logo being awkwardly dragged into trends. It became a chaotic, emotionally legible personality that could participate in them.
That matters because short-form environments punish vagueness. A faceless brand trying to be funny has to work very hard. A recognisable character with an established tone can move much faster because the audience already understands the rules. Duo’s menace, neediness, absurdity and persistence all became part of the brand’s social language.
This is where System1’s point about distinctive assets becomes especially relevant. A fluent character can do a huge amount of memory work in a feed where everything is moving at a stupid pace. The joke may change, but the brand asset remains consistent.
Duolingo’s lesson is simple: the best meme brands don’t just use memes. They build characters and behaviours people want to meme back.
Nutter Butter: The Nutterverse
Nutter Butter’s social renaissance is stranger, messier and, in many ways, even more revealing. The brand didn’t win by dutifully referencing whatever joke happened to be trending that week. It won by constructing The Nutterverse, an absurd, slightly unnerving, community-fed world that felt native to TikTok’s weirder corners while remaining unmistakably tied to the product.
The Drum’s awards case study described the campaign as creating a cult following of new fans and reigniting interest in the snack, while The One Show case study reported that household penetration among Gen Z/Y grew 16.5% year on year over the latest 26-week period cited.
That’s not meme marketing as garnish. That’s meme logic turned into a brand platform.
What’s interesting about Nutter Butter is that it didn’t chase polish. In fact, the slightly cursed quality of the work was the point. It felt like something users might stumble across, question, share with a friend and then, fatally, keep watching. That kind of energy is difficult for traditional brand systems to tolerate because it does not always look “safe” in the conventional sense.
But Nutter Butter proves that weirdness can be strategic when it has a world around it. Randomness is not the same as originality. Chaos is not the same as tone. The Nutterverse worked because it had a recognisable logic, however unhinged that logic appeared from the outside.
The lesson is not that every brand should become bizarre. Please, no. The lesson is that original brand worlds beat trend-chasing when they give audiences something to return to.
Astronomer: Gwyneth Paltrow and the Coldplay Kiss-Cam Response
Reactive meme marketing is riskier because the shelf life is shorter and the margin for embarrassment is thinner. But it can be brilliant when the move is bold enough and the writing is good enough.
The standout recent example is Astronomer’s response to the Coldplay kiss-cam fiasco that unexpectedly dragged the data company into mass culture. Rather than issue a beige statement and hope the internet moved on, Astronomer released a deadpan video titled “Thank you for your interest in Astronomer,” fronted by Gwyneth Paltrow as a “temporary spokesperson.”
Entertainment Weekly reported that Paltrow appeared in the video after the viral kiss-cam moment involving Astronomer executives, using faux Q&A to redirect attention towards the company’s actual work with Apache Airflow, AI and data pipelines. The Washington Post similarly described the video as a humorous way to redirect public attention back to Astronomer’s business.
Rory Robinson is right to single it out: “Amongst the avalanche of ‘Coldplay couple’ related content last year, the crown has to go the company of the CEO himself ‘Astronomer’. They took a big swing by hiring Gweneth Paltrow to divert the newly acquired attention away from the incident itself and onto what the company actually does, whilst getting a few laughs along the way.”
That is the key distinction. Astronomer did not merely join the joke. It improved the situation by introducing a smarter angle. The casting was funny because of Paltrow’s connection to Chris Martin. The tone was funny because it pretended to answer the public’s lurid questions while briskly pivoting to data workflows. The whole thing worked because it treated the internet as intelligent enough to enjoy the misdirection.
This is what reactive meme marketing should do. It should not panic. It should not grovel. It should not explain itself into dust. It should find the angle that lets the brand survive the moment with wit and usefulness intact.
Jet2: “Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday”
The inverse case is also revealing: when the brand becomes the meme without planning to.
In 2025, Jet2holidays found its “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” advert soundtracking millions of ironic travel-fail posts. The Guardian reported that more than 1.3 million videos had used the audio by July 2025, while the hashtag #nothingbeatsajet2holidays had surpassed 25,500 posts. People later reported that the sound had appeared in more than 1.5 million user-generated videos, often attached to chaotic or disastrous travel moments.
Jet2 didn’t invent the joke, and it certainly didn’t control all of its meanings. But it did the sensible thing by leaning in with its own content and a voucher challenge rather than trying to suffocate the trend. That is not always the right response, but here it made sense. The meme still carried the brand name, the sonic asset was unmistakable, and the irony was more affectionate than destructive.
The original advert already had social-media DNA built into it too: glossy holiday shorthand, an upbeat audio cue, aspirational travel imagery and a line with the sort of chirpy confidence that becomes funnier when paired with disaster. In that sense, the meme was latent in the asset from day one.
The lesson from Jet2 is that brands cannot always control how culture uses them. Sometimes the smarter move is to recognise the energy, steer what can be steered and avoid sounding like the only person in the room who doesn’t get the joke.
What the best uses of memes in advertising actually look like
When you strip away the noise, the best meme marketing examples tend to fall into a few clear patterns.
One is the remaster: take an existing meme or viral asset, clear the rights, and reimagine it with a product truth attached, as EE did with Fenton.
Another is the brand-owned meme format: use a distinctive asset that already belongs to the brand, such as IKEA’s assembly manual, to enter cultural conversation in a way that feels recognisable and repeatable.
A third is character-led worldbuilding, where the brand becomes the source of the joke rather than a parasite on it, as with Duolingo’s owl or Nutter Butter’s peculiar fever dream of a social universe.
Then there’s reactive redirection, where a brand finds itself inside a meme whether it asked to be there or not and responds by clarifying, amplifying or channelling the moment, which is what made Astronomer and Jet2 interesting for completely different reasons.
What joins all of those examples is brand memory. The best meme ads are not merely amusing. They are memorable in a branded way. System1 and TikTok found that when brands entertain, they generate 39% more memory lift and double the brand-awareness lift in viewers. But that entertainment only accrues long-term value when the brand is clearly there in the first place, ideally through a distinctive asset, fluent character, recognisable tone or product relevance.
That’s why the worst kind of meme marketing can go spectacularly viral and still be commercially hollow: people remember the joke, perhaps, but not who told it or why. Great meme advertising leaves behind both a laugh and a breadcrumb trail back to the brand.
This is also why the old split between brand advertising and social content feels less useful than it once did. In 2026, the social account is often part billboard, part customer service desk, part editorial product and part live comedy room. The feed is not below-the-line fluff. It’s where a lot of brand meaning is now negotiated in public.
If that sounds exhausting, it’s. But it’s also why memes matter so much to modern advertising strategy. They are not a side quest. They are one of the clearest signals of whether a brand can behave like a participant in culture rather than a sponsor lurking awkwardly on the edge of the dance floor.
Here’s a ready-to-drop-in section. I’d place it just before “The future of meme advertising is originality with a pulse”, because it naturally follows the section on what good meme advertising looks like and turns the argument toward Creativepool’s practical value.
How to Use Creativepool to Discover Your Next Great Marketing Meme
The slightly awkward truth about memes is that you can’t really “source” them in the way you might source a photographer, production partner or packaging designer. By the time a meme has become obvious enough to appear on every brand’s trend deck, it is often already halfway to being dead.
The better move is to look for the conditions that produce memetic ideas: distinctive creative voices, social fluency, visual wit, strong characters, odd formats, cultural timing and people who understand how audiences actually behave online.
That’s where Creativepool becomes useful. Not because it can magically tell a brand which sound, joke or reaction image will be funny next Thursday, but because it gives marketers a way to discover the agencies, creatives, social specialists, content makers and campaign thinkers who are already working in that space.
Creativepool is a global creative industry network connecting brands with talent, agencies and companies, which makes it a useful starting point when the brief is less “make us a meme” and more “help us understand what our brand has permission to say online.”
For brands looking for a partner, the creative services directory is the obvious first stop. It lets marketers search for companies to solve creative challenges, get inspired by their work, or find suppliers across different disciplines. That matters for meme marketing because the strongest work rarely comes from “social” in isolation. It might need strategy, copywriting, design, motion, creator knowledge, production, brand identity and a very good sense of what not to say.
Creativepool’s broader company directory also lists thousands of creative sector companies with work, ratings and rankings, which gives brands a more useful route into discovery than simply asking whoever in the meeting has the most TikTok screen time.
There’s also value in looking at the work already being recognised. The Creativepool Annual is useful here because meme-led work rarely lives neatly inside a single category. It might show up as social, digital, entertainment, branded content, experiential, direct marketing or integrated campaign work.
The 2026 Annual categories include technology-driven creative work, interactive experiences and immersive content, while the 2025 winners and shortlist cover areas including social, digital, branded content, creative teams and agency recognition. In other words, it’s a good place to spot not just “funny posts,” but the kinds of campaign systems and creative behaviours that can actually carry a brand.
For inspiration, the Creativepool Magazine is just as useful as a live cultural archive. Features on the best uses of memes in advertising, social media campaigns and branded content show how meme culture connects to wider questions of brand voice, audience participation, entertainment and distinctiveness.
Meme-led social works when it builds around a recognisable voice, not when it disguises the lack of one. That’s the lesson brands should take into the search process. Don’t look for someone who can paste a logo onto a trend. Look for people who can help the brand become culturally legible enough that its own jokes start to travel.
And if the missing piece is talent rather than an agency, Creativepool’s jobs board and creative jobs pages can help brands find the people who live closest to this work: social-first copywriters, content strategists, community managers, motion designers, editors, creative producers, art directors, social video specialists and creative technologists.
Creativepool’s jobs section is built around creative, design and digital roles, with browsing by title, company and category, which is useful when the role needed is more specific than “someone young who understands memes.”
The smartest way to use Creativepool for meme marketing, then, is not to hunt for a meme at all. Use it to find the people and companies with the cultural instincts to know when a meme is right, when it’s wrong, when the brand should join in, and when the funniest possible thing is to stay quiet.
Because the next great marketing meme probably won’t come from a trend report. It will come from a brand, agency or creator with a clear voice, a sharp eye and the nerve to make something that feels alive before everyone else has flattened it into a format.
The future of meme advertising is originality with a pulse
Lucy Sutton
The most useful conclusion here is not that every brand should become “unhinged,” nor that every social team should now spend its days trying to locate the next viral sound. Plenty of brands shouldn’t touch meme formats at all, just as plenty of brands have no business trying to use online slang.
Cultural fit matters and some brands are better served letting creators handle the looser, more vernacular edge of online communication. Audiences want brands to understand culture, yes, but they still value originality, honesty and distinction more than trend-chasing for its own sake. That’s actually reassuring. It means good strategy still beats opportunism.
What brands do need is a healthier relationship with humour, a quicker route from insight to execution, and enough self-awareness to know whether the joke is genuinely theirs to tell. Kantar’s numbers on the decline of humour in advertising suggest the industry has grown oddly frightened of making people smile.
The best memes in advertising are the ones that make the work sharper. Funnier. More human
Meme culture offers a route back, but only if used with proper craft. The opportunity is not simply to look current. It’s to make work that feels alive to the way people actually talk, share and perform identity online. Done well, meme advertising can deliver brand awareness, earned reach, community participation and genuine affection. Done badly, it’s a cry for help with a logo attached.
And that, really, is the heart of it. The best uses of memes in advertising aren’t the ones that make a brand look younger, louder or more online. They’re the ones that make the work sharper. Funnier. More human. More shareable because it deserves to be shared, not because it has borrowed someone else’s momentum.
If there’s a standard worth keeping, it’s this: use meme culture to inspire better advertising, not to excuse worse advertising. The internet already has enough noise. What it still has far less of is genuinely great ideas.