Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Welcome to another installment of Last Week’s Meme at the Engine Digital Blog, where we investigate the latest internet meme, a week too late. I’m sure you can guess what this week’s Last Week’s Meme is, since we haven’t seen an explosion of traffic around a piece of video like this since 37 million of us took part in the much loved Rick Roll.

Yes, that’s right friends, your latest internet celebrity looks kind of like Animal from the Muppets, lives in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, and is also an estranged father looking for his daughter. (don’t get any ideas, we’ve already bought the movie rights).

If you haven’t seen Double Rainbow yet, your life is just a vacant shadow of itself until you partake in the slightly creepy/erotic experience of Hungrybear9562 describing his double rainbow sighting through a full-spectrum of emotions. You better put on headphones too, or others around you will think you’re a weirdo, and maybe put some sunglasses on as well, because you’re likely to get emotional.

The take away from this week’s Last Week’s Meme though is not that you can become famous by living in a camper. The single most important message is this: moments like a video of a double rainbow are now experienced in the context of connected users sharing across their favoured networks. So, as a brand or marketer, you should be making content that is sharable between the networks and communities you’re looking to ignite. In this case it was Youtube.

This would have been an award winning campaign for the tourism industry if they had been the ones to release this video, since they’d be emulating much of what most people do on holidays; take video. Add a nutter doing some narration, and you’ve got something that will activate the community on Youtube, because, in all honesty, much of what motivates the Youtube community is lunacy.

Instantly, everyone was sharing this video on Youtube, and how do people share on Youtube? Well they re-mix and re-contextualize, but most importantly, they share! The speed, ingenuity, and efficiency to which the Youtube community embraced Double Rainbow was amazing. You can see some of the ingenious re-memes in our posted video above, our favourite is the DOUBLE RAINBOW OH MY GOD! 2001 EDITION!

So, three things Hungrybear9562 taught us with Last Week’s Meme:

- Experiences like this are happening in one place only – networks
- Advertising content should be designed to be sharable on these networks
- Marketers should be looking for ways to activate these networks (even if it’s some crazy guy freaking out over a double rainbow)

That concludes another episode of Last Week’s Meme, this week. See you next time!

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