Meme 2020: How The Bloomberg Campaign Changed The Role Of Memes In Modern Politics

n recent years, internet memes have made their way into numerous advertising campaigns, appearing in billboards, physical junk mail, commercials and more. However, until this year, politicians failed to make use of memes as a major tool in their election campaigns -- that is until Bloomberg launched a campaign on Instagram with the help of a company called Meme 2020. If you’re unfamiliar with this project, let’s briefly explain what it is, and why it’s such a significant milestone in meme history.

In early 2020, Bloomberg’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination began heating up as he spent a whopping half a billion dollars on his campaign by advertising with commercials, billboards and yes … memes. With an average of $5.5 million being spent per day, Bloomberg outspent every single one of his Democratic rivals combined by more than $190 million (including fellow billionaire Tom Steyer), making his primary campaign the most expensive in history.

In January, as a part of this advertising push, Bloomberg and his staff began working with a newly formed company called “Meme 2020,” comprised of some of the most influential social media accounts around with each boasting millions of followers across several platforms. Behind this company is Mick Purzycki, executive director of Jerry Media, best known for their massive accounts such as Fuck Jerry, Beige Cardigan, Dude With Sign and several others.

Before the posts appeared online, Purzycki reportedly contacted many influencers outside the Jerry Media circle (such as Tank Sinatra and Kale Salad), working closely with them to cast a wide net across social media.

On February 12th, the campaign launched on Instagram with over 20 accounts on the platform posting screenshots of fake direct messages between them and Mike Bloomberg’s official account as sponsored content (seen below). Though some of these did include the use of Instagram’s “Paid partnership with” function that specifically lets users know the content is part of a paid promotion, many of them only mentioned this within the caption.

In addition to these posts from the accounts that participated, several influencers on Instagram also commented on them with various messages. One such example of this comes from Josh Peck, known for his role on Nickelodeon’s TV show Drake and Josh, who commented on the Fuck Jerry ad with “The choice is clear.”

The reception to this push was initially met with confusion by many users on the platform, as seen in a comment by @branmuffin7 who asked, “Is he really reaching out to all these meme accounts? I’ve seen similar posts from multiple pages today with this.” As time went on, many began criticizing them either for “shilling” and agreeing to use their influence to assist in his presidential campaign or for supporting Bloomberg as a candidate in general.

Perhaps one of the most surprising individuals to condemn the ads was none other than Josh Ostrovsky (better known as The Fat Jewish on Instagram), who’s no stranger to criticism himself. On Tank Sinatra’s post, Ostrovsky’s comment, “Tank you’re a beautiful man, but this is an L,” became the top reply with over 3,100 likes (shown below). Ostrovsky was allegedly approached to participate in the campaign but turned the offer down.

Public opinion aside, how well did these “memes” actually work for Bloomberg? Well if you ask George Resch, director of influencer marketing at Brandfire and founder of Tank Sinatra who acts as Meme 2020’s “primary liaison with the meme community,” it did quite well. In a quote from Resch, he said it was “the most successful ad that I’ve ever posted,” attributing the success to the confusion as to whether or not it was an actual paid promotion.

On February 26th, additional advertisements from the Meme 2020 campaign were seen popping up on Instagram yet again -- this time from high-powered accounts with millions of followers each, including Nugget, Wasted and Worldstar Hip Hop, who posted a video of a man directing a model during a photoshoot that zooms in on his screen to reveal the message, “This is a Bloomberg ad” (seen below).

Though some of the ads did make use of Instagram’s official branded content tag, others did not. Facebook recently announced that these types of sponsored memes for political campaigns would be allowed on their platforms, so long as they adhered to the company’s policy on properly disclosing that information. According to a recent article by New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, most of the accounts that participated on February 12th and the 26th retroactively updated their posts to add the official sponsored content tag.

While it seems no one is exactly sure about the compensation these accounts received for their participation, an article from 2019 on HuffPost states that Jerry Media makes about $30,000 per post by running ads for brands like Burger King and Bumble. Recently, The Daily Beast reported that micro-influencers (with followers between 1,000 to 100,000) on the branded content marketplace Tribe who created content supporting Bloomberg would be offered $150 for their contributions.

Some of these ads have also since been deleted. Though the exact reasons for this are unclear, it’s likely that the accounts who participated only did so after fulfilling their end of the bargain. Lorenz explained in a tweet (shown below) that many of these accounts are paid a certain amount to run an ad for a specific amount of time and that afterwards, they delete them to keep their feeds clean of ads.

Apart from the Meme 2020 project, the role of memes during the 2020 presidential election has been unprecedented to say the least. There have been numerous meme formats spawned from many of the Democratic debates held throughout the primary election, though most were short-lived.

Perhaps one of the biggest memes to surface during this period was the Bernie Sanders "I Am Once Again Asking For Your Financial Support" series that widely circulated across social platforms from Twitter to Reddit, even winning Know Your Meme’s “Meme of the Month” contest in January. In contrast however, these memes arose organically, rather than being a part of a strategic campaign backed by a candidate themselves.

Another example showcasing the intersection of memes and politics was seen after Bloomberg’s Anti-Trump Billboards were posted to his official Twitter account on February 21st. After his initial tweet, users on Twitter began editing the original images of the billboards to criticize or mock the presidential candidate.

These more organically created meme examples from recent months share many similarities to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, where online users created memes either supporting Trump or mocking Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton. So while these may not prove the influence of memes and their use as a political tool on a new, unprecedented level, Bloomberg’s Meme 2020 campaign that originated from his own staff -- paid for with his own money -- certainly marks a historic milestone in meme history.

Does this mean we’ll continue to see the use of meme culture in the 2020 election and future political campaigns? Only time will tell, but it’s likely a sure bet.