Adam the Creator

Submission 13,354

Part of a series on Fan Art. [View Related Entries]

About

Adam the Creator is the online handle of Adam Padilla, a New York City digital content creator and brand strategist who has garnered a large social media following by creating and sharing original iterations of memes on Instagram.

Online History

On June 9th, 2014, Adam Padilla, a brand strategist living in New York City, New York posted the first entry of a year long project to post a new, original sketch every day on his personal Instagram ^[1] page. The first sketch, which featured a man eating a woman's body, received more than 15 likes. Several days later, he posted it on his alternate account @adam.the.creator,^[2] where the post (shown below) received more than 100 likes.

Over the next two years, he continued to post sketches of various cultural figures and memes, such as Heath Ledger's the Joker (shown below, left)^[4] The following year, on January 27th, 2015, he announced that he had received more 7,500 followers (shown below, center).^[5] On February 9th, 2016, he posted a sketch of crying Michael Jordan, which received more than 1,200 likes in two years (shown below, right).^[3]

On June 24th, 2016, Padilla posted one of his first memes, which he would eventually transition his main focus toward. In an Instagram^[6] post, he superimposed a picture of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump onto a Burger King Mac and Cheetos food item. The post (shown below) received more than 1,300 likes in a year and a half.

Several months later, he posted a parody Fisher-Price toy for called "Toddler's Happy Hour Playset." Within one year, the post (shown below), received more than 4,000 likes.^[9] However, because some thought the toy was real, Fisher-Price mad a statement. They said,^[10] "Fisher-Price even issued a release that recognized the humor and assured parents that they are not involved in the parody."

On December 31st, 2017, Padilla began posting sections of a collage he had made featuring the memes of 2017. These included references to Salt Bae, The Ting Goes, Cash Me Ousside, the Weinstein Effect and more. The final section received more than 17,000 likes in less than two weeks on Instagram.^[7] (entire collage shown below).

Reputation

Padilla is known as a successful brand strategist, who has consulted for celebrities, startups and Fortune 500 luxury brands. In 2016, Business Insider named him one of the 29 best people in advertising to follow on Instagram.^[8]