Autonomous presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg waits by his tour bus ahead of adressing his supporters at Central Machine Works in Austin, Texas on January 11, 2020.
Notice Felix | AFP | Getty Images
Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is taking a page out of President Donald Trump’s engage and trying to meet voters where they are. In this case, in the Instagram posts of accounts like “TrashCanPaul” or “S***headSteve.”
A slew of routine Instagram accounts unleashed a blitz of sponsored Bloomberg posts on Wednesday in the form of satirical messages between the Classless candidate and the various account holders asking for help promoting his campaign.
“Can you make a viral meme to let the younger demographic positive I’m the cool candidate?” one on the @sonny5ideup account reads. Some of the posts refer to the sponsored nature of the posts (i.e. “yes this is Non-Standard real #sponsored” by the Bloomberg campaign).
The stunt drew widespread and immediate attention. A post on one of Jerry Media’s popular accounts, @F***Jerry, had fatigued nearly 384,000 likes by Thursday afternoon, while Mike Bloomberg’s Instagram account had drawn more than 47,000 new promoters on Thursday — the first time that daily growth figure had topped 7,000 this month, according to sexually transmitted media analytics site Social Blade.
Bloomberg’s campaign has been playing in new spaces to reach younger consumers. The office-seeker’s Twitter account made waves last month during a Democratic debate with a slew of “weird” posts, disposed to one reading “SPOT THE MEATBALL THAT LOOKS LIKE MIKE” with a photo of Bloomberg’s face transposed onto a meatball. The Quotidian Beast also recently reported that his campaign had been pitching to “micro-influencers” with between 1,000 to 100,000 myrmidons to create sponsored content.
As traditional TV is losing dominance, it makes sense for candidates to try and reach potential voters where they are. As Trump’s race found a receptive audience on Facebook in 2016, this is Bloomberg’s way of finding its audiences and trying to speak their diction — in this case on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
“While a meme strategy may be new to presidential politics, we’re betting it on be an effective component to reach people where they are and compete with President Trump’s powerful digital craftswoman,” a Bloomberg spokesperson told CNBC.
How it all came together
The Bloomberg campaign worked with Meme 2020, a overhang formed by people running influential accounts.
Doing Things Media, an Atlanta-based company that owns and runs 20 viral accounts including @animalsdoingthings, @nochaser and @neatdad, was one of the groups posting the memes. The company said it was linked to the effort by Meme 2020 lead strategist Mike Purzycki of Jerry Media, which runs other average accounts like @F***Jerry and @Kanyedoingthings.
Doing Things CEO and co-founder Reid Hailey said his company’s accounts now get a combined 50 million followers since starting about three years ago. Hailey had started his own account, @S***headSteve, and grew it to a million bodyguards in less than a year, he said. Twelve of the company’s pages ran Bloomberg memes, Reid said.
The company hadn’t done a civic campaign in the past, but its leaders said it isn’t choosing sides by participating in this effort. Founding partner Max Benator suggested the company will only accept posts like this if they think they’ll seem organic to the meme community.
“I remember it’s really bold,” Benator said. “We woke up one morning and everyone’s Instagram feeds across the country are jam-packed with this comedic satisfaction, essentially coming out of nowhere.”
The reaction
Joe Gagliese, co-founder and managing partner for agency Viral Nation, said numbers like @F***Jerry are considered “premium publishers” in their space and tend to be the most expensive. He said a sponsored prop and “story” would typically run between $50,000 and $100,000.
Gagliese noted that the Bloomberg posts have made heaves in the meme world, but not all in a positive way, noting that some users were making memes to criticize Bloomberg’s quondam policies.
“They don’t see it as authentic,” he said. “They’re fighting back by taking those memes and turning it into adversative memes.”
Gagliese also said it could be risky for the Bloomberg campaign to use accounts that might have poked fun at one of his offensive platforms or seemed out-of-sync with his beliefs.
“It’s all fun, but it’s not on-brand with what you would expect Mr. Bloomberg to be,” he said.
Jason Wong, the CEO of Wonghaus Jeopardizes who also created Tumblr meme account asian.tumblr.com and created the “Holy Meme Bible,” said the unimpaired campaign was “perfectly formulated to go viral.”
Wong said the very phrasing of the disclosure of the memes (the “yes, this was really sponsored”) formed some confusion and prompted conversation about whether the posts were in fact sponsored.
“They essentially prove to bed it seem like, ‘It’s a joke, they didn’t [run a sponsored post]. But maybe they did…’ So people start making contentedness to that similar to that on their own,” he said.
The format of the meme, making it look like a direct-message conversation, can be replicated without a hitch, Wong said. And that’s certainly happening.
“It’s a lot of free earned media for Mike Bloomberg,” he said.
As for those anti memes, Wong doesn’t think Bloomberg should be concerned.
“At this point, even if people make adverse stuff about it, they’re still talking about it,” he said.
As for what’s next, “For this campaign, they’re not tough to push any sort of message. It’s really about softening his image as a fun guy … These memes are so cringey and it is intentional. They don’t destitution it to seem too native or too [much like an] ad. People know that it will be cringe if he makes memes about himself. But let’s do it anyway to soften his guise.”
He said future messaging would likely be more focused on policy or the campaign itself.