![]() Hailey spent his childhood in suburban Atlanta as the unrepenting class clown. Tradition has never appealed much to either Hailey or Lucas. “We were like.‘Let’s go all in on memes.’ ” Lucas moved to Atlanta to join Hailey a year later. “It’s a better source of customer acquisition than going the traditional advertising route.”Īfter winning early deals to create ads for Gucci and Hinge, Lucas and Hailey decided to join forces, founding Doing Things in 2017. “Leveraging memes is cost efficient,” Lu says. He looks out over the next few years and sees a bidding war between establishment media firms who want to snap up newcomers like IMGN and Doing Things, prizing them for that ability to generate inexpensive marketing that doesn’t look like marketing. (Neither IMGN nor Warner Music would comment for this story.) That price tag seems like it could be a steal to Jerry Lu, an investor at Advancit Capital, a media-focused New York VC firm. In August, Warner Music purchased IMGN Media, another meme-making company that’s roughly the same scale as Doing Things, for a reported $85 million. And traditional media is starting to pay attention, too. There’s New York-based Fuck Jerry, for one, their most well known rival. Hailey and Lucas aren’t the only ones doing this type of thing. This keeps the low-brow content at a polite distance from their traditional marketing and doesn’t draw attention to the meme post being an ad. These corporations pick which of Doing Things’ Instagram accounts will run their meme ads, and the brands don’t always publish the memes on their own accounts. Doing Things MediaĪlong with Bud Light, other advertisers have included Dole food, Crocs footwear, Netflix, Hulu, T-Mobile and Activision video games. Doing Things ran the memes the day of the Super Bowl and continued to for nearly a week. ![]() One of 18 memes starring hip-hop artist Post Malone that Bud Light paid Doing Things Media to create. The beer giant wouldn’t comment on exactly how much it spent, but it probably cost around $500,000, roughly a tenth of the Super Bowl ad’s price. In all, Doing Things has created 50 such meme posts across four campaigns for Bud Light over the past year. Then, in February, when Bud Light wanted to extend the life of its Super Bowl spot starring Post Malone, Doing Things created meme ads featuring the rapper that ran on seven of the company’s Instagram accounts, reaching roughly 20 million people. ![]() For Bud Light’s yuletide marketing, they came up with an image of two guys joking about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reinbeer, who turns out to be a crudely Photoshopped Bud Light can with antlers and a cherry-red schnoz-dad humor at its finest. Their Doing Things Media quietly runs some of Instagram’s most popular meme accounts, like (7.9 million followers), (6 million) and (4.6 million), and they also specialize in creating ads that resemble memes. When Bud Light wanted to end 2019 with a Christmastime digital ad campaign, the beer giant turned not to Madison Avenue’s mad men but to two 29-year-old dudes in Atlanta: Reid Hailey and Derek Lucas.
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