Bite Size Comms

Cast your mind back to the last time you scrolled through your social media feed and stopped. Not because of a polished campaign or a perfectly crafted press release, but because of a meme. You laughed, you shared it, and for a moment, the person or brand behind it felt strikingly human. That is the extraordinary power of the meme. But where did it come from, and what should those of us in PR and communications understand before we embrace it?

The word “meme” predates the internet. British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Drawing on the Greek word mimema, meaning “something imitated”, Dawkins defined a meme as a unit of cultural information that replicates through human behaviour, spreading from mind to mind in the same way that genes spread biologically. Think of a catchy tune you cannot stop humming, or a political catchphrase that takes on a life of its own. Yes, even those from Nigel Farage! Those are memes in Dawkins’s original sense.

The internet gave this idea rocket fuel. By 1996, the “Dancing Baby”, a looping animated GIF of a chubby infant doing the cha-cha, was circulating by email and would later appear in the TV series Ally McBeal, marking one of the first recognisable internet memes. From there, the format exploded: All Your Base Are Belong To Us (1998), Hamster Dance (1999), the raw comedy of Numa Numa (2004), and the inexhaustible universe of Lolcats (2006). Each spread because it captured something true and funny about a shared human experience, then invited others to remix and reinterpret it.

Some memes transcended the screen entirely. Pepe the Frog began as an innocent cartoon character in 2008, before being adopted and eventually reclaimed by competing political communities. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency launched as a joke based on a meme of a Shiba Inu dog, grew into a multi-billion-dollar asset. Memes, it turns out, can reshape culture, politics, and markets.

This summer’s World Cup in the United States has provided the most joyful proof yet that memes are no longer confined to screens. Norway’s “Viking Row” has become the tournament’s viral phenomenon. The celebration, with fans seated as if in a longboat, drawing imaginary oars through the water to an accelerating drumbeat and chanting “Ro!” (Norwegian for “row”), was not spontaneous. It was carefully designed by Ole Frøystad, a Norwegian primary school teacher who wanted something “short, easy, had culture in it and would have a massive impact”.

After Norway beat Senegal 3–2 to reach the last 16, their best World Cup run since 1998, players including Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard joined their fans on the MetLife Stadium pitch to row together. Videos spread across every platform within minutes. Fans rowed in Times Square, on Boston escalators, and even in fighter jet cockpits. Back in Trondheim, supporters rowing en masse created vibrations strong enough for seismologists to detect. Frøystad’s Instagram post from an earlier match had already garnered more than 38 million views.

The Viking Row echoes Iceland’s famous “Viking Clap”, the thunderous synchronised chant that captivated the world at Euro 2016. Interestingly, that was not authentically Viking in origin either: Iceland’s fans adapted it from Motherwell FC supporters in Scotland after encountering it during a 2014 Europa League qualifier. Both celebrations demonstrate something important: a meme does not need to be born online to go viral online. It needs to be shareable, repeatable, and emotionally resonant.

For PR and communications practitioners, this is more than entertaining. Memes achieve approximately ten times the reach and 60% higher organic engagement than standard communications assets. They humanise brands and invite audiences to become participants rather than passive recipients. Used well, they offer a low-cost route into genuine cultural conversation.

But, and this is substantial, the risks are equally real.

Timing is everything. The average lifespan of a meme has collapsed; what is hilarious on Monday can be desperately dated by Friday. Corporate approval chains, legal reviews, and brand sign-offs are the natural enemies of meme speed. By the time a post has cleared every desk, the internet has moved on.

Tone-deafness is unforgiving. In 2019, Chase Bank posted a budgeting meme that read as a billionaire bank lecturing millennials about their coffee habits. Twitter’s response became a PR story covered by CNN. In 2021, Burger King UK opened a tweet with “Women belong in the kitchen”, intended as an ironic promotion for a female chef scholarship but immediately seen as sexist. The apology outlasted the campaign. When memes misfire, they do so at scale.

Copyright is a hidden hazard. Many meme formats rely on images or characters that belong to someone. Using them commercially without permission can expose organisations to intellectual property claims, an area where communications teams often lack legal cover.

Brand alignment matters enormously. Memes thrive on wit and speed. They suit brands with a naturally irreverent voice, such as Ryanair or Netflix, but far less well for institutions that trade on gravitas, trust, or regulated authority. Forcing humour where it does not belong signals inauthenticity far louder than staying silent.

If you are considering memes as part of your communications toolkit, three principles apply:

• Know your audience and your voice. A meme that lands brilliantly on TikTok may raise eyebrows on LinkedIn. Test content with colleagues before publishing, and be honest about whether your brand has cultural permission to be funny.

• Speed with judgement. Monitor trends in real time and pre-agree internal thresholds for rapid social response, but build in a 30-second check for sensitivity, accuracy, and brand fit. One rushed post can undo years of carefully built reputation.

• Have a plan if things go wrong. Social listening tools allow you to track sentiment and viral spread almost in real time. Agree in advance who will communicate what and to whom if a meme triggers unexpected backlash. Memes don’t solve PR crises, as United Airlines discovered when lighthearted social posts during a controversy amplified rather than dampened criticism.

The Norway Viking Row reminds us that the most powerful memes are born of genuine emotion and shared identity, not from a PR brief. When organisations tap into that energy, the results can be extraordinary. When they manufacture it, audiences smell the effort immediately. In communications, as in life, authenticity remains the most viral content of all.

[Image of the dancing baby GIF, from Wikipedia, fair use – author unknown]