Communicating through Memes | Yuxuan Chua | TEDxTanglinTrustSchool
[Applause] can I just have a show of hands do you guys know what memes are oh that's great I can still continue with this talk so I think memes to summarize it it's is the puppet oh yeah memes it's you know a content or catchphrase that spreads across the internet and it goes expressed by person to person and it usually is in the form of an image or a Jif or a video and it looks something like this you know it's just some text and an image that corresponds to it but the key idea it's that it's able to spread condensed ideas in digestible shareable pieces of content about four years ago I was still a fresh graduate from University comms graduate and together with all my friends we are looking for jobs and we are looking looking looking and you know we all had the same objective we wanted to go through established organizations we want to rise up the ranks we run to rub shoulders with the giants of the tech industry of the advertising industry of the media industry and you know at a core of it we wanted people to pay attention to what we are doing we want our people to pay attention to what our work is and through my job hunts I I found these two guys who ran a mean page they make names for a living they work together with brands together with media organizations with agencies with government organizations to create content and that's a living so they offered me a job hey you wanna make me for living and to me it was really hard to refuse so I asked my then-girlfriend my wife hey about anything about this and she said yeah it's better to get a stable job okay nevermind so I asked my parents you're like yeah yeah just do everyone get a stable job and so I asked a few friends around as well and of course I did the most logical thing that anyone could do I went for this job and four years later we are a team of 75 spreading costs three countries in the Singapore Malaysia and the Philippines and we create memes and we create content for people around the region just to make the day a better one true content entertains and engages but it's a different story I'm here to talk about how means can capture attention so it means a great way to spread condense ideas and you must be thinking to ourself hey doesn't that pander to the short attention span culture that's the point I think the fact is that you know right now we are standing in such a crowded digital space and people don't have much attention to give to you they have so many options right imagine you're taking a train to work and you know you're just calling for your phone there's so many thousands of messages we just bombarded by you you know Instagram Pinterest you have to LinkedIn you have your reddit and your core us and you know your attention is really one of the most critical resources that you can give to whoever wants it from view and that's that's what we are going to talk about here right now and throughout my years in advertising or brand messaging or whatever I realized that the most important thing that the audience can pay to you is in fact attention and here's a piece of a comic strip from Calgary hops and this shows the flip side of what some form of attention grabbing things are so what he does is you know he just pokes the balloon and uh hey give me attention and there's a fine line to be drawn between this and attention that things that you do that give true value they'll get attention from you so for example um I'm pretty sure you have seen see that content or see that fights online for example Logan Paul and the other guy you know they just want to create fights that drums up behavior are their drums our attention that drums up high by then it's not sustainable and it doesn't really give true value for the audience whereas you know for example if you do memes at least you provide humor there's many things we call you can condense ideas and you can spread these ideas to your audience and that is more sustainable in my opinion okay um that I mean if you haven't heard or if you haven't taken in whatever I've said just now I think this is something that is most important so this is the kind of content that s getting the company not working for thus we create localized contextualized memes because we realize that this is what Singaporeans want if you want attention from people you had to think about their point of view the other thing about why would they be willing to pay attention to you and for us that decision was really clear at a point in time a couple of years back nine gang was really still popular and manga was churning out memes here and there and what we really wanted to create is a main page that catered to Singaporeans and we realized that all our content had to be contextualized for Singaporeans so we talked about the weather through the joker meme and because we don't have access to chewing gum here so we make it such to a you know when you open a pack of gum the classmates will come true like how the Avengers heroes come true like the portal and we write on trends as well for example Pokemon go we compare Joseph's schooling when he was young to a man he come and anyway you know he won the Olympic gold medal he became a goddess for those of you know you folks who know what pokémon is and we write on trends like the haze we Photoshop the Marina Bay Sands flyer into a huge fan to blow the haze away and we realized that if we don't differentiate ourselves from the other generic meme content pages out there we're just gonna end up like just just some random mean page and we're gonna be competing with the big boys out there maybe the US or other countries and we lose our relevance so this is what we've been doing we and we try our best to understand why people want to consume our attention why people want to give us attention and we work on that it applies on the physical setting as we are imagine you're a teacher in a classroom you can't just shut pay attention and expect your students to pay it to you for a long period of time you had to think of some way to engage them fruitfully such as they listen to you even when talking to kids you can't talk to keep the same way like you talk to adults you have to think of why they will want to pay attention to you or perhaps not relevant to some other people here in a meeting it's a corporate meeting it's professional or it's a casual meeting I think what would be really helpful is that a start of the meeting you just address everyone find out you know how the day was ask them to share a bit more about their lives so for the next 15 minutes you can get the full attention every kind of a fruitful meeting instead of one-hour meeting that doesn't amount to anything so to me the question that I like you guys the thing about is how do we get the maximum attention from people and I think as creating memes is one way that you know can cut through the clutter in this digital space and really get people to share to talk about this content and to really just talk about what is important okay the second part to this about getting attention is perhaps you can tell a story if I were to show you this image like this there will probably be no context to it and there will be no story but for exhibit Lu that actually that's me and you know that's me with a bunch of friends and military training and there was a story behind this perhaps we pay more attention to it so the story behind this is we were in Thailand in Canterbury and we had this regular helicopter flights to and fro the region and just that day after this photo was taken that night we went on this training exercise and someone in this photo he got shot by a farmer it was late at night and the farmer thought he was a wild boar and you know the farmer shot him but it wasn't a like a assault rifle or something it was a shotgun pellets but the guys I was being torn and had to go through emergency hospital it wasn't a noose so it's not yeah so I think if I were to just show you this photo and you know just give it no there's no context no story to it I think it would have been a bit vague and ambiguous but with this story you know in the last couple of minutes you probably pay attention to this and and yeah this is me jumping off a plane because we used to be from the airborne and we jumped and and this is not it is real because it's not just any Google image that you can grab for the internet I was probably in the plane I haven't jumped out yet so it's a short hop it's a short session but to summarize all of these if you want attention in this current digital space where everything is crowded everyone is trying to cut through the attention cut through the clutter and get your attention I think you have to realize that attention it's not something that is a given is earned you have to think from someone's point of view you have to think of why would they want to give you the attention you have to kill mother nature the context and environment even channel that they are going to pay attention to you to so for example if if for us as gang as a mean page we don't want to post our memes on LinkedIn we don't post on memes on Pinterest or whatever because it doesn't reach the maximum it doesn't reach a critical mass that you know the means are supposed to give you so if you want to get national attention for people remember to think from their point of view and remember that you have to earn it yeah thank you [Applause]