From laughter to ratings: Myself Allen Swapan, Rantages and the power of meme marketing

"Myself Allen Swapan", a spin-off to Shihab Shaheen's 'Syndicate',  has become one of Chorki's most successful ventures. The show recorded two crore minutes in only eight days of release, which was the highest on the streaming platform within that period.

While a lot of work – both in terms of the content and the marketing – was behind the success, another interesting component on the promotion side was the use of a meme competition.

The show right from the get-go, created a viral phenomenon. 

To celebrate the release of the show, Chorki partnered with Rantages, a Bangladeshi meme-sharing platform, to host a meme competition.

That competition further bolstered the movie's success. 

To give us insights into how "Myself Allen Swapan" became a success story of the meme marketing culture, The Business Standard spoke to Rumman Kalam, founder of Rantages.

How meme drives market

Meme marketing is significant because it enables businesses to have a more intimate, personalised and emotional connection with their target group. 

It fosters a sense of relatability and inclusiveness through humour and pop culture references. 

Meme-sharing communities are some of the most engaging, active, and creative communities on the internet. 

"Rantages has 37,000 members of which about 36,000 are currently active. That's a huge number of active members generating content. Meme platforms are like hubs for content creators. They share the memes in their personal pages as well. This gives any campaign a double-layered effect."

"Users sharing the memes on multiple platforms also helped in creating the social media narrative [Myself Allen Swapan]. As long as they were being shared at the same time, we were okay with that," said Rumman.

So what hit the mark with Chorki's campaign? 

Shelf-life is an important factor for any digital content and more so for memes. In spite of garnering viral traction upon creation, memes also run the risk of losing relatability as soon as the shelf life runs out and the trend changes.

"While most clients don't understand the significance of certain timelines, Chorki was that one platform onboard with our idea. They presented us with an idea of wanting to host a competition where everything needed to be done quickly," said Rumman. 

Over the years, Rantages worked with many campaigns, but success wasn't always a guarantee. 

Photo: Rantages

But after years of trial and error, their success was looming over the horizon.

"We've been around for 14 years. You actually will come across people who grew up with Rantages. They bring in that much required passion as well.", added Rumman.

Tried, tested

The use of meme for promotional purposes isn't brand new. 

The most popular streaming service in the world, Netflix, has a meme page that produces content specifically for their TV shows and films to increase audience engagement. Bangladesh media, too, has joined the meme race.

But creating a meme isn't just about having a sense of humour. This is where Rantages played a key role.

"The movie's screenshots and clips would be used as templates for the netizens. What Rantages Goatposting did was to engage some of the best content creators of the scene in the group, who went on to set the tone for how those meme templates would be used for the greater social media audience. In essence, Rantages Goatposting was sowing the seeds of viral memes through the group," he said.

From passion to productivity

"The competition had around 400 user-generated content that needed to be checked by the moderators. But if they did that in a short span of time the computer would crash. The primary challenge was the fact that Facebook does not hand you the tools for operating campaigns like these," narrated Rumman.

"We also had to develop the tools to procure all the data. It was a huge process that took intensive engineering," he added. 

Even though all these take up almost 24 hours of moderation and quality controlling, so why does Rantages still organise these contests? 

It's the idea of creating a community or a platform that can have a greater value and impact. "It is also working as research material for us as we are planning to launch our own platform later on."

In this day and age, memes aren't just amusing things to look at while scrolling online.  

The social media evolution means memes are now powerful tools for generating conversation, promoting fresh ideas and much more. 

In terms of creating a phenomenon or a frenzy, nothing reaches people faster than memes.