ROFLcon II: Internet culture and marketing collide

It was a gorgeous weekend in Boston, so I did what any self-respecting web professional would do – spent two days inside surrounded by my pasty colleagues at ROFLcon II, the Internet culture conference dedicated to understanding how and why memes work. I wasn’t alone. 900 people had the same idea and, as we descended on MIT Friday afternoon, it felt like a homecoming of sorts. We had found our people.

Here were the in-jokes and viral videos we spend our days LOLing at, made flesh. From the guy with the boombox rickrolling us all in person as we waited in line, to Brad O’Farrell (founder of playhimoffkeyboardcat.com) dressed as Keyboard Cat and lugging a Casio, it was a little like Disneyland for geeks—and I mean that in the absolute best way possible. Because ROFLcon is an event for insiders, for those of us who have been poking around the web since long before ad agencies realized there was any potential there. Those of us who came of age in the era of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. And, in my case, those of us who have been trying to reconcile a career in digital advertising with a passion for the digital underground.

ROFLcon has been described as “SXSW for web memes” and it’s an apt description. All weekend I felt like this is what SXSW must have been like before the MBAs showed up. Every so often you’d hear an offhand comment about “the marketers”, as if we ad types were some sort of alien species that has no overlap with the geek core audience. Not necessarily true, but online marketers could learn a lot by stepping back and listening to the indigenous peoples of the Internet. Here are a few things I was reminded of at ROFLcon:

• Web subculture started because of marginalization. Alienated people reached out to find others of their kind and the first social networks were born. The Social Web is not new, and advertising didn’t invent it. The Internet is inherently social and has been since the first emails were exchanged.
• Content has been going viral since the Internet began. As marketers, we like to think a good idea is all it takes to makes something shareworthy. In fact, delivery mechanism (the network) is as essential to viral success as the nature of the content.
• Web culture is about permissiveness. Copyrights, when they exist at all, are often gleefully violated. Content is co-opted, remixed and repurposed.  If brands want to play, they need to loosen the reigns and get over the sanctity of brand standards. It’s okay to let people play.
• The foibles of others make for great entertainment. Being relentlessly positive doesn’t always work and it’s okay to poke gentle fun at human failure.
• Even the most carefully designed and vetted project can take on its own life once it gets into the hands of users. Be flexible and don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself or your efforts—no one wins over the crowd by getting defensive.

As digital marketers, we are playing in someone else’s house. The party has been raging for more than a decade without us and we should be eternally grateful we’ve been allowed in at all.  If we want to be trusted as content providers we need to know our web culture and history and respect those who preceded us. The Internet has evolved wildly since its inception and will continue to do so, but when we know where it all comes from it’s a little easier to understand how we got where we are. And that makes it easier to understand what works in the space.

Which brings me back to the Media Lab at MIT, where I watched artists battle it out in a SuperArtFight, covering giant canvases with illustrations of memes. No one had to explain the jokes—we all got them faster than the artists could draw. And that’s exactly why I was proud to sacrifice my late spring tan and frolic with the geeks I’m happy to call my own.