Nike and your Lady Gaga meme future

Darryl Ohrt calls this new Nike spot epic, but we think it's more -- an explanation of how individual memes have taken over pop culture.

A meme (pronounced to rhyme with "gene") is a cultural idea or practice that, once seeded, can spread until almost everyone has adopted it. The Nike soccer players flash through victories and defeats, each result cascading into a future of fortune or disaster. In reality, memes can last a long time -- blue jeans, leather jackets, women's stockings and men's short haircuts have been around for more than 50 years. The word "cool" to represent, well, cool is a meme that stuck. God, religion, political views and superstitions are foundational memes. Other cultural units have fleeting lifespans -- pop music, women's dress lengths, goatees, the use of the word "curate" to denote managing something in advertising, the "#" hashtag symbol everyone used a year ago on Twitter that now appears to be waning. We wonder if the hipster-khaki look will ever take off. And just as each soccer player's fortunes in this Nike spot are cut short by the subsequent action of another, new memes tend to push prior ideas off the cultural table.

Mutations and marketers

British scientist Richard Dawkins thought up the idea, stating memes are cultural expressions that, like genes, mutate and spread. All you need is variation (a new idea), propagation (the ability to create copies of the idea), and something called "differential fitness" (in which some ideas are better suited for an environment than another) and a meme can take off.

Advertisers are in the business of producing memes. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the darkly funky ad shop behind psychologically dissonant campaigns such as Burger King's "King," has a core strategy of always seeking buzz behind the paid communications -- the goal of a meme replicating in society. Every "viral" campaign is a meme gone successful, if only for a fleeting moment.

But now individuals are getting in on the game. Like the soccer players in the Nike spot above, your personal future seems to hinge on whether you can send the right message about yourself to your networked peers, and have that idea scale until they erect statues of you in a public square. Lady Gaga is the best current example, and say what you will of her pop hits, you probably want to be as famous. The challenge, of course, is that in a world of limited communication inventory, the rising supply of memes and the falling demand of consumers to absorb what other people say (since they are creating their own stories) mean the value of any message has fallen. The odds of winning the meme game are shrinking because the number of slots spinning on each cultural concept wheel has multiplied. The players on the field have grown too numerous. Still, go ahead, idea-makers: kick the meme ball.