Commercial Communication in the Digital Age

Tamás Csordás, Dóra Horváth, Ariel Mitev and Éva Markos-Kujbus

4.3User-Generated Internet Memes as Advertising Vehicles: Visual Narratives as Special Consumer Information Sources and Consumer Tribe Integrators

Abstract: Internet memes – highly evolutive iconic, yet topical contents with shared meanings replicated and spread by and to the Internet folk – have become a prevalent Internet phenomenon (Figure 1). Embedded in a culture of consumption, Internet memes often employ branded contents in the expression of personal messages, which often could not be farther from the contexts originally intended by organizations. Yet, there is little business insight into memes. The following chapter introduces the concept of memetics and its connection with ...