Rap stars making songs about a cartoon. TikTok influencers trying to get free movie premiere tickets. Teenagers starting a fancy attire pandemonium around the globe for a kid's movie. Just a few of the ways Minions, a movie marketed toward kids, crush the holiday weekend box office record.
For those who don’t know, Minions: the Rise of Gru is the sequel to the 2015 box office hit, Minions, which is part of the greater Despicable Me franchise. The movie launched July 1, 2022 with a budget of $80 million. Within 4 days Illumination brought in a record $125.1 million over the holiday weekend at the box office, and as of writing the movie has made over $426 million worldwide.
These financial feats were obtained largely due to the movie’s marketing efforts as well as some help from the internet.
Soon after the first trailer aired for Minions: the Rise of Gru, memes started to sprout across the internet like mushrooms. First the Tickets to X, Please memes, then by late June, the ‘let’s wear suits to the theater’ memes began to take over the internet. One TikTok gained over 17 million views in just a couple days.
Illumination also called on the help of influencers to create Minion themed content that helped get the word out. Cole Bennett of Lyrical Lemonade teamed up with rapper Yeat to create Rich Minions, the music video that was released in late June that has over 4.3 million views at the time of writing.
So, what can be taken away from this viral lightning storm?
Well, memes and influencers are extremely powerful marketing tools when utilized correctly. Another, is that content is being seen as a form of social currency, especially by younger generations.
If it isn’t going to help them (mainly by gaining popularity and notoriety) then they aren’t going to engage with it. The last thing people want is to feel marketed to, they want to be the ones marketing by starting the trend.
The last takeaway, and the most important, is that the quality of your content is dictated by your community, not you. The only way your content is determined to be quality is if it can help your people move up their social hierarchy.
So, how can you help them?
