Meme is a concept that has become popular and is spreading through the word of mouth, email, blogs etc. It may be a video, picture, text, etc., especially humorous in nature, which gets recreated by the user and reaches a large audience, with some slight variations. Internet meme is an idea or a concept which is popular through the Internet media. It contains visual elements and photos with witty text, jokes, urban legends, viral videos, funny pictures or contagious music. This paper provides details about meme. How it originated, Why meme is popular, use cases of meme and tools available to create memes. ‘Meme’ is pronounced as ‘meem’, which rhymes with ‘seem’ or ‘team’. An evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in 1976, introduced the term meme. ‘Meme’ originated from the Greek word "mimema" (which means "somewhat imitated"). Dawkins described memes as a form of cultural propagation, through which people can transfer social memories and ideas to one another. Modern internet memes are humor-centric (e.g. Dog Shame, Ask a Ninja, Lolcats, Dancing Baby, Domo-kun, Numa Numa Dance). Most common type of internet memes is about shock-value and drama (e.g. Angry German Kid, Dogs Go to Heaven). Other memes are urban myths that taught some kind of life lesson (e.g. The Littlest Fireman, Mel Gibson and Man Without a Face, Kurt Warner). A few internet memes are about deep content, and involve social commentary and intellectual absurdity (e.g. Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell's Orbiting Teapot). In a few cases, a meme can become a conversational expression as well as a viral curiosity (e.g. You Mad Bro ). Through memes, cultural or personal experience is shared among people, rapidly, and at a fast pace like fashion.

1. MEME
A RapidValue Solutions Whitepaper

2. Contents
02A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
Executive Summary...............................................................................................................
Origin...................................................................................................................................
Types of Memes....................................................................................................................
Why are Memes Popular ?......................................................................................................
Use Cases: Role of Memes in Today’s Life................................................................................
Using Memes in Marketing Campaigns..........................................................................
03
03
03
04
05
05
Memes Speak To Target Audience................................................................................
Marketing Using Memes..............................................................................................
Benefits of Using Memes in Marketing Materials.......................................................................
Creating Memes....................................................................................................................
How to Make an Effective Meme for Your Business?.......................................................
05
05
05
06
06
Five Tips for Creating Memes.......................................................................................
Meme Making Tools...............................................................................................................
Develop Meme Generator Application in Android...........................................................
Conclusion............................................................................................................................
06
07
07
11
References............................................................................................................................
About RapidValue..................................................................................................................
11
12

3. Executive Summary
Origin
Types of Memes
Meme is a concept that has become popular and is spreading through the word of mouth, email, blogs
etc. It may be a video, picture, text, etc., especially humorous in nature, which gets recreated by the user
and reaches a large audience, with some slight variations.
Internet meme is an idea or a concept which is popular through the Internet media. It contains visual
elements and photos with witty text, jokes, urban legends, viral videos, funny pictures or contagious
music.
This paper provides details about meme. How it originated, Why meme is popular, use cases of meme
and tools available to create memes.
‘Meme’ is pronounced as ‘meem’, which rhymes with ‘seem’ or ‘team’. An evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins, in 1976, introduced the term meme. ‘Meme’ originated from the Greek word "mimema" (which
means "somewhat imitated"). Dawkins described memes as a form of cultural propagation, through
which people can transfer social memories and ideas to one another.
Modern internet memes are humor-centric (e.g. Dog Shame, Ask a Ninja, Lolcats, Dancing Baby,
Domo-kun, Numa Numa Dance). Most common type of internet memes is about shock-value and drama
(e.g. Angry German Kid, Dogs Go to Heaven). Other memes are urban myths that taught some kind of
life lesson (e.g. The Littlest Fireman, Mel Gibson and Man Without a Face, Kurt Warner). A few internet
memes are about deep content, and involve social commentary and intellectual absurdity (e.g. Flying
Spaghetti Monster, Russell's Orbiting Teapot). In a few cases, a meme can become a conversational
expression as well as a viral curiosity (e.g. You Mad Bro ). Through memes, cultural or personal
experience is shared among people, rapidly, and at a fast pace like fashion.
03A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
I See What You Did

4. The first characteristic of memes is that they're viral. Today, people use internet primarily for
entertainment. Because of this reason, sites like Facebook and YouTube are popular, and companies like
the Cheezburger Network have built an entire Internet empire from witty pictures and videos. Internet is
one of the major sources of recreation and people spend time watching videos, pictures in Internet. In
this way, a meme becomes viral.
● Easy to make - A basic understanding of Photoshop and a good sense of humor is what you require
to make an interesting and mind catching meme.
● Easy to consume - As memes are simple images, with a few words printed on them, they are easy
to understand.
● Shareable - Just ensure you’ve got social media accessibility and contacts.
● Familiar - Although, a person may not be familiar with the specific context or reference, memes are
easy to understand.
● Funny - Mostly, all successful memes have an element of humor, which makes them attractive.
Therefore, people love to share them with each other.
● Facilitate Interaction and Communication - These involve people - facilitate communication and
increases people’s interactions. They create a community where people understand a particular
reference or identify, with a message, and can share it with the like-minded.
Memes are Viral
04A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
Why are Memes Popular ?
In the present era, people use web as their primary means to express and explore their interest, feelings
etc. and thus, internet memes have risen in popularity. For example, a Lolcat (pronounced "lull-cat") is a
meme in which people attach different human behaviors and funny captions to the images of cats.

5. Memes Speak To Target Audience
Using Memes in Marketing Campaigns
Marketing Using Memes
Although memes might look simple and trivial, they play an important role in the business world. Today
professionals try to make memes to convey messages which attract people and stays in their mind for
long. This is the main reason why advertisement professionals try to utilize and promote memes as much
as they can.
Creating a meme is not enough, it should reach the audience, effectively. Memes have to be
understood by the people they target, their language has to be simple, and one has to get the sense
of humor of the artist. When a meme is developed, it must be relevant to the situation and must have
the ability to spread all over the Internet, fast. Such a meme will surely be an attention grabber.
When marketers attach brand messages to already-trending memes, it helps audiences remember the
brand and relate to it.
05A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
Benefits of Using Memes in Marketing Materials
i. Easy to create and in-expensive - Websites, like memegenerator.net, help users to find a popular
meme and customize it using their own text. You can upload your own images, also.
ii. They establish an emotional connection with the audience - Memes, usually, use humor as their
content. Contents that have emotions (humor, especially) become more popular among people and
spread faster.
iii. They’re already popular - Content, that are already popular, can also, be used in memes. For instance,
“newsjacking”, “memejacking” are effective ways to infuse the meme into the trending content.
Use Cases: Role of Memes in Today’s Life
Memes had influenced the whole Internet users and also, the modern language and culture. As they have
a unique characteristic and are also, inexpensive, they play a major role in advertising, marketing and
promotions. Memes have changed people’s lives by making them famous and popular.
For web professionals and copywriters, Internet memes are much familiar. The effect produced by an
internet meme is more powerful as compared to the power of a video or an image that is carefully shot.
Internet memes, when passed on from one person to another, spreads vast knowledge and much
information.

6. Creating Memes
How to Make an Effective Meme for Your Business?
There are many ways to create a good meme. While creating an effective meme, for your business, first
think about finding the right image to be used. The images can be either the picture that you have taken,
images of animals or people or any animated picture. Open source meme is freely available and popular
memes can be found by searching the web. Several sites will show meme based images which were much
popular for a long time and also, the ones which are presently, trending.
The chosen image and the overall meme should match your brand or your company in one way or the
other. While developing memes, it must be noted that it has to be clever, witty so that it helps to make
your meme go viral. Think about your goals and how you want your audience to react when they
associate the meme with your company. Once you have the theme, you can pick the image and then,
develop the text.
Some popular themes or text ideas are :
● Animals quoting human beings
● Babies behaving like adults
● Images or popular dialogues of popular characters from television shows or movies
After choosing the right image, you can think of the appropriate words or quotes that match your image.
These tags must be attention grabbing so that your company or product gets highly noticed. In this way
you can run a mini advertisement campaign instead of going for the expensive ones. After developing a
funny or clever meme, as per your need, it’s time to share it on social media. Use the social media
channels and contacts for publicity and the memes that grabs the most attention should be considered
for advertising campaigns.
Five Tips for Creating Memes
● Know your subject - Before creating a meme you should know the exact purpose of creating it.
It becomes easy for you to grab the attention of your audience.
● Study the experts - Before creating a meme, do a thorough study on different memes of the same
type so that you can grab a particular joke formula and create some variations of your own.
● Make several drafts - If you come across a funny idea, try to have different versions of same joke
so that you can get the right wording. Memes are like poetry: selection of words, according to
theme, is important.
● Ask for feedback - It is important to get suggestions or feedback from others. They may have
different idea for the same thing you have created. This helps you to go close to perfection.
● Have fun - While creating memes you should also focus on being funny rather than serious.
Audience must laugh and enjoy while reading them.
06A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015

7. Are you an Android developer? Interested in creating a meme generator application? If yes, then you can
go through the following steps which give you an idea about creating a meme, programmatically, in an
Android. We would like to share some sample code, which is available in github, (courtesy: Jason Yu) for
generating memes in Android.
As you know that in order to create a meme, first we need to select an image. So consider an application
which has an option to select particular image from gallery or camera of your device. After selecting the
image, you probably need to edit it as text over image. To achieve that, a separate editor view will be
used.
Step 1: Pick an image from gallery/camera roll of your phone
Sample code snippet to pick an image from gallery of phone
Develop Meme Generator Application in Android
Meme Making Tools
There are several sites that allow you to make memes for free, but have a watermark of their own at the
bottom. This can be taken care of if you are handy with the Photoshop design tool. You can create your
own meme which, you feel, would be ideal for your brand.
Sites like www.memegenerator.net and www.memesly.com, help you generate memes for free. They
also, show you the most popular and trending images, too. The sites allow you to add the top text and
bottom text and then download the image, which is royalty free.
// Intent for calling gallery
Intent importFromGalleryIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_PICK,
android.provider.MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI);
// Intent for calling camera
Intent importFromCameraIntent = new Intent(MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE);
// Add a property that it will store full-size output to
makeCacheImageUri() which return Uri of the cache image
importFromCameraIntent.putExtra(MediaStore.EXTRA_OUTPUT,makeCacheImageUri());
// Intent to include camera and image intents
Intent chooserIntent = Intent.createChooser(importFromGalleryIntent,
getResources().getText(R.string.chooser_intent_title));
chooserIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_INITIAL_INTENTS,
new Intent[] { importFromCameraIntent });
startActivityForResult(chooserIntent, IMPORT_IMAGE_RESULT);
// Create a temp uri for camera
public Uri makeCacheImageUri(){
// Store image in dcim
cacheImage_forPassing = new
File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()+"/DCIM/","tempCameraImage.png");
Uri imgUri = Uri.fromFile(cacheImage_forPassing);
return imgUri;
}
07A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015

8. 08A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
Step 2: Get image path of image from intent
This need to handle on onActivityResult() callback. Sample code here:
// Method that will be call when the action pick is completed
public void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent intent)
{
super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, intent);
if(requestCode==IMPORT_IMAGE_RESULT&&resultCode==RESULT_OK)
{
// If there is intent
if(intent!=null)
{
// If there is data inside the intent
if(intent.getData()!=null){
String imagePath;
// Get the image path of the image
if(intent.getData().toString().contains("file:///"))
{
imagePath = intent.getData().toString();
imagePath = imagePath.substring(7);
}else
{
Uri pickedImage = intent.getData();
Log.i("Uri", pickedImage.toString());
String[] filePath = {MediaStore.Images.Media.DATA};
Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(pickedImage,
filePath, null, null, null);
cursor.moveToFirst();
imagePath=cusor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(filePath[0]));
cursor.close();
}
// Forward the image path to the next activity
forwardImagePath(imagePath, MemeEditorActivity.class);
}
}
}
}
Step 3: Pass the image path to Editor Screen
// Method for forwarding a image path to the next class
private void forwardImagePath(String imagePath, Class<?> targetClass)
{
// Put the image path to the intent with the variable name
// "cs4295.memcreator.imagePath"
Intent forward = new Intent(selfRef, targetClass);
forward.putExtra("cs4295.memcreator.imagePath", imagePath);
startActivity(forward);
}

9. 09A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015
Step 5: Add upper and lower text over image
This is accomplished with the ‘use Meme Editor View custom view class’ which uses onDraw() method to
add upper and lower text. The lower and upper text is written, using canvas, which will set the text above
the image.
// Set up the color and flags for the paint
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setColor(0xFF000000);
paint.setFlags(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG);
// Draw background
canvas.drawColor(R.color.meme_background_color);
// Draw the bitmap with the transform matrix
canvas.drawBitmap(bitmap, transform, paint);
// Add font to the canvas
if(showUpperText)
{
textPaint.setTextSize(upperTextSize);
strokePaint.setTextSize(upperTextSize);
Rect bounds = new Rect();
strokePaint.getTextBounds(upperText, 0, upperText.length(), bounds);
canvas.drawText(upperText, this.getWidth()/2, bounds.height()+20,
textPaint);
canvas.drawText(upperText, this.getWidth()/2, bounds.height()+20, stroke-
Paint);
}
if(showLowerText)
{
textPaint.setTextSize(lowerTextSize);
strokePaint.setTextSize(lowerTextSize);
canvas.drawText(lowerText, this.getWidth()/2, this.getHeight()-30,
textPaint);
canvas.drawText(lowerText, this.getWidth()/2, this.getHeight()-30, stroke-
Paint);
}
Step 4: Decode image and set into Editor View
Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(imagePath);
memeEditorView = new MemeEditorView(this, bitmap);
memeEditorView.setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(memeSize, memeSize));

10. Step 6: Finally save the meme image that is created
// Set up the color and flags for the paint
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setColor(0xFF000000);
paint.setFlags(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG);
// Draw background
canvas.drawColor(R.color.meme_background_color);
// Draw the bitmap with the transform matrix
canvas.drawBitmap(bitmap, transform, paint);
// Add font to the canvas
if(showUpperText)
{
textPaint.setTextSize(upperTextSize);
strokePaint.setTextSize(upperTextSize);
Rect bounds = new Rect();
strokePaint.getTextBounds(upperText, 0, upperText.length(), bounds);
canvas.drawText(upperText, this.getWidth()/2, bounds.height()+20,
textPaint);
canvas.drawText(upperText, this.getWidth()/2, bounds.height()+20, stroke-
Paint);
}
if(showLowerText)
{
textPaint.setTextSize(lowerTextSize);
strokePaint.setTextSize(lowerTextSize);
canvas.drawText(lowerText, this.getWidth()/2, this.getHeight()-30,
textPaint);
canvas.drawText(lowerText, this.getWidth()/2, this.getHeight()-30, stroke-
Paint);
}
10A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015

11. Conclusion
Memes, used as a part of marketing efforts, definitely, can grab the attention of users. It helps in
increasing your reach and facilitates branding efforts. For marketing team, it can be a fun and an exciting
project. It must be well-planned and propagated through social media to increase the reach. This will
increase your chances of making them popular among the target audience, followers, and customers.
Meme creation and promotion is more delicate and requires a lot more patience and tactics.
Some memes have the tendency to become annoying. Like few marketing tactics, memes can backfire.
Before creating meme-inspired marketing materials, it’s important to consider your audience.
In addition, there is always the chance your readers take offense to the meme. Consider the
consequences a meme will have on your audience before its publication.
References
1. Meme :
http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/weirdwebculture/f/What-Is-an-Internet-Meme.htm
2. Newsjacking :
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/01/brand-marketing-newsjacking-next-level/
3. Memejacking :
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33363/Memejacking-The-Complete-Guide-to-Creating-
Memes-for-Marketing.aspx
4. Meme generator application :
http://www.androidauthority.com/best-meme-generator-apps-for-android-531044/
11A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015

12. RapidValueEnablingMobilityMobility Information Series – Jan 2013
About RapidValue
RapidValue is a leading provider of end-to-end mobility, omni-channel and cloud solutions to enterprises
worldwide. Armed with a large team of experts in consulting, UX design and application engineering, along with
experience delivering global projects, we offer a range of services across various industry verticals. RapidValue
delivers its services to the world’s top brands and Fortune 1000 companies, and has offices in the United States
and India.
If you’d like more information on this topic, please do write to the authors, Suma A,
Software Engineer at suma.a@rapidvaluesolutions.com and Sr. Software Engineer, Pradeep Menon, at
pradeep.menon@rapidvaluesolutions.com.
www.rapidvaluesolutions.com www.rapidvaluesolutions.com/blog
+1 877-643-1850 contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions - October 2015