Future of Marketing Briefing: Memes used to be a joke. Now they’re a strategy

Last month, a U.S. Special Forces soldier was indicted for insider trading — not on stocks, but on a prediction market. He had detailed knowledge of a military operation. He bet on it. The platform where he placed those bets responded to the indictment with something close to a shrug. That shrug tells you everything about the world marketers are only beginning to understand. It’s one where a meme can move a market, and a market can become a meme. Where the internet’s lingua franca — irony, virality, the shared joke — now has real stakes attached. This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.