A few months ago, two people climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and flew a flag that read, “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.” It was a powerful message, and it was immediately diluted when brands jumped in for cheap clicks, turning the flag into a meme template and replacing that message with a bunch of jokes.
That was the moment I realized I’m so tired of meme marketing.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud” piece where I long for the days when brands were sterile and every post sounded like it went through six levels of legal review. But I do want to talk about the state of meme marketing in 2026, because over the last few years it’s gone from a powerful playbook to what feels like the only playbook brands use. And the weirdest part is, I don’t even think it’s working anymore.
So how did we get here?
Before Brands Had Personality
Believe it or not, there was a time when brands didn’t try to entertain you on social media. Corporate social media used to be painfully boring. Every post sounded like it had gone through six rounds of legal review, because it literally had, and every reply was some variation of “We’re sorry to hear about your experience. Please send us a DM.” Brands acted like corporations, because they are corporations.
Then Wendy’s decided to break every corporate norm.
If you were on Twitter in the mid-2010s, you probably remember the day Wendy’s woke up and chose violence. They started roasting competitors and customers, making jokes nobody ever thought a billion-dollar company would make. And people absolutely loved it. Their Twitter account blew up overnight, and mainstream news outlets started covering their tweets. Most interesting of all, for the first time, people weren’t following a brand for its products. They were following because Wendy’s was genuinely entertaining.
Looking back, it’s easy to lump Wendy’s in with every other funny brand account. But if we do that, we miss what actually made Wendy’s successful. Yes, the jokes were funny, but more than that, they were surprising. Nobody thought a Fortune 500 company would ever behave like this, and the novelty was the marketing. Roasting people on Twitter isn’t some brilliant strategy. Everybody does it, except brands didn’t at the time, because none of them had the courage to try. It was new, and that’s what made it stick.
The Brand That Changed Everything
Following Wendy’s success, more and more brands started pushing the envelope over the next few years, experimenting with different brand voices and leaning away from corporate and toward entertainment.
Then Duolingo came along and shredded the envelope entirely.
Duolingo took the idea of a brand account posting the occasional meme and built an entire persona around it. They took Duo the Owl and gave him running jokes and recurring lore, all with the underlying reminder: do your Spanish lesson, or vanish. It was a massive success. Duolingo started making major appearances in pop culture, to the point where their mascot became a genuine internet celebrity in his own right. By tying their app to the content, Duolingo became one of the biggest brands of the early 2020s.
Of course, other brands were watching, and they wanted a piece of that pie. They’d soon find out that Duolingo’s success wouldn’t be easy to replicate.
The Copycat Economy
Duolingo spent years intentionally building a whole universe around their brand, full of in-jokes and lore. What they built couldn’t be replicated through a simple marketing strategy. That didn’t stop brands from trying to replicate it through a simple marketing strategy.
Instead of asking “Why does this work?”, brands started asking “How can we do this too?” A formula was extracted from Duolingo’s success, and it’s impossible not to notice, because now, in 2026, every brand is self-aware. Every brand is chronically online. Every brand is quirky and unhinged. And all of them are missing what actually made Duolingo’s strategy successful: novelty.
It’s the same thing that made Wendy’s successful in the 2010s. But one brand’s novelty can’t just be retrofitted onto every other brand.
To be fair, some brands do understand this distinction. Take Nutter Butter. They were clearly inspired by Duolingo, but they put their own unique spin on meme marketing, one that feels more akin to tripping on psychedelics. And that’s great. Not the psychedelics part, but the Nutterverse and its cryptic lore give the brand a unique presence that keeps audiences coming back.
It’s also worth saying that humor naturally works for some brands and not for others. That’s totally okay, but it’s important to recognize where your brand falls on that spectrum. Because, I’m sorry, the last thing we need is a quirky, chronically online TSA. Please, just let me get to my gate.
I think this disconnect is a big part of the meme marketing fatigue we’re seeing on a wide scale today. The harder brands try to have a personality, the more they end up sounding like every other brand, because at this point it’s just the meta. Marketing is more creative than ever, yet somehow it feels less original than it’s ever been.
Brands Are Renting Culture
From here on, I’m going to stop calling this phenomenon meme marketing, because that’s not really what’s happening anymore. It’s closer to reaction marketing. A lot of brands have relegated themselves to a formula where they don’t even try to create anything original. Instead, they take whatever is trending that week, coat it in their brand’s paint, and post it.
And it works, sort of. The trends these brands jump on are instantly recognizable, which drives strong engagement. But then the viewer scrolls and sees the same trend from another brand, and another, and another. None of these brands gain any tangible equity from their posts. They’re just hijacking a trend. People may like the post in droves, but they register it as the 21st brand to do the trend, not as something coming from a specific brand.
That’s the issue with reaction marketing. On the surface it looks like what Wendy’s and Duolingo did, but it’s inherently void of the novelty that made them pioneers. Fatigue sets in when brands can’t tell what should and shouldn’t go into their reaction inventory for the week, like the flag we talked about at the beginning.
This cycle is becoming increasingly transparent, too. Something genuinely interesting happens. People talk about it. Then hundreds of brands show up asking, “How can we make this about us?”
In the case of the Empire State Building flag, I’m not saying those brands had bad intentions. Quite the opposite. I think most of them are so stuck in this cycle that they’ve lost any intentionality beyond chasing engagement metrics. It’s why it feels like nothing online is allowed to just exist anymore. Every meaningful cultural moment becomes fodder for brands, and they’ve completely given up on creating those moments themselves.
Borrowing attention from trending culture is very different from creating something viewers will actually associate with your brand. Wendy’s pioneered a new expectation for how brands could behave online. That’s novel. Duolingo created one of the internet’s most recognizable characters, complete with recurring lore. That’s novel. Today’s brands are settling for reacting to everybody else’s ideas.
The Duolingo Paradox
From a surface-level perspective, this works, right? Reaction marketing gets likes, shares, and comments, and sometimes it even goes viral. But step back and ask what it’s actually building for the brand.
Engagement and brand equity aren’t the same thing. Just because someone engages with a post doesn’t mean they’ll remember who made it. I could show you ten funny brand posts right now, and I bet you’d love most of them. I also bet you won’t remember who posted half of them by tomorrow. That’s because reaction marketing is built on borrowed attention.
The most ironic part is that brands have spent years trying to copy Duolingo without realizing that copying Duolingo is the least Duolingo thing you could possibly do. Duolingo wasn’t successful because it followed internet culture. It used trends to create its own internet culture and did things no other brand would do. Duo the Owl gave the brand a personality through running jokes and lore. Nobody was waiting with bated breath to see which meme Duolingo would react to next. They were waiting to see what Duo would do next. The memes were never the strategy, and that’s what every brand copying the formula is missing.
Funnily enough, I think Duolingo has started to lose sight of that too. Over the last year or so, they’ve leaned into the reaction economy, and their novelty has diminished as a result. The last time Duolingo got attention for something that felt truly novel was when they killed off Duo the Owl, which is weirdly symbolic.
Some might chalk this up to the natural life cycle of meme marketing: what starts out disruptive eventually becomes familiar. But I think it has more to do with the fine line between meme marketing and reaction marketing, and even Duolingo has proven it isn’t above crossing that line.
Closing Thoughts
I want to be very clear: I’m not saying brands should stop making memes or stop being funny. But a lot of brands have sacrificed building real brand equity for cheap clicks and engagement. Most have stopped asking “What can we create?” and become far too focused on which trend they can hop on next. And when every company chases the same trends, using the same templates, making the same jokes in slightly different fonts, nobody stands out.
