For much of modern advertising, we were taught to remember campaigns as films. There was the big idea, the television commercial, the launch, the media plan and, eventually, the award entry. A campaign had a beginning, middle and end. If the film was memorable enough, people remembered the brand along with it. The Internet has made that much messier. And, in many ways, that much more interesting.
Today, people may encounter an advertising idea through a meme or Reel before they ever see the film. A creator might explain it, mock it, remix it or accidentally become part of it. A six-second clip might travel further than the 60-second hero film. Sometimes, what people remember isn’t the original piece of advertising. It’s what the Internet did with it.
CeraVe’s Michael Cera campaign is a good example. Rather than asking a Super Bowl film to carry the entire campaign, the brand spent a month seeding an absurd conspiracy that actor Michael Cera had somehow created CeraVe. It enlisted 450 influencers and pushed the story through social and mainstream media. By game day, it had generated 9 billion earned impressions. The Super Bowl commercial then revealed the joke.
The interesting part isn’t the scale. It’s the architecture. The campaign gave people something to speculate about, discuss and pass around. Advertising became a piece of Internet culture before it became a piece of television.
Coca-Cola’s return of ‘Share a Coke’ in 2025 offers another clue. The original campaign was built around seeing your name on a bottle. Its latest iteration added digital personalisation, creator-made templates and a ‘Memory Maker’ that lets people create and share their own videos. The physical product, social content and personal memory now form one connected experience. This changes what memorable means.
We used to optimise the campaign for recall and repeat value. Today, we should be thinking about re-entry points. How many different ways can an idea enter someone’s life? Through a creator. A reaction. A meme. A product interaction. A conversation with a friend. A piece of music. A moment that gets reposted months later.
It also raises a question about the campaign itself as the basic unit of creative thinking. A campaign assumes a relatively controlled journey: brand creates, audience receives. The Internet has made that journey far more circular. Brands put ideas into culture, and culture decides what happens next.
This is where creators become particularly important. Their value isn’t simply their reach. They understand the native grammar of the communities they participate in. They know which formats people respond to, what gets shared, what gets remixed and what gets ignored. Bringing creators in after the campaign has been made can miss the more valuable opportunity—letting them influence how the idea is constructed in the first place.
The same applies to short-form content. A six-second video shouldn’t necessarily be treated as a truncated television commercial. It can be the entire idea. A meme can carry the strategic thought. A creator can become the medium. This doesn’t mean the 30-second film has become irrelevant. Great filmmaking still has extraordinary power. What has changed is its relationship with everything around it. The question for creative teams becomes less about making one memorable thing and more about designing an idea with enough elasticity to generate memories in different places. That requires a different kind of creativity. We need to think about what audiences might do with an idea, rather than only what we want them to see. We need to leave room for interpretation. We need to understand the communities an idea might travel through. And we need to recognise that the most memorable expression of a campaign may emerge somewhere the agency never planned for.
Advertising has spent decades trying to control its message. The Internet has made control increasingly impossible. Perhaps that’s a good thing.
Because when people take an idea, add something to it and pass it on, the brand has moved from being something they saw to something they experienced, participated in or helped remember. The campaign still matters. Increasingly, though, it may be better understood as the starting point of a cultural life rather than the finished product.
