Jump on the trend of spoofing world-famous paintings and create your own unique content marketing campaign
Spoofing famous paintings has become a new trend on the Internet
In daily life, we occasionally see friends reposting world-famous paintings on Facebook or LINE to show off their youth, or in TV dramas, we see rich people hanging two ostentatious paintings in their homes. Whether it is Van Gogh (opens in a new tab) or Picasso (opens in a new tab) or Michelangelo (opens in a new tab), which usually arouses the admiration of “Oh, what a literary youth (but this painting is too high-end for me to understand)!”
However, recently in the Japanese Twitter (opens in a new tab) community, there has been a trend of spoofing world-famous paintings. Japanese netizens use various famous paintings and quote them on the themes they want to express, creating a lot of impressive (or hilarious) content.
Like the recent hit “Learn Taiwan by looking at famous paintings (opens in a new tab)” (#名画で学ぶ Taiwan) series uses world-famous paintings to describe the moods of Japanese friends when they encounter various situations when traveling to Taiwan, such as missing the bus, accidentally getting on the MRT, and accidentally sitting on a shuttle bus, etc. Later, some Taiwanese netizens went to follow these Twitter posts and posted tweets describing “famous Taiwanese sayings”, such as “Go to the south to get dentures (opens in a new tab)” and other Taiwanese jokes.
Media reports:
Then Mother’s Day is coming soon, and Japanese housewives also use famous paintings to show off their misanthropy, creating the slogan “Learn to be a housewife by looking at famous paintings (opens in a new tab)” (#名画で学ぶhousewife industry) series of tweets describe various “mom is very tired” situations. Like a mother who has just finished raising a child for three days and is exhausted, the daughter-in-law opens the door early in the morning and sees the tragedy of her parents-in-law standing outside the door without warning, and the wife is trying to fix her husband’s “Do you have the consciousness to be a father? (opens in a new tab)” crazy expression (as shown below).
Media reports:
*Mirror Weekly: Housewife Class in Famous Painting Middle School, Netizen God Translates the Voices of a Misanthropic Mother (opens in a new tab)
A picture speaks a thousand words creatively
Some of these interesting works can make people smile immediately, while others cannot react immediately. The main difference lies in whether it allows people to immediately experience the artistic conception the author wants to express. These practices generally adopt the following techniques:
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Learn from Taiwan’s famous paintings
Learn to be a housewife from famous paintings
Reflect mood
☆Japanese tourist who ate stinky tofu for the first time (opens in a new tab)
☆Mother who accidentally let go of her 2-year-old son in a hypermarket (opens in a new tab)
Combine famous quotes
☆Go to the south to get dentures (opens in a new tab)
(Never available)
Integrate into current events
☆Military, public and educational 18% (opens in a new tab)
(Never available)
Purely funny
☆Snatch a seat in the restaurant (opens in a new tab)
☆The express delivery came at the wrong time (opens in a new tab)
Marketing techniques for combining famous paintings with products
Of course, we don’t just want the target audience to just laugh at these famous paintings and parody sentences and forget about it. How can we use these famous paintings and combine them with our own products to impress the target audience?
1. Reaction mood: Give full play to the expressions of the characters in the painting to describe consumers’ failure to use their own products, or their feelings after using them.
If the expressions of the characters in the painting can explain the feeling of using your product, add explanatory text to the painting so that the target audience can directly form an association by looking at the picture.
For example, the famous Norwegian painter Munch’s work “The Scream” has been widely used in advertisements and comedy programs. White Bear used it as an example to see what the backup software can do with the Scream.
☆ Backup software + shout
2. Combine famous sayings: whether they are idioms or popular sentences. As long as the picture can be related to the sentence and can describe the characteristics of the product, you can give it a try.
For example, a dentist can consider combining the famous painting “Go to the south to get dentures”, but remember to add the characteristics of your own dental clinic. It may be a perfect service of “no need to queue, get it done on the same day”, so that consumers can associate more with your clinic.
3. Integrate into current events: If the picture can be brought to the season or current events, and it happens to be a time when the product is hot-selling, it can be combined into content marketing. For example, the weather in Taiwan is getting hot very fast this year (2018), and everyone wants to drink some refreshing thirst-quenching drinks in the hot weather. At this time, you can combine the characteristics of the drinks with famous paintings.
Assuming that Brand A Lemonade hopes to bring consumers a “beautiful as a dream” feeling, it can consider combining the exaggerated expressions of the famous painting “The Scream”, the lyrics of the song “Change”, and lines from the movie “God of Cookery” to form a funny content marketing copy.
☆ Lemon Juice + Scream:
Note: The Norwegian Museum has opened the CC license for the “Scream” painting image. You can directly go to the museum website download (opens in a new tab).
What other good ideas can you think of that can combine famous paintings with your own products? Welcome to leave a message below to share!
★ Photo Credit: Norway The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (opens in a new tab), Twitter (opens in a new tab)
★ Make generating inspiration a habit, please sign up for the Ouchi Master Lecture on June 4: Building an Inspiration Database (opens in a new tab).
★ Vista Reading Club May Special: “Scene Revolution (opens in a new tab)”.
★ To improve your content power, please don’t miss the online course “Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands (opens in a new tab)”.
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
