If you’re on this article, let’s start by welcoming you to JustMediaThings! We hope our meme stash tides you over the struggles that you face in these unprecedented times, now and in the future.
Since this is our first article, we decided to write about how JMT came to be and little bit about ourselves. Earlier in the creation of JMT, we had not put much thought into how to identify ourselves, so we went by Admin1 and Admin2. Nowadays, we call ourselves Panda and Moose instead for better identification. Why? There’s no real reason, just like your Suntec City carpark that uses random animal names for each section. Even if there was a reason, I’m sure you guys wouldn’t remember. Have you ever heard anyone say “I park at the East Wing Red Zone near Zebra there”? If you have, I would suggest avoiding that friend. Probably a psychopath.
But enough about that, you’re probably more interested in how JMT came to be.
It all began during a coworker’s farewell dinner. Panda stared deeply into my eyes and said, “Bro, we should start a meme page”. After 2 seconds of deep thought, I agreed with my mouth still full of samgyeopsal. “Okay, steady we make meme page together confirm f**king funny one”. Of course, where were other motivating factors, like the fact that there weren’t many media agency meme accounts, and even with the existing ones, it just wasn’t enough memes for our intake. Most meme pages are from western countries and aren’t super localised for our consumption. At that point, we had been making memes and sending them to our group chats anyway, so we thought – why not just share them to more people?
That was what we had felt about the “meme landscape” for a while and after deciding to create a meme account, we convened later on the same night to decide on the name of this new page. We had a long and deep discussion on it, with some back and forth before coming to a conclusion. A name, after all, had to be impactful, easy to say and easy to remember.
The handle was unfortunately and unsurprisingly taken, so we had to settle for a slight modification.
“Eh if only got like 5 or 6 posts people won’t follow one. Let’s try to front load our memes” – Panda 2k19.
“So, we gotta set to pacing ahead?” – Moose 2k19
Our goal was to upload 100 memes within the first week, but we managed to hit the target within 3 days. Achieving this of course came at the cost of spending every single minute of our free time outside of work to think of our content.
To our surprise, there were about 500 people who followed us within the next 5 days.
We realised that people liked our content, so we just ran with it and the rest is history.
A look at how we make memes:
Panda and I usually spend our weekends looking at memes on twitter and reddit as a way to relax. At the same time, it allows us to find meme formats that we can use or formats which are suddenly trending. Generally, Panda finds the new memes, and I QA the copy. Together, we brainstorm on appropriate punchlines and captions and make sure the phrasing is appropriate for posting. Please find attached screenshots of our “creative process”.
As most people would imagine, managing a meme page is not as difficult as managing a brand page since we don’t technically have a “fixed” schedule to adhere to. We answer to ourselves and honestly, a lot of the pressure comes from ourselves to create content. Though we don’t have a “brand” alignment, most of the work goes into scheduling a certain meme, making sure themes are not repetitive and ensuring that punchlines are not lost in their delivery.
The quality of our memes’ aesthetics is something we take a lot of pride in. Panda, who is generally responsible for the creative, would often remind me or tell me off when the image colour is a little off, or if there is a higher resolution image that we could actually use. Cropping and watermarking is also important; Panda often nails it down to the pixel, sometimes even telling me to “move the watermark to the right by 3 pixels”. This is the reason why our memes always look very clean/crisp (or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves).
Community and Engagement:
Fast forward to November 2020 and we managed to hit a 10k milestone with the help of this supportive community. Till today, this community is growing and we are still trying to figure out how this happened. Frankly, we never thought that we would gain followers beyond our immediate circle, much less attract the attention of people from the media industry. I suppose this is what some of our followers consider as success, but follower count has never been one of our targets. Which is also why it feels weird to receive hate messages because we really don’t think we are “popular”/”famous” enough to be targets, but we still receive them once in a while. What matters to us most is your engagement on our content so that we can refine and deliver the most relevant memes to you guys, who are the at heart of everything that we do.
Just Media Things was created in 2019, during the peak of the dreaded 11.11 period. All we wanted to do was to poke fun at our miserable lives and hopefully inject some humour into our workplace, but through our milestone QnAs we quickly realised that this could be so much more than a simple meme account. We could actually make a small impact by providing the community with some of our perspectives.
Making memes has not been easy for the both of us, especially with our full time jobs to juggle, but receiving well wishes and being able to have conversations with people from all walks of life has made it all the more worthwhile to spend our time doing this. If either of us had been running this account alone, we probably would not have made it this far with the account.
Our future, and where we are headed:
This account has evolved a little from the meme page that we were on instagram, but we don’t have any intention to stop creating memes. At our core, we are still a meme page. Our objective has always been to bring humour to the table and shed light onto some of the things about the industry. With pain that transcends borders, it only goes to show that there are some parts of this industry that needs improvement. We hope that through our content, we can bring about awareness to these areas and as our followers and readers move up the career ladder, thereby bringing about some change in the future.
The creation of this website is simply another outlet for us to create longer forms of content and engage with you, the community. We hope that you guys will continue to consume and enjoy the different forms of content that we produce. As always, our platform is always open for conversation and if there’s one thing we can promise, it’s that we at Just Media Things keep anonymity an utmost priority.
After all, it’s the basis of how we are able to run this account too.
And with that, thanks for reading our first article.
– Moose