These Taxpayer-Funded Memes Are The Most Wholesome Thing On The Internet
Earlier this month, a government agency let a one-word tweet fly from its verified account. No, it wasn't scandalous or subversive tweet. It was… well, it was this:
"Horses" sat divorced from any context at the top of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission's Twitter account for two whole hours. That was enough time to capture the internet's interest, rack up a couple thousand likes and earn a blog post on Digg dot com.
Finally, the US CPSC — a government agency dedicated to promoting safe practices around the things people buy every day — granted us relief and some much-needed context in the form of this meme:
The explicit message? Put a new battery in your smoke alarm.
The hidden truth? The CPSC is one of the world's best meme accounts. And that's all thanks to the agency's social media specialist, Joe Galbo.
Before moving to the private sector, Galbo worked in pharmaceutical advertising as a copywriter for McCann. When he became the CPSC's social media specialist in 2016, he took with him some important lessons he learned in the advertising world.
"There's a lot of time and money spent to make people love objects," Galbo told Digg in a phone interview. "The companies who create the products we regulate spend a lot to make you love their products."
Galbo also attributes his "meme-centric strategy" to old ad industry conventional wisdom.
"Memes themselves are built on classic ad best practices," he said. "What memes added is a touch of surrealism." Galbo also explained one of the things he likes about communicating messages through internet humor is that it's a good way to present information so that it can be understood and consumed at a glance.
That the CPSC's message is especially easy to understand is important because, as Galbo is well aware, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is not among the most well-known government agencies.
"You don't see us in movies, you don't see us on TV," he said. "We have to introduce people to what we do. So we're taking all of your expectations about a federal agency and flipping them on their heads."
The strategy has proved effective for a handful of reasons. For one, wholesome memes had a culture moment — which Galbo says he's familiar with, though tries not to take too much direct inspiration from places like Imgur, Reddit and Twitter for fear of starting to sound redundant.
Perhaps more importantly, the extremely meme literate Millennial and Gen Z cohorts are careening through life's many milestones, becoming avid consumers of potentially dangerous products.
But most importantly, they're becoming parents. Galbo said that parents make up the agency's biggest target demographic.
"Protecting children is such an important part of our mission," he said. This is why so many of the page's memes depict extremely heart-warming parent-child relationships.
That's really it. There's no extra catch or complication to the CPSC, it really is that wholesome. In this age of cynicism and irony poisoning, that might be hard to believe, but I swear it's true.
Need more evidence? At the end of our interview, I asked Galbo if there was some final message he wanted to get out about his agency and its work. Here's what he said.
"We're not here to sell you something, you don't need. Just take an extra second to think about your safety. Think about the safety of your family."
