Fuck Jerry, the joke-stealing Instagram account most famous for helping make Fyre Festival such a roaring success and pissing off pretty much every comedian who’s ever heard of them, is not known for its scruples. It comes as no surprise, then, that some of the people behind the company are involved with another disaster in the making: Mike Bloomberg’s attempt to meme his way into the presidency.
Spotted on Twitter by users like Josh Billinson, Fuck Jerry has been posting enormously bad sponsored content of the kind Bloomberg’s team is currently commissioning. It’s joined by other big social media accounts who seem eager to accept cash in exchange for the opportunity to shill for the nominee in the pseudo self-effacing style made famous by corporate internet brands.
The format is the same throughout all of the examples we’ve seen. Mock-up DMs show Bloomberg’s campaign contacting popular accounts asking to have memes made that show that multi-billionaire Mayor Stop And Frisk is actually really hip. The punchline is that Bloomberg is not cool, flipped into some form of self-aware joke and topped off with a description mentioning that the post has been #sponsored.
With posts as awful as these popping up all over, it isn’t shocking to learn that Fuck Jerry isn’t just one of the soulless drones taking Bloomberg’s money, but is also involved in the campaign strategy on a larger scale. A New York Times article from Taylor Lorenz lays out further details of this collaboration, describing how Bloomberg’s team are working with a recently-formed company called, we regret to inform you, “Meme 2020,” which is led by Jerry Media/Fuck Jerry chief executive Mick Purzyck and includes team members like head of creative Evan Reeves, also Jerry Media’s creative director.
Lorenz reports that Purzycki “tapped a number of large influencers who he had formed relationships with through his association with Jerry Media” in January and that Reeves worked to “build a self-aware ironic character around Mr. Bloomberg.” You can see exactly what that looks like in the above posts.
While it’s easy to dismiss everyone involved with this awful social media campaign, the strategy is appealing to the kind of people in Fuck Jerry’s corner of the internet. Lorenz quotes “the teenager who runs the meme page @BigDadWhip” as saying “I would be down—bread is bread” and that it “would be kind of dope” to “say I helped a presidential candidate.”
Read highlights from Lorenz’ story through a Twitter thread filled with excerpts or check out the entire article here.
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