You want some? Itsu's meme dream in showmanship

Whilst channel hopping on TV the other night, I nearly choked on my late night chow mein. Not because it was too spicy, or because I felt guilty eating left-over Chinese that late, but because Itsu’s new adverts made me actually laugh out loud. In what I think is a genius campaign, they’ve borrowed the energy of classic internet meme characters, and in doing so created one of the most effective bits of brand building I’ve seen recently.

Take the Wealdstone Raider. Back in 2014, a shaky clip of a pint-sized football fan taunting rivals on a non-league terrace went viral. His catchphrases “You want some?” and “I'll give it ya” became cult internet memes. Itsu twists that infamous line into “You want dim sum? I'll give it ya”. It’s ridiculous, funny, and unforgettable.

Then there’s Ronnie Pickering. In 2015, a motorcyclist's helmet-cam captured a road rage incident in which a furious middle-aged man in Hull screams “Do you know who I am? I’m Ronnie Pickering!” at the seemingly unintimidated moped rider. The brilliance was that nobody, anywhere, seemed to know who Ronnie Pickering was and the clip exploded online. Even Peter Kay parodied the scene to kick off season 2 of Car Share in 2017. Itsu has flipped the gag perfectly: “It’s who?” - a cheeky pun on the brand name that’s instantly sticky.

It’s funny, it’s distinctive, and most importantly, memorable.

Memes as 'mind viruses'

The genius here isn’t just that Itsu made me laugh. It’s that they tapped into an idea that already had cultural “stickiness”. After Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene back in 1976, he went on to explain it as a kind of “mind virus”; a cultural unit that spreads, replicates and persists, often indifferent to the welfare of its host. The only thing that matters to a meme is its own survival.

What Itsu has done is tap into an existing "virus" that, just like Dawkins' idea of a meme, has already spread effortlessly through culture. By plugging into these ready-made memory structures, they've ensured their ads will land harder and stick longer than a brand-new creative idea might.

A word of caution: you can’t just copy and paste a meme into an ad and expect magic. Context is everything. Without it you risk looking like a brand trying too hard to be relevant.

The Long and the Short of It

Les Binet and Peter Field have been telling us for years that brands need both long-term emotional brand building and short-term activation. In a world that's obsessed with short-term metrics and ROI, we've forgotten that, as well as short-term sales activation, we also have to do long-term brand building. It's called 'The Long AND the Short of It' for a reason! These Itsu ads aren’t shouting “Buy now!” or flashing supermarket discounts. They’re building long-term mental availability by making you feel something.

Humour. Surprise. Recognition. These are emotions that etch a brand into memory and sew the seeds for all that short-term sales activation work to succeed later.

Salience is Everything

And this is where Jenni Romaniuk’s Ehrenberg-Bass research comes in. Growth comes from salience, and salience = mental availability + physical availability.

Here’s my own proof: before those ads, I’d walked past Itsu’s products in Sainsbury's countless times without ever acknowledging them or stopping for a second to wonder what they were. Now, thanks to the creative jolt of these meme ads, I can’t not see them. Noodle cups, frozen gyoza, sushi snacks... they now seem to leap off the shelf and into my attention.

That’s the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion) in action: once something is in your mental frame, you start noticing it everywhere. Itsu has managed to crack my mental availability, and suddenly the physical availability is now obvious too.

The Extraordinary Cost of Dull

As Orlando Wood often argues, the biggest sin in advertising isn’t to be cheesy or even to be controversial... it’s to be dull. Dull advertising evaporates on contact.

Why? Because it lacks showmanship. Orlando makes the distinction between salesmanship (rational persuasion, functional claims, blunt product messages) and showmanship (emotion, storytelling, cultural resonance, the stuff that makes people actually enjoy watching ads).

Salesmanship alone is functional and forgettable. Showmanship is what makes campaigns live in culture, stick in the memory, and spread through conversation.

Itsu’s meme ads are pure showmanship. They don’t lecture me on calorie counts or nutrition, they entertain me with humour and recognition, whilst keeping the brand front and centre. And in doing so, they make their subsequent salesmanship (whether on the shelf or online) far more effective.

That’s the trick most brands miss. They choose rational persuasion over emotional connection, instead of doing both. With this 'meme dream' of a campaign, Itsu shows us why that’s a costly mistake to make. The campaign isn’t just a clever gimmick, it’s some classy brand building to remind us that salience isn’t optional, it’s everything!

The Big Lessons for Marketers

1. Build memory with emotion. Distinctive, funny, surprising ads carve space in people’s brains.

2. Lean into showmanship, not just salesmanship. Persuasion without entertainment is often invisible.

3. Salience is the growth engine. Be memorable and findable, or don’t bother showing up.