Who is @digital_chadvertising, the ad industry’s self-appointed memelord?

In recent years, the page has also become a valuable source of industry gossip. The account’s creator frequently posts screenshots of direct messages from his followers, many of which air out confidential details about forthcoming layoffs at their organization or share insider knowledge.

Building on the hype of his page, the creator sells a range of adland-focused merch, including sweatshirts that draw inspiration from the Pornhub and Supreme logos and a smattering of mugs and stickers. He also publishes Drip Sequence, a newsletter that curates ad industry news and insights with the same ironic, self-aware style as the meme page. It covers marketing and advertising headlines and key trends, from cookie depreciation developments to adtech earnings reports.

When The Drum meets with the creator of @digital_chadvertising in San Francisco, he speaks candidly about everything from why he believes industry professionals spill their secrets to him to the economic health of the ad industry and why meme culture is infiltrating brand strategies at scale.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I’ve been all over the place – agency-side, adtech-side, client-side and even some personal freelance and [consulting] on the side. There are times when I’m up at, like, 2am on a Saturday, pounding Modelo, doing something for someone. Or, you know, I’ll help with some social media activation, but they’re in another part of the world, so I’ll be up at like 4:30am on a Tuesday. So the hours are wacky. But that’s why we have caffeine, I guess.

I feel I’m pretty transparent. I come off as a bro-y dude who likes skateboarding and hockey and I make fun of a lot of things.

How was the @digital_chadvertising account born?

I started my page when I was super hungover on New Year’s Day in 2019. I was vomiting in my bathroom and I just thought it would be funny to start the account.

It was during an era when all these meme pages for different industries were proliferating and I felt left out because there wasn’t anything for advertising. So I made it to make fun of myself. And I kind of let Pandora out of the box forever.

What other meme accounts inspired you?

The finance meme pages were literally everywhere. They kind of provided the template on what to do, which is basically making fun of job roles, making fun of your execs and all that kind of stuff. It has kind of been the format for every single corporate meme page.

How quickly did you see the page’s following take off?

The original plan was to delete the account by the end of the month or maybe after two weeks. But after the first week or two, it really just blew up out of nowhere. I didn’t know how. I was just kind of a little shit-stirrer – I didn’t really have any organic growth strategy or plan. People join the whole content creator scene to become famous – I just wanted to make fun of myself. I just wanted to kick the hornet’s nest, I guess.

What does your creativity and curation process look like? How do you source and create the content and how do you decide what is posted to your feed versus what is posted on your story temporarily?

In the beginning, I just made fun of my personal experiences. A lot of my early memes were personal vignettes of what happened to me or what happened to my agency or my org. But as things evolved, I started making fun of current events, like Google kicking the can down the road for third-party cookie deprecation.

It kind of made me realize that this industry has almost endless content – like, everything is just so wacky. It’s so easy to meme – sometimes to the point where I’ll just make 20 memes in a row. Other things have had real impact, like when I posted about the cockroaches at Omnicom. Apparently, it had to close the office for a week to do a deep cleaning. I’m wondering, ‘Did I do that?’ because I was making fun of it and then people were talking about it on Fishbowl.

What are some of your favorite memes that you’ve made?

The Spotify Wrapped video versions, because I do all the editing myself. The Instagram account @justmediathings started the whole Spotify Wrapped parody trend. Allegedly, they’re two guys in Singapore, but they were the first ones to do a Spotify Wrapped meme. Now, everyone does it. But I wanted to take it a step further and also flex on my editing skills, which are very rudimentary, really. I screen-record my own Spotify Wrapped and I just edit over it. It differentiates me from other meme accounts because everyone else just takes a screenshot and they just put a label over it. My memes often have music, too – I’ll have Sexy Red playing for no reason on news about layoffs. Adding music and video is always kind of fun. I do like making video memes, but they are very taxing, especially since I do it on my phone. It’s just five hours of pinching and zooming and uploading.

Are you often approached by brands to collaborate? Do you monetize any of your content?

I mean, the money was a lot more free-flowing when the economy was more Gucci. Once the layoffs started to come in, I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ But right now, some of the best monetization areas for me come from leaning into one-off projects or consulting things. Once in a while, the sponsored posts come through, but the more consistent money comes from helping out on social media activations.

In general, what kind of feedback do you get from folks in the industry?

It’s either people sharing insider information, like, ‘Oh, this is happening’ – usually layoffs – or complaining about something in particular. People also kind of see me as an outlet to… troubleshoot some things. There have been technical questions that I’ve posed on behalf of inquiries I receive and people discuss it. So, in a way, it’s kind of like a giant Slack channel on my Instagram Stories. I pick the best direct messages I get and try to just kickstart a dialogue by posting it on my Story.

What is it about an account such as yours that inspires trust in people? Why do you think so many folks in the ad industry confide in you about the goings-on at their organizations internally?

I honestly have no idea why people trust me. I’m flattered that they do. Maybe they understand that I have no reason to ever report. I’m not a snitch. I’m not sure if the whole ‘bro’ vibe makes people trust me, too.

Do you think that sometimes people share private information with you because they want to be anonymous whistleblowers and they want you to publicize those secrets?

Yeah. There have been times when something happens, I share it and then it hits the news a day or two later or several hours later and people are like, ‘No way.’

You’ve made a conscious choice to remain anonymous since starting the account nearly six years ago. Why?

It’s just more fun. And on top of that, the anonymity lets me be a little more transparent about some things. Because if I say certain things and people know who I am, it creates a certain level of distrust. I mean, there have been times where I’ve had meetings and there’s someone from Reddit pitching and I look them up and they actually follow me. If people knew who I was, they’d probably be a lot more guarded about what they would say around me.

In your view, how has meme culture impacted the advertising and marketing industry?

A lot more companies are more willing to lean into the memeification of things. It’s kind of the way advertising has always been – they just try to go where the eyeballs are. And it’s just proven that the consumer is more receptive to unhinged content. That’s just going to win. Advertising has always kind of rewarded the disruptors in whatever media channel that exists. So right now, many of the disruptors are just being unhinged.

I don’t see that going away, especially when you have Gen Alpha, who are kids right now, growing up in a memeified culture. They’re super insane. I visited my friend a few days ago and his Gen Alpha daughter and her friend were asking for a ‘fanum tax.’ And I didn’t know what that was. They were like, ‘That’s food.’ And then they called me an ‘edgemogger.’ They said, ‘We’re bullying Alabama now.’ I didn’t have any context. If the industry thinks the millennial meme stuff is unhinged, just wait until Gen Alpha becomes consumers.

Does leaning too hard into memes and ‘unhinged’ content work for every brand, though? Can it sometimes read as inauthentic, depending on the brand and the context?

Yeah. It only works if you’re a certain kind of brand, such as a consumer packaged product – for example, Nutter Butter. It’s a brand that no one’s really thought about in a while. And it kind of benefits from people who just swing down the right grocery aisle and make an impulse purchase. You’re trying to sell a snack that people just pass by all the time and [for that kind of brand, meme culture works in its favor]. If you’re trying to sell a mesh router for your home wifi system, probably not.

What are the biggest trends you’ve observed in the ad industry since starting the @digital_chadvertising account?

Unfortunately, layoffs have been a recurring theme. It’s been nonstop for two years at this point. The industry has changed because of the fact that we have been entering an era of quantitative tightening for a while. And advertising has always benefited when there’s a low interest rate environment. You think about the early days of the Obama administration – the economy was recovering and interest rates were nuked. As a result, companies like Facebook were able to become major ad platforms. Advertising has always been kind of intrinsically linked to interest rate policies – when rates are low, money’s easy to obtain and ad spend goes through the roof. And agencies just make money hand over fist. So when things tighten, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to care about profitability.’

The Fed cut rates in September and additional cuts are expected next month. Do you anticipate that this will have an impact on ad spend in 2025?

I’m not an economist, but, probably. This is based on what I’ve experienced so far. It’s always just going to come down to a new brand raises a ton of money and it wants to penetrate the market and the only way to do so is through advertising, because I don’t know how else you’re going to do it.

What have you learned or what has been surprising to you in the process of running @digital_chadvertising and having an inside view into the industry?

What has surprised me? Almost everything, really. There’s always something that blows my mind when hearing about the way things work in the industry. I have a follower who has hopped around from place to place and they just tell me the inner workings of certain things – like, for a publisher, it has a ton of programmatic DSPs and those DSPs are all kind of playing hot potato and reselling the inventory before it gets to the advertiser. So we’re all kind of buying inflated prices. I’m not sure if I was supposed to share that.

With the trust that you’ve established among industry insiders and the kind of content you share, you’re often acting as much more than a curator. In some ways, you’re like an analyst or a cultural commentator. Do you see yourself in that way?

It’s weird to have me labeled like some analyst when I was just a pothead in college who picked this degree because of one episode of Mad Men. But it’s just unavoidable. In my career field, I had to be analytical and it just happens naturally. There are some things happening; people want to know why and it’s worth discussing.

But a lot of my content is from people contributing. So, I want to say I’m more of an aggregator than an analyst because for the people that follow me, it kind of democratizes their POV. I think that gets us closer to the truth than just some random influencer saying, ‘This is my POV.’ I’m able to corral multiple POVs together so that people can see a more distinct picture of how things are going in the industry.

Tell me a little bit about your newsletter, Drip Sequence, and how that project was born.

I felt like every newsletter was just kind of a glorified press release or a circle jerk, like, ‘Look at this cool creative by Droga5,’ or whatever. I just wanted a headline roundup and something that’s more nitty gritty, behind-the-scenes. So I started with a compensation chart [that I created from original research to compare compensation across different regions, ages, levels of seniority and job functions in marketing]. The whole idea of Drip Sequence is to have something that provides you with top-down information so you get a glance at the industry. My Instagram story goes away after 24 hours. And I think having a newsletter that you can hang on to – something to reference back to – can be useful. It’s also providing some deep-cut information that you wouldn’t really get anywhere else.

You’ve made it clear that you have a lot of other commitments outside of running @digital_chadvertising, Drip Sequence and the merch store. How do you balance your everyday work with these ventures?

I don’t. It’s just kind of chaotic. I’m pretty much free-balling everything. As a one-man operation for the meme page, the newsletter and other things in my personal life, obviously, I’ve got to sacrifice some things, such as sleep. I’m human, you know.

There are some dudes who can sacrifice sleep and just grind all the time. I don’t know if that’s even real – you see all these faux entrepreneurs on Instagram and they’re like, ‘I wake up at 4 am, drink my own urine, run 10 miles and run 10 businesses.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, man.’

What’s next for @digital_chadvertising? Where do you see the account going?

I have no idea. I didn’t think this was going to happen. I didn’t think I was going to even get 1,000 followers. I didn’t think I was going to have a merch store. I didn’t think I was going to have a newsletter. I didn’t think I would have an anonymous profile written about me several years later.

Can you share a prediction about the future of the industry with us, based on what you’ve learned in the process of running @digital_chadvertising?

Everyone leaning into the content creator scene is inevitable. With the way legacy media has been going, people just kind of want to lean into their favorite content creator or influencer, which I’m kind of ambivalent about. I’m not really all for it, even though it benefits me. I know people work at publishers that need the revenue and all of the attention. Some companies are leaning towards hiring people – I see job listings for content creators. They’re trying to develop their own creators like Corporate Natalie or the Work.Retire.Die creator Jack Lawler – they want to have an in-house content creator.