How Réson Makes Memes

A good meme works because someone sees their own week in it. Getting there by hand takes time: you need a real observation about your customers, a format that fits it, a picture that delivers the joke, and words that read at phone size. Most small teams skip memes for that reason, even though people share them more readily than almost anything else a brand posts.

Réson now makes memes as a batch. You give it a theme, and it returns a ranked set of finished drafts for you to review. This article walks through what happens in between, using a real batch from Réson's own workspace. You can also watch the one-minute walkthrough.

Start with one sentence

In Studio, choose Meme and describe a theme. For this batch we typed "Make 4 memes starring Rési, our mascot, about the small marketing chores busy owners keep putting off." A number in the brief sets how many finished memes you get, up to eight. Attach images if you want the art to use them as references.

You can also schedule batches. In Automations, a weekly meme run can produce a few drafts every Monday about whatever your customers are dealing with that week.

Research before writing

Réson first searches for what your audience actually talks about: the frustrations and phrases that come up again and again. In our batch it came back with 12 of these "audience truths". Among the observations behind the finalists:

• Second-guessing a French call-to-action late at night, with a finished promo waiting to go out.
• A business so busy with real customers that its social profile looks abandoned.
• The marketing block on the calendar that gets moved to next week, every week.

A meme built on a real observation lands better than a generic joke about Mondays.

Write wide, then judge

Three writers then draft candidates from those truths. One looks for instant recognition, one escalates a situation, and one writes the insider jokes only people in the trade will get. They work in eight formats of Réson's own: a caption over a picture, top and bottom text, two panels, a three-step escalation, a labelled picture, a two-line script, a text-message exchange, and a text post from your account.

Our batch started with 24 drafts. Five didn't meet their format's rules and were dropped. Before anything is judged, a safety screen removes candidates that name real people or other companies, copy well-known meme templates, punch down, touch sensitive topics, or state made-up facts about your business. It removed four: three named other companies, and one copied a famous meme.

The remaining 15 then went head to head. Réson compares two at a time and asks which one this audience would be more likely to share, over five rounds. Each pair is shown in random order, so the first one doesn't get an advantage. Then it picks finalists that differ from each other in format and in the observation behind them, so you don't get four versions of one joke.

Draw, set the words, check

Each finalist gets its own art. If your brand has approved characters, Réson can cast them: our workspace has Rési, a round blue mascot. We asked for Rési in the brief, and it appears in three of the four memes. The fourth, a text post, made the final four on the strength of its joke alone. The art follows your brand's visual style and never contains lettering of its own.

The words are not painted into the picture. Réson sets them as live text, fits each block to its space, and frames the picture so that captions don't cover the subject's face. Then it looks at the finished file the way a viewer would. It catches words that don't fit, a picture that doesn't deliver the joke, or stray lettering in the art. When something is wrong, it repairs only that part: it rewrites the words, or redraws the one picture at fault. All four memes in this batch passed on the first look.

What you get back

The batch arrives in Studio as drafts, ranked. Each one shows its format, its rank in the batch, whether the finished-file check passed, and a line on why it should land. For the top meme here, that line reads: "Every bilingual Canadian business owner knows the exact late-night fatigue of second-guessing a French call-to-action." The top-ranked meme also comes as a short motion version, paced so the punchline hits at the right moment.

You can change the words of any meme, or its size: square, 4:5, Stories (9:16) or landscape. The same art is laid out again for the new size.

Nothing is posted without your approval. Every meme goes through the same review and scheduling as the rest of your content.

Learn what lands

Social platforms don't hand per-post engagement back to Réson, so after a meme goes out you record its shares, saves, comments, likes and reach in the meme panel. Visits through tracked links are added automatically. Shares count the most. Over time, the formats that work for your audience get more of the next batch, and your best performers are shown to the writers as examples.

To try it, open Studio, pick Meme, and tell it what your customers are dealing with this week.