The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Art. Lets fix that.

0:00Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, the algorithm doesn't care about your art. Let's fix that. Specifically, I'm going to be talking about the problem that no one wants to hear, how we can get the algorithm to care about you, your story, your brand, your art, and a little deep dive on the power of memes.

0:30Welcome back to another edition of the Art Marketing Podcast. Absolutely thrilled to have you. And I'm really working on building in series and having one episode hand off to another and hand off to another and really make it feel a little bit more connected. I'm still going to keep doing one-off episodes here or there as the inspiration strikes. But if you recap to the first seven episodes that I've done this year,

1:00I'm really trying to come at the same kind of a problem that I know all of you guys are dealing with from a whole bunch of different angles, right? And so what have I taught about so far on the podcast? The fact that story matters. I've talked about the one metric that matters. I've talked about context files. I've talked about prompts in the coffee shop test and the comedian mile on IG Live, right? Or the comedian model, rather. And in the coffee shop test, you know, you learned that oftentimes the default behavior is to have a one-dimensional feed, right?

1:32And the feed could really just be a proxy for anything. Yes, I'm talking about Instagram because it's the most important for artists, but it could be Instagram. It could be Facebook. It could be Pinterest. It could be your emailing, any communication that you're doing, right? So the coffee shop test really sort of called that out one way. And the comedian model talked about you need to learn to test new material, right? Now, here comes the next uncomfortable step in all of this. You kind of have to be entertaining. You have to be entertaining. And I've come up with a new analogy,

2:04which I think works in all of this, which is what I'm now going to start calling the gallery wall problem. Most artists treat all of their marketing like it's a gallery, right? You walk into the gallery, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art. The problem with that is that nobody walks through a gallery on their phone at 11 p.m. on the couch. Nobody wants to visit a gallery when they're pushing a stroller on their way to the park at 10.30 in the morning. And people don't necessarily want to walk through an art gallery

2:35when they're sitting on the couch waiting for their name to be called at the doctor's office. They just want some short, simple entertainment. And really, social media, our marketing, especially in today's day and age with these screens, it's just a TV channel. It's a television channel. And I know TV channels are sort of going away for most of us. But TV channels need programming between the commercials, right? They need programming between the commercials. Your art posts are the commercials. What's the show? What's the show? And I think my central thesis in this

3:06is that spend less time posting your art and more time being entertaining and more people will actually see your art. And that sounds totally backwards, I know. But the data, my lived experience, says it's not. I can't believe I just said that, my lived experience. Where did I hear that from? It's just a stupid statement. Anyway, let's talk street cred. And let me just start out by saying this. You guys think you have it tough with art and photography and creations? Try hawking business software for artists

3:38that specialize in helping artists market their creations, okay? Your content is at least beautiful and colorful and has composition and brings people joy. My content is like trying to get small children to take their cough medicine. Or if you were staying with my grandmother in the early 80s, you're shot of cod liver oil. I hated that stuff. It's not so easy. It's not so easy, is it? When you have that kind of content. Yet art storefronts Instagram account and Facebook accounts have what? Two to 300,000 followers each?

4:08Crazy engagement. How is that possible? How is that possible when I have to deal with boring, mundane, professorial business education content? And that's what we're gonna delve into today. It's just important to me that you, the loyal listener knows that I'm not teaching you this out of a textbook or because I'm in some social media masterminds paid group or some stupid course on social media hacks and algorithms. We've been executing this strategy on the daily for years now because it just works. It just works. It's worked for a long, long time.

4:40And the good news is, is I know what ails you and I know what ails your strategy and it's a super easy fix. So the algorithm doesn't care about your art. It just doesn't. And again, I'm going to new, and by the way, it doesn't care about my business content either. And I'm gonna nuance this to Instagram because that's the network that you're all on. It's the one that's the most important for art. It's the one that we recommend that you all be on. But it applies to any of the others. TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Blue Sky, Threads, Reddit.

5:11Take your pick. It applies to all of them. It even applies to the sites that are not governed by an algorithm. Okay, what do I mean by that? It applies to your emails. It applies to your website copy. It applies to your text messages. It applies to any printed media you send out. Right? It just applies across the board. So we can get into some data and some stats. I think it's important. So I obviously always go to Adam Mosseri. He's the president. I always forget his title, president of Instagram or whatever. You know, he said in January of 2025,

5:42a little dated now, that top three signals, watch time, likes per reach, sends per reach. Okay? So that means sends. So when someone sends your content to a friend, that is weighted three to five times more than likes for reaching new audiences. Very important distinction. So someone forwarding the content to a friend is three to five times more important of a signal, okay, than someone liking a post. So the translation of that is basically,

6:12you know, 10 direct message shares. We can just say shares when someone shares a piece of content is greater than 100 likes, right? So the funniest post beats the most beautiful post. And that's really, really important to know. And so I like thinking about this, how it works. And, you know, I always use the dropping a rock in a pond analogy. And, you know, when you drop a rock in the pond, one concentric circle forms and then another and then another and another and another and the concentric circles just kind of go out. That's how it works in social media.

6:43So your post gets dropped in the pond and it gets a very small test audience in the first 30 to 60 minutes. And that's that first ring, okay? That first ring as they go out in concentric circles. If they watch, if they share, if they save and do a lesser extent like, the algorithm goes, okay, this is a good post. It's going to go out to that next circle. The opposite is true. If they scroll past and they don't interact with it and no one shares and no one leaves a comment and it doesn't get any action, that's it.

7:14It's done. The post dies. The distribution's killed. Instagram shut it off, right? So what do art posts primarily get all the time? What are all of you guys? What is the first thing that you're saying? Hey, how you doing with your marketing on the cell phones that everybody's carrying around? What are you getting? Oh, I'm getting a ton of likes. Really, just likes? Yeah, that's the problem, right? Art posts, photography posts, creation posts often get likes. Entertaining posts, on the other hand, get shares. And the shares are what win, okay?

7:46This is the next really important thing to understand about an algorithm, okay? Your last nine to 12 posts train the algorithm, okay? Your last nine to 12 posts, and this is according to research from Buffer, Sprout Social. No one knows what the numbers are, but I like the nine to 12 numbers, so I'm going to work on it. So if your last 12 posts are all art with low engagement, the algorithm learns this account is skippable.

8:20I don't need to show it to anyone else. I don't need to create that second concentric circle and push it out to the next audience. So when you change your posting strategy, you guys, from just art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, and you mix in some high entertainment posts, the algorithm recategorizes your account as high value, okay? And 94%, depending on who you talk to, 90%, 85%, whatever, of Instagram and the others,

8:51all of the distribution now comes from AI recommendations, okay? And so this is why I've been teaching you all year long not to just post your art. That alone will never work. That is why there's 300 posts on Reddit of people complaining that Instagram's reach is dead and Facebook's reach is dead and it doesn't work anymore and social media is stacked against the artist and it's holding it. Like, no, no, it's not. No, it's not. There are just rules and we have to follow them. And I like thinking about it as like, you know, the engagement, what would I call this? Engagement battery.

9:22You have a battery, right? So let's just treat the engagement battery as a metaphor, right? Entertaining posts charge the battery. They charge up the shares. They charge up the watch time. They share up the comments. This is why I tell you to post things about what you do individually and the things that you like and your dirty studio and your cat spilling, walking in the paint and walking all over your dog with the throat. All of that stuff charges up the engagement battery, okay? That charges it up. The art sales,

9:53the here look at my work, the sales posts, they spend the battery's energy, okay? They spend that engagement energy. And so when you understand that, you realize I can't only post art. The battery is always dead. That's why no one sees anything. That's why I feel like I'm shouting into the social media void. I haven't been charging up the battery. You guys have not been charging up the battery. We all need to charge up the battery. You can't do anything with a charged up battery, without a charged up battery, right?

10:23And this is going to bring me to memes specifically. I think most of you guys probably know what memes are, but I will get into it in the next section in a little bit more detail, okay? But essentially, memes get 10 times more reach than traditional marketing visuals. They just do. They get 60% higher organic engagement than standard posts. Promotional posts perform 40% worse than an entertaining content on TikTok, according to implicit 2025. Instagram engagement dropped 26%

10:55year over year, 24 to 20, year over year, 2024 to 2025. The bar is even higher now, okay? Meaning the algorithms, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, is now actually rewarding even more the entertaining content, okay? And you can argue that this is a terrible thing for society, and perhaps it is, but to me, I'm contrarian. What do I always say? Okay, we creators want our creations to get in front of eyeballs so they can be sold, right?

11:26If we were fishermen, we would go down to the docks, get in the boat, and go to where the fish are. This is just the algorithm, social media, the marketing world saying, hey, if you want to get to where the fish are, be more entertaining. That's it. That's really all it is. Let's get into the memes, though, and I'll give you, I'll give you what is even a meme. So I didn't know this. I just had to go look this up, but the real definition, a guy named Richard Dawkins, coined meme in a book called The Selfish Gene, I think it's a book, in 1976,

11:57and he stole it from a Greek word, everything comes from Latin or Greek, mimama, which means imitated, right? And I think the formal definition is like, it's a unit of cultural information that spreads through sharing the current equivalent of a gene. And look, a meme is not just funny pictures with impact font. That's one format, but memes are much, much bigger, okay? You know what a meme is? It is an idea wrapped in a format that people want to share.

12:27That's it. That's it. It can be a photo with text. It can be short video with a relatable caption, screenshot of a tweet, a reaction clip. And when you think about it, it's what you guys do already. You take an emotion, you wrap it in a visual, and you make someone feel something or you try to when you're creating those works, right? And I think a meme does the same thing. It just optimizes for sharing instead of hanging on a wall. You guys are already visual communicators. You're just missing the punchline on this. And I would go so far to say that in our always on screen glued to our faces

13:02mode humanity is in currently, like memes have sort of emerged as their own language, you know? They have the power to sway political elections and turn around public opinion on charged issues of society in the day. And they just work. It's just a language. It's just a way of communication, right? And there are so many different types of memes. And don't worry, I'm going to give you guys a ton of resources that you can do this. Absolutely anyone, as I'm about to show you, can do this, right?

13:32And there's all kinds of types of memes that artists can share, right? Like, you know, the relatable artist struggle memes, right? When someone says digital art isn't real art or the jokes about art school or the jokes about being a starving art, like there are so many different memes of artistic struggles that absolutely just work and people respond to. Like I've gotten incredible results on the art storefront's account with this. Niche humor, only your audience gets, right? You know, you can grab a trending template and give it your spin,

14:03which is what I do all the time. Like the internet just surfaces these images that are just hilarious, that everyone just knows what it is. And, you know, there's like no end in sight to the funny, witty quip or two-liner or question and answer or point or angle or spin, whatever you want to call it, that you can put on it. You don't even have to create anything here except the text. You know, there's a ton of memes of the behind-the-scenes disasters. There's, you know, paint spills, cat on canvas, shipping nightmares,

14:33you know, folded in half art that arrived at the customer's door, you know, all of those things. And then there's hot takes on art culture, gallery pricing, Instagram versus reality. There's process content with humor. There's so many different ways to spin it. And, you know, when you actually study this, when you really actually like look at it, you know, the proof is so there on how well this works. And I think I would go as far to say that, like, not only does it work employing memes being more entertaining

15:04in your social thing, it makes the difference between being seen at all versus just shouting the vapid social media divide where no one ever hears you, right? And that's where all artists get so hung up and which is why I want to fix it. So one that I found recently, which is absolutely ridiculous, okay, in which dispels the rumor, no matter how old you are listening to this, that you can absolutely do this. There's a gal named Allison Lukes, okay? And I'm going to put links to all of these things in the show notes

15:34so you can just click them and go see them. Near as I can say, she's the gallery director at this national gallery. And somehow the social media manager convinced her, this 77-year-old curator, that if she just created a script in this woman who's not good on video, has zero social media experience, okay, and just started saying these ridiculous lines that the kids use these days, okay? And I can say that because my kids say them all the time and I'm like, I don't even know what any of this means anymore.

16:04And so it's this video of this woman, okay, curator at this gallery, basically talking about the art pieces that she would have been talking about anyway, okay? In whatever social media post they told her to make before this creative post. And instead, because she used all this language that the kids use these days, Rizzler and this and that, you know, how ridiculous it was. And because she's so bad on video, this thing ended up getting 9 million views. My guess is it drove a ton of people into this museum that were not going to go into this museum otherwise, right?

16:35So she did all of this in one take. You've got to watch this video. I wish I had it queued up so you could just like listen to how awkward it is when she's talking. I should have had it queued up, but it's okay. Just go to the show notes and watch it. You guys will absolutely get a kick out of it. And you're like, oh my gosh, if she can do it, I can do it. Another meme that is blowing up right now. And I hate to introduce politics into this at all because politics are so charged with this meme. It's absolutely hilarious. It doesn't matter whether you love the administration or you hate them. There's the Rubio couch meme, okay? And these things just take off, right? And when they take off, they take off at a million miles an hour.

17:07And you almost, you see them everywhere. There can't be enough of it. But the backstory is that like in February of 2025, Trump and Vance and Zelensky were all in this like oval office, like spat or whatever, where they, you know, they started fighting and yelling at each other and the whole thing was a big deal. And they got this picture, someone did, Marco Rubio just sitting on the couch, like sort of like sinking into his chair, just going, oh my God, kill me now. What am I doing, right? And sort of the internet recognized that this universal feeling

17:37of stuck in a meeting and trying to become invisible and it just took off, right? Then in January of 2026, Rubio just kept getting more and more jobs. Like I think they fired somebody and he became like secretary of state and some other, I don't even know what, because I don't follow it that closely. But I understood, I read in the headlines that he just kept getting more and more jobs, right? Trump just kept giving him more and more jobs. So now they've got these photos of Rubio on the couch

18:07where he was just slinking into the couch going, guy, I want to be invisible. Get me out of here. And now they're essentially putting him in as every job imaginable. They've got him as the governor of Greenland and like that type of an outfit. They got him as the new manager for Manchester United. They've got him as Superman, Frodo, Miss Universe, the Michelin Man. And each one of these posts is getting like 500,000 to 1.4 million views each. And I think at one point, Rubio leaned into it and like responded on Twitter or whatever. That one got like 5.7 million views.

18:39And the lesson here in all of this is like somebody somewhere came up with something super creative online. All we have to do is just water ski behind it with our own unique personality, right? It can be anything. The sports fans are putting their sports teams in that are doing terribly. They're like, you're fired. Rubio is the new manager, right? You guys as artists could complain about camera settings. You could complain about the cost of art paints. You could say my gallery curator. You could say my new social media director.

19:09And then just tell the AI to dress Rubio up and boom, off it goes, right? And these are the things, these are the things that just get shared like absolutely crazy. And so I'm bringing up a political one, not to piss off half of you, my audience or whatever, but just to see like as artists, okay, as creatives, you don't have to be limited to your industry, okay? It can be in your niche. It can be your country. It can be your language,

19:40your spin, but we can grab these other things that have just been proven to work like gangbusters by just being a little bit more astute on what ends up in social media and then putting our funny spin on it. That's it. Like that's how it goes, right? There's another one that I love and it's this artist, Devin Rodriguez. Some of you guys have heard about this guy. He drew portraits on the New York City subway and filmed the reactions, okay? He got up to 35 million TikTok followers and I think he's now over 30

20:12or something like that, 35 I think or 35 million, whatever. He's signed by the United Talent Agency. He's having gigantic gallery shows, okay? And he's got this line and I'm gonna put this YouTube video. His art is fabulous, okay? But do you know what he said? He's in a gallery show and someone's interviewing him and you guys will see the art and immediately you'd be like, oh my gosh, that's so good. I would pardon his broken English. This is him in his words and I quote, I was painting just as good as this five years ago. It just wasn't getting anywhere, end quote. Sounds interesting.

20:42Sounds relatable, right? Like the talent was always there. The work just wasn't selling because he wasn't being entertaining enough. And that's what it comes down to. And that is what the power of these memes are. That is what the power of putting in a little bit more entertainment into your content can potentially do. And there's a bunch of really interesting business use cases about this, okay? And again, I'll put links to a ton of this because I don't want you to just see artists. I want you to kind of bounce around, not just your industry,

21:13but other industries too. Because if you look at these, you should be like, wait a minute, I've got stories like this, right? I can totally do this. And these are just really, really interesting stories. There's a gal named Sarah Lueberger, Lueberger, I think. And she got 60 million views on one pottery video, one, and it's entertaining. And it was just entertainment. And now she's full-time, okay? There's Garbo Zoo, Grumpy Kids School. You ever heard of this one? Selling $40 to $80 ceramics. Grumpy Humor first, product second,

21:43sold out of every single solitary one she's dropping, okay? There's Freeze Magazine. They got to 160,000 followers from Art World memes, okay? And then transitioned to real gallery exhibitions. So actually built a business from the entertainment. There's BarkBox, okay? I love this one. This is a company that has 500 million plus in revenue. Their entire Instagram is dog memes for the most part. Not a single product photo. They don't even ever talk

22:14about their product. None of it. None of it. It's just for entertainment. That's it. And they've got $500 million in revenue. Liquid Death famously, which is just water, got to a $1.4 billion valuation. And their claim to fame was that they hired comedy writers from that network Adult Swim. And their only content test is would somebody share this? That was, would somebody share this? Then post it. Hey, should we post this? What do you think? Would somebody share it? Post it. It's like, I need to remember that. I need to do more of that. Going back to my notes.

22:44Oh yeah, there's Scrub Daddy. Again, I'll link to all these. It's helpful to look at these individually, right? Just to get ideas. But the CEO's come out and said like, demonstrable sales growth from just the meme content. And the pattern across all of these, you guys, is that entertainment is the vehicle. It's not the destination. They're not selling memes. They're selling reach, right? Niche memes are better than generic memes. Darkbox is just dog memes for dog people, right? Your memes should be art memes

23:14for art people that want to buy art, right? And your personality, who you are, right? Like what I've talked about in these earlier episodes, your personality is the brand. People follow the voice and they buy the product. People fall in love with the person and they buy the creations, right? And low production value is not just fine. It's encouraged. It makes it more authentic, right? Like all of the platforms and I've talked about this are really rewarding, raw and real. Like why do I want

23:45all of you guys going live on Instagram? Because Instagram is raw and it's real. Do I think any of you or some of you or most of you are going to go live on Instagram? No, but I've got to give you the tools and you make the call, right? I'm going to give you a cheat sheet, okay? Here's how embarrassingly easy this is. Here's how every single solitary one of you can do this, okay? One, there's a website called Know Your Meme founded in 2008, I believe and it's basically the Wikipedia of memes and they're editorially verified entries. There's millions of them in there. You can look at them,

24:17all the ones that are trending, why they're trending, why they're interesting. I mean, this thing got inducted. Know Your Meme got inducted into Library of Congress in 2014 because what are memes? They're just forms of communication on the internet in today's day and age. So you can see what's trending in there. You can see the template, understand the joke and it makes it easy to go in there and just get the ideas that you can adapt to your niche, right? And it's just a good place to do research, okay? The tools, there are so many tools to do this. Zero, when I say zero,

24:47zero design skill is required. The only thing that is required here is creativity. That's it. There's a website I'm going to send you called IMG Flip. It's got 1 million templates. You pick one, you type the words, you download, literally 30 seconds. It doesn't even matter if it's free and it has a watermark for their product. Nobody cares. Everyone just posts the memes. Canva's got templates. There's an AI product that came out called supermeme.ai. Type what you want the meme to say, AI makes it for you. You don't even have to log in. You can if you want.

25:18Catwing is really good at doing this with videos. They've got like 2,000 plus templates. Adobe Express can do it for free as well. But the age excuse on this one, you guys, is dead. You know, I go back to that Alison Luke, 77 years old, most viral post in the National Gallery's history. History. Because what were they doing? They were an art gallery trying to behave like an art gallery. Well, guess what? That doesn't put butts in seats. All that does is get the people that were going to go to an art gallery anyway. We need fresh blood. You guys need fresh eyeballs. This is the playbook, right?

25:50Like that whole Rubio meme, it's made with AI image generators. Describe what you want, it appears. So if you can type a sentence and have a creative thought in your head, you can make a meme, period. The barrier isn't skill here. It's just permission. You need to give yourself permission to be funny, okay? And so this, you guys, it's what consumers want. It's what they actually want. 66% of consumers find entertainment the most engaging brand content. 60% of consumers more likely

26:20to buy from brands using memes. That comes from Forbes and Clear Voice. 75% millennials and Gen Z prefer brands that use memes. 80% of consumers say brands using memes appear more relatable. Your customers are asking for this. All of our customers are asking for this. We're just not giving it to them. Not enough, right? And the big picture mind shift here, right? The reframe of your mind, the mindset shift. Social media is not a gallery.

26:51Stop treating it like one. It's a TV channel, okay? A gallery hangs art and hopes people walked in. A TV channel has programming, shows, segments, personality, commercials. Your art posts are the commercials. What's the show? What is the show? In order to show the commercials, you have to have the show. What is the show? Nobody watches a channel that's all commercials. They change the channel. That's what your followers are doing. That is why you're not getting enough engagement on social media. That's why your art is not getting in front of enough eyeballs. And again, it's not just social media.

27:22It's just in your marketing in general. And like, what's great here is the ratio. It doesn't have to be extreme, right? I said it's going to be a very easy win and very easy to fix in the title because your engagement battery is too low. You can start winning immediately just by charging it up, okay? You don't need to become a mean page. You need to be not an only art page. That's it, okay? That's it. Even two to three entertaining posts per week mixed with your art

27:52changes the game, okay? Hootsuite has these stats. The stats piss me off sometimes because it's like really, the stats say, okay, the most successful brands are like 80 to 100% entertainment. The next tier is like 60, between 60 and 80% entertainment, okay? Only 15% of brands post mostly promotional content. Ask yourself, honestly, is that where you fall right now? Are you posting mostly promotional content? That's where most artists are, you guys. This is in the bottom 15%,

28:23right? And, you know, doing this, it's not selling out or being gauche or, you know, something that you're going to get penalized for. Your audience will love it, right? The National Gallery didn't lose any credibility posting Gen Z slang. Quite to the opposite, people were actually talking about a stodgy museum, okay? They gained 9 million views. Devin Rodriguez, who was not selling any of his art, which is really good, did not shoot in it, he'd started doing his subway reactions,

28:53got signed by UTA. You know, Rubio didn't lose his job or political capital about joking by the dolphins. Entertaining content doesn't replace your art, it just gives your art an audience. That's it. That's it. It's quite literally that simple. And, for anyone that is actually going to truly take this on, which I hope is all of you, if you reply to the comments, because you're actually now really going to start getting a lot of comments, there is a reply multiplier. When you reply to comments,

29:24engagement jumps, okay? According to Buffer, it's like 21% on Instagram alone, that your engagement will jump if you are replying to comments, okay? So, entertaining posts generate way more comments. Like, many of you guys say this to me all the time. Like,