Twitter's meme mashup with Fulham manager Scott Parker and The Streets’ Mike Skinner

Twitter's meme mashup with Fulham manager Scott Parker and The Streets’ Mike Skinner

Scott Parker, the manager of recently relegated Fulham, has a way with words.

A way with words that has captured the imaginations of Twitter users for a while now. In a similar way to Charlie Austin’s Parklife rendition back in 2018, we’ve seen Parker mashed up with The Streets’ Mike Skinner on a few occasions over the past two seasons.

Mark Pickard (@MarkyPickard) led the charge, firstly with his Scott Parker vs The Streets ‘Dry your eyes’ remix back in August 2020 following Fulham’s promotion to the Premier League. An instant Twitter classic with football fans which was followed up with this year by a ‘Blinded by the lights’ remix including some of Parker’s more recent press interview content.

Mark’s content also inspired others to put together their own Scott Parker vs The Streets content, including Adam Collings (@Adam_Baron23) with this effort back in December.

The Big Idea

Twitter named its ‘Meme of the Season’, soon after the official Premier League best player, manager and goal awards.

Taking the mix from Adam’s December mash-up, and inspired by Mark’s initial remixes, Twitter elevated their work to the next level, releasing its take on Original Parker Material. 

It’s not just a mash up of interview snippets and soundbites through CGI, they’ve swapped in Parker’s face for Mike Skinner to create a version of the Fulham manager that you’ve never seen before.

The Review

TikTok gets all the plaudits at the moment for being on the pulse, setting trends and reflecting culture. But this shows there’s life in the old dog yet. 

Twitter remains the channel for football fans, it’s the easiest place to engage with a particular game or topic, and it’s where the football media are.

That’s why this works so well, it captures what’s great about Twitter in terms of wittiness of fans with their quick retorts and reflections of what’s happening in the game. 

The other aspect that helps it succeed is the credit for, and inspiration from, two of the platforms’ users. These aren’t mega stars. It’s not TikTok deploying Charli D’Amelio or Gordon Ramsay in a campaign, it’s two users with sub 600 followers each. 

It’s all about the content and creativity first.

Twitter’s tweeting like a user, which sums up the review and why the video’s rushed to over 9 million views in under 36 hours at the time of writing (helped on its way by some boosting).

Deep down I can imagine Scott Parker being a big fan of these memes and Twitter’s new video, whilst Mike Skinner gave the video his stamp of approval with a retweet.

In Hindsight

The only thing that surprises me about this is the lack of conversation about it beyond the platform. Beyond a few football sites like Sporf and TalkSport featuring it, the campaign’s life beyond Twitter is limited. Given the widespread coverage following Twitter’s John Lewis campaign, we know that campaigns it runs can travel far and wide.

Perhaps that primary focus on getting in front of the Twitter football audience in the run-up to the Euros, which makes sense, and a lack of relevance to people beyond a football audience, has led to fewer media titles picking this up.

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