According to the internet culture archive Know Your Meme, [trashposting] is a slang term describing a range of user misbehaviors and rhetoric on forums and message boards that are intended to derail a conversation off-topic, including thread jacking, circle-jerking, and non-commercial spamming. On 4chan, for example, the byproduct of [trashposting] is referred to as cancer.

The exact origin of the term is unknown, but the earliest-known instance was submitted to the Something Awful Forums on April 10th, 2007, when member OhSNAP!Tray used the expression when describing worthless threads on the site's BYOB forum.

As you can see, the vast majority of the group's posts come from the internet. This is a vivid expression of the changing marketing industry landscape. Globally recognized pollster, political strategist, and marketing business leader Mark Penn thinks that the days of Mad Men pitch decks have been replaced by the science of numbers-oriented digital media presentations.

"As my old boss at Microsoft said: every company is becoming a digital company. But in my view, every company is also becoming a digital marketing company – whether it wants to be or not," he wrote in Forbes.

With the turmoil underway at Meta and Twitter, Penn believes that a strong digital marketing strategy is now more important than ever. "Reaching consumers today is a process based on successfully analyzing a company's consumer data, understanding how they spend their time, and then reaching them through new media – whether it's TikTok, connected TV, or programmatic ads in Forbes online."

"Most no longer watch the evening news or sink four hours a night into devoted couch TV viewing. People are instead on their devices, picking them up first thing in the morning and putting them down just before bedtime. In fact, 71% of U.S. ad buys are now online digital buys, up a whopping 16 points this year alone – a new record," he explained.

Penn said we've come a long way from the Ford economy in which every car was painted the same color to make goods more affordable. Now, the name of the game is personalization.

"We are even beyond the era of Starbucks personalization, in which there were 55 varieties of something as simple as coffee," he said. "We have reached the Uber economy – rather than simply iterating products, businesses have created the infrastructure to deliver product and service experiences that take you on a customized and connected journey instantly."

This requires businesses to know more about consumers – and do more to retain and please them. Which is one of the main reasons why so many online marketers try to establish a relationship with the audience through memes.

"We need to give [consumers] their favorite order before they even order it; or as I tell marketing leaders, get the right ad or product to the right person at precisely the right time," Penn said. "Successful companies will build at the intersection of digital marketing and digital production to grow in this arena."

And the failures, apparently, end up trashposting.

"Most digital ads are static and boring, flashing a simple name or offer in front of a consumer. Successful digital marketing takes a new kind of creativity built around new production techniques, augmented reality, and the growing set of new tools available today," Penn said. "Most digital ads are simply annoying – the best digital companies will change that."

A good example of a company riding the digital marketing wave, in Penn's opinion, is Chipotle. "It set out just before the pandemic to transform into a truly digital business ... [and] it has built one of the fastest-growing loyalty programs in history, an integrated effort tying enterprise data, creative marketing, and digital performance tactics together to grow its membership base to 30 million users," he noted. "The burrito may not be digital, but everything else about the company has built a digital infrastructure that will pay dividends for decades."

However, everyone clearly can't be the best. And, in a sense, thank you for that. How else could we feel better about our social media feeds if we didn't see that people who spend money on theirs have even worse ones?