#ponderize

#ldsconf meme business gets called out before #ponderize can expand to City Creek

Sunday night after a heavy controversy, ponderize.us was shut down, as was it’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

The word was used by Devin Durrant during the LDS semiannual general conference to encourage Mormons to ponder and memorize scriptures. It was discovered afterward that his son and daughter-in-law had setup a website with merchandise to sell the “ponderize” brand. After some controversy they claimed that funds would go to the Mormon missionary fund, then hours later the whole site shut down.

His son and daughter-in-law are Valerie and Ryan Durrant, but the public WhoIs data on the site showed that ponderize.us was registered by D Durrant early in September - a whole month before general conference. Devin had also been tweeting the term as a hashtag for some time on his Twitter account.

The idea wasn’t entirely ridiculous- conference memes have become increasingly popular, and quaint little buzzwords used during conference talks spread like fire among the righteous. It’s a built-in market, and isn’t the first time someone in the Mormon public eye took advantage of the money making opportunity there. Celebrities create their own money making brands all the time that take advantage of their ready-made following. But any amount of market testing would have shown them that this shot at religious entrepreneurialism would turn out to be a botched job at best.

The pre-planning involved in creating a brand for any profit that is then broadcast around the world as an innocent message to remind people to indoctrinate themselves on a regular basis makes the Mormon church seem more like a money hungry mega church. The church’s PR department may want to consider monitoring the general authorities activities a little closer, and offer to pay the extra few dollars a month to keep their website registrar data private. Or perhaps more planning could involve having a known third party buy the URL that they then purchase from said accomplice after the 30 day domain registration lock is lifted.

Then on the other hand, why hide it? They may as well have projected the site on a screen during his talk and proclaimed “Let’s go shopping!” The millennials at conference who were creating conference memes in between tweaking their deadly virus in an aim to wipe out the world on the game Plague Inc. (you know who you are) could have had a ponderize t-shirt in the mail before the closing prayer. Then they might have made enough money to expand into a boutique shop at City Creek mall!

Next time maybe.