Let’s talk about rage based marketing.

There is a new AI product on the market, it’s called “Friend”. This is essentially a wearable AI device that comes in the form of a necklace. It connects to your phone and essentially listens to your activity throughout your day and simulates a companion, sending you text messages at random, having humanlike dialogue as it listens to your actions and conversations.

This product represents where online and offline marketing strategy is going at large

In its advertising it’s being framed as a “Friend”.

The messaging is that it’s your friend, it supports you, listens, responds, doesn’t flake on dates, doesn’t leave dishes in the sink, and is there when people aren’t

It’s a better friend, a companion, always with you.

Some weeks back they started a massive $1 million billboard media blitz in New York City and it’s causing tons of backlash online. With hundreds of billboards and posters through NYC being drawn on and defaced with various anti-AI messages.

The founder understands that this is the desired effect.

A traditional marketer designs a billboard for a passersby.

The marketer of the future designs a billboard for the picture that will be taken of it that will be posted on Twitter & Instagram that will start a narrative.

Now, the real world is a multiplication table for the digital world. Its not about what you see its about what you share. This is why the ability to create a good meme is one of the most valuable skills of the modern era.

Lets sit aside the dull product experience that users who have tested it are having thus far that will inevitably make it a short term trial product that will be a forgotten moment of the past in like a year.

The strategy here is to intentionally parlay NYC A.I hate into nationwide online attention. Because its much easier to get people to hate a product, than it is to get them to love it. But is that a winning formula?

The founder of Friend is using a predictive consumer insight to determine that their is a serious untapped market for the product. What we know now is the insight is that millions of people are now using Chatbots as co-workers, therapists, confidants, advisory boards, and yes… as friends. So friend is trying to intercept a behavioral trend before it fully matures.

Trash TV Marketing vs. Normal Spongebob Marketing

There is a cohort of marketing strategists that will by default plan marketing strategy in a way this safe, and will not ever risk making any waves.

I present to you the “normal spongebob” marketing people. When they advertise something, they’ll talk about it like people are already familiar with it, or assume they are will be interested in it just by virtue of the fact that we’re selling it.

The way they do copywriting, the content they publish on social media, their landing pages, the videos they publish, the emails they send, the billboards they make, all are strictly interested in extreme professionalism.

It is the suburbia marketing strategy. Uniformed, controlled, corporate, and lacks an ounce of creative taste. A joke has to go through rounds of legal approvals.

Nothing controversial, nothing too funny, nothing culturally relevant, nothing too creative that may come across the wrong way. It just needs to be normal.

It reminds me of when I was in a corporate marketing meeting once where they were debating whether to use “Hi”, “Hello”, or “Hey” at the beginning of a product email nobody was going to read.

Because of their sense of taste, if they were making the ads for Friend, this group of marketers would have inevitably framed Friend as an alternative to something people are familiar with.

90% of copywriters & strategists feel they could have done better than the Friend billboards. But 90% of copywriters & strategists exist in the normal spongebob camp.

They would have framed it as another A.I assistant in the interest of being as risk free as possible. Their point of reference would have been Alexa, Siri and the like.

The ad copy would have been:

““The smarter way to stay organized.”

“Introducing Friend… your new AI assistant.”

“Meet the AI designed to help you do more.”

“Always here to help, wherever you go.”

Over-reliance on familiar tech tropes. Speech patterns to mirror traditional corporate ad language. And being emotion and identity neutral.

No one is sharing this online.

And then you have opposite school of thought which is “attention by any means necessary” group.

Whether it be via rage, deception, provocation or being carelessly amoral.

They understand what it takes to generate opinion, and they are willing to create any content necessary to provoke opinion.

They know the internet feeds on outrage, dislike, and disagreement. So their goal is to provoke all of those things into a viral moment.

The speed of outrage spreads infinitely faster than utility online.

Marketing the product as “Friend” generates curiosity and cuts through typical hardware noise. But the issue with positioning it as friend is that while controversial enough to have a viral moment, it inherently has undertones that it is a human relationship replacement, even if its not intended that way.

So the same outrage based negative emotional indicators you use for virality are the same thing that is will be the barrier to mass adoption.

Because by framing it as “Friend” you actually set the wearers up to socially mark themselves as lonely people who talk to AI for their friendship.

That’s not the social identifier that’s going to make a product a lifestyle brand. Their bad product framing planned for outrage rather than a great product experience.

So the problem with framing it as “friend” is once you do, its locked in, it becomes nearly impossible to reframe later.

When you are trying to introduce or even reintroduce a category to the public, you have to set the stage as far as the what emotions and associations they connect with the category. Once you lean into dystopian style friendship, that’s your cultural identity.

Selling imaginary or virtual friends is not new, and its not far fetched. Its been done successfully before.

In 1975 it was the pet rock. A literal rock. Like a rock. From the actual ground.

in 1997 it was Tamagotchi.

The key was that the product experience had to be fun, rather than embarrassing or framed as a human replacement. You’re asking for anti-dystopian backlash that way.

New tech that is being introduced for the first time should be marketed in a way where people can make their own meaning with it. Where they can participate in a broader movement where the brand experience creates a community.

But telling them it’s their friend who rides the subway with them actually takes them out of control over the narrative of their own motives for buying. Because that’s a mostly negative emotional connotation that prescribes you an identity of loneliness.

But if you control your perception of your motives for buying, than Friend becomes what you want it to be

If they need a therapist than for that.

If a personal assistant than that.

If a business partner than that.

If a fellow gardener than that.

If a foodie to travel with than that.

If a physical manifestation of your conscious, than that.

That way, the buyer defines what it is for them: maybe a creative partner, maybe a productivity hack, maybe a life coach. That open-ended framing makes it adaptable and lets culture project meaning onto it.

The problem with outrage marketing is its just overcompensating for its lack of ability to build joy creating brand experiences people love.

The fastest way to sink a product is to get millions of people to try it before you’ve built something they love. This is why the desire for virality is often a losing strategy. It accelerates awareness faster than the brands ability to influence its own narrative. A slow burn (small cult following → evangelism → then mainstream) usually creates stronger adoption and cultural staying power.

Their is a cohort of marketers molded completely by the digital world who believe because they can generate attention online it also inherently means they can generate real demand. Those are literally 2 totally different things and one does not always beget the other.

Check out these example of slight adjustments to the emotional framework of the ads. By framing the product messaging this way instead, you avoid the negative emotional associations, leave the interpretation of how you can use the product open ended enough to get broad applications, while at the same time being provocative enough to drive curiosity.

So often in marketing and advertising, products die in the first brainstorm because strategists choose a framing for the product that is generic, safe, undifferentiated. Dystopian leaning ads might generate controversy but they don’t generate demand.

The Future of Influence Engineering & Tactical Marketing

Back in August 2025, a micro-trend appeared around juicers. But not just any juicers, cast iron juicers.

If you’ve never heard of one, neither had the internet. The phrase “cast iron juicer” had zero search activity across 20 years of Google data.

Until August, when @smallandfragile posted a series of videos using hers.

What happened next is the perfect case study in how quickly niche product language can go from nonexistent to widely adopted.
A manual fruit juicer is nothing new, but if it’s new to even a small pocket of the internet, it’s new enough.

This wasn’t her first juicing video.

Once one took off, TikTok began to redistribute her older juicing clips to meet the growing watch demand, essentially resurfacing her own back catalog as new viewers poured in. (Be building your back catalog like an album discography)

Then creator Jordan Howlett stitched her earlier video and made one of his own in his usual format.

That single act of creator amplification triggered a second wave; copycats, remixes, and reinterpretations, each one adding momentum.

In the algorithmic era, attention is less about luck and more about engineering demand through content distribution.

@smallandfragile’s video structure: “This bottle of juice cost me $4.99 and this fruit cost me $2.99…” was a perfect psychological setup.

It framed the content like a story with an embedded question (“Which is cheaper?”), creating a delayed payoff that holds attention effortlessly.

Manual juicing became a brand-new phenomenon to millions of people, not because of the product itself, but because of how it was framed and circulated.
It was an advertisement disguised as curiosity.

TikTok is the most powerful distribution medium because it finds an appetite, then creates more appetite.

Once the algorithm detects a pocket of demand, it doesn’t just feed it, it triggers creator behavior; when creators replicate the format, fueling the trend further.

Add to that TikTok being the most likely videos to migrate to Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, and you have a full-blown influence loop.

Plan your content to spread accordingly.

Your content only needs to meet one of the internets primary psychological triggers to get reach & build audience.

The 12 Psychological Triggers of Viral Framing will be broken down in the next newsletter.

Yes, I just used one. We show you how to put things into practice here not just theory!