Use everyone’s natural OCD-like behaviors for traffic 🌀

A quick guide to leveraging the "oddly satisfying" trend: 7 ethical ways to use lightly hypnotizing images & videos in marketing

Based on my experience, there are 3 types of graphics that, when shown, immediately make people stop scrolling:

1. Oddly satisfying visuals

2. Nostalgia

3. Private chats (i.e. iMessage / Whatsapp screenshots)

Today, we're diving into the first category.

🤯 What’s Oddly Satisfying Content?

Almost everyone has a touch of OCD in them, and this trend strikes a chord. Oddly satisfying content features visually soothing subjects like soap cutting, honey-dripping, slime-playing, pool-cleaning, pressure-washing, window-cleaning, wood floor-staining, and more.

It’s basically everything that “fits perfectly”.

While the term has been around since 2013, it's only recently been harnessed for marketing, as exemplified by Coinbase's viral Super Bowl commercial:

People loved it because it resembled the old DVD animation where there was anticipation for it to hit a corner perfectly – and it did.

The psychology behind oddly satisfying content lies in our love for symmetry, patterns, and repetition, or even the tingling sensation known as ASMR. It's like a "brain massage" or a form of psychological self-care.

And we can use it in marketing with 7 easy-to-apply methods.

But first…

🤖 AI Joins the Conversation

Recently, the internet started exploding with BEAUTIFUL oddly satisfying artworks with natural-like patterns. This anamorphic art was created with AI and something called ControlNet (tutorials here, here, and here).

This is simply mesmerizing, so I can't resist sharing a few more examples:

Companies can even recreate their logo ‘naturally’ using this concept:

h/t Eddie Goldenberg

📈 My “Oddly Satisfying” Playbook

How to leverage this effect and do it yourself?

Here are 7 marketing tactics you can steal: 👇