Rude Marketing 101 😈

Steal these savage growth ideas.

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#1

The most savage “social proof” I’ve seen

Look at the logos on the homepage of Pylon:

“Migrated off”. 🤯

They grouped their customers by which competitor they left!

My take: If your customers came from a competitor → that’s your strongest selling point. Don’t bury it in a case study. Put it right on the homepage where every visitor sees it.

Thanks Ben Lang for sending this

#2

I found a 30-second trick to get more X followers.

Just swap your regular X profile link for this one:

https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=YOURHANDLE

That’s it.

When someone clicks it, instead of landing on your profile, they get a popup that says “Do you want to follow @you?” with a big Follow button.

It’s amazing.

We switched this at Wiz and the numbers went up pretty much immediately.

My take: Put it in your website footer, email signature, link-in-bio. Anywhere you’re linking to your X (Twitter) page. Easy quick win!

#3

A masterclass in roasting your competitor

Ok this campaign is incredible:

A few weeks ago I wrote about ChatGPT adding ads…

Anthropic saw blood in the water and went ALL in. 🥊 They made a series of ads where AI interrupts you with sponsored garbage:

It blew up.

Sam Altman responded with a long thread defending OpenAI, and I honestly think that was a mistake ❌

You can only punch up. Punching down makes you look insecure. OpenAI is the giant here, Anthropic is the challenger. When the giant responds seriously to a joke → it loses.

Best move was probably silence. Second best was posting a ChatGPT user growth graph with the caption “lol” ✅

My take: I love Anthropic’s ad because they found the one thing everyone already fears about AI and made it funny. They didn’t invent a problem. They just said out loud what we’re all thinking. That’s the whole trick with attack ads- find the thing people already believe and turn up the volume.

#4

This is becoming the new “Mac vs. PC”

Anthropic isn’t the only one running this playbook:

Webflow invented the “AI Guy” - a confidently wrong chatbot who makes up everything about your brand.

And even Amazon Alexa dropped a super funny ad with an AI that “tries to kill you”.

See the pattern? They all humanize chatbots + make AI look dumb.

This feels like the start of a trend. And it totally gives me Mac vs. PC vibes.

Apple’s template got copied for a decade. I think “your product vs. dumb AI” is going to be the next version of that.

It works because everyone has been burned by bad AI answers.

My take: If your product solves an AI-related problem (or helps people avoid an AI-related annoyance) → you’ve got a ready-made ad format. This template is going to get copied a lot over the next few years so better be early.

#5

How to insult a competitor AND get away with it

Figma’s had a rough few months. Stock is down. Everyone’s expecting them to ship something big with AI. The pressure is real.

So what did they announce this week?

Image-to-vector conversion 🙄 People were expecting more.

So two hours later, Notion posted this:

“ALERT THE PRESS!” for a totally unimportant feature 🤣

My take: This is the *cleanest* way to be rude to a competitor. No tags, no mentions, no screenshots. Just a well-timed post that makes everyone laugh at the right target. If Figma responds, they look defensive. If they ignore it, the joke still lands. Notion wins either way.

Have an amazing week ✌️

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P.S. Done something cool at work recently? Send it my way! I’d love to feature your unconventional/crazy marketing projects as an inspiration drop in the next few weeks. This is your chance to get all the fame (and traffic from 71k+ subs) for it :)