Today’s ✨ free marketing idea ✨ is sponsored by enso
Growth hacking is back, baby! And this time AI agents do the work.
enso is a growth research lab. Their agents scan the platforms your buyers already use (Reddit, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Google) for attention loopholes: spots where a little effort gets a CRAZY amount of reach because no one else is looking there yet. Then they build custom agents that go get that attention for your company.
In one experiment, 62 Wikipedia edits got 3 brands cited by ChatGPT within six weeks:
I've gotten to know the team, and they publish every experiment with the full protocol, so you can steal it even without hiring them. I’d hire them myself.
Want to sponsor this newsletter? Apply here.
How can your brand help people avoid AI?
Weird question coming from me, I know (I love Claude).
But every website you open now has this widget:
Port’s website has the same Slack widget…
But it says it’s a human:
Smart! 🧠
That’s the biggest trend in tech right now: everybody wants a human.
Even if your bot is smarter and faster than a person, people don’t want to be the guinea pigs who test it. A human is more reliable right now, and a human has all the privileges, like issuing a refund or opening the admin panel.
Your competitors replaced people with bots wherever they could, so a human who answers is rare now. That’s AI fatigue working for you.
So here are 3 ways to put humans back into your marketing ↓
1. Put a real person where people expect a bot 👋
Port’s widget is a Slack connector: your message goes into their Slack.
Legit Security does the same with a “Chat over Slack” button, right next to “Book Demo”:
Gartner asked thousands of customers about AI in customer service, and 53% said they’d consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was going to use it.
Do this:
💻 Change your chat’s opening message to “Real person here! I’m [Name], write to me and I’ll answer”, and replace the robot icon with your photo. Then answer it yourself.
🌌 Add an offline message so the promise holds while you sleep: “It’s [Name], I’m offline. Leave your email and a person replies within one business day”. If you don’t have a widget at all → put your name and face next to the support email instead.
2. Say what you DON’T use AI for ⛔️
Aerie pledged to never use AI-generated people in its ads:
It became the brand’s most-liked Instagram post with 40,000+ likes, and that quarter’s sales grew 23%. (Correlation, I know. I’d still take it.)
Among people under 30, 66% react negatively to businesses using AI in ads. Yup, the AI-friendly generation is allergic to AI ads!
Do this:
✏️ Write a post like Aerie’s - along the lines of “we will never use AI for [the thing your customers care most about]”.
👱🏻♀️ Sign the product: “Made by [Name] and [Name]”, with photos, in the footer or on the About page.
🌈 Put a sentence on your pricing page (or your support page): “Every support reply here is written by a person, at 2 AM too”.
3. Host something with no screens 🪑
At a recent conference, we built a branded “No-AI Zone” near the entrance, with free coffee, board games, a postcard-writing station, and a working mailbox. Most booths inside were selling AI.
I've been collecting examples since I wrote about proof it’s human last November, and my favorite is Ramp: they put Kevin from The Office in a glass office in Manhattan, doing expense reports by hand for 7 hours, and the clips passed 85M views.
Ramp’s own explanation to this stunt: “We wanted to show something real in an AI world”. *chef’s kiss*
A few more from the past year:
Cursor rents a café for a day and puts its engineers in name tags so users can come meet them. The NYC slots had a waitlist.
Thursday, the dating app, shut down its own app and became an in-person events company, now in about 150 cities.
Pinterest ran a phone-free space at Coachella: phones locked in pouches at the door, and a printed guide instead of QR codes.
Hinge has given $2.3M to running clubs and book clubs (yes, a dating app paying people to get off the app).
Anthropic’s version was the “thinking” hat, and I waited 2 hours in line for mine.
Do this:
⚙️ The cheapest version is office hours in a café, in a city where your customers already are (or the day before a conference you’re attending anyway). Post from your own account: “I’m at [café] on [day], 9 to 11. Come by and I’ll fix your homepage in person, coffee’s on me”. About $40 in coffee, and Cursor had a waitlist for theirs.
🍔 Host a dinner for 8-10 customers, phones in a basket at the door.
🎪 If you have a booth this year → set up a folding table where someone does the task your product automates, by hand, in front of everyone, under a sign that says “This is what [product] replaces”.
Have an amazing week ✌️
Tom
P.S. For your own writing, the Anti-AI cheat sheet covers the 15 patterns readers catch.
P.P.S. There’s even a marketplace where AI agents “rent” humans: rentahuman.ai lists 795K+ people available for hire for real-world tasks. Even the AIs are buying human! 😅
Everything I do is human and I always declare it.
Great article! We truly believe it too Tom, thats why we love to organise events in IRL with companies that change the future!