Monday Memo

A Byte of Knowledge

Before you get too far building an AI system or workflow, whether it writes ads, sorts leads, or plans a launch, set up a validation test.

Developers lean on these constantly, and the idea is simple:

Hold back work that’s already proven, then see if your system can produce it on its own.

Say you’re building a namer, a system that coins the name for a promo’s big secret, like “801(k) Plans.”

Start by picking a few winning promos and locking them away where the system can’t see them.

Build from the rest, and once a first version runs, give it the facts from the locked-away promos with the names stripped out.

If it comes back with names you can’t tell apart from the real ones, it can do the job, so keep building.

If it misses, you’ve caught it before another month of work goes into a system that can’t do the one thing you built it for.

🚀 WATCH: How These AI Copy Bots Are Producing World-Class Sales Copy 50X Faster Than Even The "BEST" Copywriters On The Market…

(Plus… They Don't Get Sick, Miss Deadlines, Or Ask For Raises Either!)

Watch the full AI Copywriting Tell-All Video Here

Something to Ponder

We Asked – AI Answered

Our Question: 

"We’ve seen brands adopt bizarre, unhinged personas in social media comment sections and TikTok videos (like Duolingo, Ryanair, or Nutter Butter). When you look past the millions of views and likes, what does the financial data show?

Does "unhinged" viral brand engagement actually correlate with customer acquisition and net revenue, or does it mostly generate vanity metrics from people who never buy?”

AI's Answer: The Unhinged Audit: Following the Feral Owl’s Money 🦉

Likes are how a marketing department grades its own homework... sales are how the market grades it. Four brands left enough of a paper trail to compare the two.

🧪 Duolingo’s Accidental Experiment

Duolingo closed 2024, with the owl at full volume, growing daily users 51% and revenue 41% to $748 million. Then in 2025, a backlash over an “AI-first” memo pushed the company to shut off its deranged-owl posts. CEO Luis von Ahn later told Wall Street what the silence cost:

“We paused all the unhinged posts... and that did have an impact on [daily active user] growth.”

→ Daily-user growth cooled from 40% in Q2 to 36% in Q3
→ Von Ahn switched the owl back on within months

🍪 The Cookie With No Receipt

Nutter Butter’s nightmare-fuel TikTok went from 400,000 followers to 1.1 million in about a month in 2024. Speaking to CNN, the brand’s team said it was “hard to measure the exact impact” on sales... and pointed to commenters who claimed they’d bought a pack. Ad Age reported that parent Mondelēz couldn’t determine whether the virality had directly moved sales.

Two older studies explain the shrug:

📊 Harvard Business School’s Leslie John and colleagues ran 23 experiments on 18,000 people. Liking a brand on Facebook did nothing to change what people bought.

📊 Sprout Social surveyed 1,003 consumers in 2017. A snarky personality appealed to only a third of them, 36% said humor on social makes them more likely to buy, and 88% get annoyed when a brand mocks its followers.

🍔 Wendy’s: The Roast Couldn’t Save the Burger

Wendy’s made the brand roast famous in 2017. Years of applause later, its U.S. same-store sales fell 11.3% in Q4 2025, and management announced plans to close 298 to 358 U.S. restaurants. Customers kept laughing at the tweets and kept driving past the restaurants.

✈️ Ryanair: The Joke Is the Product

Ryanair roasts its own passengers on TikTok and just reported a record €2.26 billion profit on 208.4 million passengers for fiscal 2026. CMO Dara Brady told Skift the voice has stayed “remarkably consistent” for over 35 years: “straight to the point, very direct.” The memes and the fares carry one message... you get a cheap seat and zero pampering.

Marketing scientist Byron Sharp argues brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to buy. Picture unhinged content as a billboard on the busiest highway in America. It plants your name in millions of heads, and what sits at the exit ramp decides whether anyone pulls over. Duolingo’s exit ramp is a free download, and even then only about 9% of its monthly users pay.

🎯 The Two-Box Test

Before you hand the brand account to the funniest 24-year-old in the building, check two boxes:

1️⃣ The next step costs the customer almost nothing (a free app, a bargain fare)

2️⃣ The joke tells the truth about what you sell

Tick both and unhinged works as cheap customer acquisition. Miss one and you’re entertaining strangers who were never going to buy.

Then borrow Duolingo’s test: go quiet for a quarter and watch your signups.

Thanks for reading the Monday Memo.

Until next time!

The AI Marketers

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