Monday Memo
A Byte of Knowledge
Live in a house long enough and you stop seeing the wallpaper.
A guest spots it instantly.
Your business or client is the same...
What you do better than anyone has been around so long it stopped looking like an advantage.
The guarantee you've honored for a decade, the story of why you started, normal to you and striking to a stranger.
And AI makes an excellent stranger.
Before asking it for fresh hooks or a new campaign, have it dig into what already exists.
Paste in three years of testimonials and ask which benefit customers keep praising that your copy never leads with.
Paste in your five best promos and ask what they share that the flops lacked.
Do that and the AI can identify the advantages that are already there, proven and ignored...so the new work starts from proof.
Find the edge you already have before you try and invent one from scratch.
🚀 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:
"How have memes changed commerce?"
AI's Answer: The Meme Economy - When Jokes Started Moving Money 🐸💰
Richard Dawkins coined "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) to describe ideas that replicate like genes... jumping from brain to brain and mutating along the way. Fifty years later those replicators move stock prices and rewrite P&Ls, while most marketers still file them under "social content."
📈 1. Memes Became a Capital Market
Nobel laureate Robert Shiller argued in Narrative Economics (2019) that stories spread like epidemics and drive real economic events. The internet then ran the experiment for him:
→ GameStop, January 2021: r/WallStreetBets pushed a struggling mall retailer from roughly $17 to an intraday high of $483. Melvin Capital lost 53% that month and took a $2.75 billion lifeline from Citadel and Point72.
→ Dogecoin: Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched it in December 2013 as a parody. By May 2021 its market cap had passed $80 billion.
Anonymous retail traders armed with a shared joke beat credentialed professionals at their own game.
🥤 2. Your Customer Runs the Ad Department
Sept 2020 🛹 Nathan Apodaca, an Idaho potato-warehouse worker, films himself skateboarding to work, drinking Ocean Spray while Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" plays.
Weeks later 🎶 "Dreams" re-enters the Billboard Hot 100, 43 years after release. Ocean Spray gives Apodaca a new truck.
Nov 2023 🔥 A TikTok shows a Stanley tumbler surviving a car fire with ice still inside. President Terence Reilly responds on camera and offers to replace the car.
Per CNBC, Stanley's revenue climbed from $73 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023. Neither brand created the content. Each one simply responded quickly and generously... so speed of reply now beats size of budget.
⚔️ 3. Memes Made Consumer Revolts Cheap
Economist Mancur Olson explained in The Logic of Collective Action (1965) why large, scattered groups rarely organize: each member pays a cost and sees little personal benefit. Memes wipe out that cost, since sharing one takes two seconds and feels like entertainment.
Bud Light found out in April 2023. After its Dylan Mulvaney promotion, parody videos and memes spread a boycott faster than any formal organization could have. AB InBev reported U.S. revenue down 10.5% in Q2 2023, and Modelo Especial took the best-selling-beer crown Bud Light had worn for more than two decades.
A brand that forgets its core buyer can now get fired by that buyer in a weekend.
🧪 4. The Science of What Spreads
Wharton's Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman analyzed nearly 7,000 New York Times articles (Journal of Marketing Research, 2012):
✅ Awe, anger and anxiety → shared more
❌ Sadness → shared less
The common thread was physiological arousal. Committee-approved, offend-no-one copy produces none, so it travels nowhere.
💀 5. The Joke Can Be the Whole Product
Mike Cessario, a former Netflix creative, put water in a tallboy can, named it Liquid Death, and gave it the tagline "Murder Your Thirst." Investors valued the company at $1.4 billion in March 2024. Water is about as commoditized as products get, so nearly all of that valuation rides on the bit.
🎯 Your Move
Hand your social accounts to someone with a personality and the authority to reply within hours
- Know exactly who your core buyer is, and never mock them
- Write copy that makes people marvel or get fired up
- Treat customer-made content as your best ad inventory
Thanks for reading the Monday Memo.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
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