Rude Marketing 101 😈

Written on 02/09/2026
Tom Orbach

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 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!

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#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.

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Have an amazing week ✌️


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 :)