BUILD | Word of Mouth
The Invisible Ones
I spent five minutes this morning staring at an Instagram ad for a brand that makes overpriced water bottles. It was a perfect, frictionless video with a pulsing lo-fi beat and zero soul. The algorithm knew exactly who I was, but the more I saw it, the more I wanted to throw my phone into the toilet. I wasn't on the toilet, mind you. It was just a visceral reaction to the realization that we’ve reached a point where being targeted feels like being hunted.
I’m looking at the marketing budget for Canard and wondering why we’re even considering playing this game.
Rion Harmon at Day Job recently pointed out a growing demographic of consumers who simply no longer go on the internet. They can only be reached in the real world. He says, in a recent WSJ article, "They don't know which skincare product is currently viral on TikTok. They don't care if ankle socks are out of fashion. To them, being aware of every micro-shift in digital culture isn't a sign of being cool; it’s a sign of being distracted."
They are the invisible ones.
I want to build things for people who aren't looking at their phones. That is a terrifying operational decision when every growth playbook tells you to spend your first fifty thousand dollars on Meta ads. If you aren't in the feed, do you even exist?
The traditional marketing path is a race to the bottom of a very shallow pool. You spend money to interrupt people who are already exhausted by interruptions. It feels like a desperate attempt to manufacture relevance through frequency rather than quality. I’m thinking about pulling the plug on the social strategy entirely before we even launch. I might be wrong. We might end up with a warehouse full of bags that nobody knows exist because I was too stubborn to buy a few million impressions.
But there is a specific kind of recognition that happens when you discover something organically. It’s the difference between being told a joke and actually finding something funny.
Anu Lingala calls this the hierarchy of humanness. As AI flattens the digital world—making every caption, every image, and every brand voice feel identical—anything that proves a human was actually involved becomes an asset. We are moving toward a world where a fingerprint on a piece of hardware is more valuable than a high-resolution render.
I’m threatening to test this theory: that being worth finding is better than being impossible to avoid.
This means the physical touchpoints have to carry more weight. If we aren't shouting on the internet, the weight of the zipper pull and the specific shade of duck egg blue on the liner have to do the talking for us. It’s a slower, more expensive way to build a brand. It requires a level of patience that doesn't usually exist in a venture-backed world. Fortunately, we are not backed by venture capital so I can explore these counterintuitive ideas freely.
We are still figuring out how to show up without being loud. Maybe it’s a series of small, unannounced physical spaces. Maybe it’s just making a product so good that one person tells another person over a coffee.
I don't have the answer yet. I just know that every time I see a perfectly optimized ad, I feel a little bit more invisible myself. I’d rather build for the people who have already looked away.