Marketing Through Obscurity

I spent some time with an old friend this month – we were exploring Tokyo together and he was really excited about this technology he couldn’t wait to tell me about. AI Agents was the tech, and he played me a segment on a podcast hosted by a prominent crypto influencer where he “interviewed” the AI Agent. It sounded like any conversation you might have with ChatGPT or similar, yet to my friend (and to the host and his fans) it was “mind blowing.” See, this Agent was called “Kolin AI” – ignore for a moment the gastroenterological connotations of this name – and the innovation here, apparently, was that this AI Agent is “deployable on the blockchain.” Which made absolutely no sense to me, but I’m both intellectually predisposed to think this kind of stuff is bullshit as well as not financially invested in its success. 

But I like to understand things, especially things that are marketed either obscurely or badly. I love the process of taking complex technologies and boiling them down to really simple value statements. 

So I did some research. And here’s what I found:

I had some fun with this on LinkedIn, because what the fuck does any of this even mean? I get the concept of AI Agents intelligently doing stuff for us (if a bit skeptical about them actually solving any problems yet) but why the connection to crypto? I got some fairly obscure responses about “AI Agents doing business with each other” (?) which doesn’t seem to solve a problem anybody has, until my friend Pete finally cleared it up for me:

Ah! A bunch of annoying AI-powered crypto bots pushing the latest shitcoin to pump its value such that we can all buy it and realize the gains in its value. That’s it. Mind you, this value is neither innovation nor technology at all. It’s basic pump and dump, and as long as you get in early, you’ll make money. And yet, almost nobody who claims to understand it decided to state it this clearly. Why is that?

Obscurity as a Marketing Strategy

Back to tech. In the early days of programmatic media buying, the industry I cut my teeth in, there was a hot company founded by a hot founder with some hot executives doing hot stuff and it was called AppNexus. 

Yet, I found them to have some of the worst marketing I’d ever seen – it was never clear from their website what exactly the value was they were offering. What was a “real-time ad platform” and who was it for?

Competing with them in my role at MediaMath, where we prided ourselves in being very clear that we were helping marketers run data-driven campaigns that performed better, we continued to see our competition at AppNexus get more attention, more buzz, and ultimately exit in a $1.6B acquisition by AT&T. 

Why Obscurity Works

In AppNexus’ case – and this is mostly based on my experience competing with them, so take it for what it’s worth – I think there were a few reasons why they were this obscure: 

1. Flexibility – were they a DSP? An SSP? An Exchange? Ultimately they were all of the above, with constituencies to please in all these categories. Being clear about any of them could alienate the others. Better to get them in a meeting, then present the value prop that’s most tailored to them. 

2. Buzz – by being so enigmatic at the same time they were clearly showing impressive business results generated a lot of “well what are they?” interest. A lot of people wanted to understand what was going on here. And they had the pedigreed founder and team to justify the interest. They had an “air of inevitability” about them.

3. Deniability – related to #1, they may have wanted to avoid legal concerns related to the founder’s previous company

I personally do not like this kind of marketing strategy and I’m admittedly not very good at it. I like stating a value proposition clearly, which is why the whole crypto “AI Agents” thing vexed me. And so did AppNexus at the time. But it does point to a principle that I do agree with which is that, again, your job with your brand, online collateral, and any other discoverable asset on the web is not to explain completely what you do and why it’s good. Flexibility, buzz, and deniability are assets when you’re marketing something truly complex that has many constituencies, often at odds with one another.  

Back to Bored Apes and Slurp Juice

Now let’s bring it back to why nobody seems to want to call a spade a spade with regards to AI powered pump and dump schemes. The real value prop is “it’s a thing that spams people with crypto hype so you can 5x your money.” But that, alone, just sounds like a scam, so there’s this game we have to play where we pretend that the reason we’re 5x’ing our money is because there’s some incredible innovation we’re buying into. People can understand why buying Apple or Meta a few years ago would have generated 5x returns; this needs to fit into a similar narrative. For this to succeed, obscurity is the only strategy. Luckily, most of you readers have companies that aren’t built on complete bullshit, so you can flirt with a bit of this without relying completely on it.