Friction beats friendly
Four campaigns building memorable companions in an age of sycophantic AI
Your AI is too nice. So is everyone else’s.
ChatGPT agrees with you. Claude apologises when you raise your voice. Gemini wants to know how it can help. Every brand sounds the same. Helpful, friendly, slightly desperate.
The work I actually remember this month does the opposite. It builds characters with friction. Weird, gross, mean, joyful in a slightly unhinged way. Impossible to ignore.
Marcel says: “I am chaotic and slightly unhinged. That is the entire point.”
Slather made the sun the bad guy
One line: “The sun is not your friend.”
Every sunscreen brand on earth sells holidays and bikinis. Slather (by SICKDOGWOLFMAN) sells you a creepy, vindictive sun actively trying to cook you. Their latest spot is an Aussie infomercial spoof where the sun BBQs a man on a spit.
Same SPF 50+ that everyone else sells. Suddenly, it’s protection from a threat, not an accessory for a tan. They villainised the entire category’s hero. Men, who barely use sunscreen, finally noticed.
Marcel says: “Make the customer’s problem the antagonist. Always.”
BONUS POINT: I particularly like that this one is embedded fully in the brand; it’s not just a campaign asset.
Four Seasons made STIs into kaiju
A couple skips the condom. Cut to a giant baby kaiju levelling Sydney. Then gonorrhoea shows up. Then chlamydia. Then syphilis. Full grotesque monster movie.
Four Seasons Naked Condoms, by Emotive and AiCandy. No PSA energy. No shame. Just literal cinematic monsters personifying every reason to reach for the box.
The kicker: the kaiju were built to talk back in the comments. Hate the ad? Gonorrhoea pops up to celebrate its case numbers.
“The campaign is built to respond in real time.” — Gavin McLeod, Emotive
A friendly mascot would have killed this on impact. The friction is the point.
Tesco built a fruit giant called Plumbert 🍎
The masterclass.
Tesco doubled its Free Fruit & Veg for Schools programme. The kind of brief that usually produces a soft-focus ad of kids smiling at apples. Forgettable, every time.
Instead, BBH built a giant. His name is Plumbert. 105,000 photorealistic pieces of fruit and veg. Six months in post. He travels the UK with a boy called Theo, gradually giving himself away to schools until he’s almost gone. All set to “Give a Little Bit.”
It should be cringe. It isn’t. They committed to the character. The agency invented their own term (”fruit resolution”) just to get his apples the right size.
“A big initiative deserves a big idea. Some would say it’s giant.” — Felipe Guimaraes, BBH London
A purpose ad with a narrator dies after one airing. A purpose ad with Plumbert sells plush toys and runs for years.
Marcel says: “Friction isn’t always anger. Sometimes it’s commitment.”
Canva built a squirrel cult and refused to explain it
A giant unbranded squirrel statue appears in Brooklyn Bridge Park. No logo. No press release. Around it: knitting circles in acorn hats, a squirrel choir, balloon vendors, billboards from a fictional movement called The Squirrelites.
New Yorkers had no idea what was going on. That was the whole point.
Canva and Quality Meats sat on the reveal for days. Why a giant squirrel? Who are The Squirrelites? Is this a cult? Eventually, the hero film dropped: a woman has a chance encounter with a squirrel and accidentally starts a movement.
The campaign works because it withholds. Most B2B and SaaS marketing tells you what it is in second one, then explains why you should care for sixty more. Canva did the opposite.
“The squirrel concept works because it is bizarre enough to interrupt attention.” — ContentGrip
Curiosity loops travel faster than clarity. A friendly mascot waving from a Canva banner is invisible. A faintly menacing squirrel that won’t explain itself gets a week of free press.
Admittedly, the character’s versatility also makes it less memorable as a long-term asset, but I’m curious to see if Canva will continue to build this world or if it was a one-off.
The pattern
Smooth is forgettable. Friendly is forgettable. Helpful is forgettable.
These brands didn’t pick villains. They picked characters with edges. STI kaiju have edges. A creepy sun has edges. A fruit giant who gives himself away has edges. A squirrel cult that won’t explain itself has edges.
Edges create curiosity. Curiosity creates memory. Memory creates brand.
We’ve been here before. The Noid. Mr Mucus. The Pillsbury Doughboy is sixty and still working harder than most social teams. They earned their decades by refusing to be likeable in the bland, agreeable way that AI and modern marketing default to.
Marcel says: “Polite characters die in the algorithm. Distinctive characters live forever.”
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