👀 Don’t look, I dare you

What’s your first impulse when someone tells you not to do something?

Do that thing, obviously…

Brands are dissing themselves as a marketing technique

I’ve started noticing brands using this hack to start tapping into audiences that specifically care about what’s different about what they’re marketing.

The screenshot comes from a marketing campaign from Visit Oslo (the tourism board for the city of Oslo, Norway). It’s based around Halfdan, a fictional 31-year-old Oslo native listing out all the reasons why he wouldn’t visit Oslo if he didn’t already live there. It’s intentionally niche humor because many of the things that he “finds annoying” are what make it a great place to visit for the target audience of this video. For example here are some of his other complaints:

• “I don’t understand why people go swimming in the middle of the city - it’s disgusting”

• “You can walk from one side of town to the other in, like, 30 minutes”

• “Culture…” shows museums “…If you don’t have to stand in line for a couple hours, is it even worth seeing?”

• Shows restaurant, “Sometimes I just walk in off the street and get a table. And I’m not even famous. I mean, what does that tell you?”

For a specific type of tourist, ahem me, many of these “complaints” sound rather nice. I don’t love super busy cities… sorry NYC die-hards… but places that are super accessible, and have cool things to see and do, are appealing to me.

Not gonna lie, years ago we spent a night in the Oslo airport, and even though we didn’t venture into the city, I really liked it there - if an airport can actually tell you anything about a city…

Why should you consider dissing your own offers?

Let’s look at some numbers:

• In the first two days, this ad was live, it got 2 million views on X/Twitter (50k followers as of writing)

• In the first week, it had 2 million organic views on TikTok (26.6k followers as of writing)

• Youtube has 763k views as of writing (8.25k subs as of writing)

The reason this works is because it’s a combination of humor and making people feel seen or highlighting things they actually care about. At its core this works because you’re pointing people’s attention to the things that differentiate what you’re marketing, with the hook that people can’t look away from a “train wreck”.

This “don’t visit” video wouldn’t do well if they pointed out that they have road construction, 9 number of months of cloudy weather, or no hotels to stay in.

But, if you rephrase those exact three things, it could work to say not to visit because “everyone rides the new public transit system”, “9 months of snow sports every single weekend”, or “tons of unique short-term rentals to stay in” (I have no idea if any of these statements are true).

Individual creators are doing this on IG as well

If you watched this video Jo put up on IG yesterday about how we cut our grocery bill by $250 last month, you’re well aware we’re big Aldi fans, it doesn’t hurt we live within 100 yards of one…

This is a great example of a “less negative” way of still highlighting the things that makes you different by an Aldi partner @josh.dad.gillett.

Pointing out things like needing a quarter or buying bags could be either a negative or a positive depending on how it’s framed in your marketing.

3 easy ways to come up with these ideas:

• What are the things that you get the most comments/questions about?

• What are your brand identifiers and how do they fit in context to your offers (eg, Oslo has culture as an identifier & empty museums as context)?

• How do you know if someone is a good fit to work with you (eg, we learned for our branding packages, that if a client is planning to hire a creative director other than us, we’re probably not a good fit)?

Now take the most relatable of those and turn them into a “this isn’t for you if” piece of content. This could be a skit, or something as simple as a carousel.

If this made you think of another “this isn’t for you” piece of content or marketing you’ve seen, hit reply and share it with me! I’ve been finding this interesting this week and would love to see more examples.

Lyndon

Ps, here’s a link to this article if you’d like to share this with someone

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