Eric Siu breaks down spectacle marketing through examples like MrBeast and the startup Cluey, which use high-production stunts and paid creator interns to launch. The problem: chasing constant outlandish moments burns you out and kills long-term growth.
I want to talk about spectacle marketing. When you look at MrBeast, his videos, they're all spectacles, right? It's like, oh, here's a $1 date versus a $500,000 date, or here's a $1 boat versus a billion-dollar boat or something like that, right? Now, you saw Cluey, right? So I watched an interview with this— he's a kid, literally, he's 21 years old. When they first released Cluey, he had a video that was super high production where he was, uh, like on a date with a girl, and then you can see him wearing glasses, and then it was telling him what to say, right? That's how Cluey works. It tells you what to do on like a sales call, for example. His whole thing is he always tries to do outlandish And so they made a launch video on how they're hiring 50 interns. Like, they want an army of these creator interns that they'll pay $50 an hour, and then if they hit a million views on a video, they'll bonus them $1,000, right? But his whole thing is like, you have to like stand out, and I do think that's a nice way to get press in the beginning. I think that's a big reason why Andreessen backed them. I do think though, if you keep doing this for the long term, you're gonna burn out. It's actually not gonna compound in a positive way for you in the long term.
