There’s a counterintuitive move available to brands that understand the current trust landscape well enough: deliberately deploying the visual and linguistic codes of scams, manipulation and digital unease, not by accident, but with full authorial intent.
When this works, it signals cultural fluency. It demonstrates that the brand sees the same environment its audience navigates every day and isn’t pretending otherwise. When it doesn’t work, it just looks like a scam.
The difference is intention, craft, and whether the brand’s actual offer remains transparent underneath the aesthetic.
Why the post-inversion internet makes this possible
Max Read wrote in 2018 that the internet had reached a state where “everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real”.
That inversion has deepened considerably since. Audiences are now so saturated with slick, optimised content that polish itself has become a trust signal working in reverse. Imperfection, roughness and uncanniness can read as more honest than production value, because production value has been so thoroughly colonised by content that isn’t trying to do anything except capture attention.
This creates a genuine opening. Brands willing to work inside the aesthetics of the post-inversion internet, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, can achieve cut-through and relevance that conventional brand communication increasingly cannot.
Three campaigns that got it right
1) DIIV: Soul-Net (2024)
LA band DIIV created a fake cult promotional website for their album *Frog In Boiling Water* that was a deliberate tour de force of MLM visuals, pyramid scheme aesthetics, conspiracy theory imagery and uncanny digital unease. The band’s Instagram was cleared before the campaign launched, then began posting context-free visuals that looked like a hack. Audience speculation built organically. People eventually started commenting “Soul Net saved my life.”
What made it work: the aesthetic directly served the album’s themes. The scam semiotics weren’t borrowed; they were the point. And the actual offer, an album, a band, a live experience, remained completely legible underneath the aesthetic layer.
2) Mozilla: Choose Your Future (2026)
Mozilla’s campaign for their annual impact report placed contemporary tech innovations inside an early-internet scam aesthetic: uncanny AI avatars, absurd content, manipulative UX patterns deployed knowingly. The campaign acknowledged the societal collapse in trust in digital environments rather than papering over it.
What made it work: Mozilla is a non-profit whose stated purpose is a better, more open internet. The gap between that mission and the current reality of the web is real and felt by their audience. Foregrounding the problem, rather than offering false reassurance, was coherent with who they actually are.
3) Guess Jeans: idk… GUESS (2026)
Guess deployed iPhone 5 photography, casual captions and a lo-fi aesthetic that reads closer to a personal photo archive than a brand campaign. The copy is deliberately vague and self-questioning, “i think, therefore i GUESS,” treating meaning as something the audience co-authors rather than the brand declares. Then they placed all of it inside the high-status machinery of billboards and global fashion campaign infrastructure.
What made it work: the mismatch between the intimate aesthetic and the official campaign context was intentional, not accidental. In an economy where AI has made high-production imagery feel suspect, Guess positioned restraint and imperfection as an authenticity technology. The lo-fi wasn’t laziness. It was craft applied in a different direction.
The Anthropic case: naming the scam directly
Anthropic’s 2026 Super Bowl campaign addressed OpenAI’s announcement of ads coming to ChatGPT by framing those ads as a form of deception, effectively a scam. Rather than simply positioning Claude as better, the campaign named the specific mechanism by which trust in AI gets eroded and placed Claude on the other side of that line.
This is a harder move to execute than aesthetic play. It names a competitor’s behaviour explicitly and stakes a claim that must be backed by actual product decisions. But it demonstrates the full logical extension of the trust-as-strategy argument: when you’re genuinely operating differently from the extractive norm, you can afford to point at the norm.
The rules that separate intent from accident
Not every brand should reach for these codes. For most, the better advice is to avoid them. But for brands with the cultural fluency, the genuine position and the creative skill to deploy them intentionally, the rules are:
Use scam-adjacent cues only when they reveal a real tension in the category, not as a general posture. Make the target of the critique clear enough that the audience understands what’s being said. Keep the underlying offer transparent and easy to understand. And ensure there is visible human authorship behind the work, because the entire thing collapses if the scam aesthetic was itself produced by the optimisation logic it’s ostensibly critiquing.
Accidental uncanniness still reads as automation, not strategy. The difference between the two is everything.
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Next: Five practical opportunities for any brand to rebuild trust and turn sceptics into believers.
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