Apps & Consumer
Chaotic Good and the business of manufactured viral trends
Marketing firms like Chaotic Good are using thousands of social media accounts and creator farms to manufacture viral trends, raising questions about digital marketing authenticity in the American market.
The American marketing firm Chaotic Good is using thousands of social media accounts to manufacture trends for its clients. To execute these campaigns, the firm’s office is overrun with hundreds of iPhones bought to fabricate viral trends. The company’s co-founders, Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren, openly describe these tactics as a way to simulate engagement and control online narratives. Spelman explained that a major part of their work involves posting a high volume of content across numerous accounts to generate enough impressions to simulate the idea that a song is trending. Coren expressed a highly skeptical view of online authenticity, stating, “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments”
This shift toward inorganic growth is not limited to specialized agencies; startup founders are adopting similar playbooks. Phia, a fashion app founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, uses a “creator farm”—which refers to a marketing strategy involving paying many individuals to post content about a product. Kianni explained that they basically run this creator farm by paying college students to make videos about Phia on their own accounts. The strategy relies heavily on volume: Phia employs like ten creators who post twice a day, ultimately reaching like 600 videos total to generate the appearance of organic popularity.
The music industry has seen similar dynamics, where the line between organic success and corporate backing is increasingly blurred. The Brooklyn-based rock band Geese faced scrutiny after their album release in September, leading to allegations of being an “industry plant”—a term for an artist whose success is perceived as manufactured by industry executives rather than organic growth. Meanwhile, the global girl group Katseye, consisting of six young women, was developed through an eight-episode Netflix docuseries that openly detailed how record executives manufactured their success. The group has been described as the “definition of industry plants.” These strategies highlight a broader shift toward manufactured success that challenges consumer trust in global digital discourse.
Why it matters
The shift toward inorganic, manufactured growth strategies—from bot-driven comment flooding to creator farms—challenges the assumption that viral success is organic, forcing brands and consumers to rethink digital authenticity.