The Manufactured Hype Question: When Do We Draw the Line on Viral Marketing?
Last year, I received an unspoken, almost subliminal mandate from indie rock’s ruling tastemakers: I was supposed to love Geese. These young Brooklyn-based musicians make solid, enjoyable rock, but are they really the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll, the definitive Gen Z rock band, the second coming of The Strokes?
If you buy into the endless industry buzz around the group, you’d be led to believe that’s exactly what they are. After their album Getting Killed dropped last September, Geese was inescapable for anyone who regularly refers to live concerts as “shows.” When frontman Cameron Winter played an “extremely sold-out” solo set at Carnegie Hall, many attendees left convinced they’d witnessed history: 50 years from now, they’d tell their grandkids they were there for a seminal moment in American music, the birth of the next Bob Dylan. But how can any act possibly live up to that level of hype?
That’s why when Wired reported that Geese’s mainstream popularity was actually a coordinated psychological operation, I felt immediately vindicated. I’d been right all along! I was smarter than everyone else for only casually enjoying their music, not buying into the full hype train.
But the truth is never that simple. The real story is that Geese partnered with Chaotic Good, a marketing firm that builds thousands of social media accounts specifically to manufacture viral trends for its clients, a roster that also includes TikTok stars Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. This reveal has sparked wildly mixed reactions: from diehard fans feeling deep betrayal to casual observers confused why anyone would get upset over a band doing marketing, a totally routine step for any growing musical act.
“On TikTok, it’s really easy to get views. You just post trending audios. But artists can’t do that, because they want to promote their own music,” explained Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman in an interview with Billboard. “So a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving.”
Once you learn how widespread these manufactured marketing strategies are, it hits the same way it does when you’re a kid and find out the Tooth Fairy isn’t real. You probably already had a hunch something was off, but you wanted to believe the fantasy: that a tiny magical fairy sneaks into your room at night, and every viral success story is an organic fairy tale, not a pre-planned product.
This tactic isn’t limited to the music industry, either. Young startup founders are following the exact same playbook.
Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt
Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410.
Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt
Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410.
While preparing for an interview with the Gen Z founders of fashion app Phia, I searched TikTok to see what real everyday users were saying about the platform. I found dozens of videos repeating the exact same talking points: that Bill Gates’ daughter built an app to help you save on luxury goods, or that using Phia is like having a personal shopping assistant that only cares about getting you the best deal. When I clicked through to the accounts behind these videos, I found most of them had never posted any content except videos about Phia.
This isn’t some “gotcha” exposé of Phia. Founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni don’t even try to hide their social media strategy—this is just how modern marketing works.
“One thing we’ve been trying lately is basically running a creator farm, so we have a ton of different college students that we pay to make videos about Phia on their own accounts,” Kianni said on her podcast. “This is an approach that’s really focused on volume. We have like ten creators, they post twice a day, and we ultimately reach like 600 videos total.”
On TikTok-style feeds, users watch videos in a bubble, disconnected from the rest of a creator’s full profile. Very few viewers stop to check what else that account has posted, so they never suspect a glowing recommendation for a cool new app could be an inorganic, paid promotion. Even independent big-name creators pay armies of teenagers on Discord to edit clips of their streams and post them en masse to grow their reach.
“That’s been going on for a bit,” Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch last year. “Drake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it — Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] has done it — hitting millions of impressions … If it’s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.”
Marketing firms like Chaotic Good just scale this same approach to a massive level. Instead of paying college students or teen fans to make content, they buy hundreds of iPhones and build a network of social media accounts they can use to fabricate a viral trend out of thin air. Spelman told Billboard that Chaotic Good’s office is “overrun with iPhones,” and they have so many devices that Verizon treats them like VIPs.
“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,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
This line of thinking aligns perfectly with the Dead Internet Theory, which argues that bot-generated content already dominates the public web.
If Chaotic Good’s content armies aren’t posting organic-seeming content for clients, they’re commenting on existing posts about the company’s clients to control the overall narrative. Instead of waiting to see how real fans respond to a new song, they flood comment sections with fake accounts gushing about how much they love the track.
For Geese, being labeled an “industry plant” is a major insult. After songwriter Eliza McLamb published the blog post that first connected Geese and Chaotic Good, the marketing firm removed all mention of Geese and “narrative campaigns” from its website. (The company told Wired that it did this to protect artists from being “wrapped up in false accusations or misconceptions about how their music was discovered.”)
But just like the unapologetic marketing behind many Gen Z startups, global girl group Katseye has been completely open that they are the definition of an industry plant. There is literally a Netflix docuseries, Pop Star Academy, that shows exactly how a room full of global record executives turned these six young women into superstars, even pitting potential members against each other in a K-pop-style survival competition.
When Pop Star Academy came out, I watched it with a growing sense of horror: HYBE and Geffen were treating these aspiring teenage pop stars like raw material to mold into walking billboards, designed to sell everything from Erewhon smoothies to hair serums. But over the course of the eight-episode series, I became deeply invested in the girls’ journeys. I wanted to watch them thrive in the face of unrelenting industry pressure.
I’m sure that is exactly what Katseye’s management wanted from the documentary: to cultivate a fierce, protective sense of support for the girls, even if it means framing executives as the bad guys. Fast-forward a few years, and Katseye performed their track “Gnarly” at the Grammys — a track fans hated at first, until suddenly, they didn’t.
It’s hard not to think of Chaotic Good’s “narrative campaigns,” flooding comment sections to steer public discourse, when I look at that shift. I hated “Gnarly” when it came out, but over time I decided it’s actually an avant-garde masterpiece. Did I change my mind on my own, or was it changed for me? For as much pride as I took in resisting the hype around Geese, I am so wrapped up in Katseye that I’ve spent hours speculating on Reddit forums about the real story behind Manon’s hiatus.
Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?
This is not a rhetorical question. The Geese discourse (which could also be manufactured, now that I think about it!) has inspired such varied reactions because we have not established clear social norms around what counts as necessary, routine marketing and what counts as inauthentic, manipulative growth hacking.
We, the fans, get to decide now where we draw the line.
The Manufactured Hype Question: When Do We Draw the Line on Viral Marketing?
