1. Monaco put a plane in the sky over San Francisco
Monaco flew a small private plane over San Francisco trailing a banner with their name on it. Sam Blond, @samdblond broke the whole thing down and made the case that it beats a traditional billboard.
I think he's right. Every founder in SF went billboard-blind a long time ago.
A plane overhead is a different thing entirely. People looked up and went "wait, what is that?", and that little moment of confusion is attention. Attention & standing out is the whole game.
As far as I can tell this hadn't really been done in SF before, which is why it worked. Find a medium nobody has saturated yet (especially if its popular elsewhere), and it'll earn attention a crowded medium can't for way cheaper.
The plane & banner are incidental. The novelty is the point.
2. Founders Fund launched a Mafia show
@foundersfund dropped a show called MAFIA, where a room full of tech luminaries play the party game of the same name.
It's hosted by Mike Solana, @micsolana, who edits Pirate Wires and is also FF's CMO, and the debut had a real who's who:
@sama, @PalmerLuckey, @bryan_johnson, @moxie , @zoink, and more.
They filmed it at Tosca Cafe, the same North Beach spot where the original PayPal Mafia photo was shot back in 2007, which is a great touch.
It did around 1.5 million views on X in its first day. Honestly, it's the first time I've watched a proper show on X all the way. It hooked me, and I'm looking forward to the next episodes.
This is brand marketing done really well. They took something timeless, a game people have played forever, and adapted it for the tech world. It sits in the same new-media wave as OpenAI buying TBPN and a16z's MTS, but Founders Fund went entertainment-first, and I think that's why it stands out.
Owned entertainment is a moat. If you can make something people genuinely want to watch, you own that attention instead of renting it. More firms pouring money into new media should be studying formats like this, and honestly, SF could use the entertainment.
3. HeyClickly launched with a raw founder video
@FarzaTV launched @heyclicky with what was basically a Loom recording of himself, just demoing the product with a ton of energy. No crazy high production, no "we raised $$ to do Y" hook, barely any copy in the post. He got straight into showing the thing.
It did around 3.6 million impressions, 14,000+ likes, and 8,300+ bookmarks. For a launch with no budget behind the video, that is a lot.
This one is pure show-don't-tell, and it's a good reminder that authenticity beats production almost every time.
You don't strictly need a big budget to launch on X. I'll be honest, our next few launch videos are going to borrow from this. If you can find a way to be yourself and show your product truthfully, just do that. Launch every other day, for all I care.
4. Anthropic's creator partnership with Roberto Nickson
@AnthropicAI worked with the creator, Roberto Nickson @rpnickson on one of the more creative paid partnerships I've seen in a while.
The video follows him through his day. He tells his partner "sorry babe, gotta go for training," gets in his car, and starts working entirely from voice dictation. He has Claude build a fully responsive website, save the project, open his Instagram dashboard, pull 30 days of analytics, write 20 posts, work out what people are asking for, and fold all of it into a strategy report.
Meanwhile he's at the gym and getting punched in the face at a boxing match, with Claude running in a half-screen overlay the whole time. He gets home and it's all done, sitting in a doc, ready to go.
On Instagram it did over a million views and 100,000+ likes. On X the same video is around 858,000 views. What makes it work is how specific and cinematic it is. Really good ideation and execution.
It shows the product at the edge of what it can do, inside a real, slightly absurd story you end up remembering.
Brands should over-index on hyper-specialized creatives. A specific brief with the right creator returns far more than a generic influencer partnership.
We run these kinds of creative partnerships on YouTube and Instagram in the tech niche, and the specific ones always outperform the safe ones. This is Anthropic staying ahead of the game.
The fifth one is yours
I left the fifth slot open on purpose. What was the best marketing motion you saw on X last week (or even earlier)?