How a Silly Slide Became Our Best Marketing

There’s a business principle that can make your brand’s message travel ten times further on a fraction of the budget, and it’s all about embracing the absurd. I learned this firsthand when I launched my first marketing company at twenty years old. It was a classic a story that grew way too fast for me to handle. Just a year in, I took a $300,000 investment from our biggest client.

When you hand that kind of money to an inexperienced, 20-year-old CEO, there's a good chance they'll do something completely ridiculous with it. And I did. I signed a ten-year lease on a massive 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Manchester, England, for a team of just ten people. Before I even bought desks, I had a mezzanine floor built with a gaming room. I decided stairs were boring, so I spent £13,000 on a giant blue slide that emptied into a ball pit. By the time the desks finally showed up, I’d also installed a basketball hoop, a fully stocked bar, and a huge tree right in the middle of the office.

Over the next few years, that little company became the most talked-about, fastest-growing disruptor in our industry, with an average employee age of 21. Our sales shot up by over 200 percent each year, we landed the world’s biggest brands as clients, and our team grew to over 500 people by the time I turned 25. This entire journey was an example of how a can explode.

The wildest part? We never had a sales team. We didn’t need one, because we had that massive blue slide. This might sound like an exaggeration, but for the first few years, that slide was the single biggest driver of our media coverage. Every major newspaper, TV channel, and blog that covered us mentioned that slide. By our third anniversary, journalists had photographed it hundreds of times. It became an office joke that anytime a reporter came to interview me, someone would yell, “Get in the ball pool!”

The BBC, BuzzFeed, Forbes, GQ—they all lined up to see our office, and the headline photo almost always featured the slide. One BBC story called our office the “coolest” in the country. Looking back, our founding team agrees that spending £13,000 on that slide was one of the smartest, albeit accidental, financial decisions we ever made. This unconventional was proving its worth.

The Message Behind the Madness

I probably only saw people use that slide a handful of times in seven years. But its value wasn't in its function; it was in the message it sent. The slide screamed that we were different, young, disruptive, and innovative. It communicated our identity more powerfully than any marketing campaign ever could. If a picture is worth a thousand words, our blue slide wrote a novel about our values and who we were. This experience showed me how a can define itself without a traditional ad spend.

I’m not suggesting you go out and buy a slide. But I am telling you that your public identity will be shaped more by the uselessly absurd things you do than by the practical ones. It’s a key lesson for anyone looking to turn a into a major player.

A friend of mine recently tried to get me to join his high-end London gym, Third Space. He didn’t mention the hundreds of exercise machines or the top-of-the-line weight racks. Instead, he said, “You should come—it’s so good, they even have a 100-foot climbing wall in the entrance!” He sold me on the most absurd feature. And it worked. I’ve been a member for over a year and have never seen a single person use that wall. But its presence suggests that if they have a climbing wall, they must have everything else, too.

Tesla's Absurdity-Driven Marketing Strategy

Tesla has become one of the world's best-selling car companies in a fraction of the time it took its competitors, all with a $0 advertising budget. Like my agency, Tesla doesn’t need traditional advertising because its brand is defined by absurdity. It’s packed with intentionally ridiculous features that get people talking. This is a core part of its .

Instead of “Comfort” or “Sport” driving modes, Tesla has “Insane,” “Ludicrous,” and “Ludicrous+.” They added a “Caraoke” function, a “Bioweapon Defense Mode,” and an arcade mode. There are even hidden Easter eggs, like one that makes the car emulate Santa’s sleigh and another that produces fart sounds from any passenger seat. These features sound immature—just like my slide—but they generate more online conversation than all the practical features of their competitors combined. People are wired to share things that break the mold, not things that maintain it.

How Beer Showers Built a Billion-Dollar Brand

BrewDog, an indie brewery, became the UK’s fastest-growing beer brand by leaning into the same principle. They operate on a tiny fraction of the marketing budget of their centuries-old rivals. When they launched a hotel chain, they installed beer fridges inside every shower. It's an absurd idea; who is actually using it? But a quick image search reveals countless photos of those shower-beer-fridges.

Without saying a word, that fridge tells you everything: this brand is for beer lovers, it’s punk, it doesn’t follow the rules, and it’s for people who are different. The most absurd thing about the brand says everything about the brand.

So why doesn’t every company adopt this effective ? Because most executives demand a directly measurable ROI. The power of absurdity is hard to quantify, so you either believe in it or you don’t. From what I’ve seen, the founders who do believe in it see their marketing dollars go ten times further. Their stories are defined by the illogical and nonsensical because convention and rationality, while useful, say nothing about who you are. Absurdity sells.