Morning!

It’s my birthday weekend. So after I finish writing this email, the laptop is getting closed and the notifications are going off. I’m ready for a much-needed long weekend away from work.

But before that, it seems like I had one birthday present come early as this week’s newsletter is sponsored by Whispr Flow. No word of a lie, Whispr Flow has completely changed how I work over the last 6 months. I’ve peer-pressured everyone in our team to start using it.

If you’ve never heard of it, you literally click a button and are able to dictate straight into your phone or laptop. It then uses A.I. to clean up what you said.

In fact, the text you’re reading right now was written with Whispr. It’s incredible.

Check it out below, then let’s get into this week’s essay!

In 1842, P.T. Barnum was looking to find the star piece for his American Museum — or "freak show" as it was better known. He already had Chang and Eng (the original Siamese twins joined at the chest), a bearded lady, and a working replica of Niagara Falls.

But they weren't enough.

He didn't want something people would come and see. He wanted something people couldn't not come and see. Something so interesting, so crazy, that the whole of America would have no choice but to flock to it.

That’s when he got his hands on something he called the, “Feejee Mermaid”.

The name conjures up images of an ethereal sea creature. Which is exactly what Barnum wanted you to picture. The promotional posters he distributed across New York showed a beautiful, bare-breasted siren with long flowing hair. Romantic. Mysterious. Irresistible.

The actual object was a 3-foot monkey torso stitched to the back half of a fish. Mouth frozen open. Arms raised. Barnum later described it in his autobiography as "an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen... with the appearance of having died in great agony."

He knew it was fake before he even leased it.

But here's the bit that interests me.

Rather than just putting it on display and opening the doors, Barnum spent weeks engineering a story before a single person saw the thing. He wrote anonymous letters himself, from Alabama, South Carolina, Washington D.C., to New York newspapers, each one describing a mysterious English scientist called "Dr. J. Griffin" of the British Lyceum of Natural History, who had apparently discovered a genuine mermaid near the Fiji Islands.

Dr. Griffin didn't exist. The British Lyceum of Natural History didn't exist. "Dr. Griffin" was Barnum's associate Levi Lyman in a costume. Barnum even staged a fake public dispute between himself and "Griffin" about whether the mermaid could be displayed, just to stoke more curiosity. Then he distributed 10,000 pamphlets across the city.

By the time the Feejee Mermaid went on display, New Yorkers were already talking about it.

Museum attendance tripled.

Now, most people who tell this story focus on the deception. The fake scientist, the gap between the poster and the grotesque reality. And yes, Barnum was a conman by any modern measure.

But the real insight has nothing to do with the hoax. It's the fact that Barnum understood he needed to give people something to say. He had to feed the gossip machine.

Before the Feejee Mermaid, his American Museum was just a museum. You could go, you could tell a friend you'd been. They'd nod. That was it.

After the Feejee Mermaid, you could lean across the dinner table and say: "Have you heard about this museum? Apparently, they've got a mermaid skeleton from the Fiji Islands. Some British scientist found it."

That’s a great bit of gossip to share and a story that’s destined to spread.

The story was the marketing.

And Barnum himself understood it better than almost anyone. He once wrote: "Without publicity a terrible thing happens: nothing."

But while Barnum was using hoaxes to make it happen back in 1842, that same tatic is now running quietly underneath some of the biggest brands you know and love today - just in a slightly different way.

Kim Kardashian is a prime example (whether the rumours are true or not).

In 2007, Kim Kardashian was Paris Hilton's stylist. Largely unknown. Then a tape surfaced of her and famous rapper Ray J, and suddenly, everyone had something to say. Whether the conversation was sympathetic, scandalised, or somewhere in between didn't really matter, because the conversation was happening at all. She was no longer a nobody, she was the person who’d had a tape leak with Ray J. She had a story attached to her name, a story that fed the gossip machine.

On the brand side, we saw a similar thing happen with American Eagle & Sydney Sweeney just last year.

In July 2025, they launched a campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney — star of Euphoria and White Lotus — built around a simple pun:

"Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans."

In one of the ads, Sweeney looks down the lens and says: "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue."

Within days, half the internet was loving it, and the other half was in uproar. Donald Trump posted about it on Truth Social. JD Vance mocked the left's reaction on a podcast. Lizzo weighed in. The story ricocheted from TikTok to the White House and back again.

American Eagle's jeans sold out within a week. Their stock rose 136% over the following months. The campaign generated 40 billion impressions.

Whether American Eagle planned the controversy or not almost doesn't matter. What matters is that they created a sentence the entire country couldn't stop repeating.

"Did you hear about that Sydney Sweeney ad? The one for American Eagle."

They fed the gossip machine.

Hailey Bieber did the same thing on a less controversial level with her skincare brand, Rhode. At the time, her Peptide Lip Treatment was meant to be selling well, but half the world hadn’t heard of it. In fact, I still have no idea what a Peptide Lip Treatment even is.

Then, in 2024, they released their "Lip Case”, a $35 silicone case with a slot on the back to hold the lip balm.

It blew up on social media and the gossip machine were feeding off it for months. "Have you seen Hailey Bieber's lip gloss? You can clip it to the back of your phone."

1 year later, Rhode was sold to ELF Beauty for $1 billion. Certainly not just because of the phone case, but it’s safe to say it did play a part.

This is why people say all press is good press. Barnum understood that 100 years ago, and it’s still very true today. Because whatever news you’ve got going out, it’s feeding that gossip machine.

Jonah Berger spent years researching why things spread, and the conclusion he came to is deceptively simple: people don't share products, they share stories about products. The story is what gives someone social currency, something interesting to say that makes them look interesting too.

And that’s what all of these examples I gave had it common.

The question worth sitting with for your own brand isn't "how do we get more people to see our ads?"

It's simpler, and harder, than that.

What's the story that people will gossip about?

And try not to make it a fake mermaid that’s actually a fish sewn to a monkey.

Right, that's all I've got for you this week.

Until next Sunday,

— Niall

If you’ve read this far, why not see how else I can help you: