Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.If you haven’t subscribed, join 70,000+ weekly readers by subscribing here:We all know about the Coldplay “kiss cam” scandal that rocked the world last week. The internet, of course, had a field day with memes: But there was an offshoot story that flew under the radar, a story that embodies growth marketing in 2025.After the Astronomer CEO was caught on camera, his daughter began to post on TikTok. Soon, she had over 100K followers and 15M views. This video alone got 3M+ likes: The only problem? The CEO of Astronomer doesn’t have a daughter. Some sleuthing from Roberto Nickson revealed that the CEO only has two sons. Someone had pulled a random woman’s Instagram photos to create a fake persona for a non-existent daughter, then started posting content like crazy. Why? Well, once the “daughter” had amassed an audience, the person behind the profile began to subtly plug a meditation app. You can see here the link in her profile: Eventually, the posts themselves began to shill the app. The entire stunt—the fake profile, the fake videos, the fake backstory of Andy Byron’s daughter—was all an effort to get some downloads on a meditation app. Pretty wild. This captures the state of marketing in 2025: guerrilla marketing. Points for effort, I guess? But also an indication of how low companies will go in their quests for eyeballs and clicks. Of course, this is to be expected: attention is the last scarce resource.Kyla Scanlon, one of my favorite economic theorists, recently wrote about attention and went on Ezra Klein’s podcast (worth a listen). Scanlon argues that we’ve had traditional economic substrates like land, labor, and capital. Now, increasingly, the new foundational input is attention.This is particularly true online, and we see Silicon Valley put a premium on