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    Branded Mayhem
    Case Study

    How We Made Surveillance Funny (And Built the AI Engine to Scale It)

    Michael Sebastian
    Chief Mischief Maker
    January 22, 2026
    How We Made Surveillance Funny (And Built the AI Engine to Scale It)

    The "Boring Tax" in B2B Security

    If you look at 99% of security company marketing, it looks the same:

  1. Stock footage of a guy in a hoodie breaking a window.
  2. Matrix-green code falling down a screen.
  3. A voiceover talking about "comprehensive threat vectors."
  4. It is fearful. It is generic. And it is ignored.

    EyeQ Monitoring had a different problem. They wanted to reach small business owners and younger managers who didn't want "Big Brother"—they just wanted to know their shop was safe.

    We realized the real challenge wasn't "make content." It was: Make surveillance feel normal, helpful, and weirdly likable.

    Here is how we built a content engine that achieved the highest engagement in brand history, using platform-native creative and a custom AI toolchain.

    ---

    The Strategy: "Friday Fails" (Humor as a Weapon)

    Most brands are terrified of humor. In security, they think it kills credibility.

    We took the opposite bet. We launched "Friday Fails," a recurring video series using real surveillance footage of criminals failing spectacularly.

    The Format:

    1. The Hook: A thief tries to throw a brick through a window. The brick bounces back and hits him.

    2. The Reveal: The audio commentary (funny, not mean).

    3. The Payoff: A punch-card caption.

    4. The Brand Tag: EyeQ logo.

    Why it worked:

  5. It dropped defenses. People share funny videos. They do not share fear-based ads.
  6. It proved the product. You can't laugh at the footage if the camera didn't catch it. The utility was baked into the joke.
  7. It created a habit. "Friday Fails" became appointment viewing.
  8. This series drove the highest weekly engagement in the brand's history. Not because we spent millions on ads, but because we stopped acting like a security company and started acting like a media channel.

    ---

    The Engine: A Custom GPT Toolchain

    Creating content is easy. Creating *good* content at scale without burning out your team is hard.

    We didn't just write blog posts. We built an Integrated GPT Ecosystem to automate the grunt work so the humans could focus on the strategy.

    What we built:

    1. The "Topic Generator"

    An agent that picks from five proven angles (The How-To, The Horror Story, The Data Dive, etc.) and generates ideas based on actual search volume.

    2. The "Blog Researcher"

    An agent that builds structured knowledge packs with citations, so the writer isn't starting from a blank page.

    3. The "Blog Writer 9000"

    A custom model trained on EyeQ's specific voice (Flesch-Kincaid score ~60). It drafts publish-ready content that doesn't sound like generic AI robot-speak.

    4. "Vigil" The AI Mascot

    We created a branded AI character for the website that guides users through sales questions using a consistent, on-brand persona.

    ---

    The Weirdness Factor: The Head-Swap Video

    To prove EyeQ wasn't a faceless corporation, we got weird.

    We produced a platform-native video where we swapped a human head with the EyeQ logo using AI voice modulation and facial tracking. It was intentionally "uncanny."

    The result? It stopped thumbs. It signaled: "We are technical, we are modern, and we don't take ourselves too seriously."

    ---

    More Friday Fails: The Series in Action

    Here are a few more examples of the "Friday Fails" format that drove massive engagement:

    ---

    The Lesson: Platform-Native Beats Polished

    This campaign proved three things about B2B marketing in 2026:

    1. Series formats > One-off posts. If you want compounding attention, build a franchise.

    2. Humor is a conversion tool. If you can make them laugh, you can make them listen.

    3. AI is infrastructure. Use it to do the research and drafting so you can spend your energy on the creative risk.

    If your B2B brand feels invisible, it's not because the algorithm hates you. It's because you're boring.

    See the Content Lab and let's build something people actually want to watch.

    "If your content makes people feel like they are in a detention center, they will not buy from you. Even in B2B security, the "boring tax" is real."

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