How to engineer fame in an AI era – and why you need to start now

Let’s start with the bit no-one in marketing wants to admit: you aren’t struggling because your product is “too niche”, or because your budget is “small”, or because “B2B is different to B2C”.

You’re struggling because your brand is invisible and invisibility is now the default state. Google has gone full Skynet. It doesn’t really want to send traffic to your site anymore; it wants to answer the query itself with AI and keep the user in its own little walled garden.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sora generates photorealistic video from text, which means very soon, an eight-year-old with a cheap laptop will be able to produce more content in an afternoon than your entire marketing team produced in Q3.

Everything is flooded. Everything is pay-to-play. Everything is louder. And being found is going to become tougher and even more expensive. That is, unless you are famous. Fame is about to become massively important, so it’s about time we learned how to engineer it.

Fame is the only moat left

Fame is not “a nice-to-have”. It’s not ego. It’s not awards, podcasts, or a nice Canva banner. Fame is the only functioning moat you have left.

When they’re searching for you by name, you’re not playing Google’s game anymore. They’re coming straight in the door. Fame breaks algorithmic chokeholds and lets you jump the queue. Fame means you spend £0 on search and still get found.

The question, then, is not “is fame important?” The question is, “how the hell do you engineer it in 2025 if you’re not already famous?”.

Because here’s the first uncomfortable truth: fame is not accidental.

Understanding relative fame

Let’s get clear on terms before the CMOs in the back have a coronary.

Fame is relative. Fame is contextual.

Molly-Mae is famous to millions of British women under 30. She is probably less famous to your mum than the bloke who reads the local weather. Your CEO might be “well known in the sector” and still be a complete nobody to procurement.

The new marketing buzzword is GEO – but is it real?Fame is simple: how quickly and how widely can you come to mind inside the group that matters to you. That’s it.

You don’t need to be Taylor Swift famous. You need to be top of mind among the however many people who make the buying decision in this category, famous.

You need what we’ll call relative fame.

If you’re selling mass beer, that group is basically everyone with a liver. If you’re selling industrial gas detection systems, that group is a few thousand operations directors. Scale the ambition to the pond you’re actually swimming in.

The smaller you are, the less you can afford to waste. But how do we reduce waste in our quest for fame?

The network science of fame

To answer that, we have to go somewhere marketers almost never go: network science.

Albert-László Barabási, who has done more work on how fame spreads than any brand “guru” you’ve seen on a conference stage, describes the internet not as a flat democracy but as a scale-free network.

In plain English, that means most people get almost no attention, and a tiny number of “hubs” get a grotesque, unfair, self-reinforcing amount of it. Those hubs attract more links which, in turn, attract yet more links.

And I’m not talking about backlinks to drive some SEO campaign. I’m talking about everything from stores on the high street, memories, Reddit threads, social posts, conversations, and, of course, those pesky hyperlinks.

Success compounds. The rich get richer. Barabási calls this ‘preferential attachment’.

You already know this instinctively. Big brands get cheaper reach per pound because they are already big brands. So, if fame is a network effect, your job is very obviously not to “make content and pray”. Your job is to build links into yourself faster than others in your category.

Fitness, Q factor and tenacity

Barabási breaks this down with two ideas that marketers should have tattooed somewhere tender.

First: fitness signals. Fitness is how appealing, interesting, or desirable you appear to the market you want.

Sydney Sweeney has fitness in obscene quantity. You can dress that up as beauty, talent, presence, charisma, brand fit, whatever gets you through HR, but the point is she emits signals that the market is actively selecting for. That creates demand for attention.

Spud Man from Tamworth, a bloke selling jacket potatoes out of a trailer, also has fitness. He strapped a camera to his chest, filmed himself making aggressively comforting, overfilled potatoes, and people wanted to watch that. Millions of them. Because watching butter get knifed into a hot crispy spud is oddly satisfying. That’s fitness.

He wasn’t pretending to disrupt anything. He was just unusually watchable in a category nobody thought could produce a celebrity. In 2021, he had basically no following online: no YouTube audience, 13,000 on TikTok, 4,000 on Facebook.

Flash forward to 2025, he’s sitting on multi-million TikTok followings and six-figure YouTube subscriptions. He turned potatoes into reach.

Liquid Death had fitness. It’s water in a can that looks like an energy drink and shouts ‘METAL’. You think you bought it because it’s “mountain water” and trumpets its “sustainability” credentials. You didn’t. You bought it because carrying a can that looks like a beer and says ‘DEATH’ is cooler than holding a plastic Evian like a Pilates instructor. That’s fitness.

They built a brand you wanted to be seen with. And then, because distribution never got fully sorted, the shine dulled in the UK. Fitness can fade.

Go to any B2B expo and you’ll find a haunted graveyard of polite corporate wallpaper.

Second: the Q factor. Q is the hidden unfair advantage. It’s the ineffable quality that means some people, some companies, some ideas, generate more links per unit of effort than others.

Some people walk into a room and the room lights up. Some brands launch and everyone wants a piece. Barabási’s point, which annoys a lot of “hard work beats talent” LinkedIn philosophers, is that Q exists.

Some propositions are just more contagious than others. You often don’t know your Q until you expose it to the market. But, and here comes the bit small brands never hear, Q only matters if you have tenacity. You have to keep showing up long enough for your Q to compound. You can’t pop up once, declare yourself a “thought leader”, and expect the network to rearrange itself around you.

That’s not how the maths works. If you stop feeding the network with signals, you stop gaining links. You stall. You sink.

Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast) is worshipped because he cracked this at industrial scale.
His breakout early stunt? Sitting on camera counting to 100,000 for 24 hours. Stupid? Yes. Watchable? Weirdly yes. Algorithmically perfect? Absolutely.

He fed YouTube what it optimises for: retention, watch time, spectacle. YouTube rewarded him because it made it money. And as YouTube rewarded him, YouTube made him a hub. Today, he has hundreds of millions of subscribers and is effectively his own broadcast network.

The ugly modern truth is that algorithms are the new talent scouts. If you create something that helps these platform retain attention, that platform will make you famous. Not because it “likes you” but because it likes money.

That’s what Molly-Mae did, by the way. Everyone thinks Love Island is a dating show. Not really. Love Island is an accelerated fame machine disguised as reality TV. You step into a format that has 3 to 5 million viewers and relentless tabloid coverage. You get weeks of forced exposure, narrative framing and repeat impressions. You don’t even have to win. Molly-Mae didn’t win. Didn’t matter. She walked out with instant Q.

That’s engineered fame. That’s not, “oh she blew up”. She plugged herself directly into an existing high-reach node. This is the part business owners need to understand. You don’t get famous sitting in your office scheduling LinkedIn posts about “disruption in the [insert dull category] space”.

You get famous by deliberately inserting yourself into bigger nodes than you. Stages. Shows. Media moments. Stunts. Outrage. PR. Whatever forces the network to notice you.

This is literally what P.T. Barnum did in the 19th century. It’s what Edward Bernays industrialised with modern PR. Daniel Boorstin wrote about it in 1963 in The Image.

You don’t wait to be reported on. You manufacture things that must be reported on.

Is all of it, shall we say, empirically robust? Probably not. Does it matter? Not for fame. Fame runs on transmission, not truth.

Forget influencers – your brand needs to be a playable characterBrewDog did the same thing in beer. Tanks on the streets, beer wrapped in roadkill. Borderline-illegal nonsense dressed up as marketing. You can dislike the taste, the governance, the behaviour, and many do. But you cannot argue with the fame.

They became the most talked-about beer brand in Britain not because their performance marketing stack was efficient, but because they behaved like maniacs in public and made the press do their distribution for them.

This is where PR sneaks back in through the back door wearing a smug ‘Joker’ style grin. PR isn’t merely “get us in the paper”. PR, when done properly, is the deliberate construction of fame accelerants.

You are creating events, visuals, claims, moments, beefs, collaborations, and anything that the network will carry for you. Influencers, when used properly, are not just affiliates doing swipe-ups. They’re accelerant nodes.

They are already hubs. You borrow their links. You inject yourself into their network.
But let’s slow down, because this is the point in the article where half the readers start screaming “yes but what about ROI” and the other half start Googling “how to hire a tank”. We need a working model.

Paul Feldwick, in Why Does the Peddler Sing?, gaves us one. Fame, he says, tends to happen when four conditions are met:

1. What you’re offering is sufficiently interesting or appealing to people.
2. It reaches a large audience.
3. It’s distinctive, unique and memorable.
4. The public and media actively engage with it and carry it forward.

That’s it. That’s the checklist.

How to engineer fame without a fortune

Now let’s translate that into something useful for anyone who doesn’t have a Super Bowl budget and a Cannes yacht.

1. Be interesting or appealing

Sounds obvious. It’s not. Go to any B2B expo and you’ll find a haunted graveyard of polite corporate wallpaper. Ten stands, ten identical taglines, ten identical people in branded T-shirts promising “innovation” and “partnership” while handing out pens for your swag bag.

I was at a marketing event recently, and I swear to you, if just one vendor had put someone in a giant chicken costume outside their booth, they would have outperformed the other 30 exhibitors combined.

Most marketers are not losing fame to competitors. They are losing to boredom. This is where your fitness signals sit. Your product, your founder story, your tone of voice, your look, your visuals, your claim.

Are you giving the market anything it actually wants to pay attention to?

Spud Man did. Liquid Death did. Bonnie Blue did – albeit in a way most HR teams could not comfortably endorse.

She is one of the most searched-for adult performers in the world not because being an adult performer is unique, there are thousands, but because she staged an act so extreme (publicly claiming to sleep with 1,000 men in a day) that mainstream media had to pick it up.

That is not a moral example, but it is a surgical example of Feldwick point one. She generated a story people could not resist retelling.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting your B2B SaaS brand organise an industrial-scale orgy to promote your CRM migration toolkit. I’m suggesting you stop being ignorable.

2. Reach the right large audience

Fame isn’t about shouting at everyone. It’s about reaching enough of the right people, fast. For small and mid-sized brands, that doesn’t mean, “buy a TV spot”. It means stages, trade press, events, collaborations, podcasts, and PR.

Go where your audience already is and get in front of them. Borrow bigger platforms. Borrow their reach. I’ll tell you what will not make you famous: quietly bidding on paid search and convincing yourself that the funnel is working.

Paid search is harvesting demand that already exists. Fame is creating more demand for your business than the competition. Stop confusing the two.

3. Be distinctive, unique and memorable

Distinctive assets are the glue that makes fame stick. It’s your look. Your sound. Your slogan. Your behaviour.

Think BrewDog’s punk attitude. Mr Beast’s over-the-top generosity. Spud Man’s potato rig. Liquid Death’s skull can.

Consistency turns a gimmick into an asset. Most marketers genuinely believe they’re distinctive but then you line their stuff up with five competitors, and it all looks like it was generated by the same mid-level ad agency after three flat whites and a sad deck about authenticity.

4. Get the public and media to carry it

If you nail the first three, this happens naturally. People talk. Press bites. Clips circulate. Algorithms detect retention and push you further.

You become easier to find, easier to cover, easier to buy, which makes you more famous, which makes you cheaper to distribute. That’s how hubs form.

The long game

Here’s the kick in the teeth that will depress the hustle bros and cheer the grownups: none of this is instant.

Barabási’s research shows again and again that, yes, Q matters, fitness matters,  attaching yourself to big nodes matters. But the compounding mechanism is time, tenacity and relentless repetition.

You keep showing up. You keep emitting the same codes. You keep feeding the network until the network starts feeding you. Mr Beast didn’t become Mr Beast overnight. Spud Man didn’t go from 4,000 followers to millions in a weekend. I didn’t get 70,000 LinkedIn followers and 40,000 newsletter subscribers in six weeks. It’s taken a decade of showing up, speaking on stages, writing columns like this, and generally making a professional nuisance of myself.

Fame is persistence-dependent.

The new strategic shift

If you’re running a business in 2025, here’s the uncomfortable shift you have to make.
You can no longer rely on being “discovered”.

AI is about to kill discovery. Search will answer itself. Social will throttle you unless you pay. Every channel will be saturated with infinite cheap video, cheap copy, cheap imagery. You are entering an age where creativity is basically free and distribution is basically impossible.

In that world, being findable beats being good – and being findable is fame.

So, you need to do a fame audit. Ask yourself:

• Are we interesting or appealing to the people we’re trying to impress?
• Do we have any obvious vehicle to reach a relevant mass of those people quickly?
• Are we distinctive enough that if we did get that reach, they’d remember us and recognise us next time?
• Are we giving the network reasons to carry us without paying for every impression?

If you can’t answer yes to at least two of those points, stop throwing money into Google Ads and fix it.

And for the love of all that is holy, accept this: fame can be engineered.

It always could. Barnum engineered it. BrewDog engineered it. Molly-Mae engineered it. Spud Man engineered it with a potato.

AI is not going to make fame easier. AI is going to make fame more valuable. Aim for fame. Build nodes. Hijack bigger nodes. Repeat.

Be interesting. Be seen. Be remembered. Or enjoy invisibility.