We all know endlessly scrolling is bad, and the way mental health can get talked about on these endless scroll platforms is bad, and also AI slop is bad. But what if you combined all of them? You\u2019d get these ads for an app called Liven that will not leave me alone recently, until I finally decided to face them head-on and enter a very special circle of Hell.<\/p>\n
I have to start with a confession here: I have been seeing these ads because I have fallen back into my habit of compulsively scrolling YouTube shorts<\/a>. This is a bad use of my time and makes my brain feel like a hotel lobby carpet, and I hate that I\u2019m doing it. Anyway, increasingly often when I\u2019m scrolling that endless feed, an ad for Liven will pop up. Some deeply specific self-help phrase will play over a beat, like \u201cthis is how procrastination manifests in high-performing men\u201d or \u201cday in the life of a dopamine-addicted man.\u201d These sound like pop mental health garbage, so I usually quickly scroll away.<\/p>\n Last night I finally decided to let one of the full ads play through, and they\u2019re fascinating. They\u2019re set to dance or club beats, but instead of being advertising jingles in the traditional sense, they\u2019re just text, an entire series of sentences like you\u2019d see in ad copy. They don\u2019t rhyme, and the flow of words doesn\u2019t follow the music in a way that works together with it. They mention the Liven app, but not in a chorus or musically memorable moment in the song. Here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n One more, if I have to suffer you have to suffer:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Some are specifically geared toward women (\u201cthis is how dopamine obsession looks in women<\/a>\u201d) while others are geared toward men (\u201cmen with ADHD often become insecure \u2018nice guys<\/a>\u2019\u201d). I\u2019ll hand it to Liven\u2019s ad department for using the language popular (and harmful<\/a>) on the short-form content channels where the ads play, and for tailoring their message toward how users on those channels might be feeling. Case in point: I feel awful about my use of these platforms, and I often investigate why I engage in this scrolling behavior when it doesn\u2019t make me feel good. I don\u2019t think the ads\u2019 creators thought this deeply or they\u2019d have made better ads, but starting off with \u201cthis\u201d can be read as subtly turning the whole thing back on me: seeing the ad is how procrastination is manifesting in my life! Purporting to then have an answer, and even better an answer that lives on an app and thus on the phone where I\u2019m mindlessly scrolling, is a real example of meeting potential customers where they are. Congrats to Liven, really.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n I\u2019m not alone in seeing these ads an unusual amount. I found many<\/a> folks<\/a> on<\/a> Reddit<\/a> also complaining about their frequency and how much they stink of self-help bullshit. Many folks speculate they\u2019re made by AI; beyond the sounds-like-music<\/a>-but-isn\u2019t of the songs, the videos that accompany the ads feature some of the hallmarks of AI animation: characters change<\/a> throughout the videos, and the animations feel like space-fillers<\/a> rather than going along with the song, and they don\u2019t seem to line up with the topic being sung about.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n On its store<\/a> pages<\/a>, Liven calls itself \u201cyour self-discovery companion, a system of tools designed to help you better understand and transform yourself.\u201d It seems to include mood and task trackers and logs<\/a>, short education sections, quizzes, and an AI chat bot<\/a> that Liven writes will \u201chelp you break down your situations and suggest new ideas to try.\u201d It seems like basic<\/a> stuff, though some user reviews<\/a> complain of upsells, trouble cancelling their subscriptions, unauthorized charges<\/a>, or just a lack of personalization. I can\u2019t tell if it\u2019s a \u201cscam,\u201d as some users call it, or just a faddy cash grab in the style of so much self-help-meets-technology offerings out there, though I certainly would not give it my money. As a common refrain in many of the ads goes, \u201cA friend [or in my case, a mind-numbing social media algorithm] told me about the Liven app, I was skeptical at first.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That \u201cI was skeptical\u201d is the line I can call up from memory feels like a real flaw in these ads as ads. Because the songs are so unstructured, they don\u2019t have choruses or hooks like a traditional ad. After falling down the hole of them last night, I was brushing my teeth and realized I had one of them in my head. But because they\u2019re just a series of words instead of songs, I wasn\u2019t humming a call to action like getting the app, but instead random words like \u201cdopamine\u201d and \u201cprocrastination.\u201d Is it an ad for procrastination? Is it an ad for being skeptical of the app? I am more aware of the app and what it does than I was before, a basic function of ads, and I am far more familiar with the company\u2019s advertising now than any human should be, but the ad hasn\u2019t even managed to groove \u201cbuy this product\u201d into my brain.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I started my dive into these ads laughing at their absurdity, but by the end of it I had stayed up way too late and felt gross both about the internet and myself. That\u2019s the exact kind of feeling the app seems to want to solve, so that\u2019s either killer marketing that drives home how much I need the app, or a signal that this app is just another piece of the system it says it wants to help users break free of. I will end this blog before I overthink my way into believing the Liven people are actually marketing geniuses, but if you hadn\u2019t seen these yet, I\u2019m sorry for putting them in your head too.<\/p>\n Recommended