Have you heard the news? Virality is dead.
So claimed The New York Times in a recent thinkpiece. The Gray Lady isn’t the only publication beating this particular drum. The Washington Post published similar ideas last year, and there seems to be a growing sentiment that virality just isn’t the same force it was during earlier days of the internet. Instead, the concept viral marketing has come to represent people who are out of touch with the current state of internet culture.
But according to a pair of intrepid entrepreneurs, rumors of viral marketing’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Anthony Po, the creator known on YouTube as Anthpo, and Talia Schulhof, a creative producer who has worked for MrBeast, are the Co-Founders of a new creative marketing agency called Pufferfish.
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Though the Anthpo channel has nearly two million subscribers, its eponymous host is best known for a contest he didn’t even participate in. Po was the principal organizer of a Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest that went viral (there’s that word again) in October 2024. The irreverent competition took the internet by storm and continues to reverberate more than one year after its completion.
With Pufferfish, Po and Schulhof — who met in 2023 while they were both working for MrBeast — are out to prove that they can turn one-off stunts like the lookalike contest into a calculated, consistent marketing strategy. “We have a finger on the pulse of what it takes to go viral,” Schulhof told Business Insider. She explained that Pufferfish’s brand clients will be able to operate at “the pace at which the internet is moving.”
Po’s ode to one of America’s finest young actors helps explain how Pufferfish will measure virality. In a cultural moment dictated by Gen Z consumers, the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest had all the right ingredients it needed to blow up. It was one part aura farming and one part celebrity worship, and one part good old-fashioned internet-age silliness. The persistent cultural appeal achieved by the winning lookalikes proves that Po and Schulhof’s interpretation of virality can last for a lot longer than 15 minutes.
Post-Chalamet, Po provided a more direct proof of concept for his agency when he worked with Crocs to pull off an ambitious stunt that involved putting ugly shoes (sorry, Crocs lovers) onto the feet of statues across New York City. Now, he wants to concoct attention-grabbing stunts on behalf of other companies.
At the end of the day, Po and Schulhof’s creative backgrounds and Gen Z bonifides may be the key to Pufferfish’s success. Creators who become entrepreneurs are set to control the future of the creator economy, and the Pufferfish founders are perfectly positioned to be the Lisan-al-Gaib to their industry’s Fremen.
