Episode · 2026-03-31
Petty Lawsuit
Petty Lawsuit | Reddit DPA Ads | Trevor Crump x Miranda Pettinger x Dennis Hegstad
Rundown
Chris Hall and Colin cover a wave of small-claims 'lawsuit as a service' tools being used to pressure late-paying clients, then dig into why algorithmic reach has collapsed brand differentiation since 2016. Guests Trevor Crump, Miranda Pettinger, and Dennis Hegstad join to discuss AI-assisted messaging testing, the danger of over-indexing spend on Meta, new Reddit ad performance data, and TikTok's push into short-form drama content.
Takes from this episode
Cheap 'lawsuit as a service' tools work as a business tactic because they inflict constant psychological pressure on a debtor until they settle just to make it stop.
Every second that they're thinking about your lawsuit, they are not thinking about their business... They're at dinner, lawsuit. They're at lunch... please lawsuit.
Because algorithmic reach has collapsed since 2016, brands now win by standing out and being individualistic rather than copying the safe, pastel, curated aesthetic everyone else uses.
2016, never harder to start a business, never easier to stand out. 2026, never easier to start a business, never harder to stand out. Which is the death of the millennial marketer.
Businesses that end up near bankruptcy commonly share the same root cause: all of their traffic and media spend is concentrated in Meta with no other channel diversification.
There was a very common trend in the businesses that were having a lot of financial struggles... they had all of their media spend in Meta and they had no other channels.
New third-party research suggests Reddit is an undervalued ad channel where scaling spend actually lowers CPA and raises ROAS, defying the usual diminishing-returns pattern.
Fospha's The State of Retail Commerce 2026 study found that businesses that scaled their investment in Reddit saw cost per purchase improve by 34%... increased ROAS.
TikTok's rollout of a dedicated short-drama feed is worth betting on now because platform-backed content formats tend to get algorithmically rewarded, so brands should start testing it early.Prediction
I think brands need to uh need to go with this. Spin up a spin up an alternate account and why not start testing it now? I mean TikTok is betting heavily on this.
Gen Z's growing desire to escape attention-hooking algorithms is creating real market demand for analog, non-addictive physical products aimed at kids and young people.
There's a really big push right now with Gen Z where they're trying to push against the actual algorithms that are consuming all of their time that are hooking everything into them.