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CLONING CREATIVITY: WHY THE BEST MARKETERS STEAL
3 of the best marketing strategies which were actually just clones...
Niall Ratcliffe
October 12, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
Last week’s essay was the most liked newsletter I’ve ever written. Pretty crazy. I’ve been writing these essays for 4 years (this will be number 222) and yet last week’s was the most liked.
Which leaves me in a bit of a tricky spot this week… can I keep it up and match it? I’ll give it my best shot.
This week, I finally finished the book "The Dhandho Investor". The main premise of the book is about a philosophy of investing. But one of the most interesting concepts that was brought up in the book is that the best entrepreneurs on the planet are simply the best cloners.
Meaning people who literally just steal ideas from other people.
Just take a look at some of the most successful products from one of the largest and most well-known companies on the planet - Microsoft.
Microsoft Word → Stolen from Word Perfect
Microsoft Excel → Stolen from Lotus 1-2-3
Microsoft PowerPoint → They acquired
Microsoft Explorer → Originally licensed from Spyglass
Microsoft Windows → Stolen from Netware
Xbox → Stolen from Nintendo
Bing → Stolen from Google
Even their original operating system which gave them their big break with IBM was acquired from a tiny company called ‘Seattle Computer’ for $50,000.
The point here isn’t that Microsoft are and always were a band of thieves who deserve to be in prison.
My point is that 99% of Microsoft’s best ideas of all time… weren’t their ideas at all. They saw a small company or competitor making waves and they simply cloned it.
They saw what they were doing and went and did it themselves.
But this newsletter isn’t about building a 3.8 trillion-dollar tech conglomerate like Microsoft. It’s about marketing.
So I wanted to take this concept of “cloning” that the best business people on the planet know so well and show you just how well it applies to marketing.
Being “Creative” is something that everyone has told you is a key part of being a marketer. But I think “Creativity” doesn’t mean coming up with brand new ideas. Sometimes it means having the knack to see what works for others and finding a way to apply it to your company.
So today, I'm going to break down 3 examples of cloning marketing I’ve seen that truly moved the needle.
(2 were ones I cloned for our agency - I’ll share the behind-the-scenes stats too).
THE ESSAY
In December 2013, the Facebook team came up with a cool idea to allow users to share key moments from their year that they’d shared on Facebook.
The idea was simple and had 3 clear outcomes:
Dramatically increase the number of users posting on Facebook - as a trend would start with everyone else sharing their ‘Year in Review'
Encourage people to post more on Facebook next year
Increase Facebook users (with everyone talking about their Year In Review)
And it was massively successful.
From 2013-2014, tens of millions of users shared their Year in Review posts
Dozens of major outlets (TIME, Washington Post, NPR, Verge, Mashable) described it as “everywhere” and “unavoidable.”
A huge win for Facebook.
Over on the other side of the world in Stockholm, Sweden, the Spotify team were starting to really struggle for growth.
They were losing €160M/year
They were getting slammed for low artist payouts
There was a lot of scepticism around their freemium model
They needed a big win, a viral win, something that would get people talking about Spotify.
So, what did they do?
They saw Facebook’s massive success with their ‘Year in Review’ and simply cloned it with Spotify’s ‘Year in Music’ which became ‘Spotify Wrapped’.
Today, Spotify have become renowned for their Spotify Wrapped and marketers flood to social media to once again applaud the marketing genius from the Spotify team to create such a viral and shareable marketing campaign.
Yet the reality is, these guys weren’t creative geniuses. They were cloners.
Here are 3 other marketing clones I’ve seen up close and why you should clone them for your company:
Clone 1: The £1 Toolkit
In 2023, my agency - noticed. - was quickly making a name for itself in a niche LinkedIn sphere. At the time, we had very few corporate brands on our roster. Instead, it was a mix of growing SMEs and some personal brands that we were supporting.
One day, I got a call from a friend of mine who mentioned they may have a referral for me. It was a creator named Ruben Hassid. He had a massive following on social media and
needed help getting his newsletter set up.
“Perfect”, we thought.
It was a straightforward project for us and we knew we could have a big impact. At the time, he had ~300,000 followers and we knew that with some simple systems we could build a massive newsletter for him.
So, we brought him on as a client and got to work.
But when he gave us access to his email platform there was something unusual going on…
“There are already 35,000 emails in here?” I asked. “I thought this was your first time having a newsletter?”
“Ahh yes,” he responded, “All those are from my £1 pack”.
“You’re what?” I asked back, slightly confused.
He then went on to explain to me that he’d created a resource of the best AI prompts and tips, but rather than giving it out for free, he’d discovered that by adding a £1 price tag he gets paid but also the perception of the pack dramatically increases. People think it’s more valuable and therefore more people purchase it.
£35,000 he’d made. Off a £1 pack.
But it wasn’t the money I was interested in - it was the marketing.
If the £1 price tag increased the value of whatever he was creating from a perception standpoint. Then surely we could use a similar tactic for our agency for our next lead magnet.
So we cloned it.
We then spent the next 4 months developing a ‘Story-Driven Marketing Toolkit’. A full toolkit that included a suite of different tools, videos, templates, tactics, and ideas.
Everything and anything we knew about storytelling, we put in that toolkit. Then we put a £1 price tag on it and launched it on LinkedIn.
At the time, Morgan and I together probably had about 9,000 followers.
Yet the thing absolutely blew up.
People could not believe we’d put all of the resources we did into it and only sold it for £1. And the more people who said that, the more people bought. It had this ripple effect.
Over the next 2 weeks, over 2000 people bought the toolkit.
(Which at the time was MASSIVE for us).
That toolkit launch kick-started the next 2 years of rapid growth for the agency.
It was exactly the type of marketing we needed, and it was cloned.
Now this is the exact type of idea you can clone to - here’s how to do it:
Create a resource you think is worth £100 to the market
Launch it to the market at a £1 price tag
Simply show the market the gap in price to value
It’s really that simple. We did it, Ruben did, and so have 1000s of other businesses and creators.
The £1 pack works.
Clone 2: The Fake Wallet
6 months ago, Morgan sent me this video of a Pizza Shop (I think in Romania).
“This is really clever,” he told me. “We should do something like this.”
I agreed it was cool, but doubted we could do anything with it. Looking at the views on the videos (it had millions of views on multiple platforms - just Google “pizza shop fake wallet marketing”) we knew it got people’s attention - so we put it in the locker for a later idea.
3 months ago, we were sitting around the table trying to come up with campaign ideas to target one of our dream clients - Monzo.
They were in banking
We’d have to get creative to get their attention
We wanted the campaign to focus on direct mail
And that’s when it clicked. Morgan remembered the fake wallet campaign and we felt like it was a perfect fit.
Over the next 4 weeks, Morgan took the idea and…
Switched the wallet to “Paper wallets” to make them fit better in envelopes
Added a Monzo debit card to the wallets
Then structured a letter inside it that pitched a campaign idea we had for them
Unfortunately, we didn’t sign Monzo through it (yet).
But the campaign did drive 5 new clients and got 100,000+ views on social media.
And when you think about it, that’s no surprise. The idea was pre-validated. We just cloned it and used it for ourselves.
Now you can clone it too.
Just find a viral idea online that’s pre-validated to get attention (it’s done it before) → Adapt it to fit your business.
Clone 3: Viral Clipping
In the summer of 2022, our social media feed became flooded with this man…
Yes, Andrew Tate.
From completely unknown to the wider public, Tate became mainstream news seemingly out of nowhere. Overnight, it felt like he’d taken over all of our feeds and virtually taken over the internet.
But while it’s easy to credit his rise to his controversial statements and some outlandish comments. His rapid rise to social media fame came because of his clip-making marketing strategy.
Here’s how it worked:
He got a small subset of people to sign up for his education business, ‘Hustlers University’
Inside, they were taught different ways to make money. One of which was to:
A) Become an affiliate of Hustlers University
B) Clip up different videos of Andrew Tate from podcasts & streams
C) Distribute them on social media to push people to buy Hustlers UniversityThe feed was then flooded with thousands of Andrew Tate clips
The more clips there were → the more people saw him → the more people followed him → the more people got him on their podcast → the more people knew who he was → the more people signed up for Hustlers University → the more clips there were
It was a weird content flywheel that led to billions of views.
Andrew was one of the first people to discover this, but today it’s a strategy used by 100s of businesses and personal brands to get attention.
There are 2 (slightly more moral) ways of doing this though:
1/ They hire internal teams to run “Clips” channels for them
Nearly every podcast on the planet does this now. A prime example is the Diary of a CEO clips channel.
Notice this channel alone has 1.53M subscribers, but more importantly, it’s posted 1000+ videos. Because they’re pumping out a massive volume of clips every single week.
Those clips then get millions of views and funnel people to the podcast
2/ Pay Per View Model
The other option is a pay-per-view model. You put out a bounty of X amount of views that you want and you offer a £100 CPM (cost per thousand views) - then anyone can collect it.
All they have to do is show you the videos they’ve shared of you or your company and the analytics.
This is a much more complicated clipping approach with some infrastructure needed, but A LOT of apps that fly up the App Store charts nowadays are using this type of approach.
When people talk of a “viral app”, this is the method they’re using.
Again, it seems clever, and it is. But just like the other ideas - it’s a clone of Tate’s original marketing strategy.
My intention with this newsletter wasn’t to tell you to start stealing every marketing idea your competitor is using - that won’t end well.
Instead, it was to show you that sometimes the best way to be creative is to understand how to clone great marketing that already exists.
Because just like entrepreneurs… the best marketers are usually the best cloners.
Right, that’s all I’ve got for you today.
If you enjoyed this (or hated it) please rate it below and let me know :)
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
P.S. Please do go rate it, it’s just for me, but it helps a bunch!
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