Oops is a budgeting app that exploded on social media with a clever guerrilla marketing tactic.

It worked really well (multiple videos with millions of views), but if it is possible for a marketing strategy to be too clever, that would perfectly describe Oops because they ended up being caught in a conspiracy on TikTok and was never able to recover from their downfall.

Let’s dive into it.

Oops blew up on social media with a single content format — exposing the finances of high net worth individuals like trust fund babies, Russian billionaires, and hedge fund managers within the Oops app. And they did this all from what looked like a random persons account: https://www.tiktok.com/@jackiemorrow_1

While the account looks like just a normal person’s account, it was actually the marketing account of Oops.

The name of the app is never mentioned at all during the video, but the videos sparked enough curiosity where there would always be someone in the comments asking, “what app is that” to which the creator would respond with “Oops finance app.”

The crazy part?

None of these people existed, the videos were completely faked, and the person asking “what app is that?” In the comments was also fake and was added by a secondary account of the Oops team.

Nobody noticed this in the first few videos, but as the series kept repeating itself people kept noticing the same trend over and over again of the high net worth individuals and the person in the comments constantly asking “what app is that?”

Because the app was focused on a very personal matter (people’s finances) people started making videos about how the Oops app could be stealing personal information and be dangerous to use and install.

While the video formats were brilliant and did a great job of growing awareness of the app, after getting caught up in the crazy conspiracy theories of TikTok, Oops was never able to recover and has stopped posting on social media for almost 9 months at this point.

Account takeaways

Viewers are inherently nosy and love invasions of privacy — if possible, lean into it
One’s finances is one of the most personal pieces of information to expose
The content also revolves around super rich/mysterious people — once again again appealing to nosiness of people

Don’t try to fool people, especially gen z
- Don’t be afraid to own that you are a brand. Viewers hate feeling like they are being lied to or deceived — just be straight up and own it
- I bet that if this content was posted not from an account that tried to fake being a jormal account and instead posted from a normal brand account that fully owned up to being affiliated with the app, the conspiracy theories would not have emerged and Oops would still be thriving today
The hook is everything
- Each video has a repeatable hook that gives the user all the information they need to stay and watch the video — “how a insert rich person job title/description spends in a month
- When making a video, start with the hook first and work backwards from there. If you can’t think of a good hook, the video is not worth making