US-based creator Meg DeAngelis posted a video of herself lying in the pouring rain, the very picture of despair. The text on the image read: “Y’all I feel so bad my favourite company asked me to promote them and they paid me well and I messed up the caption and had to repost and now it’s flopping”. The brand is the clothing rental platform Nuuly – and DeAngelis has been posting about it since 2025.
Her rain video has had more than 3.4 million views but the creator did not tag the brand in this post. Instead, she created a funnel towards the previous branded content, which now has 780,000 views, 222,000 likes, and is peppered with comments such as “I came here because I saw you lying in the rain”.
By fixing her “mistake” with an organic post that went viral, DeAngelis created the perfect content pair: paid content that benefited from the engagement velocity of the algorithm. It also harnessed the power of the community, which loves a mistake or a confession. One comment on her apology post read: “Fear not diva we have arrived”. Are we going to see more companion posting of this kind? And, in this AI era, is the acknowledgement of human error a smart way of driving engagement?
Learn more from CORQ’s insights director Emilie McMeekan.
@corq.studio Is this the next marketing move? When @MEGS made a mistake in the caption of her @nuuly ad, she drove more attention to it by pointing out the mistake in a separate video. This then drove more eyes on the original ad 👀 #influencermarketing #marketingtips #marketingstrategy
