It was just another day for Srinivas Mahadevan, a Chennai-based interior designer but little did he know that one wrong click of a button and his life would get so convoluted that even murder would not be out of the question.
As he was surfing YouTube to look for inspiration for the latest project he was working on, he came across an ad for a brand of coffee. The ad seemed interesting enough as he was a coffee lover and if he did not have to make them himself, his whole day would be peppered with shots of coffee until it was time for bed. The simplicity by which he could brew his coffee like how they make tea with a teabag was quite intriguing.
The brand in question was Sleepy Owl Coffee, a relatively new entrant into the beverage market founded by  Armaan Sood, Ajai Thandi, and Ashwajeet Singh. This new model of selling cold-pressed coffee was something Ajai Thandi picked up while studying in the USA and the trio decided to replicate the model in India which had a huge base of coffee drinkers but only tea-based products.
Sleepy Owl Coffee was launched in 2016 and did close to INR 30 lakh in its first year. They have been in a growth space ever since moving from a 2 BHK flat in Dwarka Delhi to a swanky new office in Shahpur Jat. The team has also expanded from the initial 3 founders to over 70 employees.  Their sales too have skyrocketed with revenues touching close to the INR 10 crore mark.
They also received funding from DSG Consumer Partners for around INR 3.5 crore and have more than 1000 touchpoints across the whole of Northern India. The product line has also expanded from selling black coffee powder that can be brewed at home to now selling ready-to-drink coffee in pre-packaged bottles.
With this growth in revenue and funding, it was inevitable for the next thing to happen. The marketing department finally gets its hands on the budgets that it was starved of for the initial years. This leads to an indulgence in digital ads and all the latest methods of marketing that can be possibly done.
Our source at Sleepy Owl told us under the promise of secrecy that the marketing department was first shocked that they were finally given a proper budget to use. Once they recovered from the shock it was madness. The whole atmosphere within the department was similar to what an obese man would feel once he comes off the keto diet after 6 months. They wanted anything and everything.
Ads were purchased, keywords were bid on, videos were shot and every possible platform was targeted to run the ads.  This led to an avalanche of Sleepy Owl ads everywhere. With modern digital marketing techniques like remarketing and lookalike audiences, it became impossible for someone to ignore the ads, especially if you visited the website even once to understand what all the fuss was about.
This was what finally broke the camel’s back.
After seeing these ads multiple times on YouTube, Srinivas clicked on the ad instead of skipping it and ended up on the website. The pixel and cookies got triggered sending him down face-first into the rabbit hole called the “sales funnel”. There was no looking back.
Every time Srinivas logged onto Facebook, all he could see were more ads for Sleepy Owl. He couldn’t watch more than 2 YouTube videos without being forced through more ads. Sometimes for cold coffee and sometimes for hot. There seemed to be no escape.
“Finally I lost it,” Srinivas told us.
Read the full article at: http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/08/10/man-threatens-to-kill-owls-if-he-sees-another-sleepy-owl-coffee-ad/