iPhones & Golden Grams
Talk Ain’t Cheap
I may be in the minority, but I actually like watching commercials — and not just during the Super Bowl.
As a kid, I used to sit with my grandmother and watch The Clios — an awards show that celebrates creative excellence in advertising. I enjoyed the international ads the most because they could say things that would give a U.S. censor a coronary.
I've always been fascinated by the challenge: grab attention, evoke feelings, and establish recall — in 30 seconds.
A key tenet in marketing is "know your audience." It sounds obvious, but it’s profound. If you don’t understand the emotional levers of the people you’re talking to, you’re just shouting into the void.
Which brings me to an ad I recently stumbled across from a Chinese company that left me with so many questions:
Buy a Gold Smartphone Case, Get an iPhone 17 Pro Max for Free!
Yeah, you read that right. Buy the case, get the phone — for free.
Naturally, my first question was, "How much does this case cost?"
Turns out...it depends.
If you want the one made from 10g of 99.99% gold, it'll only set you back about $1,623. But you do have other options.
a 20g unit costs $3,231
a 30g unit carries a $4,840 price tag
a 50g unit clocks in at $8,070
But wait, there's more!
If you really wanna make a statement, you can get the 100g unit for a mere $16,126...plus taxes and other superfluous fees, of course. 🤯
In the words of Nancy Kerrigan, "WHHYYYYYYY?!?!?!"
What kind of person spends more money on an accessory than the item being accessorized?
A 256GB iPhone 17 Pro Max retails for $1,200. Spending 13 times that amount to protect it is like putting a titanium roof on a shed.
I have no idea who the target audience is, but I imagine a marketing team being told...
"Your challenge — should you choose to accept it — is to write an ad that makes ambitious, slightly insecure professionals with disposable income feel like $16,000 is a personality trait."
Challenge accepted.
Why join the 1% when you can start your own percentile?
The Au 99.99 Gold Case.
The ultimate humble brag.
or…
The Au 99.99 Gold case.
For those who believe the best way to handle haters is to give them something new to hate.
And just like that, the challenge doesn’t feel so impossible.
Please Wait… System Processing
The interesting thing about marketing is, the copy isn’t always selling an item or a service.
Often, it’s selling a feeling to provoke a reaction.
The Au 99.99 Gold Case isn’t selling protection for a new iPhone.
It’s selling the feeling of exclusivity through perceived status.
It’s promoting the quiet satisfaction of owning something just rare enough to signal something about you.
And here’s the other interesting thing — that’s not unique to luxury marketing.
Modern systems — advertising, corporate structures, social media — are optimized for one thing:
Reaction.
They don’t need to control what you think.
They don’t even need to control what you do.
They just need to influence what you react to.
Because reaction becomes behavior.
Reaction drives clicks.
Reaction drives consumption.
Reaction drives performance.
Systems profit most when you react automatically.
Because automatic reactions are predictable.
And predictable behavior is scalable.
A 9:47 PM Slack message marked “Quick question,” so you cancel your wind-down routine and re-open your laptop.
A LinkedIn post announcing someone else’s promotion, so you volunteer for the stretch project you don’t actually want.
A new org chart with your name two rows lower than expected, so you rehearse an explanation no one asked for.
Nothing in the system told you to panic.
But once you reacted, you adjusted your behavior.
You worked later.
You tried harder.
You signaled loyalty.
You proved relevance.
The system didn’t force you. It didn’t have to.
And that reaction — the need to prove, to escalate, to signal — is where agency quietly slips away.
But emotional self-control isn’t suppression.
It’s sovereignty.
If you don’t react automatically, systems lose leverage over you.
The gold case only works if you care who’s watching.
The urgency only works if you accept it as yours.
The comparison only works if you participate.
Systems — including corporate structures — compete not only for your labor, but for your reactions.
Pause long enough to choose your response instead of obeying it.
The gold case protects your phone from gravity.
Non-reactivity protects you from escalation.
One is 100 grams of gold.
The other is a few seconds of pause.
Guess which one compounds.
Question of the Week
Where did you react automatically — and what would have happened if you paused?
The Deep Dive
If you want to hear this idea unpacked while you walk, we push this idea further — including the uncomfortable question:
Are you acting… or just reacting?
Listen to the full conversation → iPhones & Golden Grams.
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