• by Shirley Marschall , Featured Contributor, May 1, 2025

The first time you saw it, you laughed.

A person turned into a collectible action figure, boxed up with a job title and cheeky caption. It was clever, timely, and perfectly on trend with the AI zeitgeist.

The second time, you smiled politely.

By the third, you started scrolling faster.

By the tenth, you wanted to set your LinkedIn feed on fire.

What started as a sharp, funny piece of AI-generated content quickly turned into something else: a cautionary tale about overexposure.

The Viral Curve and the Crash

The action figure trend exploded because it had everything:

•   a fresh aesthetic

•   easy-to-replicate format

•   low-barrier virality

•   and just enough self-deprecating humor to make people feel clever for joining in.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

Like many viral formats, it hit peak ubiquity within days — a point where delight turns into eye-rolls, and originality starts to feel like noise. AI made the image. Humans made it unbearable.

Not because the idea got worse, but because it didn’t know when to stop.

In a world of limitless reach and algorithmic momentum, virality rarely dies of old age. It dies of overuse.

Attention Is a Privilege, Not a Guarantee

Here’s the lesson for marketers: Even the best creative loses power when repeated too often, too fast.

It’s tempting to think that if something works, more of it will work better.

But attention isn’t something you capture once and get to keep, it’s something you earn again and again through timing, restraint, and relevance.

Frequency Capping Deserves a Bigger Role

In paid media, frequency capping is standard practice -- or at least, it should be.

Entire whitepapers, research studies, and media plans have been built around finding the “just right” number of exposures.

And yet, more often than not, people still get bombarded. Some campaigns still hit the same user with the same ad dozens of times a day. And this isn’t just a LinkedIn thing. From retail media to CTV, the frequency problem is everywhere and it’s costing attention, not just dollars.

The Real Goal Isn’t Reach -- It’s Resonance

The action figure trend was never the problem.

In fact, it was a masterclass in creative timing, humor, and cultural currency.

The problem was the copy-paste effect — everyone doing the exact same thing, all at once, with no variation and no off-switch.

Resonance requires more than volume.

It requires respect for the audience’s attention span — and a willingness to stop before they stop you.

The Takeaway

Creativity still matters, maybe more than ever.

But in a world of infinite content, restraint is part of the craft.

Don’t just ask how many people saw it.

Ask how many people smiled the first time -- and still wanted to see it again.

Even a perfect action figure gets boring if you keep pulling it out of the box again and again.