In the AI era a bit of friendly rivalry can be a campaign's magic spell

By Ash Dharan, Head of Paid Media, NP Digital

We're living through an era where brands are being told, with increasing urgency, to optimise everything. Optimise your ad spend. Optimise your content for AI search. Optimise your funnel. And in the rush to feed the algorithm, something uncomfortable is happening - brands are forgetting how to be interesting.

The rivalry reference effect

A recent study published in the Journal of Marketing Research in the US by Berendt, Uhrich, Borah, and Kilduff offers a sharp corrective. Across five studies, the researchers found that when a brand references a 'rival', rather than just any competitor, consumer engagement increases significantly. They call it the "rivalry reference effect".

The real insight they identified is that the engagement boost isn't driven by competitive intensity but the perception that a brand's message is part of an ongoing narrative with familiar characters and a recognisable plot.

When Burger King takes a shot at McDonald's, for example, consumers don't process it as a one-off marketing message. They slot it into the decades-long story of two burger giants going at each other. The message inherits the context and emotion of every chapter that came before it.

When Burger King takes the same shot at Subway? It's just an ad.

This distinction matters enormously in 2026, because digital marketing is travelling toward the contextless. AI-generated ads, programmatic placements, algorithmically assembled creative - these seldom carry narrative weight but are designed to perform in a vacuum.

And the research suggests that's precisely what makes them forgettable.

Wendy's and Burger King show how it's done

Some brands have understood this instinctively. In the US market, Wendy's turned rivalry into a spectator sport. Its socials are snarky, fearless and genuinely funny, and have built a narrative universe where Wendy's is the sharp-tongued underdog who takes on all comers.

It created National Roast Day, an annual event where other brands 'line up' to be insulted. When Burger King sent Wendy's a playful 'promposal,' the response had the energy of a teenager reluctantly agreeing to a school dance: "Ok, but don't get handsy and we have to be home by 10."

Burger King, meanwhile, has made trolling McDonald's a core brand strategy. The Whopper Detour campaign geo-fenced every McDonald's in the US, unlocking a one-cent Whopper only when a customer was standing within 600 feet of a McDonald's. Audacious, funny, and deeply rooted in the rivalry narrative, it drove 1.5 million app downloads in nine days and a 37% boost in mobile sales.

The Berendt study explains exactly why these campaigns work. Consumers are drawn to stories, and they follow plots. When a brand message feels like the next chapter in a story they already know, they engage because it's meaningful.

When AI got it wrong

But for every campaign done right, like Wendy's and Burger King, there are plenty that fall flat - and the AI industry recently gave us a masterclass in getting it wrong.

In February, Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads poking fun at OpenAI's decision to introduce advertising into ChatGPT. The spots were simple: a person asks an AI assistant a question, the assistant starts answering, then pivots into a product placement. The tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." It was funny, pointed, and perfectly embedded in the existing rivalry narrative between two companies founded by former colleagues.

Sam Altman's response was a 420-word essay on X calling the ads "clearly dishonest" and "deceptive". By responding with a defensive essay rather than a casual shrug, Altman came across as rattled.

Anthropic's ad worked because it felt like the latest punch thrown in a 15-round heavyweight bout. Altman's response broke the narrative by refusing to play his role. Instead of the confident favourite who laughs off a challenger's jab, he played the aggrieved party invoking the rules after taking what he perceived as a low blow.

Beyond famous rivals

You might think this only matters for brands with famous rivals. But the real takeaway is about more than simple brand competition.

Consumers process brand communications through a storytelling lens. They're asking, often unconsciously, does it have characters? Continuity? Does it feel like it means something beyond the transaction?

In an era where AI can generate a thousand pieces of content in the time it takes a human to write one, this is the competitive moat that matters. Algorithms can optimise for clicks, but they can't manufacture a story. They can A/B test headlines, but they can't build the relational context that makes a Wendy's tweet hit differently from a generic brand account saying the same words.

As we're pulled toward automation and scale, the evidence keeps pointing the other way. The Behrendt study revealed that across 100 brands, 20 categories, over a million tweets, and three controlled experiments, the pattern holds: what actually moves people is irreducibly human.

So remember, in the rush to optimise everything, don't optimise away the things that actually work - stories, characters, conflict and humour.