We all know endlessly scrolling is bad, and the way mental health can get talked about on these endless scroll platforms is bad, and also AI slop is bad. But what if you combined all of them? You’d get these ads for an app called Liven that will not leave me alone recently, until I finally decided to face them head-on and enter a very special circle of Hell.
I have to start with a confession here: I have been seeing these ads because I have fallen back into my habit of compulsively scrolling YouTube shorts. This is a bad use of my time and makes my brain feel like a hotel lobby carpet, and I hate that I’m doing it. Anyway, increasingly often when I’m scrolling that endless feed, an ad for Liven will pop up. Some deeply specific self-help phrase will play over a beat, like “this is how procrastination manifests in high-performing men” or “day in the life of a dopamine-addicted man.” These sound like pop mental health garbage, so I usually quickly scroll away.
Last night I finally decided to let one of the full ads play through, and they’re fascinating. They’re set to dance or club beats, but instead of being advertising jingles in the traditional sense, they’re just text, an entire series of sentences like you’d see in ad copy. They don’t rhyme, and the flow of words doesn’t follow the music in a way that works together with it. They mention the Liven app, but not in a chorus or musically memorable moment in the song. Here’s an example:
Here’s another:
One more, if I have to suffer you have to suffer:
Some are specifically geared toward women (“this is how dopamine obsession looks in women”) while others are geared toward men (“men with ADHD often become insecure ‘nice guys’”). I’ll hand it to Liven’s ad department for using the language popular (and harmful) on the short-form content channels where the ads play, and for tailoring their message toward how users on those channels might be feeling. Case in point: I feel awful about my use of these platforms, and I often investigate why I engage in this scrolling behavior when it doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t think the ads’ creators thought this deeply or they’d have made better ads, but starting off with “this” can be read as subtly turning the whole thing back on me: seeing the ad is how procrastination is manifesting in my life! Purporting to then have an answer, and even better an answer that lives on an app and thus on the phone where I’m mindlessly scrolling, is a real example of meeting potential customers where they are. Congrats to Liven, really.
I’m not alone in seeing these ads an unusual amount. I found many folks on Reddit also complaining about their frequency and how much they stink of self-help bullshit. Many folks speculate they’re made by AI; beyond the sounds-like-music-but-isn’t of the songs, the videos that accompany the ads feature some of the hallmarks of AI animation: characters change throughout the videos, and the animations feel like space-fillers rather than going along with the song, and they don’t seem to line up with the topic being sung about.
On its store pages, Liven calls itself “your self-discovery companion, a system of tools designed to help you better understand and transform yourself.” It seems to include mood and task trackers and logs, short education sections, quizzes, and an AI chat bot that Liven writes will “help you break down your situations and suggest new ideas to try.” It seems like basic stuff, though some user reviews complain of upsells, trouble cancelling their subscriptions, unauthorized charges, or just a lack of personalization. I can’t tell if it’s a “scam,” as some users call it, or just a faddy cash grab in the style of so much self-help-meets-technology offerings out there, though I certainly would not give it my money. As a common refrain in many of the ads goes, “A friend [or in my case, a mind-numbing social media algorithm] told me about the Liven app, I was skeptical at first.”
That “I was skeptical” is the line I can call up from memory feels like a real flaw in these ads as ads. Because the songs are so unstructured, they don’t have choruses or hooks like a traditional ad. After falling down the hole of them last night, I was brushing my teeth and realized I had one of them in my head. But because they’re just a series of words instead of songs, I wasn’t humming a call to action like getting the app, but instead random words like “dopamine” and “procrastination.” Is it an ad for procrastination? Is it an ad for being skeptical of the app? I am more aware of the app and what it does than I was before, a basic function of ads, and I am far more familiar with the company’s advertising now than any human should be, but the ad hasn’t even managed to groove “buy this product” into my brain.
I started my dive into these ads laughing at their absurdity, but by the end of it I had stayed up way too late and felt gross both about the internet and myself. That’s the exact kind of feeling the app seems to want to solve, so that’s either killer marketing that drives home how much I need the app, or a signal that this app is just another piece of the system it says it wants to help users break free of. I will end this blog before I overthink my way into believing the Liven people are actually marketing geniuses, but if you hadn’t seen these yet, I’m sorry for putting them in your head too.
