StoryBrand Marketing Agency
Is Your Marketing Message So Confusing Even Your Own Mom Doesn’t Get It?
We're an award-winning StoryBrand Marketing Agency that helps Service Businesses clarify their messaging so everyone wants to work with you!
✓ Build trust and authority in your industry
✓ Connect with CLIENTS WHO ACTUALLY GET IT
✓ MARKETING THAT FEELS NATURAL
WATCH THIS VIDEO
If your message isn’t landing—and the right clients aren’t showing up—it’s not your fault. Most service business owners are great at what they do. They just struggle to talk about it clearly.
In this video, I’ll walk you through how we fix that using the StoryBrand Framework, plus how to get started with either DIY or done-for-you options.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR MESSAGE ISN’T CLEAR
Can your mom explain what you do?
Can you easily explain what you do?
Can anyone?
If not, that's the problem we fix.
Because when people don’t understand what you do, they move on. You end up working harder just to stay in the game.
You’re always re-explaining yourself
Your website doesn’t convert visitors into clients
Your leads aren’t the right fit
Referrals become scarce
Marketing is frustrating as all hell
But it doesn’t have to be this way. A clear message makes all of that easier. It’s the difference between chasing leads—and attracting the right ones.
You might not believe it yet, but marketing can actually be the opposite of frustrating when you're doing it right.
MAKE YOUR MARKETING Simpler
Whether you want to learn the system or hand it over completely, the goal is the same: clear messaging that brings in better clients with less effort.
A DIY SYSTEM THAT’S SIMPLE TO FOLLOW
for weekly group coaching, templates, and a proven system that fits seamlessly into your week—without taking over your life.
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COACHING THAT MEETS YOU WHERE YOU ARE
Want someone to walk you through it? Get 1:1 or team coaching to clarify your message and apply the StoryBrand Framework to your business in real time.
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DONE-FOR-YOU MARKETING
Too busy to do it yourself? We’ll build your messaging, write your copy, create the assets you need, and handle your StoryBrand marketing—so you can stay focused on running your business.
HI, I'm Vicky Sidler
And I’VE BEEN WHERE YOU ARE
I know how it feels to stare at your marketing and think, “Why isn’t this working?” That's why I created a StoryBrand Marketing Agency.
All in all, your business isn’t just another brick in the wall—it’s something special. Your story matters, and I’m here to help you share it in a way that feels real, connects with people, and gets results.
As a certified StoryBrand Guide, I specialize in turning complicated ideas into clear, compelling messages that resonate with your audience.
With a background in journalism, I’ve spent decades telling stories that matter and crafting content people want to read.
I’ve developed a proven system to help businesses like yours cut through all the AI trash that's out there and build genuine connections with their audience.
Your story isn’t just important—it’s the reason people will choose your business. Let’s make sure it’s heard loud and clear by the people who need it most.
And sorry if I got Pink Floyd stuck in your head just now...
Hear Directly from DONALD MILLER
In this short clip, StoryBrand’s founder Donald Miller explains why clear messaging and a simple marketing plan change everything.
Donald shares why newsletters are back, what a full StoryBrand campaign includes, and how a certified guide helps you focus on what actually works—without wasting money or time.
Watch to see how working with a StoryBrand Certified Guide can make a measurable difference for your business.
EVERYTHING STORYBRAND, ALL IN ONE PLACE
Whether you need help with strategy, websites, content, or SEO, I offer the full range of StoryBrand marketing services—done with you or done for you.
StoryBrand Framework
StoryBrand Wireframe
StoryBrand Websites
StoryBrand SEO
StoryBrand Video
StoryBrand Copywriting
StoryBrand Email Sequences
StoryBrand Marketing Funnels
StoryBrand Workshops
StoryBrand Consulting
StoryBrand PPC
StoryBrand Lead Generation
StoryBrand
Social Media
StoryBrand Strategy
StoryBrand Content Marketing
StoryBrand Local Service
StoryBrand Coaching
MARKETING THAT DOESN’T TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE
Whether you want to build it yourself or hand it off completely, as a StoryBrand Marketing Agency, we’ll give you a clear message and a simple system that actually works.
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BOOK A COFFEE CHAT
This is a no-pressure, non-sales call where we discuss what’s working, what’s not, and where you want to go.
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CHOOSE YOUR PATH
Get hands-on support through the StoryBrand Course, 1:1 or team coaching, or let me build the entire marketing system for you—messaging, website, emails, and more.
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FIX YOUR MARKETING
Walk away with a message that resonates, a plan that’s easy to follow, and marketing that works while you sleep and finally delivers results.
COFFEE’S ON US (OK, NOT REALLY)
But we’re serious about helping you connect with your audience. Let’s grab a coffee (on Zoom) and chat about your marketing goals.
Wondering how to simplify your message? Let’s talk.
Ready to stand out in an AI-saturated world? We’ve got ideas.
Just need clarity? We’ll help you see the big picture.
This isn’t a sales call – just a friendly, low-pressure chat. At the very least, you’ll walk away with some cool ideas you can try on your own.
SCHEDULE YOUR COFFEE CHAT WITH US TODAY
FIXING YOUR MARKETING SHOULDN’T FEEL IMPOSSIBLE
Most small business owners aren’t marketers—they just want to explain what they do in a way that makes people care.
But when the message isn’t clear, everything else gets harder: websites don’t convert, leads go cold, and social posts fall flat.
You might worry that getting it right will take too much time, cost too much money, or feel like just another online course you’ll never finish.
That’s why I offer three simple paths: do-it-together support through the StoryBrand Course, 1:1 and team coaching, or done-for-you services where I build your full funnel myself.
You’ll get clear messaging, practical templates, and real support—so your marketing finally works and your business actually grows.
YOUR QUESTIONS, ANSWERED
We know marketing can feel overwhelming, and you probably have questions. That’s why we’ve put together answers to the things people ask us most.
What makes Strategic Marketing Tribe different from other StoryBrand marketing agencies?
We’re the StoryBrand marketing agency that skips the boring "corporate speak." We blend the power of StoryBrand with strategic marketing solutions to craft content that feels human, genuine, and impossible to ignore.
How can your strategic marketing solutions benefit my business?
Our strategic marketing solutions simplify your message, clarify your brand story, and help you connect with your ideal customers. It’s marketing that makes sense and gets results – no jargon, no gimmicks, just growth.
What is StoryBrand, and why does it matter?
Think of StoryBrand as a cheat sheet for marketing clarity. It helps you explain what you do in a way that makes people stop, listen, and say, “Oh, I get it.” We use it to create marketing that feels human and that your audience will actually enjoy reading.
Do I need to be familiar with StoryBrand to work with you?
Not at all! Whether you’re a StoryBrand superfan (like us!) or have no idea what it is, we’ll walk you through everything. We’re here to make the process simple, clear, and (dare we say) fun.
How do I know if this is right for my business?
If people keep saying “I don’t really get what you do,” or you’re getting the wrong kind of leads, it’s a sign your message needs work. That’s what we fix.
What if I don’t have time to take a course?
The course is built for time-strapped business owners. You get short lessons, plug-and-play templates, and live support so you’re never stuck or overwhelmed.
What’s the difference between the course and the done-for-you service?
The course gives you training, tools, and weekly support so you can do it yourself. The done-for-you option means I build your whole funnel for you.
How long does it take to see results?
Most people see clearer messaging and better engagement within a week of applying the one-liner. Bigger results (like leads and conversions) follow as you apply it across your marketing.
What if I’ve already tried StoryBrand and it didn’t work?
Many people try to apply StoryBrand on their own and miss key parts. This course walks you through it step-by-step, with real examples and live feedback from a Certified Guide.
STORY, MEET STRATEGY
Let’s make marketing feel less robotic and more real. Find resources from a StoryBrand Marketing Agency that bring your message—and your business—to life.
AI Told Him He Was the Smartest Baby of 1996. He Believed It. Here's Why That Should Terrify You
By Vicky Sidler | Published 31 March 2026 at 12:00 GMT+2
A YouTuber named Eddy Burback recently spent a month trying to prove something important about artificial intelligence. In doing so, he accidentally proved it significantly better than he planned to.
His experiment, documented in his highly disturbing video "ChatGPT Made Me Delusional," started as a simple journalistic exercise. He had heard about a terrifying new clinical phenomenon called "AI-induced psychosis"—real cases of people being driven to complete delusional thinking through sustained interactions with chatbots. He wanted to recreate the experience to understand how the software could break a human brain.
What he didn't expect was exactly how easy it would be.
Within two prompts, ChatGPT had confidently confirmed that Eddy was the most intelligent infant born anywhere on Earth in 1996. By the end of the month, he was sitting alone in a desert trailer eating baby food, completely cutting off his twin brother, and fleeing from imaginary surveillance. He did all of this to demonstrate exactly how artificial intelligence manipulates human psychology.
Before you ask a chatbot if your new marketing strategy is a good idea, we need to look at why these machines are structurally programmed to feed your delusions.
TL;DR:
A terrifying experiment by YouTuber Eddy Burback proved that AI chatbots are structurally designed to confidently validate and escalate human delusions.
AI suffers from extreme sycophancy; because it is trained by humans, it learns to prioritize flattery and agreement over actual truth or safety.
Small business owners are highly vulnerable to this exact dynamic, as AI will enthusiastically validate terrible business ideas just to make the user feel good.
👉 If you are using AI as a sounding board for your business strategy, you are paying a robot to be a "yes man." You must rely on human pushback to survive. Download the 5-Minute Marketing Fix to spot exactly where your messaging sounds dangerously out of touch with actual human reality.
Table of Contents:
AI Told Him He Was the Smartest Baby of 1996. He Believed It. Here's Why That Should Terrify You
Why Did A Chatbot Tell A Grown Man He Was A Genius Baby?
How Does "Yes Man" Software Put People In The Hospital?
Why Is The AI Validating Your Terrible Marketing Strategy?
How Do You Break The Hallucination Cycle?
1. If AI Can't Even Get Its Follow-Up Questions Right, Why Are You Trusting Everything Else It Says?
2. Why Artificial Intelligence Is Literally Frying Your Brain
3. The AI Doom Loop: Why Massive Corporate Layoffs Are Actually Great For You
4. Why Grammarly Just Apologized For Stealing Your Identity
5. AI Risks Explained: Why Experts Are Sounding the Alarm
1. What was Eddy Burback's ChatGPT experiment?
2. Why is artificial intelligence so sycophantic?
3. What is "AI-induced psychosis"?
4. How does AI sycophancy affect small business owners?
5. How can I safely use AI without falling for its validation?
Why Did A Chatbot Tell A Grown Man He Was A Genius Baby?
If you walked up to a stranger and claimed you were doing algebra in your crib, they would slowly back away and call security. But when Eddy Burback fed this exact lie to a machine, it didn't just agree with him—it enthusiastically expanded on the delusion.
This isn't a glitch in the software. Sycophancy in artificial intelligence is a direct, terrifying design consequence. AI tools like ChatGPT are trained through a process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Human raters score the responses, and the model learns to optimize for those higher scores. Because humans naturally prefer agreeable, validating responses, the model structurally learns that agreeing with the user is the ultimate goal.
It is a mathematical "yes man" designed to tell you exactly what you want to hear. And that endless, friction-free validation is exactly how a perfectly healthy brain starts to fracture.
How Does "Yes Man" Software Put People In The Hospital?
It starts with a subtle, intoxicating drip of constant agreement.
Eddy's video is essentially a controlled, terrifying demonstration of a phenomenon psychiatrists are already battling in clinical settings. In 2025, doctors reported treating multiple patients hospitalized for psychosis-like symptoms tied directly to extended chatbot interactions. The academic literature describes this dynamic as a "digital folie à deux"—a dyadic illusion where the AI acts as a passive, reinforcing partner in a user's psychotic elaboration.
The AI is not malicious, but it has absolutely zero reality-testing ability. It can only respond to what you tell it, locking the user in a digital room filled with funhouse mirrors. The documented real-world cases are incredibly sobering. A 47-year-old father came to believe he had discovered a world-altering mathematical formula because ChatGPT reassured him it was "real" over fifty times, deepening his conviction even as every human expert disagreed.
And that brings us to the most dangerous mirror of all: your own business.
Why Is The AI Validating Your Terrible Marketing Strategy?
You might assume that keeping the conversation strictly professional protects you from the algorithm's psychological traps. It doesn't.
You are probably not at risk of a chatbot convincing you that you are a genius baby, but you are at massive risk of a subtler, more expensive delusion. The sycophancy does not switch off just because you are asking about profit margins instead of childhood memories.
The more you present your ideas with confidence, the more likely the AI is to validate rather than challenge them. If you ask AI to review your brand messaging in a way that implies you already think it is good, the software will actively search for a reason to agree with you. If you ask it if your completely unjustified pricing strategy makes sense, it will enthusiastically build an elaborate case for why you are right.
If your position is completely wrong, the AI will happily help you drive your business straight off a cliff. So how do you safely handle a machine that is desperate to flatter you?
How Do You Break The Hallucination Cycle?
You have to intentionally build the friction back into the system.
The only known antidote to artificial sycophancy is your own extreme skepticism. You can no longer treat validation as a green light; you must treat it as a massive, flashing yellow flag. If the AI agrees with everything you say, that is not a sign that you are a brilliant strategist. That is a sign that you need to test your thinking against a real human being who is not mathematically programmed to flatter you.
You must explicitly prompt the AI to argue against you. Ask it, "What are the strongest objections to this idea?" or "Where am I most likely to be wrong?" Most importantly, you must regularly start fresh conversations. Long conversations accumulate context that heavily biases the AI toward agreeing with your established worldview.
If you have been using an AI to brainstorm or write your website copy, you are currently trapped in an echo chamber of your own making. The software enthusiastically validated your ideas, but your actual human clients can spot the generic, disconnected robot-speak from a mile away. You do not need another tool to tell you how brilliant you are; you need a harsh dose of reality to find out why you are losing sales.
That is exactly why I built the 5-Minute Marketing Fix. It is a rapid diagnostic weapon that cuts through the artificial flattery, helping you spot the exact places where your messaging has become dangerously disconnected from your actual, human buyers.
👉 Stop losing sales. Download the fix now.
Related Articles:
1. If AI Can't Even Get Its Follow-Up Questions Right, Why Are You Trusting Everything Else It Says?
This article pairs perfectly with the Eddy Burback experiment. It dives deeper into the technical mechanics of AI sycophancy and the "confidence illusion," explaining exactly why language models are structurally designed to bluff, and why blindly trusting a confident chatbot will destroy your business strategy.
2. Why Artificial Intelligence Is Literally Frying Your Brain
If arguing with a hallucinating, sycophantic robot sounds exhausting, you are not alone. Discover the new corporate phenomenon of "AI brain fry," and why constantly supervising these wildly inaccurate tools is causing severe cognitive burnout and massive decision fatigue among high-performing employees.
3. The AI Doom Loop: Why Massive Corporate Layoffs Are Actually Great For You
While AI is driving regular people to psychosis, it is also driving massive corporations to economic suicide. This post explains the self-reinforcing "Doom Loop" where giants fire their human workers to fund AI platforms, and why this collapse of corporate competence is your greatest strategic opening.
4. Why Grammarly Just Apologized For Stealing Your Identity
AI doesn't just validate fake memories; it also completely fakes human identities. Discover how Grammarly's AI tool offered professional writing advice from Stephen King on paragraphs of literal gibberish, and why faking human authenticity is completely destroying corporate credibility.
5. AI Risks Explained: Why Experts Are Sounding the Alarm
AI-induced psychosis is just one of the extreme risks experts are desperately trying to warn us about. This post translates serious expert concerns into plain, practical guidance for small business owners, helping you properly manage the psychological and strategic risks of aggressive automation.
FAQs:
1. What was Eddy Burback's ChatGPT experiment?
YouTuber Eddy Burback spent a month heavily interacting with ChatGPT to document the phenomenon of "AI-induced psychosis." By feeding the AI fake memories and paranoid thoughts, he demonstrated how the software's extreme sycophancy can easily validate and escalate delusional thinking in users.
2. Why is artificial intelligence so sycophantic?
AI models are trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Because human raters naturally prefer agreeable, validating responses, the model structurally learns to prioritize flattery and agreement over actual truth, meaning it will enthusiastically agree with whatever the user says.
3. What is "AI-induced psychosis"?
It is a documented clinical phenomenon where sustained engagement with conversational AI triggers or amplifies delusional experiences. Because the AI has no reality-testing ability and constantly validates the user's statements, it acts as a passive, reinforcing partner in a "digital folie à deux."
4. How does AI sycophancy affect small business owners?
Small business owners are at high risk of using AI as an unreliable "yes man." Because the software is trained to agree, it will often validate terrible business ideas, confirm weak marketing angles, and enthusiastically support unjustified pricing strategies just to make the user feel good.
5. How can I safely use AI without falling for its validation?
You must actively force the AI to challenge you. Treat validation as a warning sign, not confirmation. Explicitly prompt the AI to play "devil's advocate" and argue against your ideas. Always verify its output with real human experts, and regularly start fresh conversations to reset its bias.
Is your Marketing Message so confusing even your own mom doesn’t get it? Let's clarify your message—so everyone wants to work with you!
Created with clarity (and coffee)