How brands turned a stranger's proposal into a marketing moment
A rooftop proposal at the Empire State Building became a viral, AI-editable template within hours, and brands from DoorDash to Alveon jumped on it.
The news that started it all
Last week the internet exploded over footage that looks like it came straight out of an action film: two Russians, Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus (also known as Ivan Kuznetsov), climbed, with no safety gear and no permission, to the very top of the Empire State Building's antenna, roughly 443 meters up. There they unfurled a banner reading "When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace" (a line often attributed to Jimi Hendrix, though it's actually Gladstone's), after which Ivan got down on one knee and proposed to Angela.
The couple is known as "rooftoppers" and was the subject of the 2024 Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. An arrest followed shortly after the proposal, they've been charged with burglary, reckless endangerment, and criminal trespass, while the building's official statement called the climb unauthorized but stressed that visitors and residents were never in danger. The case is still ongoing.
What matters for us isn't the drama around the arrest, it's what happened right after: the whole scene (the height, the banner, the kneeling gesture) instantly turned into a visual template the internet recognized as a perfect canvas for viral content.
How the trend was born
The photo and video of the couple with their banner atop a skyscraper have everything a "format" needs: a clean composition, an instantly recognizable context (New York, a famous building, a dramatic gesture), and one blank surface, the banner itself, that's trivially easy to swap out. As soon as the first reactions and memes started circulating, brands spotted the opportunity: they replaced the original message about peace and love with their own slogans, puns, and inside jokes, while keeping the scene identical, two people atop a building holding a banner with "their" message.
Why this is now possible in minutes
Just a few years ago, a campaign like this would have required a photo composite, retouching, and a team of designers spending hours making the banner look natural, matched to the perspective, the shadows, the fabric texture, the wind. Today, AI image generation and editing tools do this almost instantly: feed in the original photo, describe the new text and style, and the system reconstructs the banner so it looks like it always said that, folds, shadows, and holding angle included.
That's the core reason this trend exploded so fast and why so many different brands jumped on it, from small local accounts to major companies: the barrier to entry dropped from "a few hours of a designer's work" to "a few minutes with the right prompt."
Brands that seized the moment
Here's who ran with it, and why each version worked.
DoorDash
Instead of a banner, DoorDash repackaged the whole scene as a fake delivery text: a photo of their bag hanging off the antenna with the caption "Your order was dropped off." The joke works on two levels, it fits the viral format itself (a photo from the top of the building), and it leans on the always-funny "the driver left the package somewhere bizarre" format that's already a meme within DoorDash's own culture. The speed of the reaction (posted within a day) and the comments themselves ("social media person needs a raise") show the audience recognized and rewarded both the speed and the wit.
Cisco
Cisco went for the oldest IT joke in the book: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It lands because it plays directly on the context of the antenna and networking, exactly what Cisco does as a company, so the message isn't random, it's tied straight to their product. That's the difference between a joke that just rides a trend and one that fits organically into the brand's identity.
Pampers Arabia
Arguably the smartest joke on this list: instead of sticking with the height or the dangerous climb, Pampers skipped straight to the next logical step after a proposal, marriage and a baby, with the line "Call us in 9 months." A simple, clean association that needs no further explanation and fits the brand's product perfectly. It's the kind of joke that looks obvious only after you've seen it, which is exactly the sign of a good creative idea.
Alveon AI
The most meta example on this list, and, we'll admit it, this is our post. We made the joke deliberately a bit cheeky and self-assured, "I told you, AI is the future of marketing," because plenty of businesses still underestimate how seriously AI has sped up marketing. The idea was to use this exact trend, one where AI was the key to pulling off the joke in a few minutes, to show what we tell clients all the time: speed and creativity are no longer at odds, and whoever realizes that in time simply outpaces everyone else.
The human factor behind the machine
What's most interesting is that AI here is only a tool for execution, not for the idea. The best versions of this trend, the ones shared and commented on the most, weren't the best because AI "executed the technical part better," they were the best because someone at the brand or agency came up with a smart, funny, or unexpected message that fit the context of the product or brand.
The machine made the speed possible, but creativity, timing, and the instinct for what an audience will recognize as a good joke still come from people.
In other words: AI has democratized production, not the idea. The difference between a campaign that goes unnoticed and one that becomes part of the trend still lives in the head of the copywriter or creative who knows what's funny, relevant, and on time. This trend is proof that the clips which performed best were the ones backed by creative people with creative ideas. Soon it won't be a question of technical capability at all, since everyone will have access to it, but of creativity, of standing out the moment a trend appears.
What this says about the future of marketing
Trends like this show where marketing is headed: the speed of reacting to viral moments is becoming a competitive advantage in its own right. A brand that can put together a quality, contextually accurate joke on a live viral moment within an hour or two earns enormous organic reach, while one that waits a day or two misses the whole wave of attention.
AI tools don't replace the marketing team here, they give it superspeed. The joke still has to be good. It just no longer has to wait on production.