In 2024, ProtégéAI set out to launch Ask Mary, an AI-powered mental health and relationship advice product delivered via text. The tool was intimate by design—positioned at the intersection of therapy, companionship, and real-time support. But what they needed wasn’t just a brand. They needed cultural traction: a way to enter emotionally charged territory without triggering backlash, skepticism, or ethical drift.

Seeqer was brought in to build from zero. But the real brief wasn’t “brand development.” It was: How do you make something that is artificial feel trustworthy in one of the most emotionally vulnerable categories in society? That’s not a design question. That’s a cultural architecture problem.

Approach: Narrative Infrastructure Meets Emotional Calibration

From the outset, we didn’t approach Ask Mary as a product to be marketed—we approached it as a cultural node that had to feel safe, real, and resonant to audiences negotiating intimacy through screens. Everything we designed—brand identity, copy tone, digital UX—was structured not just to communicate what it was, but to preempt the emotional friction of what it could be mistaken for.

This is the core of Seeqer’s cultural intelligence approach: designing for signal stability in emotionally volatile environments.

We built the website not just as a sales tool, but as a narrative container—an interface that needed to feel like a companion before a single word was typed. The visual tone had to lower heart rates. The copy had to hold complexity without jargon. The structure had to behave like care.

Lean Execution, High Signal Strategy

With a self-funded team and limited resources, our task wasn’t just to stretch a budget—it was to build a system that could self-correct. The ad campaign strategy reflected this logic.

Rather than targeting high-cost, over-saturated metros, we identified mid-tier markets with high emotional receptivity and low noise floors—places where signal could travel without friction. Across these regions, we deployed 15 creative variations, each calibrated for emotional resonance rather than viral reach.

This was about cultural attunement.

With Kiana Pirouz leading creative strategy and a credibility anchor like Dr. Pepper Schwartz onboard, we grounded the campaign in trust: bridging academic legitimacy, visual clarity, and narrative simplicity.

And then we ran it like a living system. Seeqer didn’t just build the creative—we managed the full ad lifecycle: testing, tuning, rebalancing narrative variables in response to live audience behavior. What we were managing was tone integrity over time.

Results: Product-Market Fit as a Cultural Achievement

Ask Mary didn’t just launch, it landed. The campaign outperformed expectations across all key metrics, but more importantly, the product found its market without triggering cultural resistance.

In a sector where AI often meets skepticism, Ask Mary was received with curiosity, warmth, and trust. That’s a signal alignment win.

This was a culturally informed scaffolding that let a sensitive product emerge with integrity, legitimacy, and emotional coherence.