On March 31st, sleepsleepsleepsleep.com went live. On it was a single eight-part document announcing #slowave: a mattress company’s attempt to buy itself a meme. At 3,300 words, the slowave manifesto was an unusual piece of writing. It critiqued the fact that a good night’s sleep costs money. It name-checked John Maynard Keynes. It questioned the metaphor of sleep as an off button. Perhaps, it suggested, we’d be better off if we all thought a bit harder about sleep:

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Sleep is the Kim Kardashian of wellness — omnipresent as a topic of conversation, impossible to escape, but all the same, a bit abstract. Who is she really? What exactly does she do?

A few news outlets picked up on slowave. Most did so out of curiosity about its author, Sean Monahan, a known pop-culture term-coiner. Monahan’s socialist art collective, K-hole, enjoyed a breakout moment in 2013 when it launched the fashion meme normcore (think aggressively bland Gap clothes). At first, normcore befuddled some trendspotters: Was it real, or was it a joke? It didn’t matter. By naming it, K-hole made normcore real, with the term persisting to this day. And K-hole’s members were suddenly attracting clients. Could Monahan repeat the normcore magic with sleep?

Screenshots of “#Slowave — An Exploration on Sleep + Society” on sleepsleepsleepsleep.com

The short answer: No. After a light dusting of news briefs and tweets, including one by Jenny McCarthy, sleepsleepsleepsleep.com settled back into internet obscurity.

The meme-that-wasn’t was paid for by Casper, the mattress-in-a-box startup that blanketed the New York City subway with ads this spring and churned out a thousand-plus stories about sleep through its content-marketing operation, Van Winkle’s. Slowave’s failure to spread was an unusual hiccup in Casper’s otherwise first-rate performance on social media, with enviable followings of 339,000 on Facebook, 37,000 on Instagram and 65,000 on Twitter. The company has fueled an unboxing fad, with tickled customers sharing their videos of mattresses unfurling out of their packaging. Other upstart mattress brands — Tuft & Needle, Leesa, Saatva, Keetsa, Helix, Yogabed, Purple— come nowhere near that meaty social footprint.

In interviews with far-flung publications, Casper’s founders have described wanting to become “the Nike of sleep” — to transform consumers from passive sleepers into active ones, and to “revolutionize the bedroom.” “We believe that sleep is the next great lifestyle investment,” cofounder Luke Sherwin told me. He sees sleep as the successor to organic food and ever-more-rarefied coffee. With about $100 million in revenue in 2015, its first full year of mattress sales, Casper is off to a strong start.

Casper wants us to care about sleep, fret about sleep, spend lots of money on sleep. It now sells sheets and pillows, too, with more products on the way. But before we literally buy into the commercialization of our unconscious, I’d like to capture this moment in amber: Casper has pulled off an extraordinary feat in convincing legions of twentysomethings to love something as pedestrian as a mattress company. For a startup whose success is based largely off social media, what does it mean that it flubbed slowave, its high-concept meme?

To understand Casper, you have to start with their unboxing videos. In the legions of nearly identical videos that now populate Youtube, proud owners grab their bulky new box in a bear hug, jostle it until the rolled-up mattress slides out, and slice through the plastic wrap with a neat little tool Casper provides. Then the mattress starts to expand. It emits a drawn-out sigh, as if emerging from deep hibernation. It puffs out slowly but purposefully, a languid foam leviathan that almost seems to have a heartbeat.

Jack Whittington

The customers in these videos chirp with delight. They hop onto their new beds like kids diving into a ball pit. They plunge their noses into the foam and lie still, limbs splayed. It is clear the mattress obeys the universal laws of presents: (1) the bigger the box, the better; and (2) If the gift grows even bigger once opened, that’s even better! You could satisfy these constraints with a malamute puppy — or a giant block of foam.

But here’s the thing. Depending on how you count, somewhere between 50 and 100 companies are eager to ship a mattress straight to your house. It’ll even arrive in a handsome, huggable box. “Everyone thinks they can start a mattress company. It’s relatively easy to do,” says Ricky Joshi, a cofounder of Saatva, a startup whose mattress does not fold up into a box (and whose company, he says, was more challenging to build). Once you’ve lined up the right machinery, you could whip together a new mattress in about a minute, according to another person I spoke to.

The makers of mattress-compressing equipment are reveling in their unexpected boom time. “These roll-pack machines have been around for a long time, probably 10 years,” says Paul Block, vice president of product planning and sales strategy at Global Systems Group, which sells such machinery. “But suddenly people found a use for them. It’s unusually high demand.”

Block, alongside many others in the industry, calls it “the Casper effect.” But Casper wasn’t the first online direct-to-consumer mattress company — it only started selling its first product in 2014. The likely original was Bedinabox.com in 2006, which did not respond to an interview request. Saatva, which offers in-home delivery service, stepped into the market in 2011. Tuft & Needle, a top competitor of Casper, launched in 2012. Yet it’s Casper that frames all conversations.

One reason is that Casper figured out how to turn a burden — “we dropped a big heavy box on your doorstep, good luck” — into a social media phenomenon. Customers (including the editor in chief of this publication) loved the customized tool for slicing through the plastic, the occasional handwritten note, the kid-at-Christmas vibe. “It certainly caught me, and the industry, by surprise,” says Michael Magnuson, the founder of a mattress reviews site called GoodBed.com. “People had been shipping mattresses in boxes for years, and it had never been a selling point. Now all of a sudden people preferred it!”

Equally important — if not more so — has been the decision to deploy a notable chunk of the $71 million Casper raised in venture capital to marketing. Awareness of Casper grew quickly. Others caught on and started up copycat operations. “The similarities don’t end at ‘folded up and compressed in a box.’ Some of them look like they did a find-and-replace on the word ‘Casper’ on their sites,” Magnuson says. The sites touted a single message: The traditional mattress industry lies to you, harasses you in its stores, and cheats you through inflated prices.

In the meantime, Casper has evolved to telling a different story. It barely acknowledges the rest of the industry, instead charging forward with a scorched-earth marketing strategy. “Casper’s dumping so much money into Google Adwords that it’s not sustainable for the up-and-coming [companies],” says Daehee Park, a cofounder of Tuft & Needle. “A lot of chatter among new entrants is, how do you guys sustain yourself.” (If you google Tuft & Needle, Casper comes up first. But Park says Tuft & Needle does not depend on Google ads to drive sales.)

The focus of the Casper marketing story? Making you covet the experience of buying — analogous to how Tiffany’s Blue Box became almost as desired as the bauble inside. And to get there, it wants to occupy your brain with all things sleep.

The company’s methods go well beyond Adwords. In the summer of 2015 Casper launched Van Winkle’s, an independent media site staffed with journalists and focused on sleep, with an annual budget of about $1 million. The single rule was they couldn’t write about mattresses. In Casper-y fashion, they started big, publishing 200 stories on day one, according to Van Winkle’s then-editor in chief Jeff Koyen. “The idea was to create sleep as an editorial vertical, much like fitness or shelter,” says Koyen. “I wanted to get Van Winkle’s readers to think about sleep, and the rising tide would benefit Casper.” He also wanted to shake off some of the tropes that hung around sleep writing. “It’s not just, ‘let’s wake up and greet the sun in a yoga pose.’ And it was also not that CEO shit, of maximizing the most of your day — I think there’s a backlash right now against that.”

Koyen pushed Van Winkle’s to have a distinct voice from Casper’s blog, which also features new posts almost daily. The difference could not be more stark: where Van Winkle’s might take a rigorous look at sleep in the context of PTSD, exercise, or alcohol, the Casper blog evangelizes waffles, praises the hilarity of the company’s own tweets, and tracks the location of Casper’s Napmobile, in which you can book a half-hour doze. The blog also features a monthly “sleeposcope” (a horoscope so full of garbage I can’t bring myself to quote it here).

A screenshot of Casper’s Instagram.

On Facebook and Twitter, Casper shares links from its blog, and the blog helps promote Van Winkle’s. It’s a symbiotic little ecosystem, producing a constant stream of pro-sleep propaganda.

When it isn’t boosting its own posts, Casper’s Twitter feed hosts a sterling collection of half-thoughts on drowsiness. Viewed one by one, the tweets seem innocuous. They even got nominated for a Webby award. But when considered in bulk, they add up to one odd bedfellow: Casper’s Twitter persona is as casual as a chatty friend; but in its limited set of interests, it’s as dopey as the simplest bot. As I scrolled through hundreds of nearly identical tweets, I started to feel unmoored. Do customers really swoon over this stuff? Isn’t it kind of… vapid?

When I asked cofounder Sherwin about the differences in voice, he told me, “Van Winkle’s is a different brand for us. It’s very purposefully not trying to fit in the Casper voice.”

He adds, “What we think about on social is in a territory that’s more down to Earth, a little bit more cheeky, versus the website and other channels. It’s the aspect of Casper that a lot of people love — having a personality, humanness.”

He has a point. Across social media, buyers rave about Casper. They talk to the brand as if it were a person, and the brand chats back, also in very human form. Where other companies, such as Tuft & Needle, appear more reserved, Casper is all fun and silliness, heavily seasoned with naps and waffles.

As a marketing strategy, naps-and-waffles is a vast improvement over one past foray of another Casper cofounder, Philip Krim. According to the New York Times, in his pre-Casper days Krim collaborated with Playboy on a mattress called Ecstasy, which appeared at a 2010 trade show flanked by Playboy Bunnies. Against that backdrop naps-and-waffles is the height of class. And people seem to enjoy the Casper voice — here’s the most successful recent tweet I found:

“Twitter is particularly fun for us. We talk about the daily struggle,” Sherwin says. “We joke about iced coffee and bacon and lazy Sundays — things that don’t necessarily fit in the ‘sleep better, live better, run-up-a-hill’ vibe.”

Ok, score one for Sherwin: he’s subtly dissing the life hackers and championing life’s simple pleasures. Maybe that is, in fact, what it means for a brand to be authentic. But I still had some doubts. If the goal is to “make sleep a lifestyle,” I needed to connect with something more meaningful than brunch.

I plugged onward through Casper’s marketing projects. In May 2015, Casper launched the Snooze Bar: a five-day, multi-city “celebration of sleep.” On a visit to the Snooze Bar, you could “[t]ry the outrageously comfortable Casper mattress, take a nap, have a coffee, eat some waffles, and have an artist interpret your dreams.” Naps-and-waffles strikes again! A year later, Casper produced another real-world marketing effort, a Sleep Symposium in New York. Onto the stage trotted Arianna Huffington, promoting her new book on sleep. Huffington, a co-conspirator in the commercialization of sleep, has promoted her book “The Sleep Revolution” in numerous inventive ways, including brand partnerships with Sleep Number, Uber, AirBnB, JetBlue, and Marriott (among many, many others). For these deals, she gave a talk in JFK’s JetBlue terminal while seated on a Sleep Number mattress, offered a free “Night At Arianna’s Sleep Paradise” on AirBnb, chatted with passengers while whizzing around in an Uber driven by Doctor Oz, and got her book advertised to “millions” of Marriott guests. At Casper’s symposium, she rattled off factoids on sleep deprivation and spoke earnestly against driving while drowsy.

Also on the lineup were the musician Reggie Watts, a Brooklyn pizza restauranteur, and a guy with an antenna implanted in his head, among others.

Michael Breus, also known as The Sleep Doctor, was on the program, too. He has built up his own empire around sleep: two books with a third on the way, three free ebooks, an app, and according to his site, sponsorship by Princess Cruises and Advil PM. At the symposium, he looked around and noticed he was the only person with academic credentials in sleep. “I couldn’t tell what the goal was,” Breus reflects, noting that the conversations were driven by cultural commentators, not doctors or scientists. After a beat, he reasons, “But Casper’s a disruptor, so this fits perfectly: ‘we’re not going to get a bunch of academics.’ They’re very experiential.”

Also in attendance was Sean Monahan, the arty culture critic behind #slowave. Casper had approached him months earlier to riff on ‘the future of sleep.’ Now he was here to share his findings with a live audience. But when I asked him, later, how he’d landed in Casper’s web of sleep, he sounded a little unsure himself.

“To me the funny thing about asking about the future of sleep is, like, is there a future of sleep?” he says. Meaning, it probably looks a lot like the present. Social media and internet-of-thingsiness may have shaped how we exchange data and snapshots about exercise or food, but the mechanics of sleep (eyes shut, body immobile) make it a bigger challenge. “People show that they’re at the gym, and sharing a photograph of a meal is totally normal,” Monahan says. “But posting photos of yourself sleeping is incredibly weird.”

Jack Whittington

After some weeks of thought, he published his sleepsleepsleepsleep.com essay, drawing on varied cultural phenomena to try to make a dent in our sleep blindness — to bring sleep into “an expanded scope of what we think of being conscious.” I’ve read the piece five or six times, and I was baffled the first couple times. I can see why as a meme, slowave was a dud. But as a snapshot of a cultural moment, I realized, slowave hits its mark. It comments on the rise of start-ups trying to sell us sleep products, cautions against corporations trying to sell us ideas, while also making a strong case for getting a good night’s sleep. Not bad! Even more trippy is this: not only is slowave a critical take on marketing, it is itself a piece of marketing. For Casper.

I asked Monahan what he made of that irony. After a brief reflection, he said, “I don’t think I have a problem with sleep being commoditized or productized. Sleep is so down on our list of cultural priorities. It is not one of my anxieties right now if what it takes to have a healthier population is for sleep to be more of a moneymaker.”

Monahan tells me his interest in sleep extends from an ongoing obsession he has with wellness in popular culture. When he argues that our attitudes toward sleep are a public health disaster, I believe him. You know what he didn’t evangelize, not even once? Naps and waffles.

It was Joe Lazauskas, editor in chief at Contently, a content-marketing platform, who finally cracked the code for me. He’d ranked Van Winkle’s as the second-best content marketing project of 2015. He said he was consistently impressed by its publishing. Whether investing in journalism sells more mattresses than, say, paying for a traditional subway ad campaign is an open question. But Lazauskas had gotten the sense that, at the least, Van Winkle’s stories were successfully finding an audience. I’d asked him for the best examples of content marketing of all time, and he pointed to Red Bull and GE. In Red Bull’s case, the company has created a media empire of the highest caliber: a magazine that sits on newsstands and has more than 2 million copies in circulation; a record label with top-100 artists, and Youtube channels so vibrant that to call them merely popular is like calling Earth a nice rock. Their ethos — “of excitement, of living in an all-out way,” as Lazauskas puts it — pervades everything they do. “You have people going to Red Bull festival series,” Lazauskas says. “It feels genuine — as much as I hate that word.”

That last part nailed it. I’d been peering between the floorboards of Casper’s marketing, wondering if its commitment to sleep sprang from some genuine source. With intellectual debt to Lazauskas, I have settled on a litmus test: does a brand have a consistent identity across its channels? If you examine all the public manifestations of a company’s values, what do they add up to?

You can easily imagine the person Red Bull would be: it’d be a dude wearing earbuds, his mouth contorted into a triumphant howl, fist pumped high as he blasts past you on a skateboard. My best guess for Casper? An unsettling character who flips between the poles of zeitgeisty science nerd with a penchant for Real Journalism, and a bot with a sleep disorder who enjoys criminally bad horoscopes.

Sherwin, of course, sees it differently. “You can think of a brand as facets of a person in different contexts. Our social voice would be the witty pregame conversation before going out on a Friday, or lazily hanging out on Saturday morning before brunch. But our design stories are like the hardcore parts of going to college,” he says. “We have a rich diversity of tone, but I don’t think it ever does feel like it’s coming from a totally different brand. That’s something that often means threading the needle.”

At a time when marketers rave about authenticity — on page one of LinkedIn’s new “Millennial Playbook,” its millennial author declares, “above all, we believe in authenticity” — one could argue that Casper presents a more human face than most brands, even Red Bull.

Yet no matter how likable it may seem, every company is on a mission to manipulate you — to sell its product, to turn you into an evangelizer of that product. If Casper is the quirky ingenue, the Zooey Deschanel of mattress companies, should we really trust it on the topic of how to spend our money? This is the startup, after all, that claims that in June, Virgos should wake up early and Pisces should sweep under their bed.

Realness matters. I might not trust Red Bull Guy to walk my dog or captain a ship, but I’d sure as hell invite him on a ski trip. As for Casper Guy/Gal? Maybe we can just do brunch. I’ll have the waffles, please.