Chime launched its first-ever holiday season ad in October 2025. Jason Momoa shows up in a mall at Christmas wearing a mall cop uniform, then a mattress salesman’s polo, then a department store vest. He doesn’t fight the chaos. He just points to Chime like all of this is perfectly normal.

No mention of fees. No feature list. No “we’re different from the big banks.”

Revenue went up 29%.

Active members up 21%.

And marketing as a percent of revenue dropped to 26% (down from 42% in 2022).

A celebrity ad made acquisition more efficient.

That’s the Maturation Pivot.

What the maturation pivot REALLY is

There’s a window every growth-stage brand has.

A brief moment when brand investment compounds faster than performance spend. When the unit economics of storytelling actually start to beat the unit economics of paid acquisition.

Many brands miss it.

They keep pouring money into performance channels long after feature parity has made their product undifferentiated. They keep waiting for certainty, waiting for proof that brand building “works,” while their competitors quietly occupy the emotional territory.

Chime’s CMO Vineet Mehera put it plainly: “The feature war is over. The identity war has just started.”

That’s worth slowing down on. Every meaningful fintech feature has been replicated. No-fee checking? Everyone has it. Early paycheck access? Commoditized. Instant transfers? Table stakes.

The product stopped being the differentiator. The story took its place.

What Chime actually did, and why it worked

The campaign has three moving parts that look simple but are precise.

The hook runs on emotion. Jason Momoa cycles through three consumer retail roles (mall cop, mattress salesman, department store associate), all set in consumer commerce, all grounded in the shared sensory experience of holiday shopping. The choice to anchor the ad there puts the viewer in a felt stress state before Chime ever appears. You recognize it. That’s your anxiety. That’s your shopping cart.

The customer is the hero. There’s a moment in the ad where a woman walks through the chaos completely calm, because she banks with Chime. She’s racking up cash back. She gets paid when she wants. Momoa witnesses her confidence. That’s the whole ad. Chime gave her what she needed before the holidays started, and now she’s untouchable. The product stays in the background. It just made her possible.

It ran with direct response discipline. This was brand creativity run with direct response discipline. Mehera called it “performance storytelling.” The results were tracked, attributed, and they drove the numbers above. This is how you earn the C-suite’s permission to keep doing it.

The same pattern, two other industries

The maturation pivot has shown up before. And both times, the numbers were hard to argue with.

Klarna + Snoop Dogg, 2019. Klarna was competing on features against Afterpay and Affirm. The feature war was a losing game. So Snoop became a creative partner, took a shareholder position, and said plainly: “This is a product I use.” Users grew from 10 million to 85 million. Merchant sign-ups went up 140%. The credibility of the partnership made Klarna feel legitimate in a way no feature comparison table ever could.

Dollar Shave Club, 2012. $4,500 budget. One warehouse. “Our blades are f***ing great.” 12,000 orders in 48 hours. Unilever paid $1 billion four years later to buy them out. The brand story made the acquisition economics look like a rounding error.

Same pattern. Different industries. Every time.

Why this pattern is hitting so hard right now

Three forces are converging.

AI-generated content is flooding every channel. Generic feature copy, “here’s why we’re different” posts, comparison tables. The volume of undifferentiated content is at an all-time high. That makes the premium for genuine human storytelling higher. Chime’s ad had to be felt to work.

Feature parity is accelerating. The timeline for unique product advantage has compressed dramatically. Brands that wait until their features are commoditized to invest in emotional equity arrive late to a territory that’s already occupied.

In categories where trust is the primary purchase barrier (fintech, healthcare, insurance), that signal matters more than ever. Consumers are deciding who they trust with their money, their data, their peace of mind.

That’s an identity decision.

Where this breaks

Two ways it fails.

Celebrity as decoration. When the talent is just attached to the product for awareness and nothing about the creative makes the customer the hero, you get an expensive ad that people remember but act on. The brand association exists. The acquisition efficiency stays flat.

Pivoting too late. If your category has already been consolidated around two or three identity-dominant brands, brand investment generates awareness for a player the market has already decided it doesn’t need. The maturation pivot requires entering before the emotional territory is claimed. Brands that wait for certainty usually find the window has closed.

The forward hypothesis: three scenarios

Scenario one (high confidence). Two to three fintech competitors, Cash App, SoFi, Ally, launch celebrity campaigns before Q4 2026. These brands carry the same conditions Chime had before the Momoa campaign: high feature parity, growing awareness, under-indexed on emotional identity. Brand-specific searches in the neobank category are already rising in Google Trends data. Chime’s playbook is now public.

Scenario two (watch, not call). SaaS follows fintech by about six months. Duolingo’s owl character and Zumba’s creator partnerships are early indicators. The first B2B SaaS brand to run non-functional creative at a major moment will confirm or deny this pattern transferring to enterprise categories.

Scenario three (one signal). Chime is quietly running paid ads to a subscription tier, visible in the Meta Ad Library with no announcement and no press coverage. If Chime Prime launches publicly, the Momoa campaign was the acquisition layer for a membership model. That changes the economics of the whole campaign. The cost-per-acquisition calculus looks completely different if it’s buying subscribers, not one-time users.

My take

The thing that keeps landing for me is the CMO quote.

“Performance storytelling. Brand creativity run with direct response discipline.”

I see a lot of marketing debates are still stuck on the binary:

brand or performance.

Long game or short game.

Trust-building or conversion.

The Chime campaign is evidence that this frame is wrong, or at least that it doesn’t have to be.

But here’s what I think the data is pointing at underneath the campaign mechanics. Chime made the customer feel smart. The woman walking through the holiday chaos, calm and confident: that’s the feeling. And the most direct thing you can do to kill a customer relationship is make people feel stupid.

Chime built the opposite of that.

Call it pastoral instinct. Meet people in their actual anxiety. Give them a way to feel like they made the right call. Let them carry that feeling out of your ad and into their next conversation.

The window for this kind of pivot is noticable. And for many brands, it’s narrowing.

The diagnostic question

Here’s the question worth sitting with:

Are your customers buying your features, or are they buying the feeling of being the kind of person who made the right call?

If you can’t answer that clearly, the identity war may already be underway in your category. And you may be fighting it with a feature sheet.

The Strategy Signal breaks down one high-performing campaign every week with verified metrics, cross-industry proof, and a forward hypothesis on what happens next. If this is the kind of analysis you want weekly, subscribe below.

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How Chime’s Jason Momoa gamble reveals the new rules of challenger brand strategy, and the one question every CMO should answer before the next big spend

Here’s what this newsletter covers

• The Maturation Pivot: why growth-stage disruptors have a narrow window to shift from performance to brand and why most miss it

• Chime’s Jason Momoa campaign dropped CAC while running a massive brand spend… here’s the mechanics behind that

• How Klarna, Dollar Shave Club, and Mailchimp ran the same play across three different industries

• Three brands that made this pivot too early, during a trust crisis, or with the wrong messenger and what collapsed

• Five diagnostic questions for your next campaign brief, including the one that changes the whole brief

• Why this pattern gets crowded in the next 6–12 months, and what a quietly running Chime product suggests about where the real move actually is

Chime spent a small fortune putting Jason Momoa in a mall cop costume.

Their customer acquisition cost dropped 10% anyway.

That’s not what’s supposed to happen. The conventional case for big brand campaigns is built on a trade-off: you buy awareness now, you accept short-term efficiency loss. Performance numbers take a hit.

You trust the long game.

But Chime’s Q3 2025 numbers broke that pattern. Revenue up 29% year-over-year. Active members up 21%. Marketing spend trending down as a percentage of revenue: 42% in 2022, roughly 26% by mid-2025. And the CAC dropped for the 3rd consecutive quarter.

Something else is going on here.

The maturation pivot

What you’re watching is a pattern I’m calling The Maturation Pivot.

It’s the strategic shift every growth-stage disruptor eventually has to make. Most of them time it badly.

Here’s the idea.

When you’ve proven product-market fit and unit economics are genuinely improving, a window opens. Brand investment starts to compound faster than marginal acquisition efficiency gains. The brands that recognize that window and move are the ones that build moats. The brands that miss it win the feature war and still lose the market.

Chime saw the window. And when they moved, they claimed emotional territory competitors couldn’t touch.

What Chime actually did

To understand the campaign, you have to understand what Chime was working against.

Chime went public on Nasdaq in June 2025 at roughly $11.6 billion fully diluted. The IPO raised $864 million. With that came real pressure: quarterly scrutiny, analyst coverage, institutional investors comparing Chime’s growth trajectory to every other fintech that went public and watched their valuation collapse.

The story Chime needed to tell? We’re building a durable consumer franchise with real brand moats.

At the same time, the competitive landscape had shifted underneath them.

Fintechs had been running a feature war for years: no overdraft fees, instant transfers, high-yield savings. By Q4 2025, every meaningful player had a version of every feature. The whole category had become a Signal Graveyard: same benefits, same no-fee messaging, same acquisition creative, and an audience that had learned to tune all of it out.

The functional differentiation that got you your first 5 million users doesn’t get you to 15 million.

So on October 22, 2025, Chime launched “Bank Smarter This Season”: their first-ever holiday campaign, starring Jason Momoa in three character transformations: mall cop with a mullet, balding mattress salesman, all-pink department store associate.

Agency: Mojo Supermarket, an independent known for earned-media-first creative.

The insight driving the campaign?

The holidays are when the money relationship gets most chaotic. Every single consumer feels it. Traditional banking refuses to acknowledge it, pushing aspirational imagery of perfect holiday tables or running credit card promotions that amplify the stress.

Chime stepped into that gap with humor and recognition. Momoa’s characters are there in the chaos, nodding, pointing at Chime as the calm in the middle of it all.

How did it do?

Chime’s unaided awareness in online banking reached 41%, a 12-point climb since 2023. The fastest growth came among Americans earning $50K–$100K annually, exactly the demographic Chime identified in their S-1 as the primary growth engine. Stock moved up 7.36% in aftermarket trading after earnings. And the CAC dropped for the 3rd consecutive quarter.

CMO Vineet Mehra calls his framework “performance storytelling” which could be defined as brand creativity run with direct-response analytics discipline.

The Momoa campaign ran brand and performance as one system.

The same pattern across 3 other industries

Klarna ran this play six years earlier, and the mechanics are worth studying.

By 2019, Klarna’s BNPL product was excellent.

Afterpay and Affirm were replicating it fast. The feature moat was closing. Klarna had built its brand around B2B merchant relationships. The consumer-facing identity barely existed. So they hired Snoop Dogg, made him a creative partner and shareholder with genuine skin in the story, and built a campaign around a golden retriever named “Smoooth Dogg.” The creative was deliberately absurdist, built for earned media, impossible to explain rationally.

Results? 16 million new consumers in the year following launch. Merchant sign-ups up 140%. User growth from 10 million to 85 million over the campaign period. Valuation from $20B to $50B.

The pattern? You claim emotional territory when rational territory is getting crowded.

Dollar Shave Club had $4,500 and a warehouse.

In 2012, their founder walked into it, said “Our Blades Are F***ing Great,” and walked through increasingly absurd scenarios. 12,000 orders in 48 hours. 3.2 million YouTube views in 72 hours. Four years later, Unilever paid $1 billion for the company and Gillette launched a competing subscription model.

DSC recognized something early: competing on blade technology against Gillette’s R&D claims had diminishing returns.

Nobody actually decides on a razor because of blade geometry.

They decide based on how the brand makes them feel about themselves.

Mailchimp pulled it off without a celebrity at all.

“Did You Mean Mailchimp?” ran in 2017, a campaign built entirely on deliberate mispronunciations: MailShrimp, KaleLimp, FailChips. No feature showcase, no spokesperson, just brand work that made the category feel different.

The campaign won a Cannes Cyber Grand Prix and reached 334 million people. When Intuit acquired them in 2021, the price was $12 billion, the highest ever paid for a bootstrapped company.

3 different industries.

3 different execution styles.

1 underlying pattern: when your product works and competitors are catching up on features, the game shifts from functional differentiation to emotional territory.

Why this pattern is more valuable right now

3 forces are converging that make the Maturation Pivot more powerful in 2025–2026 than it was even five years ago.

AI-generated content is flooding every channel.

The volume of generic content in every category has exploded, and most of it is indistinguishable from everything else. The premium for genuinely human storytelling is climbing: high production value, authentic creative collaboration, ideas that couldn’t have been generated by a model. Chime’s Momoa campaign is a signal that this brand invests in human creative work.

In categories where trust is the primary purchase barrier, that signal matters.

Look, feature parity is accelerating everywhere. SaaS, healthcare, consumer brands. The competitive timeline from “we have a unique product advantage” to “everyone has that advantage” has compressed significantly. Brands that wait until features are commoditized to invest in emotional equity are already too late.

And public markets are increasingly rewarding brand narrative.

Investors distinguish between growth and durable growth, between brands that have users and brands that have loyalty. Chime’s IPO timing wasn’t incidental. The holiday campaign was partly designed to shift the analyst narrative from “unprofitable tech growth story” to “consumer franchise with brand moats.”

That framing affects multiples, analyst ratings, and institutional conviction.

2 ways the pattern fails

The Maturation Pivot has specific failure modes. Both are instructive.

Pivoting too early.

Image from PBS News.

Quibi launched with $1.75 billion, celebrity IP from Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon, and massive brand investment before anyone had proven that consumers wanted premium mobile-only content. No product-market fit.

Nothing to amplify. 6 months after launch, Quibi closed.

Brand investment needs existing momentum before it can compound.

Running brand during a trust crisis.

Image captured from Marketing Dive.

After the GameStop trading halt in 2021, Robinhood launched “We Are All Investors,” aspirational brand work emphasizing democratic access and financial empowerment. The product had just demonstrated exactly the opposite. Running inspirational messaging while users were actively experiencing product failure created cognitive dissonance. The campaign amplified skepticism.

The stock fell 75% post-IPO.

Here’s what connects both…brand investment came without the conditions that make the pivot work.

Proven product.

Improving unit economics. A cultural entry point the brand legitimately owns.

A partnership with genuine skin in the story.

Momoa described it plainly in a Men’s Journal interview: “Our values align. I work hard. I could probably use a little help with my own personal banking... I’m a relatively authentic person, and it was a perfect match.”

That’s what creative collaboration looks like. Momoa talked about his actual banking situation in press interviews. Audiences feel that difference.

5 questions for your next campaign brief

Before the team opens a creative brief, work through these.

1. Has product-market fit been proven, or just assumed? Measurable primary adoption, low churn, unit economics improving for multiple consecutive quarters. Brand investment before this point is noise.

2. Is your feature differentiation compressing? If your top three product advantages could be replicated by a well-funded competitor in 18 months, the window for feature-led marketing is narrowing.

3. Do you have a cultural entry point the brand legitimately owns? Holiday financial stress is Chime’s. It connects to their product mission and actual customer base. The territory you claim should live at the intersection of what you believe and what your customers are genuinely experiencing.

4. Is the creative collaboration authentic? Snoop Dogg became a Klarna shareholder. Momoa talked about his own banking in press interviews. When talent has genuine skin in the story, audiences feel it.

5. And the diagnostic question that cuts to the core: is this an acquisition problem or a depth problem?

Matt’s take: the identity mirror campaign

Here’s what the research doesn’t surface cleanly. What many CMOs will miss when they study this campaign.

The Rational Narrative: the brief every agency is about to pitch your competitors

The conventional playbook when a challenger brand IPOs is settled wisdom: invest in celebrity-driven brand campaigns to build mainstream awareness and drive acquisition among new demographics.

Hire the right talent, claim the emotional territory competitors abandoned, let the brand halo lower downstream CAC. Every agency in the world would have written the same brief for Chime.

The signal data over the next 6–12 months runs parallel to that logic. And points toward where the pattern gets crowded.

Google Trends shows Chime at search stability. People look it up when they need it. The discovery phase is over. The “neobank” category label is flat to declining, and consumers identify with specific brands now, not category labels. YouTube data shows “It’s a whole new Chime” (two weeks old at the time of this research, 854 views) running alongside active casting calls.

Chime is mid-pivot.

The Momoa era appears to be cycling out before the trade press has even finished analyzing it.

And that practitioner silence is the most significant signal of all.

The Adweek CMO panel featuring Chime’s marketing leadership: 48 views.

Basically nothing.

The Tatari case study on Chime’s TV strategy: 101 views. Both under the 500-view threshold that marks uncrowded analytical territory. When credible practitioners are covering a topic and nobody is watching, the framing window is open. Over the next 6–12 months, 2–3 direct competitors will run celebrity banking campaigns of their own.

The analytical framing of this pattern will get crowded fast. First mover in that framing owns the territory.

This issue is that move.

The Signal: the mirror Chime is holding up, and why their best customers aren’t looking

But here’s what the data can’t show, because the question was never asked.

Chime’s existing users chose the product because they were already right about something. Traditional banks were extracting from them. Chime gave them proof they’d been right to be skeptical. The Momoa campaign holds up an aspirational mirror: people like you, savvy and financially confident, bank with Chime.

But that’s a different identity than the one Chime’s existing base chose when they signed up. They came for pragmatic vindication.

The mirror reflects who they might want to be. The real question is whether they want to become someone new, or whether they want confirmation they were right all along.

Signal collection found the Reddit gap that makes this concrete.

r/personalfinance’s top Chime posts of the past year: account security incidents, financial hardship narratives, “I want to move on from Chime” threads. Zero posts engaging with the Momoa campaign, celebrity creative, or “Bank Smarter.” The brand aspiration and the consumer reality are operating in completely separate conversations.

And buried in Meta Ad Library URL patterns (invisible to every analyst and trade publication), Chime is quietly running paid ads for a subscription tier called Chime Prime: direct-deposit loyalty benefits, higher savings APY, cash-back rewards. No announcement. No coverage. Just ads running.

If Chime Prime is what it appears to be, the Maturation Pivot is a business model transition. The Momoa campaign is the surface layer.

The Keystone: why the best acquisition campaign in neobank history is solving the wrong problem

The single decision that restructures everything else.

Before the creative brief, before the talent search, before the media buy ask

Is this an acquisition problem or a depth problem?

Acquisition problems require aspiration: introducing new audiences to an identity they could step into with your brand. Depth problems require vindication: meeting existing believers at the identity they already chose and asking them to complete it.

These demand opposite campaigns. Running aspirational acquisition creative against a depth problem is one of the most expensive mistakes in brand strategy. You attract new users into the same shallow behavioral pattern you’re trying to escape. The existing believers, the ones who already understand the premise and made the pragmatic choice, don’t see themselves in the mirror you’re holding up.

Chime’s Momoa campaign is excellent acquisition creative. It does exactly what it was designed to do. But the revenue unlock sitting inside the existing user base requires a different kind of mirror entirely. The mirror that works there says: you were right about banks. Here’s what going all the way actually looks like.

Chime can’t say that yet. The Reddit conversation (the security incidents, the hardship posts, the starter-bank churn) means the product experience at depth doesn’t yet support the full commitment ask. The Maturation Pivot, for Chime, is unfinished.

Chime Prime might be how they finish it. We’ll find out when the announcement lands.

The forward forecast: What will happen with this pattern?

The Maturation Pivot is a growing pattern. It has been proven across multiple decades and four industries. Most categories have not reached this moment yet. The window to move first is still open.

Here is where the data points.

The most likely scenario: fintech competitors run celebrity campaigns in 2026

Three independent signals point here.

First, the neobank category is losing its search identity. The category label “neobank” has gone flat to declining in search. Searches for Chime, Cash App, and SoFi specifically are growing. When a category label fades and brand searches rise, the competition has shifted. Features have stopped differentiating. Identity has started.

Second, Chime’s playbook is now visible. The Adweek CMO panel and the Tatari case study on Chime’s TV strategy are both public. Both sit under 100 views at the time of this research. Every agency with a fintech client can access them. The first-mover advantage on this strategy has a short shelf life.

Third, Cash App, SoFi, and Ally each carry the same conditions Chime had before the Momoa campaign. Proven product. Improving unit economics. Investor pressure to show a durable brand story.

My call: two to three of Chime’s direct competitors launch celebrity-driven brand campaigns in the second half of 2026. The analytical framing of this pattern gets crowded when they do. Right now, every credible practitioner source I found on this sits under 500 views. That is the window. First mover in that framing owns the territory.

The emerging signal: SaaS brands follow next

Two signals, not three. Consider this a watch, not a call.

The structural conditions in SaaS today match fintech six months ago. AI-generated content is flooding every category. Feature advantages are compressing faster than brand investment is following. Duolingo’s owl character and Notion’s creator-partnership model are early indicators that the pattern is crossing into software.

The confirmation event is specific. If a B2B SaaS brand runs non-functional creative at a major moment in the first half of 2026, the pattern has crossed categories.

What I am watching but cannot call yet

One signal sits in the Meta Ad Library. Chime is running paid ads to a URL with “prime” in the path. The ads point to a subscription tier with direct-deposit loyalty benefits, higher savings rates, and cash-back rewards. No announcement. No coverage. Just ads running.

One signal is not enough to confirm this. It is enough to watch.

If Chime Prime launches publicly, the interpretation of the Maturation Pivot changes. The Momoa campaign was the acquisition layer for a tiered membership model. The playbook for challenger brand IPOs rewrites from there.

What would change this assessment

If Chime’s competitors report performance-only creative through Q4 2025, the case for celebrity campaigns in fintech weakens. Investors may not be pushing for brand investment the way I am projecting. If no major B2B SaaS brand runs non-functional creative in the first half of 2026, the SaaS timeline slides to 2027. If Chime Prime goes public before Q3 2026, everything under the third signal above becomes the headline story.

Tracked call, May 2026. Pattern: The Maturation Pivot, growing. Primary direction: two to three fintech competitors run celebrity campaigns by Q4 2026. Confidence: high. Review date: August 2026.

Watch the breakdown

If this landed for you

The Signal Architect’s build is the read that arrives before the headline does. Every issue is one campaign: the pattern, the proof, the failure cases, and the forward hypothesis the category won’t name for another quarter.

If a colleague is asking “should we invest in brand or performance right now?” this issue is worth forwarding.

And if you’re watching a campaign in your category that deserves this kind of analysis, hit reply. The best issues often start with someone asking “did you see what [brand] just did?”

The acquisition-vs-depth diagnostic didn’t exist in your vocabulary an hour ago. Now it does. That’s what Signal Architects carry into the room that everyone else leaves outside.

See you next issue.

— Matt

They cast Peter Dinklage as a radioactive mutant to do it for them.

And it worked better than anything Pepsi’s ad team has produced in years.

Here’s the thing. Everyone noticed the creative choice. What I kept coming back to was the structural decision underneath it.

Why does borrowing someone else’s credibility work better than building your own from scratch? Why does a cult franchise with a devoted niche fanbase outperform a celebrity endorsement with mass reach? And why can Liquid Death pull this off when Coca-Cola structurally cannot?

That’s the Borrowed Authenticity pattern.

In this breakdown I walk through the $5 million campaign, show you where the pattern has worked before (Old Spice, Dollar Shave Club, Poo-Pourri), and where brands have tried it and gotten burned.

Then three diagnostics to run before you try it yourself.

Not gonna lie. I went into this thinking it was a great creative case study. I came out thinking it was a structural business strategy disguised as an ad.

The full newsletter, with sources, failure case analysis, and the implementation framework, is below.

Skip to what matters most to you:

0:00 You’re outspent by the category giants

0:37 You don’t know what this campaign is actually doing

0:46 You saw the ad but missed the strategy underneath it

1:28 You wonder if your brand could ever pull something like this off

3:18 You need a name for the pattern and a framework to replicate it

4:27 You’re not sure if this moment will last long enough to matter

5:46 You think this only worked for one weird water brand

6:47 You think you need a big budget to compete

7:56 You think you need a polished brand to borrow credibility

9:07 You’re not sure one great piece of content is worth the effort

9:45 You want to try this but don’t know what to avoid

10:28 You need to know if your brand is actually ready for this

Apply the Borrowed Authenticity pattern to your own brand.

I built a GPT that walks you through these diagnostics against your actual business and surfaces the cultural assets your audience already trusts.

Get the Borrowed Authenticity GPT →

The full newsletter, with sources, failure case analysis, and the implementation framework, is below.

→

The Strategy Signal

Everyone has access to the same marketing case studies. Nobody extracts the 1 strategic pattern, proves it across 3 industries, or tells you where it fails. The Strategy Signal does all 3. One campaign per week. Read the Pattern.

By Matthew Heyn

In this issue:

• Borrowed Authenticity: the pattern behind Liquid Death’s Toxic Avenger campaign and why a gore-horror mutant selling water drove $333M in revenue

• How Old Spice, Dollar Shave Club, and Poo-Pourri ran the same architecture across three different categories

• Three brands that borrowed without the right to and paid for it within 24 hours

• A full video breakdown on The Strategy Signal YouTube channel

• A custom GPT that runs the Borrowed Authenticity diagnostics against your own brand

Intro

You ever been outspent by your category giants?

Here's how Liquid Death won anyway. Without spending what Pepsi spends on a single ad.

There’s a scene in the Liquid Death ad where Peter Dinklage, in character as “The Toxic Avenger,” rips the arm off of a teenager to demonstrate what soda does to your body.

It’s violently disgusting.

It’s shocking and hilarious.

And it somehow makes you trust the brand more.

I’ve been sitting with that since I first watched the PSA. Not necessarily the creative choice (although that’s there in spades) but the strategic one underneath it. Why does a grotesque character make a health message land harder? Why does borrowing someone else’s credibility work better than building your own from scratch?

The campaign launched August 19, 2025. Timed to the theatrical release of The Toxic Avenger on August 29. Under $5 million total budget for acquisition, distribution, and all marketing. Over $2 million in box office. Second-highest physical pre-order numbers in Cineverse history.

And $333 million in Liquid Death revenue for 2024, up 26.6% year over year.

The product hasn’t changed. It’s still water. Here’s what has.

How Liquid Death & Toxic Avenger Worked Together

Video: “The Toxic Avenger: Liquid Death Spokesperson” — watch the ad

The partnership ran four entities at once.

Liquid Death (host brand and creative team), Cineverse (film distributor, funding the promotion), Legendary Entertainment (film producer, bringing A-list talent: Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood), and Troma Entertainment (original IP owners, 40-year legacy in cult horror).

Each brought something the others couldn’t generate alone.

Cineverse got direct access to Liquid Death’s 8 million social media followers: the exact demographic for a cult horror-comedy reboot. Liquid Death got a high-production-value creative asset with a recognizable actor at a fraction of what that normally costs.

And Troma’s punk-horror credibility gave the whole thing an authenticity that no agency brief could manufacture.

The creative team was entirely in-house.

VP of Creative Andy Pearson and Creative Director Will Carsola directed the PSA. Carsola personally executed the arm-ripping practical effect and got sprayed with about a liter of fake blood. This matters. The campaign earned its Troma aesthetic because the people making it actually cared about getting it right.

Distribution went digital-first.

YouTube, social, and a dedicated campaign hub at liquiddeath.com. A Times Square OOH placement layered on top for legitimacy and earned media.

The billboard turned a digital stunt into a cultural moment.

(Just a quick not here: the campaign budget has not been publicly disclosed. Specific Liquid Death campaign-level ROI and attribution methodology are also not public. Treat the revenue figures as company-level correlation, not confirmed campaign causation.)

Liquid Death achieved $333 million in revenue in 2024, up 26.6% year over year. They grew from $45 million in 2021 to $263 million in 2023. That’s a $1.4 billion valuation in March 2024.

And here’s the structural reality.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo can’t copy this. Because their legal teams, brand safety reviews, and mass-market positioning make edgy partnerships structurally impossible.

Liquid Death built a moat out of the exact territory incumbents are forbidden to enter.

The transferable pattern: Borrowed Authenticity

Video: The Toxic Avenger official trailer (2025)

Think of cultural credibility as a finite account.

Every brand that lectures an audience about health, sustainability, or responsibility draws from the same pool of consumer trust. The account runs dry fast.

This is exactly how E.l.f. did it well. The best sunscreen ad ever made looked nothing like an ad. How to smuggle a serious message.

Liquid Death found an account that was already full.

Troma Entertainment has been building horror-comedy credibility since 1974. Their fanbase is small, devoted, and deeply suspicious of anything corporate. By partnering with the Toxic Avenger IP, Liquid Death didn’t have to spend their own credibility. They could just borrow Troma’s. And because the thematic alignment was genuine (both brands traffic in toxicity, both reject sanitized culture, both reward audiences for having a specific taste), the loan felt like a gift.

Here’s what makes this pattern transferable: it works whenever thematic alignment is real and the audience would recognize the connection without being told.

The names alone signal it.

“Liquid Death” and “The Toxic Avenger” are pointing at the same cultural territory before a single frame of the ad runs. That kind of alignment can’t be reverse-engineered. It has to be discovered.

Borrowed Authenticity defined: Partner with a niche cultural asset that already has the credibility you need. Borrow their tone, their fanbase, and their earned trust. Create content that rewards the audience for getting the joke. Content that feels like it was made for them, not at them.

Where this pattern wins

1. Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (2010)

Watch the ad

Old Spice borrowed YouTube’s emerging absurdist humor culture to shed a brand image that had calcified around grandfathers.

Isaiah Mustafa’s rapid-fire monologue felt like a viral sketch, not a television ad. Sales jumped 107% year over year.

Old Spice became the #1 men’s body wash in the U.S.

2. Dollar Shave Club launch video (2012)

Watch the ad

$4,500 budget. Founder Michael Dubin borrowed the raw, direct-to-camera aesthetic of early YouTube creators — unpolished, profane, speaking the language of the internet rather than the language of advertising. 12,000 subscribers in 48 hours. Sold to Unilever for $1 billion four years later.

3. Poo-Pourri “Girls Don’t Poop” (2013)

Watch the ad

Poo-Pourri borrowed the “prim, proper British spokeswoman” archetype and then subverted it completely.

They placed that character on a toilet in a glamorous setting and had her deliver shockingly frank lines with total composure. The contrast between high-class delivery and low-brow subject created something compulsively shareable.

More than 45 million views. A new product category, created through one video.

In each case, the brand found an existing cultural account with credibility to spare, made a deposit of thematic alignment, and withdrew something they couldn’t have built on their own.

Where this pattern fails

This is where most brands get hurt.

1. Pepsi Kendall Jenner protest ad (2017)

Pepsi ran a campaign featuring Kendall Jenner handing a Pepsi to a police officer at a protest, positioned as a message of unity. Pepsi pulled it within 24 hours. They tried to use social justice imagery without the cultural credibility to touch it. The entertainment was corporate. The message read as appropriation.

Swift, brutal backlash.

2. Burger King UK International Women’s Day tweet (2021)

Burger King tweeted “Women belong in the kitchen.” The follow-up tweet explained a scholarship program for female chefs. The tweet was deleted within hours. Twitter’s fast-scroll feed meant most people saw only the first tweet. The punchline never arrived. The intent was real. The format destroyed it.

3. Hyundai UK suicide-themed ad (2013)

Hyundai produced a spot showing a man surviving a suicide attempt because his hydrogen car’s emissions were only water.

The concept dramatized a real product truth. The execution trivialized a serious subject. Hyundai yanked it and issued a public apology.

The failure condition across all 3: borrowed without the right to borrow. Borrowed Authenticity requires genuine thematic alignment and earned cultural credibility. Without both, you’re not borrowing — you’re trespassing.

Want to go deeper on the failure conditions?

I walk through each of these cases and the early warning signs in my video commentary on this campaign.

Watch: Borrowed Authenticity — the deep dive (YouTube)

3 diagnostics before you run this pattern

Does your brand have authentic cultural credibility in the space you’re targeting?

Liquid Death has a flaming skull and a tagline that says “Murder Your Thirst.” That’s more than a campaign, it’s an identity. A brand without that settled foundation trying to borrow Troma’s credibility would have looked desperate. The audience reads that difference in seconds.

Can you identify a cultural asset your audience already loves, the one where the thematic alignment is obvious, not manufactured? The test: would your audience recognize the connection without being told?

If you have to explain why the partnership makes sense, it probably doesn’t.

Do you have the channels and community to amplify this organically? Liquid Death had 8 million social followers and a Times Square billboard to give the campaign legitimacy. Earned media requires something worth covering.

Something worth covering requires people who’ll actually see it first.

Apply the Borrowed Authenticity pattern to your own brand.

I built a GPT that walks you through these diagnostics against your actual business and surfaces the cultural assets your audience already trusts.

Get the Borrowed Authenticity GPT →

The infrastructure question campaign briefs rarely ask

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect when I went deep into this campaign.

The more I looked at Liquid Death, the less interested I became in the creative work itself. And the more interested I became in the infrastructure that made it possible.

Liquid Death has an in-house creative team. They shipped the Toxic Avenger PSA in weeks. Most legacy brands spend that same window in legal review. The campaign’s real competitive advantage was the organizational structure that made fast partnerships possible. I think about it like the difference between having good instincts and having trained reflexes. Both serve you in a moment of opportunity.

But only one shows up before you’ve consciously decided to act.

Not gonna lie: I had this problem in my first year of ghostwriting.

I had decent ideas and slow execution. By the time I finished drafting something, the cultural window had moved on. The work was technically fine and functionally useless.

What Liquid Death solved before the campaign existed was the version of that problem at scale.

And here’s what I’m still not certain about: whether Borrowed Authenticity is a strategy you choose, or whether it’s a behavior that falls naturally out of knowing who you are. The brands that pull this off have usually spent years being exactly one thing. The IP alignment feels inevitable because the identity was settled long before the partnership was pitched. You can’t borrow credibility you haven’t already earned the right to hold.

So the question worth sitting with: what would your brand have to genuinely believe about itself for a partnership like this to feel obvious, not strategic, obvious?

That answer tells you whether you have a brand.

Or a product with a personality attached.

One campaign per week. One strategic pattern. Read it, steal it, use it.

— Matt

Duolingo killed their mascot, then required 50 billion experience points across their entire user base to bring him back.

5.1 billion lessons followed.

That’s the Hostage Mechanic: hold a beloved brand asset out of reach, make resolution contingent on collective user behavior, and tie the rescue condition directly to your core product metrics.

This week’s video covers the full pattern, three industries where it worked, and two campaigns where the same approach collapsed.

Here’s what separates the wins from the failures.

Duolingo gave users a quest. Lipton announced they were discontinuing their peach flavor and waited for outrage to do the work. It didn’t. The Hostage Mechanic only functions when there’s a path back. Jeopardy alone generates noise.

Jeopardy with participation generates 5 billion lessons.

If this connects to a challenge you’re working through, here are three related breakdowns:

Your campaign keeps failing and you’re blaming the wrong thing. Stop blaming the creative. Your campaign failed for this reason. Pepsi, WhatsApp, and Chili’s reveal the structural flaw most marketers walk past.

You need a high-impact campaign with a tight budget. Chili’s Set Up a Fake Payday Loan Office Next to a McDonald’s The Category Crasher pattern behind 6 billion impressions, and where it collapses.

You had a breakout moment and lost the momentum. They Beat Nike Without Fresh Creative — Then Stopped Under Armour built $5.7B in revenue on one repeatable pattern. By 2025, they’d forgotten it.

Every issue includes a full Notion analysis page and a client-ready strategy deck.

See you next week.

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Duolingo killed its mascot. Here’s why 5.1 billion lessons followed.

In this issue:

• The Resurrection Quest: the pattern behind Duolingo’s “Dead Duo” campaign and why 1.7B impressions converted into 5.1B actual lessons

• How Tinder, Burger King, and Deadpool ran the same architecture in three different industries

• Two brands that tried to copy the form within days of Duolingo’s campaign and paid for it

• A full video breakdown on The Strategy Signal YouTube channel

• A custom GPT that builds client-ready strategy decks using the Resurrection Quest pattern

In February 2025, Duolingo posted a simple black card across every social platform at once.

“It is with heavy hearts that we inform you that Duo, formally known as The Duolingo Owl, is dead.”

Then the second line:

“Tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson.”

The app icon changed. Dead owl. X’s for eyes. Tongue out. Just gross and sad…

And then Duolingo did something most brands can’t bring themselves to do.

They stopped advertising. They handed the story to their users.

Which is a tadddd…risky.

The number everyone’s citing. The 1 that actually mattered.

The viral numbers were a marvel.

1.7 billion impressions in two weeks.

More social conversation than the top 10 Super Bowl ads of 2025 combined. A six-person in-house team. Concept to launch in six days. Media spend the CEO described as “practically nothing.”

So every breakdown you’ll read focuses on the scale. The bold creative. The speed.

But the impressions weren’t only the achievement.

What happened after the impressions? Well…That’s the actual story.

The Resurrection Quest

Duo could only come back to life if users earned 50 billion XP collectively.

That’s roughly 5 billion completed language lessons. Duolingo built a microsite, bringback.duolingo.com, with a live global tracker showing XP progress by country.

Every impression became an invitation to open the app. Every article in the 450+ publications covering Duo’s death carried the same implicit prompt: go complete a lesson.

Screen shot from PR Daily - here.

This is the pattern. I’m calling it the Resurrection Quest.

Stage dramatic jeopardy around a brand asset users genuinely care about. Tie the resolution entirely to communal behavior that advances the core business. The story fuels the virality.

The quest converts it into product usage, habit, and revenue.

Users completed 50,921,342,438 XP worth of lessons. Duo walked out of a coffin on February 24. “LEGENDS NEVER DIE.” (Why does Babe Ruth’s line from the Sandlot, “Follow your heart,” comes to mind.?)

Duolingo raised its annual revenue guidance to $1 billion.

How they built the loop, and why the sequence mattered

@duolingoUPDATE: Reward for whoever can identify the driver. Please post any leads on TikTok. Thank you for your patience with us during these trying times. #RIPduo

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Act I was the shock. Death announcement. Icon change.

“He probably died waiting for you to do your lesson.”

It mourned and recruited in the same breath.

Act II was the mystery and the mission. Duolingo withheld the cause of death and monitored the comment section as editorial brief. When fans landed on the Tesla Cybertruck theory, the team officially adopted it. Then the bringback.duolingo.com progress bar launched. Passive observers became participants with a clear target: 50 billion XP to save the owl.

Act III was the resurrection. The community crossed 50.9 billion XP. Duo emerged in a neon-green suit. The participation loop closed.

This isn’t a Duolingo trick. 3 other industries ran the same play.

1. Tinder’s Swipe Night

Tinder built a version of this in 2019.

Swipe Night was an interactive episodic story where user choices fed directly into match logic.

The story ran inside the app. In the in the video above, we’re led through a catastrophic end-of-the-world scenario. What if you only had three days left to live? Who would you be matched up with, and who would you spend that time with?

The choices players made shaped who they’d match with next. Twenty million people participated. Matches spiked 26% on a typical Sunday. Messages increased 12%.

The narrative and the product action were the same thing.

2. The Whopper Detour

Burger King ran an earlier version in 2018.

The Whopper Detour offered a 1¢ burger. But only if you ordered through the BK app while standing within 600 feet of a McDonald’s. The competitor’s location became the trigger. The app became the reward mechanism.

1.5 million downloads in nine days. Mobile sales tripled. 3.3 billion impressions. 37:1 ROI. The One Show gave it a Gold Pencil.

The quest required a physical action to unlock the product. You had to stand within 600 feet of a competitor. And that required the app. Smart….eh?

The stunt and the product bridge were the same decision.

3. Deadpool Consistently Breaking the 4th Wall

Ryan Reynolds played the character in the film and in the marketing and breaking the fourth wall, mocking the studio, running PSAs about testicular cancer.

The absurdity worked because Deadpool violates every convention of his genre.

When the campaign violated every convention of film marketing, audiences read it as out of the box and truly innovcative. The film earned $782 million worldwide against a $58 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated film in history at that point.

Reynolds built a marketing philosophy around creative constraint because the budget forced him to.

He possessed persona. Audacious execution, which lead to an authentic result with audiences.

And if I may so, he killed Dead pool (his fav mascot) over and over again.

The pattern breaks the same way every time

For this we’ve got 2 examples for you.

1. Lipton Ice tea “rest in peach.”

Lipton Ice Tea announced the “discontinuation” of its peach flavor a few days after Duolingo’s campaign.

They got mocked immediately. The campaign was pulled within 24 hours. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority later ruled the posts misleading.

Lipton had no equivalent character. No years of personality-building with their audience. No product action to wire the stunt to.

They borrowed the form without possessing what the form requires.

2. Volkswagen Death of Gas

Image from MotoAuthority

Volkswagen tried the same thing a different way.

In March 2021, they leaked a press release announcing they were renaming US operations to “Voltswagen” to signal their EV commitment. Major outlets ran it as real news.

The stock moved 8%. Then VW admitted it was an April Fools joke. The SEC opened an investigation.

Here’s the bigger problem, though.

VW had just spent six years rebuilding trust after Dieselgate. The scandal was built on systematic corporate deception. Their answer to “how do we prove we’re serious about EVs” was to deceive the press again.

No participation path. No product bridge. No brand permission to play with truth.

The stunt and the brand’s actual situation were pulling in opposite directions.

The part of this that can’t be fast-tracked

Many marketers might look at this Death to Duo campaign and see a bold creative decision.

But the decisive call happened 4 years earlier, when Duolingo’s social team started leaning into the “unhinged owl” persona instead of softening it. Under Armour got this right in 2021. By 2025, they’d forgotten why. →

That investment created the emotional equity that made the death actually land.

There’s a concept in cognitive psychology called the Zeigarnik effect.

An unfinished task stays in your working memory until it’s resolved. The brain keeps returning to it. The death announcement was an open loop. The 50 billion XP goal was the only available close. And the only way to close it was to complete a lesson.

The loop was engineered. That takes a different discipline than running a campaign.

And the death-and-resurrection arc isn’t random.

Carl Jung argued that every person carries a deep need for what he called “revolution, inner division, and renewal.” The resurrection story is the oldest narrative structure in human consciousness, from Osiris to every folk tale that ends with a return from the underworld.

When Duolingo ran that arc, people were participating in more than a marketing stunt and they recognized the story at a level below conscious thought.

What happens when a brand generates 1.7 billion impressions with no product bridge?

Nothing measurable. The party ends and the audience goes home.

The Keystone (that’s what I’m calling the signal you build your marketing strategy) upon which they built this: 50 billion XP, lessons required, real-time tracker.

That converted viral attention into a business outcome.

• 5.1 billion lessons.

• 40% year-over-year daily active user growth.

• A run rate toward $1 billion in revenue.

And here’s what the Lipton example actually tells us. Their campaign felt wrong before anyone could explain why.

David Benner, writing about authentic presence, puts it plainly: genuine presence requires “integrity of character, where there’s a congruence between my inner life and my outer life.”

Duolingo had that congruence.

What they performed externally matched exactly what they’d built internally over four years. Lipton performed the stunt without possessing the persona behind it. Audiences decoded the gap at a gut level, before they had words for it.

You can’t retrofit the Resurrection Quest onto a brand that hasn’t done that interior work.

The viral attention was available to anyone willing to stage the stunt. The product bridge took years to build. The real-time tracker. The XP mechanic. The four years of “unhinged owl.”

Watch the breakdown on YouTube

This week’s video goes deeper on three things the newsletter can’t fully show: the real-time pacing of how Duolingo released information across the two weeks, the visual mechanics of the bringback.duolingo.com tracker, and why the Lipton and Volkswagen failures are actually more instructive than the Duolingo win.

If you read the newsletter and you want to see the pattern in motion, start there.

[Watch this episode on The Strategy Signal Just Below]

Apply this to your clients (Free GPT)

The Resurrection Quest only works under specific conditions. The right brand equity. The right product action. The right cultural permission.

I built a GPT that runs your client’s situation against this pattern — and every other campaign pattern in The Strategy Signal library. Give it the client’s industry, their core product behavior, and what emotional equity they’ve built with their audience. It’ll tell you whether the Resurrection Quest is available to them, and if it is, what the Keystone decision needs to be.

[Use the Pattern Applicator GPT →](LINK TO GPT)

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This breakdown covers the three-step Signal Architecture method for reading what any campaign is actually built on, the enemy sequence quietly destroying most content operations right now, three case studies that prove the pattern — Pepsi, WhatsApp, and Chili’s and a free AI diagnostic to run on your own brand before your next brief.

The full written foundation with sources, the complete campaign library, and implementation questions.

This is the Start Here post for The Strategy Signal.

Read it here.

Every campaign failure has the same structural root. Here’s what it is.

Matthew Heyn · May 4

What is The Strategy Signal? Everyone has access to the same marketing case studies. Nobody extracts the structural pattern underneath them, proves it across industries, or tells you exactly where it breaks. The Strategy Signal does all three. One campaign per week. Start with the foundation below.

Read full story

Image showing visual contrast between content noise and a clear signal beam, representing Signal Architecture framework, May 4th, 2026

Hey! It’s Matt. May the 4th be with you - for all my SW fans out there!

In April 2017, Pepsi released what they believed was the year’s most culturally resonant ad.

You’ve probably seen it. Kendall Jenner peels off a blonde wig, steps out of a photo shoot, and joins a crowd of protesters. She walks to the front. Hands a Pepsi to a police officer. Everyone exhales. Everyone smiles.

The ad was pulled within 24 hours. Here it is below for your “cringy watching pleasure.”

Wrong messenger, wrong cultural frame, wrong moment in history.

Pepsi apologized publicly.

Bernice King (Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter) posted a response that cut clean.

“If only Daddy had known about the power of Pepsi.”

But every autopsy I read on this dead campaign missed the structural problem.

Pepsi performed authenticity.

They borrowed the visual grammar of a cultural moment. The protest imagery, the racial tension, the police encounter. Then inserted a product into it. The problem ran deeper than execution. The brand possessed none of what the imagery required, and audiences decoded that at a gut level before they could articulate why it felt wrong.

This pattern (performing something you don’t possess) sits underneath nearly every campaign failure I’ve studied.

And it has a visible tell, once you know where to look.

So why do so many brands keep doing it? More on that below.

Why I see it

I spent 16 years as a hospital chaplain and 20 years in ministry before I ran a marketing campaign.

In healthcare, I learned fast that presence is either authentic or it’s theater.

A family in a waiting room at hour three of not knowing whether their father will survive surgery. They know when someone walks in who is presently with them. The body language looks similar from across the hallway.

But what that presence does inside that room is a different thing entirely.

What fake presence gives you is sentimentality.

The surface feeling of compassion without the substance of it. Every human being has felt what genuine presence does to a room. It changes the atmosphere in a way you notice before you have words for it.

I spent years in that work before I understood it had anything to do with marketing.

When I started studying campaigns, the pattern showed up immediately. The brands that broke through possessed something true. A genuine tension, a real enemy, a costly stake that was theirs to claim. The brands that crashed performed having it. The structural problem was identical. The industry was different.

That chasm between performing something and possessing (or even owning) it, is the thing I built this entire newsletter to teach you how to see.

The system most marketing operates inside

Before I show you the method, we need to understand what the method is up against.

The belief system running most marketing operations has a name.

Image taken from Mark Schaefer’s original 2014 blog post.

In 2014, Mark Schaefer coined the term Content Shock to describe the mathematical ceiling this approach was building toward. Content supply doubling every nine to twenty-four months. Human attention remaining fixed.

The economics of attention inevitably inverting.

I call the belief system underneath this phenomenon, the Velocity Gospel. Faster content equals more reach equals better outcomes. Volume is strategy. Frequency is progress. Quiet is falling behind.

When a brand runs the Velocity Gospel through its content operation, it becomes a Performance Engine.

More posts, more formats, more channels. The calendar fills up. Metrics get tracked. Everything looks productive from the inside. The engine produces content the way a factory produces goods.

Efficiently. Consistently.

Without asking whether any of it carries a signal.

Let’s talk examples.

CNET ran this engine at scale.

The publication built brand equity over decades, reaching a $2 billion acquisition valuation in 2008. Then, under pressure to produce at volume, it used AI to publish 247 pages in seven days. When the factual errors surfaced, so did the cost.

By 2025, potential buyers were citing the AI content scandal as an active valuation liability.

In other words, by 2025, potential buyers were walking away or lowering their offers because of it.

When every brand in a category runs the same engine at the same speed, the whole category becomes a Signal Graveyard.

Every brand publishes three LinkedIn posts a week, a monthly newsletter, a quarterly “State of Industry” report.

The audience stops reading any of it.

Here’s another example.

Between 2024 and 2026, the ten largest technology publications lost 65 million combined monthly visits.

A 58% decline from peak. The Nieman Lab documented the collapse.

Image screenshot from Neiman Lab here showing Traffic to top tech publications has plummeted since 2024, new analysis shows.

An entire category that mistook activity for signal.

The Velocity Gospel creates the Performance Engine.

The Performance Engine, scaled across an industry, becomes the Signal Graveyard.

One belief. Three consequences.

If every brand is running the same engine at the same speed, what exactly is the strategy?

The campaigns that break through almost always break one of the Velocity Gospel’s rules.

1. They publish less and mean more.

2. They signal what they actually OWN.

3. They build upon what I call the Architect’s Keystone.

The Signal Architecture method

After 3 years of studying campaigns this way (12 in depth campaigns, 36 other instances where that strategy worked, over 15 different industries, and 30+ failed attempts), I developed a three-step framework for reading them below the surface.

Step 1. The Rational Narrative. Every campaign tells a conscious story about itself. “We’re the affordable option.” “We’re the secure choice.” “We stand for X.” This is what the brand or the market intends to communicate and think the customer wants.

Step 2. The Signal. Underneath the Rational Narrative is a Signal. Not the logical extension of what the brand intends. I't’s the intuitive, pre-rational truth the audience already carries. Gut-level. Sometimes illogical and always based in the human condition.

Often the thing the category has trained itself not to say out loud.

The Signal doesn’t confirm the Rational Narrative. It operates outside it or against it. It’s the opening to a new world the brand can claim, if it actually possesses what the Signal requires.

What it reveals is whether that possession is real or performed.

Pepsi’s Rational Narrative in 2017 was straightforward. Unity is possible. A Pepsi can help get us there.

The decoded Signal always wins.

Not because brands intend it to. Because it’s what people feel before they have words for it.

Step 3. The Keystone. In architecture, the keystone is the wedge at the top of an arch. That’s the last stone placed, the one that locks every other stone in position. Remove it and the arch collapses. In a campaign, the Keystone is the single design decision that deploys the Signal.

Not the brand’s Rational Narrative but the thing audiences already feel.

The campaigns that break through almost always make a Keystone decision that runs against the category’s conventional logic.

The category says lecture with authority. The Keystone entertains without credentials. The category says defend your reputation. The Keystone names the fear. The category says compete on price.

The Keystone exposes who raised it.

Pepsi ran the opposite error. They built the Keystone to deliver the Rational Narrative and never asked what Signal their audience was already carrying.

Audiences already knew: social justice requires real stakes, real confrontation, real sacrifice. It doesn’t resolve because a celebrity steps out of a luxury photo shoot and hands a soft drink to a cop. That decoded Signal was present in the audience before a single frame ran.

The Keystone did more than create the misalignment. It just made it impossible to unsee.

Watch the framework explained. Deep Dive

The full Signal Architecture breakdown — Rational Narrative, The Signal, The Keystone — with the Pepsi failure analysis walked through in real time.

Two campaigns that prove it

Here’s the first example “What’s App - Message Privately.”

WhatsApp ran what I call an Inoculation Play.

A campaign built around the brand’s most dangerous liability.

WhatsApp is owned by Meta. That single fact had been breaking the brand since 2021, when updated terms of service triggered a mass migration to Signal and Telegram. Elon Musk told 170 million followers directly: “Don’t trust WhatsApp.”

The Rational Narrative was genuine, which was an end-to-end encryption built into every message since 2016. But the Signal audiences were carrying said something else entirely: Meta monetizes attention.

Why would this platform be different?

The Keystone was three words: “Not even WhatsApp.” A global campaign built around the admission that the platform itself cannot read your messages. Intimate texts, late-night voice notes, hospital call, which rendered as scrambled, unreadable code on screen.

The tagline demonstrated the technology.

Ad awareness climbed 11.5 percentage points in a single month. The largest campaign in WhatsApp’s history ran on the one line most brand teams would have sent straight to legal.

Read the full breakdown. WhatsApp’s Inoculation Play →

Chili’s ran a Category Crasher.

Running a humorous predatory paid laon service BELOW their business category.

Why? Because the category below them had broken its own defining promise.

Fast food’s Rational Narrative had always been simple: the cheapest meal available.

By 2025, a McDonald’s combo that once cost $5 had crept to $12 to $15. The identity stayed intact in the branding. The pricing told a different story. The Signal Chili’s recognized was the one fast food customers were already carrying: the sense that the deal they’d trusted for decades had been quietly stolen.

A sit-down Chili’s meal at $10.99 was now genuinely cheaper than the drive-thru. Nobody in the industry had said it out loud yet.

The Keystone was a fake payday loan office set up directly next to a Manhattan McDonald’s, with signs reading “Finance Your Fast Food Today.”

Chili’s didn’t argue that fast food had become predatory. The format made the argument. 6 billion earned media impressions. 31.6% same-store sales growth the following quarter.

Read the full breakdown. Chili’s Category Crasher →

Both campaigns worked because the Keystone aligned the Signal with something the brand authentically carried.

Copying the structure without the underlying possession would have produced another Pepsi ad.

What this newsletter builds

The Strategy Signal publishes every week.

Each issue is one campaign breakdown using Signal Architecture. 1 named pattern, the mechanics and human conditioning psychology behind it, the Keystone that made it work, and the failure conditions that kill it when brands try to copy it without the underlying possession.

The campaign library below is the foundation.

Each pattern has a primary breakdown and a deeper application issue. Start anywhere. They build on each other, but none requires reading in order.

If you’re working inside the Performance Engine, producing content that technically functions but generates no real signal, the exit is learning to read what you actually possess and building the campaign from that.

My take: possession is the strategy. Everything else is execution.

That’s the work. That’s what this newsletter teaches.

Run your own brand through The Architect’s Diagnostic first — a 10-minute AI interview that surfaces which enemy you’re inside, your current Signal Architecture, and 5 conversation questions for your next strategy session.

Get The Architect’s Diagnostic →

The campaign library

6 patterns. Each one a different Architect’s Build and Keystone. Start wherever the brand challenge fits yours.

The Entertainment Trojan Horse. E.l.f. Skin Sunhinged

• How E.l.f. Skin Got 10 Million People to Watch a Sunscreen PSA (Video)→

• The best sunscreen ad ever made looked nothing like an ad →

The Inoculation Play. WhatsApp

• WhatsApp said the thing most CMOs are afraid to say (Video)→

• Your brand’s biggest fear might be its best campaign brief →

The Purpose-Driven Inverter. Dove Real Beauty

• Stop chasing the 2%. Start serving the abandoned 98% →

• The lesson many marketers take from Dove is the wrong one (Video)→

The Category Crasher. Chili’s

• Chili’s Set Up a Fake Payday Loan Office Next to a McDonald’s (Video)→

• Stop Fighting Your Real Competitors. Fight Someone Else’s Instead. →

Memory Equity. Under Armour

• They Beat Nike Without Fresh Creative — Then Stopped (Video)→

• Under Armour got this right in 2021. By 2025, they’d forgotten why. →

The Cultural Aftermarket. Coors Light

• The Brand That Owned The Hangover, Not The Party →

• Deep Dive. Sloth content, tone-deaf Pepsi, and $12.6B for free (Video)→

Also in the library

• What your confident-looking systems aren’t telling you → (Signal Reader’s Digest. April 2026)

• You can’t direct what you haven’t named → (Signal Reader’s Digest. March 2026)

• 7 Hours of Research. 6 Minutes in Your Inbox. Every Week. (Video)→ (How this newsletter is built)

New issue every week.

See you next one.

Matt

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This breakdown covers the pattern behind that result, the proof across three industries, the two failure cases that show where it breaks, and a scoring tool to test whether it fits your next client brief.

The full written issue with sources, implementation questions, and the complete failure analysis is in this week’s Strategy Signal.

Read it here.

How E.l.f. Skin made a public health campaign Gen Z actually chose to watch, and what the pattern means for every brand sitting on a message its audience is tuning out.

In June 2025, E.l.f. Skin released a 20-minute comedy special on YouTube.

Not a 30-second ad. Not a six-second pre-roll. A 20-minute production with professional comedians, a celebrity cast, and a Tribeca Film Festival premiere.

Approximately ten million people watched it in the first week.

The special is called “Sunhinged.” The subject is sunscreen. The creative hook: a full stand-up comedy roast of the sun itself, cast as the “hot girl villain” of the piece. Comedian Marie Faustin hosted. Meghan Trainor appeared in her third collaboration with the brand. Heidi N’ Closet from RuPaul’s Drag Race joined the cast.

Underneath all of it ran a public health message: 64% of Gen Z regularly forgets to apply SPF.

E.l.f. made a PSA. They disguised it as entertainment people would choose to watch.

Ten million people chose.

Watch the Entertainment Trojan Horse breakdown on Youtube

Same pattern, different format.

The pattern: the entertainment trojan horse

Here’s the signal for the week.

A brand takes a message the audience would normally filter out (a health warning, a behavior change request, an inconvenient category truth) and wraps it inside high-quality entertainment.

The audience comes for the content. They absorb the message as a byproduct.

The Trojan Horse works because the psychological defense wall drops when people laugh. The Oracle Happiness Report, which surveyed over 12,000 consumers globally, found that 91% of people prefer brands that are funny, and 90% are more likely to remember humorous advertising. Among Gen Z specifically, 75% say they want brands to make them laugh — and only 20% of brands actually do it.

That gap is the opportunity.

Earned attention lands somewhere the algorithm can’t reach.

Like Inside a moment of genuine enjoyment. Here’s the youtube trailer below.

The behavioral change travels past the audience’s resistance filters while they’re busy being entertained.

Here’s the deeper principle: the frame is the product.

E.l.f. did so much more than change the sunscreen, the audience, or the underlying health message. They changed the frame from health compliance to cultural participation. That frame change was the entire campaign.

It’s the oldest trick in persuasion. E.l.f. gave it a $2.5 million production budget and a Tribeca premiere.

Primary case study: “Sunhinged,” E.l.f. Skin, June 14, 2025

The rational narrative

Every major brand in the sun care category ran the same playbook. La Roche-Posay built clinical authority campaigns around dermatologist partnerships. Neutrogena invested in UV-tracking wearables and weather-activated advertising. The American Academy of Dermatology pushed statistics through professional medical channels. The assumption underneath all of it: if people understood the danger clearly enough, they’d change their behavior.

That assumption failed.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, 64% of Gen Z regularly skips sunscreen. Only 34% cite skin cancer prevention as a primary reason to use SPF. Half the demographic gets severely sunburned every summer. The demographic that follows dermatologists on TikTok and knows the active ingredients in their serums was still ignoring the rational answer, delivered through every rational channel the industry had.

If logic were enough, someone would have found it by now.

The signal underneath

The real driver was psychological resistance to being lectured.

Health messaging, however accurate, triggers the same defensive response as any unsolicited advice: the audience knows what’s coming before the first word lands, and the wall goes up. The rational sotry had been addressing what Gen Z knew. E.l.f. looked for what Gen Z actually felt.

And they found it.

It was the defense wall that drops when people laugh. Humor bypasses the resistance that logic runs directly into. The behavior problem was wearing the costume of a knowledge problem.

Underneath, it was a psychological one with a psychological solution.

The creative decision

The answer was a comedy roast of the sun.

Marie Faustin, a working stand-up comedian with legitimate club credentials, hosted. Meghan Trainor brought her fanbase and her third brand collaboration to the production. Heidi N’ Closet brought the RuPaul’s Drag Race audience and the LGBTQ+ beauty community into the tent.

Watch the full 20 minute Comedy Special just below.

The production partner was Above Average, the Emmy-winning comedy company launched through Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. That choice carried a specific signal before a single joke aired. Audiences recognize the difference between corporate entertainment trying to be funny and production infrastructure with SNL DNA.

Above Average provided borrowed credibility the brand couldn’t have built internally.

The trailer premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 6, running in front of 450+ screenings over ten days before the full special launched on YouTube on June 14. Tribeca credentials signal filmmaking. E.l.f. arrived at that event as a content creator, and the cultural positioning followed accordingly.

The business result

Approximately ten million YouTube views in the first week.

Combined reach across celebrity talent social networks, including Meghan Trainor’s audience, reportedly exceeded 100 million followers across campaign partners.

E.l.f. Beauty reported their 26th consecutive quarter of net sales growth in Q1 2026, with net sales reaching $353.7 million (up 9% year-over-year). Company leadership cited “very significant, strong ROI” from entertainment-driven marketing during that period. E.l.f. is the only brand among nearly 1,000 cosmetics brands tracked by Nielsen to gain market share for 26 consecutive quarters.

The Suntouchable SPF line the campaign supported sells at $8 to $18.29, cruelty-free and vegan, no white cast, lightweight wear. Price points aligned with E.l.f.’s foundational brand promise: accessible quality. The campaign made the product feel like participation in a cultural moment.

Cross-industry proof: the same pattern in three other categories

1. Metro Trains Melbourne: “Dumb Ways to Die” (public safety, 2012)

Railway safety campaigns had a long tradition of graphic imagery and grim consequence statistics.

Metro Trains Melbourne went the opposite direction: a darkly humorous animated music video featuring cheerful characters dying in increasingly absurd ways, three of them wandering into train-related danger at the end.

The song became the most shared video on the internet in 2012. The campaign accumulated over 325 million YouTube views and became the most awarded campaign in Cannes Lions history: 28 Lions, including 5 Grand Prix. Near-miss incidents at train stations fell 20 to 21% in the year following the campaign’s release.

The rational narrative was safety statistics and consequences.

The signal underneath was that no one voluntarily consumes fear. The PSA reached people because it gave them something they wanted to share.

The safety message traveled inside the entertainment.

2. Blendtec: “Will It Blend?” (consumer appliances, 2006–2009)

Blendtec had a genuine product story: their commercial blenders were extraordinarily powerful. The standard product demo approach existed. Nothing broke through.

CEO Tom Dickson’s answer: blend an iPhone on camera.

The series ran for years. Dickson in a lab coat, destroying progressively more absurd objects (golf balls, rake handles, garden hoses) while asking “Will it blend?” The absurdity was the point. But the entertainment carried a real product claim: this blender handles things professionals need to destroy.

Online sales climbed approximately 700% over the three-year run of the series.

3. Chipotle: “Farmed and Dangerous” (food service, 2014)

Chipotle produced a four-episode satirical miniseries for Hulu mocking industrial agriculture through a fictional narrative about a corrupt farming corporation. The brand’s name showed up in the credits.

Nowhere else in the story.

An independent study found the series more effective at changing consumer attitudes than 98% of social-issue documentary films. Chipotle’s “Food with Integrity” positioning traveled inside the story itself.

In a category where direct brand assertions get processed as marketing noise, that decision mattered.

Why it works now: 3 converging forces

1. Post-pandemic purpose fatigue.

   Years of serious brand messaging around health, safety, and social responsibility trained audiences to tune out earnest content at scale.

   Cannes Lions 2024 showed approximately 75% of winning campaigns used humor, up from 52% in 2023. Levity reads as credibility now because seriousness became table stakes.

   The humor gap is a strategic arbitrage opportunity before the market corrects.

2. The entertainment-advertising gap stays wide.

   Ninety-one percent of consumers prefer funny brands. Twenty percent of brands use humor. When that supply-demand imbalance stays severe, brands that cross to the entertainment side find enormous uncrowded space.

   The ones that get there first lock in positioning before the gold rush starts.

3. Platform behavior has shifted toward long-form.

   Gen Z watches long-form content on YouTube the way older generations watched network television. A 20-minute branded special arrives as the content itself. Gen Z watches it by choice, the same way they’d choose any show.

   Brands that build for that platform behavior generate the engagement numbers that media-buy reporting can’t produce.

Failure analysis: 2 ways the Trojan Horse collapses

The pattern fails in two distinct ways. Both are worth studying before you build anything with it.

Failure 1: The vehicle breaks the audience’s trust

E.l.f. — “e.l.f.ino & schmarnes,” 2025

Following the success of Sunhinged, E.l.f. launched a satirical legal drama under the same playbook. Heidi N’ Closet returned. Comedian Matt Rife joined the cast.

The backlash arrived within days.

Rife had recently released a Netflix special that opened with a domestic violence joke. A significant portion of E.l.f.’s community had loved Sunhinged precisely for its inclusive, warmhearted energy. They read the Rife casting as a betrayal. E.l.f. issued a public statement acknowledging they had “missed the mark with people we care about in our e.l.f. Community.” The brand left the campaign running.

The failure condition: Sunhinged worked because every element (the talent, the tone, Above Average’s production credibility, the Tribeca premiere) signaled safety to the audience before the first joke landed. The Rife casting introduced a variable that was culturally corrosive to the brand’s core community. The container broke. The message broke with it.

The marketing error was an error of omission. E.l.f. left out the question of what the Rife casting would signal to the community they’d just built real trust with through Sunhinged.Failure 2: The horse is a costume

Gillette — “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” January 2019

In January 2019, Gillette released a short film built around the cultural conversation following #MeToo.

The brand’s thirty-year tagline, “The Best a Man Can Get,” had always been about product performance. “We Believe” attempted to reframe it: what does it mean for men to be their best selves while a culture reckons with toxic masculinity?

The cultural frame was real and the emotional territory was genuinely charged. The film generated millions of dislikes in its first days on YouTube and a trending boycott hashtag. Gillette kept the campaign running. The audience’s verdict was clear.

The brand was performing conviction rather than possessing it.

The Failure? The film existed only as advertising.

Remove the Gillette logo and what remains is an unbranded montage of men behaving badly and then slightly better. No story, no comedy, no performance value that earns an audience’s voluntary time. Sunhinged works as a comedy special before it works as a marketing vehicle. The Gillette film only works as an ad. The Trojan Horse was built from the outside in: cultural frame first, brand repositioning second, entertainment never.

Both failure modes end in audience rejection, through opposite routes. In the E.l.f. case, the vehicle was real but the talent selection destroyed trust in it. In the Gillette case, the vehicle itself was never real. The entertainment was built to carry the brand message. It had no value independent of the brand.

The test before you build: can this content earn an audience if the brand logo is removed?

If yes, the horse is real. If the answer requires the brand present to make sense of what you’ve made, you’ve built a costume.

How to bring the Entertainment Trojan Horse to life in your business?

Before taking this pattern into a client brief, work through these.

What’s the rational narrative in your category?

Name the conventional playbook your competitors are running, the logical plan, the settled industry wisdom. Then ask: is it actually working? If the rational answer has been available for years and the behavior hasn’t changed, the invitation is to look underneath the logic for the human drive the logic was never designed to detect.

What’s the psychological resistance your audience carries into the category?

Name it honestly. Not the stated reason they give you in surveys — the actual felt experience: the boredom, the judgment-avoidance, the defense wall that goes up when they see a certain type of message coming. That’s the signal. The Trojan Horse vehicle has to address the felt experience, not the stated reason.

What entertainment format has your audience’s genuine, voluntary attention right now?

The vehicle has to exist inside a format they already love and choose on their own time. Sunhinged worked because 20-minute YouTube comedy is a format Gen Z seeks. The Dumb Ways to Die song worked because earworm music videos are a format people share.

Can this content earn an audience if the brand logo is removed?

This is the test that separates a real Trojan Horse from a costume. If the answer is yes, build it.

If the content only makes sense with the brand present, go back to the brief.

Now Your Free GPT - The Entertainment Trojan Horse Playbook

If you want to try this out on your brand The Entertainment Trojan Horse Playbook runs the fit analysis for you. Fit score, implementation roadmap, failure mode checklist, client-ready deck. Built for fractional CMOs. Start here →

Matt’s take

I spent years in palliative care chaplaincy accompanying people through the last weeks of their lives.

One thing I learned there: people cannot receive serious information until you’ve first established that you understand their world. Walk into a room with a clipboard and a checklist and the conversation closes before it opens. Sit down, look around, ask about the photograph on the windowsill. The true exchange happens. The serious things get said. But they get said on the person’s terms.

Marketing operates on the same human architecture.

E.l.f. chose comedy because Gen Z has been oversaturated with messages arriving ahead of relationship. The health warning, the PSA, the dermatologist endorsement each communicate the same thing before a word is spoken: we know better, and you should listen. Comedy communicates differently. The format signals: we’re here in your world. We see what you see.

Here’s what I keep turning over about the Trojan Horse name. It sounds like manipulation. You’re concealing something inside something else. But watch how the best executions actually work. Dumb Ways to Die is genuinely funny. Will It Blend is genuinely entertaining. Sunhinged is a 20-minute comedy special that holds up on its own merits.

The brands that succeeded made something worth consuming and attached their message to it honestly. The humor was the condition of honest encounter. The entertainment had to work on its own terms, and the message attached to something real.

The Gillette case is the cautionary version of that principle. They read the cultural frame correctly. The #MeToo conversation was real, the question of masculinity was live in the culture, and they attached a vehicle that existed only as advertising to it. The signal was real. The build wasn’t.

My take for the fractional CMOs and even new marketers reading this: most of your clients believe their category is too serious for entertainment. Financial services. Healthcare. Legal. B2B. That belief is worth challenging, and the data behind Sunhinged is one counter-argument to bring into the room.

But the more important question comes before the creative brief, before the talent conversation, before the production partner decision:

What format does your audience actually want to spend time in? And are you willing to meet them there?

That question is only answerable to the degree you’ve already spent time in your audience’s world before trying to build inside it. The marketer who treats the audience as a demographic to optimize answers it differently than the one who’s genuinely paying attention. The form follows the relationship. It always has.

Close

The Strategy Signal breaks down one marketing campaign every two weeks. Each issue names the pattern, shows it across industries, pairs the wins with the failures, and gives you implementation questions for your own work.

If this one landed, forward it to a client who’s been insisting their category is too serious for this kind of approach.

They might be right. Or they might be sitting on their own Sunhinged.

See you next issue, Matt

Seven newsletters landed this week. All of them circled the same idea.

The systems you trust most have failure modes that look fine from the outside. Teams go quiet and look aligned.

AI tools degrade and sound confident.

That’s the thread and theme. Here’s what each of them found. Let’s dive in.

The $20 experiment

Karen Spinner runs Wondering About AI, a newsletter built around structured experiments on real AI behavior.

Last week she ran 250 API calls to test a question Anthropic’s own interpretability team had just surfaced: what happens inside Claude when token budgets run low? Their research found internal “desperation” activation vectors in Claude that fire as the model’s budget shrinks.

When examined in lab conditions, these patterns cause shortcuts and broken output.

Karen took that into production conditions. Under hard token caps, she found silent degradation in 44 percent of runs. Confident language. Wrong answers.

Nothing in the output that signals the gap.

The control condition had zero silent failures. The fix is simpler than the problem: tell Claude about its constraints explicitly in the prompt instead of setting hard limits via the API. When she gave Claude framing like “you have approximately 500 tokens remaining,” correctness held at 100 percent, matching the control.

Framing gets absorbed into planning. Hard caps ambush the model mid-sentence. She left the full methodology and code on GitHub.

A polished response and a wrong response look identical from the outside.

That finding ran underneath everything else I read this week.

When the signal stops working

From Kevin’s About page - here.

Kevin Ertell wrote The Strategy Trap, an Amazon bestseller on why companies fail at execution.

His newsletter this week opened with a scene most people have been in: a leadership meeting where everyone’s nodding, nobody’s pushing back, the room exits perfectly aligned.

His title: “Fear Is the Default. Safety Has to Be Built.”

Kevin names 3 behaviors that determine whether a leader gets real information or managed information.

Leaders who admit mistakes openly without spin signal that honesty is safe. Leaders who explicitly reward uncomfortable news train rooms to keep bringing it. Leaders who ask questions designed to surface disagreement get better information than leaders who wait for it to appear. The absence of all 3 is what produces the nodding room.

Self-protective behavior is an execution killer that presents as alignment from the outside.

He cites Julia Minson, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies productive disagreement: “A constructive disagreement is a disagreement that leads the two parties to want to talk to each other again.” Her five-step framework shifts the goal from winning an argument to keeping the conversation alive. Kevin also points to Brian Elliott’s research on team norms: three-quarters of teams have never established formal norms for how they work together.

One team that did cut escalations 75 percent, slashed meetings in half, and watched meeting effectiveness jump from 22 to 72 percent.

Josh Chronister runs On Messaging, a show built around deep conversations with working product marketers, followed by Josh’s own top takeaways from each interview.

His guest Alex Virden joined Vector as their first PMM hire in April 2025. By October she’d executed a full repositioning, pricing and packaging overhaul, website redesign, and Halloween-themed product launch at a seed-stage startup with fewer than 12 people.

The results? 41 percent increase in site traffic, one million dollars in pipeline, and a Product Launch of the Year nomination from the Product Marketing Alliance.

Her research covered three groups:

1. current customers across different usage levels,

2. people who never converted,

3. and closed-lost prospects.

   Her line: “Your best customers validate. Your worst customers warn. Your closed-lost prospects tell you where the message breaks down at the moment of decision.”

   That last group is the one most PMMs skip. And it’s the only interview that shows you what happens in the room when you’re not there.

The information that matters most is almost never volunteered.

Who around you has something true to say that they haven’t said yet?

What you know before you can name it

Sam Kuehnle runs Sam’s Marketing Meditations (ABOVE) and is building Affect, a platform connecting marketing metrics to actual business revenue.

He watched too many quarterly business reviews where marketing hit its MQL targets while sales missed revenue, and nobody questioned the contradiction. The five-letter series he just finished, running from first-year marketer through first-time VP to CMO, came from sitting with that gap.

The final letter is to the future CMO.

His first observation.

At that level, the job shifts from executing marketing to translating it. The CFO has quantitative models. The CRO has a revenue number. The CMO has a qualitative story about market perception and long-term brand trajectory. Getting that room to receive it as strategy is work that never stops.

He names the CEO relationship as the foundation of everything at that level, more important than strategy, team quality, or execution record.

His framing?

If the CEO doesn’t understand what you’re building and why it’ll work, you’re one bad quarter away from having the conversation. And the third thing: you’ll be defined by one or two decisions.

The big swing that worked. The bet that flopped.

Jennifer Hong runs Natural Intelligence, a newsletter of interviews with humans navigating AI.

Her guest Dallas Payne had a linguistics degree and spent 20 years doing work everyone called “just admin”: building knowledge bases, writing Boolean searches, optimizing processes, managing context across teams. She’d been doing context engineering, knowledge architecture, and pattern recognition for two decades before AI gave her vocabulary for any of it.

Her breakthrough?

She ran her resume through Claude. The analysis named the patterns she’d been executing without language for them. She said there were tears. Dallas lives in rural New Zealand, where no one around her knows what Substack is. Her take on AI: she endorses “Slow AI,” a framework from Sam Illingworth. His advice: “don’t be afraid to close the tab.” Her slop detection is precise: sentences starting with “And” or “But” without purpose, and any appearance of “Here’s the thing” or “delve.”

Abrar Maqdoomi named the same pattern in From Equations to Innovation from the entrepreneurship side: years of what he called “an intuitive whisper,” the pull toward building, before any framework arrived to give it language.

Some things are real before they’re nameable.

If you’re still waiting for the right words, what’s the cost of the delay?

Worth your attention: Free + Paid Resources

• Affect (Wait List here - Sam Kuehnle): a platform for marketers who want accountability tied to actual business outcomes. Built by someone who watched marketing hit its targets while the business missed revenue, and felt the contradiction. Waitlist open. Pricing not announced.

• The Strategy Trap (Kevin Ertell): Kevin’s book on why companies fail at execution. Amazon number one in its category. Available now.

• Claude Cowork Bootcamp (Nicolas Cole + Dickie Bush, PGA): six production-grade Claude skills (File Master, Newsletter Writer, Calendar Ninja) plus six text modules and a full setup kit. $350 or two payments of $175. Self-paced option available.

• $100M Newsletter Skill Pack (Based on Hormozi frameworks): Claude Skills built on Alex Hormozi’s email marketing frameworks for newsletter operators. Free.

• Agent-ready website webinar (YOYABA + Wix, via Sam Kuehnle): Oliver Kuttruff and Crystal Carter break down what an agent-ready website looks like in practice: WebMCP, declarative vs. imperative API approaches, and what SEO looks like when AI agents are navigating instead of humans. May 7th. Free.

• CarouselBot (Karen Spinner): turns posts into LinkedIn carousels and PDF documents via Claude MCP integration. Paid.

• Karen’s token experiment (Wondering About AI): 250 API calls, full methodology, code on GitHub. Read this before you trust the next confident-sounding output. Free.

The other side of the coin

Darla Bautista showed the other side in Culture >> Commerce this week with three brands making precision bets before the signal becomes obvious to anyone else.

Starbucks launched an ube vanilla latte this spring. Ube carries meaning: Filipino diaspora identity, independent café culture, years of presence in London’s independent coffee scene before any major chain touched it. Starbucks validated a signal that already existed, at the moment it was ready to scale.

The risk is important. Ube is genuinely scarce in supply chains, and that scarcity is part of what makes the move credible.

Teams executing this kind of move in 2026 are using AI to track emerging ingredients across TikTok, menus, and retail shelves, mapping entertainment calendars for peak attention windows and assessing talent trajectory on signals beyond follower count. Rhode and Justin Bieber went from concept to Coachella debut in weeks.

Darla calls these beachheads. Which are entry points with low risk to the core business. Specific enough to open a new lane. Small enough not to threaten the brand if they miss. Every one of them worked because the signal was authetnic before the bet was placed.

The gap between signal and what’s happening is where execution dies. Or where it wins first.

Build on the signal

What’s my final take? The thread running through all 7 newsletters this week is the same: the confident claim is usually the weakest one.

Karen found it in API output. Kevin found it in leadership rooms. Josh’s guest found it in the customer interviews most PMMs skip. Sam found it in the gap between what the CMO presents and what the board hears. Jennifer’s guest found it in 20 years of work that passed as admin.

You as the Signal Architect, your move is specific: verify the foundation before you build on it. Every precision bet Darla covered in Culture >> Commerce this week worked for the same reason. Starbucks found a signal already real in diaspora kitchens and London cafés, then validated it at scale. Lego read adult collector culture accurately, then built a £160 entry point precise enough to open a new lane. The signal was authentic before the money moved.

Find what’s actually true. Build on that.

Where in your work are you building on a confident output rather than a verified one?

Share

The message: their own platform couldn’t read your messages.

Most brand teams would have killed it before it left the room. WhatsApp ran it on TV, digital, and billboards across five countries. Ad awareness in the UK climbed 11.5 percentage points in one month. YouGov ranked it as the highest single-brand gain tracked across the entire UK market.

Here’s the pattern. I call it The Inoculation Play.

A brand finds the single biggest fear customers carry into every buying decision. It makes that fear the centerpiece of the campaign. It backs the claim with proof customers can verify on their own terms. The fear doesn’t disappear. It gets resolved in public, on record, at scale.

Most brands bury that anxiety under feature lists and aspirational copy. The Inoculation Play puts it in the headline.

In this video, I walk through how WhatsApp executed it, where the same pattern won in three other industries, and the two conditions that caused it to destroy trust. Dove’s 2017 product line and Volkswagen after Dieselgate both tried the same move and watched it accelerate the deficit.

Subscribe now

I also want to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.

When physicians at the University of Michigan hospitals began disclosing their mistakes openly to patients, malpractice lawsuits dropped in half.

Patients came to those lawsuits wanting to understand what had happened. When the doctor shared, patients forgave.

Organizational psychologist Piers Steel calls the instinct that runs against this an ego-protective maneuver. We delay putting our reputations on the line because we’ve learned to equate self-worth with outcomes. Brands do this structurally. Every campaign brief, every positioning document arrives with a protective architecture built in.

The campaigns that worked arrived with the real thing.

Run your brand through The Inoculation Play Analyzer GPT →

Four diagnostic questions, a fit score, a failure mode checklist, and a client-ready deck. Built for fractional CMOs.

The full written breakdown is at The Strategy Signal. Same campaign. More depth. The complete failure analysis is down there too.

See you on the next one.

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The difference between a 20-year competitive moat and a 24-hour PR disaster is structural. Three mechanics. Many brands get at least one wrong.

This is a breakdown of the Purpose-Driven Category Inversion pattern.

What it is, where else it's worked, and four diagnostic questions before you recommend it to any client.

Subscribe now

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CHAPTERS

00:00 — Why most people read Dove's case study wrong
01:00 — What Purpose-Driven Category Inversion actually is
01:42 — What Dove did before they said a single word publicly
02:24 — Why competitors were structurally locked out from copying it
02:53 — The wrong lesson CMOs keep taking from this
03:15 — Three brands that tried to fake it — and what happened
03:35 — Why Rory Sutherland says this only works when it's illogical
04:54 — The structural difference between a moat and a PR disaster
05:08 — Why this pattern is more powerful in 2026 than it was in 2004
05:34 — Three forces making truth-telling a competitive advantage right now
06:22 — Dove's Evolution Film: $135K in production, $150M in earned media
06:48 — Where else this pattern drove consistent results (Always, Nike, Burger King)

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READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN
The Strategy Signal on Substack → https://thestrategysignal.com/p/dove-real-beauty-purpose-driven-inverter-playbook

TEST THIS PATTERN ON YOUR CLIENT OR YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Purpose-Driven Inverter Playbook (free GPT) → https://thestrategysignal.kit.com/purpose-driven-inverter

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Ad awareness climbed 11.5 percentage points in a single month.

It went from 13.6% to 25.1%.¹ YouGov tracked this number across the entire UK advertising market.

WhatsApp topped every brand on the list.

The campaign behind that result ran on TV, digital video, out-of-home, and audio across five countries: US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, and India. In Hong Kong, a billboard covered entirely in “encrypted” gibberish text went viral after local celebrities shared it. Nobody knew what it was until the WhatsApp logo appeared at the bottom.

The tagline was three words: Not even WhatsApp.

Designed to demonstrate that the platform itself cannot read your messages, that phrase became WhatsApp’s highest-performing awareness campaign ever. And the strategic reason it worked is exactly what most brands are afraid to do.

Here’s the Strategy Signal: the inoculation play

Here’s the signal for the week.

I call it “The Inoculation Play.”

A brand finds the single biggest fear, skepticism, or criticism customers associate with the product or category. Then they make that fear the centerpiece of their marketing, backed by overwhelming proof that they resolve it. In a sense the “inoculate” or immune their customers to their core brand weakness.

The pattern works because most brands do the opposite. They soften concerns. They redirect. They bury the anxiety under feature lists and aspirational imagery. The Inoculation Play puts the anxiety front and center. Being seen is the trust mechanism.

When it connects to something the brand actually, verifiably owns?

Primary case study: “Not even WhatsApp,” WhatsApp (Meta), May 2025

The situation

WhatsApp’s parent company is Meta.

Meta’s relationship with user data has been under sustained public scrutiny since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2021, updated terms of service sparked a mass migration of users toward Signal and Telegram (love signal by the way). Elon Musk, with 170 million followers at the time, told people directly: “Don’t trust WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp had a perception problem. And the perception problem lived entirely outside the product itself.

End-to-end encryption has been built into every WhatsApp message since 2016. The technical architecture was solid and auditable. But the Meta stigma around data-sharing, ad targeting, and regulatory investigations kept attaching itself to WhatsApp’s reputation regardless of the underlying product reality.

The creative execution

The 60-second hero spot flips the perspective completely.

You watch intimate, real messaging moments from WhatsApp’s point of view: a hospital call to a parent, a voice note from a sibling, an emotional late-night text. The actual content appears as blurred pixels, indecipherable code, scrambled fragments. Nothing readable.

The message: we cannot see this. West BBDO’s creative director described the brief this way:

“The weird voice notes, the emotional late-night texts — the stuff you only share because you know it’s private… that’s what this campaign is about: trust, intimacy, and total freedom to be yourself.”²

The campaign deployed simultaneously in US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, and India, with localized executions including Aamir Khan providing narration for the Indian market. Experiential activations ran on June 7–8, 2024 at London’s Southbank, New York’s High Line, Delhi’s Connaught Place, and São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park.

The business result

Ad awareness in the UK hit +11.5 percentage points in one month, the highest single-brand gain YouGov tracked across the entire UK market in June 2025.³

WhatsApp Business Platform posted 55% year-over-year revenue growth to $519 million in Q4 2024.⁴

The campaign WhatsApp called their “largest ever” ran on a message that would have scared most brand teams straight into legal review.

“Not even us.” Said loud, in public, across five countries.

That willingness to be seen saying an uncomfortable truth, backed by a product that could actually deliver on the claim, is what made the numbers move.⁵

Cross-industry proof: where the same pattern won

Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty” (beauty/CPG, 2004)

The beauty industry’s most uncomfortable reality in 2004: advertising had spent decades telling women they were physically insufficient. Dove’s core customers had absorbed that message for thirty years. Dove decided to put it in the headline.

The campaign featured real women: diverse body types, real ages, physical characteristics the industry had historically treated as defects. Every ad made the industry’s fear explicit. Beauty standards have caused harm, and we’re drawing a line here.Sales climbed from $2.5 billion to $4 billion over the campaign’s first decade.⁶

The campaign worked because Dove actually changed what they put in their ads. The claim had a product-level proof layer customers could verify every time an ad ran.

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Patagonia “Don’t Buy This Jacket” (outdoor apparel, 2011)

Apparel companies face a structural tension. Their business model requires customers to keep buying, and buying requires resource extraction. Patagonia’s entire brand was built on environmental stewardship. The tension was sitting there, unaddressed, visible to every environmentally conscious customer.

Patagonia addressed it on Black Friday, the year’s highest-revenue retail day, with a full-page New York Times ad urging customers not to buy their jacket. The ad listed the environmental cost of producing a single item: 135 liters of water, 20 pounds of CO2, 60% of its weight in waste.

Revenue grew 30% the following year, from $400 million to $543 million.⁷

The inoculation held because Patagonia backed it with Worn Wear repair programs, supply chain transparency reports, and an actual corporate pledge to give 1% of revenue to environmental causes.

McDonald’s “Our Food. Your Questions.” (QSR, 2012)

Fast food’s most persistent reputational anxiety: what is actually in this product?

McDonald’s Canada built a campaign around that question by inviting customers to ask it publicly, on camera, with full transparency. The campaign answered the hardest questions candidly: ingredient sourcing, processing methods, the infamous “pink slime” accusation. They produced videos shot at supplier facilities, hosted by a Mythbusters presenter.

Brand trust scores in Canada jumped 60% during the campaign period. The brand that had spent years fending off food-quality accusations turned the challenge into a conversation and walked away with measurably higher credibility.⁸

Where the same pattern went catastrophically wrong and how you can avoid it too

The two campaigns below attempted the Inoculation Play and failed. The failure conditions are worth studying more closely than the successes.

Dove “Real Beauty Bottles” (2017)

Dove tried to extend the Inoculation Play, which had worked brilliantly in their advertising, into product packaging. They released limited-edition bottles shaped like different body types to celebrate body diversity. The backlash arrived within hours and ran for weeks.¹⁰

Why it failed. The campaign that made Dove famous was built on the idea that women are more than their physical appearance. Packaging shaped to resemble different body types reduced women to the physical forms the original campaign had moved beyond. The execution violated the terms of the brand’s own inoculation. The underlying value was authentic. The execution contradicted it so directly that it looked like satire. When customers can’t distinguish your campaign from a parody of your campaign, the execution has failed regardless of intent.

Here’s a Rule. The proof layer must consistently reinforce the promise. Execution that contradicts the message destroys more trust than the campaign builds.

Volkswagen “Think Blue” sustainability campaigns (2015–2017)

After the Dieselgate emissions scandal, in which VW was caught deliberately engineering vehicles to cheat emissions tests during regulatory inspections, the company ran extensive sustainability campaigns positioning itself as environmentally responsible.¹¹ The campaigns read as satire. Consumer trust scores in key markets stayed depressed through the campaign period.

Why it failed. VW’s cars had been engineered to deceive environmental regulators. The operational reality of the business directly, provably contradicted the values the campaigns claimed. The Inoculation Play cannot bridge a gap between what the brand says and what the product does. When the proof layer is toxic, marketing accelerates the deficit.

Here’s a Rule. If the product contradicts the claim, marketing makes it worse. The inoculation requires an operational reality customers can actually verify.

How do I turn my brand’s weakness into my strength? YOUTUBE Video

Everything here in this newsletter plus 4 questions and a red flag to see if it works for your business.

Matt’s Take: A Contemplative Marketing on This Strategy

When physicians at the University of Michigan hospitals began disclosing their mistakes openly to patients, malpractice lawsuits dropped in half.¹²

Patients were suing to find out what happened. They weren’t suing to punish their doctors. When the doctor shared, patients forgave.

I’ve spent fifteen years in healthcare. I know that room. I know what it costs a physician to walk in and say “I got this wrong.” The instinct running against that disclosure has a clinical name. Organizational psychologist Piers Steel calls it an ego-protective maneuver: we delay putting our reputations on the line because we’ve learned to equate our self-worth with our outcomes.¹³

Brands do this structurally. Every review meeting, every campaign brief, every positioning document arrives with the same protective architecture built in.

Here’s what I’ve noticed working in spiritual direction alongside marketing. Spiritual direction requires the practitioner to show up without an agenda, without a narrative they need confirmed. Business storytelling arrives with a fixed narrative. The facts get curated to support it. The Inoculation Play requires the posture of the spiritual director. You arrive without a fixed story about yourself. You let the real thing be seen.

Marketing errors are wrongs of omission. What the brand left out. What the brand shaped to look like certainty.

Now Your Free GPT - The Inoculation Play Analyzer

If you want to try this out on your brand The Inoculation Play Analyzer the runs the fit analysis for you. Fit score, implementation roadmap, failure mode checklist, client-ready deck. Built for fractional CMOs. Start here →

Bibliography

Edelman. 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. Chicago: Edelman, 2025. https://www.edelman.com/trust/trust-barometer.

“Don’t Buy This Campaign in 2011 by Patagonia.” Marketing Maverick. Accessed April 2026. https://marketingmaverick.io/p/don-t-buy-this-campaign-in-2011-by-patagonia

“Dove: A Spotless Approach to Digital Marketing.” Digital Marketing Institute. Accessed April 2026. https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/case-studies/dove-a-spotless-approach-to-digital-marketing.

“Dove’s Body-Shaped Bottles Are a Misguided Mistake.” The Guardian, May 9, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/09/dove-real-beauty-bottles-body-positive.

Kachalia, A., S. R. Kaufman, R. Boothman, S. Anderson, K. Welch, S. Saint, and M. A. M. Rogers. “Liability Claims and Costs Before and After Implementation of a Medical Error Disclosure Program.” Annals of Internal Medicine 153, no. 4 (2010): 213–221.

Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. New York: Dutton, 2014.

“McDonald’s Q&A Content Campaign Tries to Build Consumer Trust.” Momentology. Accessed April 2026. https://www.momentology.com/2240-mcdonalds-reveals-all-in-live-qa-content-campaign.html.

Meta Platforms, Inc. “Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results.” Investor Relations, February 2025. https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2025/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024-Results/default.aspx.

Steel, Piers. The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

“Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: How It All Began.” BBC News, September 22, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41190426.

“WhatsApp’s Global Campaign Proves Your Messages Are Truly Private.” Marketing Interactive, May 2025. https://www.marketing-interactive.com/whatsapps-biggest-global-campaign-proves-your-messages-are-truly-private.

“WhatsApp Underlines Commitment to Privacy in New Ad Campaign.” Social Media Today, 2025. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/whatsapp-privacy-focussed-ad-campaign/748552/.

YouGov Business. “June UK Advertisers of the Month: WhatsApp, Head & Shoulders and Oral-B.” YouGov, June 2025. https://business.yougov.com/content/52511-june-uk-advertisers-of-the-month-whatsapp-head-shoulders-and-oral-b.

Dove weaponized the beauty industry’s own research against it and built a 20-year competitive moat in the process.

Watch the Purpose-Driven breakdown on Youtube

Same pattern, different format.

In 2004, Dove commissioned a global study with researchers from Harvard and the London School of Economics.¹

The finding was damning.

Only 2% of women worldwide described themselves as beautiful. And 68% agreed that media set unrealistic standards. And 75% said they wished the industry did a better job representing diverse ages, shapes, and sizes.

Dove’s leadership looked at that data and saw something most brands would have buried. It was the proof that their entire category had been selling to 98% of consumers while making them feel excluded.

While every competitor chased the same 2% with aspirational imagery and airbrushed perfection, Dove claimed the abandoned 98%.

The result?

Sales climbed from $2.5 billion to $4 billion over the first decade.² That’s 60% revenue growth in a category where everyone said the room for growth was spent.

The pattern: Purpose-Driven Category Inversion

Here’s what Dove actually did.

They inverted the category’s core assumption.

Every beauty brand in 2004 competed on aspiration: here’s the ideal, buy this product, reach it. The game was selling an impossible standard to people who could never achieve it, then selling them hope that the next product might close the gap.

Dove’s research proved the strategy was backfiring.

Consumers felt alienated by the very advertising designed to attract them. And no major brand was addressing that disconnect.

Purpose-Driven Category Inversion is the pattern here. Find the fundamental dishonesty your industry tells customers. Surface it with undeniable data. Then build your brand on telling the truth.

Interestingly this is also the POV of the Strategy Signal. Stay tuned for the next issue.

The pattern works because it transforms marketing from persuasion to advocacy. When you side with deeply held consumer values, people side with your cause. And competitors can’t follow you without looking like hypocrites.

But the pattern carries three non-negotiable requirements:

1. irrefutable consumer research that exposes the disconnect,

2. operational authenticity (your products must be able to deliver on the honest promise), and

3. platform thinking over campaign cycles.

   You’re building a movement. That distinction matters.

Dove checked all three.

The case study: Real Beauty

The campaign launched in October 2004 with a series of billboards.

Ogilvy & Mather global brand director Sylvia Lagnado and her team hired portrait photographer Ian Rankin to shoot ordinary women, unretouched, representing ages, shapes, and ethnicities no beauty billboard had shown before.

The creative intelligence was in the headline. Each billboard posed a binary question: Wrinkled or Wonderful? Fat or Fit? Grey or Gorgeous? Flawed or Flawless?

Passersby could vote via SMS. Results updated on the digital display in real-time. In Times Square, a lineup of women in their underwear celebrated curves and body diversity in front of millions of daily commuters.

Dove had turned an advertisement into a public forum. And in doing so, they’d conducted market research in public, in front of every competitor watching.

The first month told the story. Dove’s firming cream sales doubled.³ By month six, that product line had grown 700% in Europe. Market share jumped from 1% to 6% in that category alone.

In October 2006, the campaign released “Evolution,” a 75-second film directed by Tim Piper and Yael Staav on a production budget of roughly C$135,000.

The film showed a time-lapse of an ordinary woman being transformed through hair, makeup, and aggressive Photoshop retouching into a billboard model. It ended with one line: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”

The truth about how the industry manufactured the standard it sold against did the work on its own.

That C$135,000 film earned an estimated $150 million in free media coverage.⁴

In 2013, the campaign released “Real Beauty Sketches.” An FBI-trained forensic sketch artist, separated by a curtain, drew portraits of women based on their own self-descriptions, then drew a second portrait based on how a stranger described the same woman. The strangers’ portraits were consistently more accurate, more generous, more beautiful. The film closed: “You are more beautiful than you think.” It became one of the most-viewed video advertisements in history: 163 million views across 150 countries, generating 4.6 billion earned media impressions.⁵

Here’s what made the whole thing structurally different from any competitor campaign.

Dove operationalized the commitment.

In 2004, they launched the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which has since delivered body-confidence education to over 100 million young people across 150 countries.⁶ The marketing claim became an institutional program.

Competitors couldn’t copy this.

How does a brand that sells anti-wrinkle cream celebrate wrinkles? How does a brand whose business model depends on manufacturing insecurity suddenly champion self-acceptance? Any rapid pivot would have looked hypocritical. Dove claimed the authenticity high ground and made it structurally unavailable to anyone else.

By 2025, Dove and Ogilvy’s Real Beauty campaign won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Creative Strategy for Long-Term Brand Platform, recognizing two decades of sustained effectiveness in a single award.⁷

Cross-industry proof

The same pattern has run across at least three other industries.

1. Always #LikeAGirl (Procter & Gamble, 2014).

Leo Burnett commissioned research showing that more than half of girls lose confidence at puberty, the exact moment they first encounter feminine care products. The phrase “like a girl” had become a cultural insult. Always inverted it into a symbol of strength. The campaign generated over 90 million views across 150 countries and drove Always to 59.6% market share.⁸

2. Nike Dream Crazy (Wieden+Kennedy, 2018).

The sports apparel industry ran on strict political neutrality, an industry norm designed to avoid alienating any segment of a diverse global consumer base.

Nike inverted it.

They built the campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback exiled from professional football for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. The tagline: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The short-term backlash was real: burning shoes and boycott calls. The long-term result added an estimated $6 billion to Nike’s brand value and drove a 31% surge in direct sales.⁹

Burger King Moldy Whopper (INGO Stockholm, DAVID Miami, 2020).

Fast food’s ironclad aesthetic rule is visual perfection: tweezers, glue, and artificial coloring to make the product look impossible.

Burger King inverted it too. After quietly removing 8,500 tons of artificial preservatives from their supply chain over three years, they photographed their flagship burger decaying over 34 days and released it as their main campaign visual. The implicit message was plain: their food rots because it’s real food.

The campaign generated 8.4 billion media impressions, $40 million in earned media value, and a 14% sales increase.¹⁰

Three industries. Same pattern. Same mechanics.

Why this pattern wins right now

Three forces make Purpose-Driven Category Inversion more powerful in 2026 than when Dove launched it in 2004.

Advertising trust is near historic lows. Edelman’s Trust Barometer data tracks a sustained multi-decade decline in consumer trust across advertising, media, and corporate messaging.¹¹ When trust is scarce, the brand willing to name what the industry won’t becomes immediately credible. The truth-teller earns trust precisely because truth-telling has become rare.

Social media makes inauthenticity a liability with a short half-life. In 2004, a brand could run an aspirational campaign and the gap between that and consumer reality stayed quiet. In 2026, that gap surfaces within hours. The reverse is also true: an authentic campaign finds an audience that carries it for free. Dove’s “Evolution” earned $150 million in earned media from a C$135,000 budget in 2006, before social sharing was a mainstream behavior. The dynamics are even more favorable now.

Most categories still haven’t done this. The playbook is documented. The case studies are famous. And the majority of brands in the majority of industries are still selling aspiration to people who feel excluded by it. The abandoned majority is still out there, in nearly every market.

Where the pattern fails

1. Victoria’s Secret’s 2021 “VS Collective”

This rebrand attempted the pattern after spending three decades building the very standard it was trying to dismantle.

For most of its history, VS sold the Angels standard: a narrow, aspirational body type positioned as the pinnacle of feminine beauty. In 2021, facing falling sales and reputational damage from the Jeffrey Epstein–Wexner connection, the brand replaced its Angels with a diverse collective — Megan Rapinoe, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, transgender model Valentina Sampaio — and claimed to have changed.

The products hadn’t changed.

The business model hadn’t changed. No research foundation named the lie the brand had told for three decades. No institutional program backed the new claim. VS had spent decades profiting from the exact standard they were now denouncing, and critics immediately called it “inclusivity washing.” Sales continued to decline.

2. H&M’s Conscious Collection

H&M’s Conscious Collection ran the same failure mode in 2019. Sustainability positioning built on top of a fast-fashion business model that produced billions of garments annually. The marketing claimed authenticity the operations couldn’t deliver. Norway’s consumer watchdog flagged it publicly as greenwashing. Class action lawsuits followed.

3. Facebook “Here Together”

Facebook’s “Here Together” brand campaign in 2018 launched weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. It positioned the platform as a safe space for human connection and promised to do better on user privacy. A business model built entirely on data collection cannot credibly position itself as a privacy champion. The FTC fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations the following year.

The pattern fails when the category inversion is marketing strategy without substance. Research, product alignment, and institutional commitment must all be present.

Two out of three produces backlash. One out of three produces ridicule.

The pattern fit test

Four questions to run before committing to this approach.

Question one: What does your category promise that consumers know, but haven’t said out loud, is false? The research Dove commissioned named what millions of women already knew. If you can’t point to a clear statistical gap between what your industry claims and what customers actually experience, the foundation is missing.

Question two: Can your core product deliver on an honest promise without contradiction? Dove sold cleansing and moisturizing products. Celebrating natural beauty didn’t undermine the product’s function. A brand whose primary revenue driver is anti-aging serum faces a harder alignment problem. The inversion has to work without making the product line hypocritical.

Question three: Is your organization prepared to sustain this for 10 to 20 years? Dove’s Self-Esteem Project has reached 100 million young people. Nike’s stance on social justice has outlasted multiple news cycles. The competitive moat this pattern builds is proportional to the commitment behind it. Campaign thinking and platform thinking produce completely different results.

Question four: How will your top three competitors respond? A competitor who can pivot to your position in 12 months signals a head start, and head starts expire. The structural advantage comes when competitors are architecturally locked out of matching you.

Dove earned the ground - My Personal Take

Culture assigns identity.

That’s Erich Neumann’s insight, and it holds more weight here than any marketing framework. When the beauty industry spent fifty years defining “beautiful” as a narrow physical standard, it handed people a definition of themselves. Women internalized the standard at the ego level. The cultural imposition and the self-concept fused.

Dove’s research found that 2% of women worldwide would describe themselves as beautiful. That word, themselves, is the tell. The industry’s standard had traveled all the way inward.

Robert Johnson, drawing on Jung, names a distinction worth sitting with: apprehension versus comprehension. You can know a thing completely before you have language for it. Carry it in how you move through a room. Feel it in what you skip past in a magazine. Apprehension precedes comprehension. The 98% had been apprehending the lie for decades before Dove named it. The feeling was there. The language was Dove’s to give.

Dove spent 3 years in research before they said anything publicly. That was the work of earning the right to name what already existed. They made sure they were receiving something real.

And what do you do once you’ve received it? In chaplaincy, we call this accompaniment. You sit with someone in the reality of their situation. You name what’s actually there. You stay. The naming is the work.

The brands that execute this pattern well are doing something that looks more like pastoral honesty than marketing strategy. They name something true about how people feel, at institutional scale, in public, in front of the companies that built the imposition.

The brands that fail operate at the surface level. They borrow the emotional texture of truth-telling without receiving the truth first. Pepsi rented the imagery. Dove earned the ground.

Here’s what I keep sitting with: consumers can feel the difference. They’ve been told enough false things that the truth, when it arrives, has a different weight to it.

The weight of it goes back further than any marketing framework.¹²

If your category tells a lie that consumers are carrying quietly, and you have the operational ability to tell the truth instead, you have a responsibility. The brands that act on it build 20-year competitive moats.

The ones that wait keep chasing the 2%.

If this issue gave you a useful frame, forward it to one person on your team who needs it. That’s how The Strategy Signal grows.

— Matt

P.S. The tool

If you manage client brands, the Purpose-Driven Inverter Playbook runs the fit analysis for you. Fit score, implementation roadmap, failure mode checklist, client-ready deck. Built for fractional CMOs.

Start here →

Footnotes or…”in case you’re wondering where it came from!”

¹ Nancy Etcoff, Susie Orbach, Jennifer Scott, and Heidi D’Agostino, “The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report,” commissioned by Dove (Unilever), 2004. The study surveyed 3,200 women across ten countries. Full campaign history and study context: Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, Wikipedia.

² Unilever, “20 years on: Dove and the future of Real Beauty,” Unilever.com, 2024. Sales figures represent total Dove portfolio performance across the campaign period. Incremental attribution data and baseline comparisons have not been publicly disclosed by Unilever. For strategic planning, treat as campaign-period correlation rather than confirmed causation.

³ ARF David Ogilvy Awards, “Dove: The Campaign for Real Beauty,” American Research Foundation, 2007. Firming cream sales figures represent European market performance in the initial campaign launch phase.

⁴ “Evolution” (advertisement), Wikipedia. Production budget of C$135,000 and $150 million earned media value are the figures most widely cited from Ogilvy PR’s post-campaign analysis.

⁵ Dove and Ogilvy, “Real Beauty Sketches,” 2013. View count and earned media impression figures cited in Cannes Lions and Effie award submissions; broader campaign history covered in Ogilvy’s Real Beauty Grand Prix writeup.

⁶ Unilever, “20 years on: Dove and the future of Real Beauty,” 2024. The 100 million figure reflects the milestone reported in Unilever’s 2024 anniversary coverage, updating the 94.5 million figure from the 2023 Dove Self-Esteem Project impact report.

⁷ Ogilvy, “Dove and Ogilvy’s Decades-Long ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign Wins Creative Strategy Grand Prix,” Ogilvy.com, 2025.

⁸ CASSIES (Canadian Advertising Success Stories), “Always #LikeAGirl.” Market share figure (59.6%) sourced from US Brand Health Tracker data (July vs. June) per Leo Burnett’s campaign effectiveness documentation. View count per Campaign Live case study (2015): over 90 million views achieved within the campaign’s first two months. Confidence-at-puberty research sourced from Always Confidence & Puberty Survey, conducted by Leo Burnett and Procter & Gamble in support of the campaign. PR Grand Prix win confirmed via PR Newswire.

⁹ Nike “Dream Crazy” post-campaign analysis. $6 billion brand value addition and 31% direct sales surge per Nike’s Cannes Lions Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix submission (2021), as reported by Fortune and Contagious. Comprehensive breakdown at Globe Media Group.

¹⁰ WPP, “DAVID & INGO: Burger King Moldy Whopper,” WPP.com, 2020. Sales increase and earned media figures sourced from WPP’s published effectiveness report.

¹¹ Edelman, “2024 Trust Barometer,” Edelman.com, 2024. The 24th annual survey fielded across 28 countries with 32,000+ respondents.

¹² Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. Johnson, Robert A. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986.

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31.6% same-store sales growth the following quarter.

But the story isn't what they did. It's when.

In this video I break down The Category Crasher, the strategic pattern underneath Chili's Fast Food Financing, and show you where else it's worked, where it's collapsed, and the five questions that tell you whether the window is open in your category right now.

Chapters:
0:00 The activation that changed fast food marketing
1:30 The Category Crasher pattern explained
3:00 Why this pattern works right now
4:30 Cross-industry proof: Planet Fitness, Newcastle, Dollar Shave Club
6:00 Should you run this play? Five diagnostic questions
7:30 My take: the ancient circuit behind consumer betrayal

Apply this pattern to your own category with the Category Crasher Playbook GPT:
https://thestrategysignal.kit.com/cat...

Subscribe to The Strategy Signal, one pattern per week, verified, transferable, ready to use:

The Strategy Signal

The Strategy Signal Weekly marketing intelligence for fractional CMOs and marketing executives. One campaign decoded every week, the pattern underneath it, where it works across industries, where it fails and what it means for your industry.

By Matthew Heyn

Four writers this week named the same problem from completely different angles. That tends to mean it’s become a pattern.

Nina Koskivaara said it about AI visuals. Category Pirates said it about careers. Neha Kabra said it about organizations. Ilaria Colasanti said it about the work nobody’s been naming. The thread across these three is this: access to the tool is everywhere. The scarcity is direction.

Regarding our authors below… too good looking to be writers in my view. Is this reader’s digest? or Model’s digest?

I seriously can’t tell. Now onto the good stuff.

The camera, not the slot machine

Nina runs Nina Studio AI, one of three newsletters I’m spotlighting in this issue.

Her framework repositions the relationship between creator and tool. Many people treat AI image generation like a slot machine. You type in words, pull the lever, hope for something good. She teaches the camera. You’re the director. The AI is a photographer in your studio. Give it the lighting, the film stock, the mood.

Describe the world your subject exists in.

Christopher Lochhead of Category Pirates made the same argument at a San Diego keynote last week.

“If you connect your different to making the biggest possible difference at scale with AI, you will have a different career. If not, you’ll suffer the fate of a knowledge worker.”

His perspective? A five-year-old creates freely and without permission. By fifty-five, most people have been trained to execute. AI made execution the cheapest thing available. Creation is the variable now: an original point of view, a framework that belongs to you.

That’s what the market pays for. Check out their new book Creator Capitalist here.

Copper Nelms of Essentially made an adjacent argument from a completely different industry.

He writes for church leaders, but his framework lands in any organization. His term for it? He calls it threshold variables vs. scalable variables. Threshold variables are what get you in the room. For instance, adequate preaching, clean systems, a kids ministry that works. Scalable variables are the fat-tail events you notice and then go all in on. The dangerous middle is where most growth strategy lives: medium-sized bets on things that are already good enough, dressed up as vision. His line is the one I keep coming back to:

“The church growth canon is essentially a collection of lottery winners explaining why they won.”

AI made the threshold cheaper. The variable that scales is still the one nobody can buy.

The scarcest input in any AI setup is the vision behind it.

What breaks at 10am

Neha Kabra spent two decades at McKinsey and inside banking.

She published the first piece of a three-part enterprise AI series this week, and her opening observation got us thinking about sociological implications.

At 10pm, AI is private.

At 10am, it’s monitored. Same person, same tool, different social cost. Employees keep using AI at work. They run it where nobody can see. The organization loses visibility into where data is flowing, where quality is degrading, where incidents are accumulating. Neha’s prescription for this?

It’s a one-page permission charter, signed by the CDO, COO, Risk, and HR, written in plain language.

It removes the need for employees to guess what visible AI use will cost them personally.

AI-Ready CMO added the structural version of that story.

China’s Communication University suspended 16 undergraduate creative degree programs (photography, visual design, translation) and merged them into AI-integrated curricula, a Ministry of Education policy. Jilin University cut 19. East China Normal suspended 24. The junior creative pipeline is closing from both ends: frozen on the hiring side, eliminated at the source.

The entry-level creative work AI handles in under a minute is probably still in your job descriptions.

Audra Carpenter of The Intelligence Era put it more precisely this week.

Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Live dropped the latency in real-time voice AI to near zero. The awkwardness tax is gone. Her response: “The tech can finally keep up. Are you ready to deploy it?” That’s a direction question dressed up as a tech announcement. Her background is 28 years of operations, NLP, and behavioral science.

Her take on this? The fix to poor AI output is a better sequence. Structured systems create the strategic leverage.

Prompts fill them.

Name the invisible work

Ilaria Colasanti runs Contentish, a newsletter on content marketing. Her February piece put language to something most content teams have never named.

The title: “You were hired for one. You’re doing three.”

Content work has three distinct functions: Strategy (deciding what to make and why), Coordination (managing the who, when, and how), and Execution (actually making the thing). Execution is the one in the job description. Coordination is the one in the calendar. It consumes 40 to 60 percent of most content people’s time, produces no visible artifact, and earns no title or budget.

Her diagnostic strategy is to tag every task for two weeks as strategy, coordination, or execution.

The invisible work becomes undeniable once it has a name.

Build what belongs to you

Wes Pearce was a career coach. Five, six, sometimes seven calls a day, and no real security underneath any of it. He started a Substack with no plan. Fourteen months later: 16,000 subscribers, $100K+ in revenue from simple digital products, a winter working from Puerto Rico.

His framework? two types of people right now. Those whose income depends entirely on one employer’s decision. And those who’ve built something that belongs to them completely regardless.

The second group built it before they needed it.

Myrthe Warmenhoven of The CEO Journal made the same bet from a different angle.

Last year she shut down a successful five-year community business, left Bali after six years, walked away from Instagram and LinkedIn, and went all in on Substack. She quit a business that was working but wrong. Her framework, “The only real stability in life is the one you build within yourself.”

Direction clarity comes first. The asset follows.

Worth Your Attention: Free & Paid

The Direction Method Nina Koskivaara — Free starter guide for building an editorial AI visual identity using directorial techniques. The shift from prompting to directing, in practical steps. Free.

AI Adoption Breaks at 10 a.m. Neha Kabra — Part 1 of a three-part enterprise AI adoption series. Parts 2 and 3 cover the workflow layer and the enterprise spine. Part 2 coming next week. Free.

Free 30 min fit call Ilaria Colasanti / Contentish — The three-function framework for content work: Strategy, Coordination, Execution with a free 30 min consultation here. She designs content marketing systems that make the right audience notice, trust, and choose your brand.

Substack Side-Hustle Sprint Timo Mason and Karen Spinner at Wondering About AI — Includes a 7-step AI-assisted writing workflow worth studying on its own. Free.

Content Hub OS Audra Carpenter — AI-led content system for founders and agencies. One idea in, dozens of assets out. Built around structured workflows and sequenced automation. Paid.

The Shift Myrthe Warmenhoven — Myrthe’s signature program for entrepreneurs operating below their actual capacity. Build the life and business that matches who you actually are. Paid.

Essentially Copper Nelms — Newsletter for church leaders on the real drivers of scalable growth. The threshold vs. scalable variable framework applies well outside ministry. Also building a community and apprenticeship connecting experienced marketers with new ones entering the AI era. Free.

Matt’s Take

The tools are everywhere. Access is cheap.

What differentiates any output is the quality of direction behind it.

Seven writers this week landed on the same gap from completely different industries: AI visual identity, enterprise strategy, content operations, church growth, business operations, entrepreneurship, and marketing.

What scales is the thing that requires a genuine point of view: a named framework, a direction bet you’re willing to go all in on when it fires. That gap is the job now.

What would you build differently this month if you treated your AI setup as a direction problem first?

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Matt at The Strategy Signal

Chili’s set up a fake payday loan office next to a McDonald’s in Manhattan.

Two days. Three-hour lines. 6 billion earned media impressions. A 31.6% jump in same-store sales the following quarter.

The budget? Roughly $15 to $20 million by industry estimates. A fraction of what McDonald’s spends on a single Super Bowl slot.

This is how they did it. And the strategic pattern underneath it applies in nearly any industry where a dominant player has quietly broken its own promise to customers.

The pattern is called The Category Crasher.

If you’re a watch-it person, I broke this down on video.

Watch the Category Crasher breakdown on Youtube

Same pattern, different format.

What the Category Crasher is

The pattern works when a brand from a perceived higher tier deliberately attacks a lower-tier category at the precise moment that lower tier loses its defining advantage.

The key word is moment.

Category crashes happen when the incumbent is vulnerable (“incumbent” meaning the big cheese): when its core promise has started to fail and consumers are already feeling it.

For fast food, the walls got thin the moment inflation turned a $5 combo into a $12 to $15 meal.

The whole identity of the QSR industry (cheap, fast, reliable) began eroding.

McDonald’s Quarter Pounder crept toward $7 to $8. And a full sit-down Chili’s meal at $10.99 suddenly looked like the actual deal.

George Felix, Chili’s CMO, spotted it early. He’d been building toward this play for two years, starting with the “Big Smasher” burger (a direct challenge to the Big Mac) and the “3 For Me” value platform established in 2022. Fast Food Financing was the loudest note in a long, patient song.

Worth sitting with for a second.

The viral moment is the payoff.

The Category Crasher is built over years.

The Fast Food Financing campaign: what really happened

April 15, 2025. Chili’s launches with creative agency JM&D, PR firm Edelman, and experiential production house M ss ng p eces. (yes you read that right… M ss ng

The centerpiece was a two-day pop-up at 37 Union Square West in Manhattan, a storefront designed to look exactly like a predatory payday loan office.

Garish signage.

An infomercial-style video on loop. Signs reading “Finance Your Fast Food Today.” And directly next door…you guessed it …a McDonald’s.

The inside of the “office” functioned as a speakeasy, serving Chili’s new Big QP burger (85% more beef than a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder) as part of the $10.99 “3 For Me” meal. Visitors who got “approved” received $20 gift cards.

On X, Chili’s ran a simultaneous giveaway asking people to post the price and location of their last fast food meal using #ChilisFastFoodFinancing. Every frustrated McDonald’s customer who played along became unpaid Chili’s content

Lines ran three hours at peak.

The activation generated 6 billion earned media impressions, outperforming the prior year’s “Big Smasher” launch. Social conversation around the brand spiked 400%.

Q3 2025 earnings told the business story. Brinker International reported 31.6% comparable same-store sales growth for the Chili's brand. Average unit volume grew by $440,000, reaching $3.6 million per location. Customer traffic climbed 5.9%. CEO Kevin Hochman attributed the growth to marketing directly: "Marketing is driving guests in and operations is bringing guests back."

60% of the traffic increase traced to advertising. The other 40% came from organic TikTok virality.

The Category Crasher had worked.

The format IS the message in this youtube video above.

Chili’s built the commercial as a pitch-perfect infomercial parody, borrowing the most culturally loaded advertising vehicle in American memory…the predatory payday loan ad.

Every “Are you tired of overpaying?” moment and thumbs-up spokesman beat is a signal the audience already knows how to read. Fast food, Chili’s is saying, has become the very thing it used to mock.

The move here is precise.

Infomercials are the shorthand for “you’re desperate and we have the solution.” By putting fast food pricing inside that frame, Chili’s doesn’t have to argue that $15 combos are predatory.

The format does it for them.

3 other industries where this pattern wins

Planet Fitness vs. traditional gyms (2008)

When the recession hit, traditional gyms at $50 to $80/month became inaccessible to millions.

Planet Fitness entered at $10/month and reframed their incumbent cultural authority as a liability. The “Judgement Free Zone” positioning said that serious gyms had become intimidating, expensive, and hostile to ordinary people. All of it was true, and all of it the major gym chains had ignored.

Same-club sales grew 18% in 2008 and 23% in 2009 as consumers traded down from pricier gyms.

By 2010 Planet Fitness had 389 locations. By 2023, over 2,400. The Category Crasher here went beyond price. It attacked the emotional experience that came with the price: the feeling that you didn’t belong there.

Newcastle Brown Ale “No Bollocks” (2014)

Honestly, this is one of the most brillant strategies…I just …Just think I might explode of joy.

Newcastle crashed the Super Bowl advertising category without buying a Super Bowl ad.

Agency Droga5 built “If We Made It”, a campaign about the amazing Super Bowl ad Newcastle would have made if they could afford it. Fake storyboards. Mock focus groups. Celebrity commentary from Anna Kendrick. The “No Bollocks” platform named big-budget beer advertising as polished, cliché-ridden, and fundamentally dishonest. A massive production budget became the evidence of inauthenticity.

Over 1 billion media impressions, a 416% lift in brand awareness, and an 18% increase in purchase intent, at 1/35th of a competitor’s Super Bowl budget.

Near-zero media spend. What!? Who does that? Risk-taking marketers do.

Dollar Shave Club (2012)

Gillette controlled the razor market through a “razor and blades” model.

Which meant cheap hardware, expensive proprietary cartridges sold through retailers who locked them in display cases. Michael Dubin made a 90-second YouTube video for $4,500 that named the absurdity out loud: the unnecessary blade technology, the frustration of asking a store clerk to unlock a case for a $30 pack of cartridges.

The D2C subscription model bypassed the retail environment entirely. Gillette’s distribution network went from moat to obstacle in the consumer’s mind.

The video crashed DSC’s website. 12,000 new orders in 48 hours. Revenue hit $225 million in 2016. Unilever paid $1 billion for the company that same year.

Dang…makes me think we’re all in the wrong business when I hear that number. And for blades?

In each case, the Category Crasher worked by finding the exact moment the incumbent’s core promise had failed, and naming it before anyone else did.

Why the window is open right now

Three forces converge in 2025 to 2026 to make this pattern more powerful.

Consumer trust in established categories has a shorter shelf life. Post-pandemic pricing decisions broke implicit contracts. When a $5 value meal becomes a $12 combo, a decades-old promise shatters. Consumers who feel betrayed by a category are primed for the brand that validates the feeling. And that window closes fast once the incumbent responds with value deals.

Earned media infrastructure scales faster than paid. A well-designed physical activation in 2025 can generate global reach through PR, influencer growth, and social impressions. The structural gap between “big brand media spend” and “small brand reach” has collapsed for any brand willing to give consumers something genuinely worth sharing. The Category Crasher is engineered for this environment which lends itself to a local event with national distribution built in.

First-mover advantage within a window is decisive. Executives across industries are studying this playbook. The brands that move first in any given moment of category betrayal capture the most territory. By the time the eighth brand runs a similar play, the press calls it derivative and consumers have moved on.

Where this pattern didn’t work

1. Attack without operational proof.

A smaller brand can name a Goliath’s broken promise all day. But when new customers arrive and the product fails, the campaign backfires twice: once for the unmet expectation, and again because the brand now owns the comparison it invited.

MoviePass named a genuine consumer frustration in 2017: movie tickets had become too expensive. The attack was clean. Unlimited movies for $9.95 a month, positioned directly against AMC and Regal’s $15 to $18 per-ticket pricing. The challenger move landed. The service grew from 20,000 subscribers to 3 million in a matter of weeks. The cultural moment was real.

Then the new customers showed up.

MoviePass was paying full ticket price to theaters for every film every subscriber saw. The average subscriber was seeing 2.11 movies a month. The business needed them to see 0.77. The gap was fatal. The company started restricting access, blocking popular showtimes, suspending accounts without warning. Every restriction was a public betrayal of the exact promise that had made them famous. MoviePass filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

The attack named the wound correctly, but product bled out before it could prove the point.

2. A manufactured cultural tension.

The Category Crasher requires a real wound in the incumbent’s armor. Brands that try to invent the consumer problem, implying a betrayal that doesn’t fully exist in the market, find that the humor reads as forced and the empathy reads as marketing theater. You can feel the difference immediately, and so can consumers.

Samsung ran years of ads mocking Apple for removing the headphone jack from the iPhone.

The frustration was known for some consumers. But Samsung overstated how universally it mattered, and when they needed to make the same engineering trade-off in 2019, they quietly deleted every one of those ads the same week the Galaxy Note 10 launched without a headphone jack. The wound wasn’t deep enough to build a platform on. The difference between a deep wound and a convenient one shows up the moment you can no longer avoid making the same choice yourself.

It’s a story of trying to crash upwards when Goliah (apple) doesn’t have that weakness.

3. Running the play past the window.

This pattern is most powerful at the peak of category betrayal, when consumer frustration is highest and receptivity to the challenger is widest. Sustaining the same posture six months later …well, you missed the moment.

Quibi raised $1.75 billion on the premise that mobile viewers needed short-form premium content for their commutes. The attack on Netflix and HBO was indeed there. Long-form streaming wasn’t built for a five-minute subway ride. Quibi launched in April 2020, two months into COVID lockdowns. The window, which was the commute-time entertainment, had closed before the doors opened. Six months after launch, the company shut down. Content sold to Roku for less than $100 million.

The Category Crasher needed a wound that still existed when the product arrived.

Fast food chains have already responded with value menus and $5 meal deals. The window Chili’s exploited in spring 2025 is likely not worth now. Any brand running this play in late 2026 needs a fresh wound: a new broken promise, a new category vulnerability.

The attack needs to feel true and original.

Questions to ask before running this play

1. Which lower-tier category has recently broken its defining promise? You’re looking for the specific moment a price, quality, or experience guarantee failed publicly, something consumers are already angry about on their own.

2. Does your brand have positioning runway? The Category Crasher lands loudest when it’s the culmination of an established narrative. Cold entry into a category attack with no prior context reads as opportunistic.

3. What’s the operational proof? The stunt earns the comparison. The product has to back it up when the new customers show up.

4. Can you execute with wit and genuine empathy? This pattern lives and dies on tone. Brands that attack with smugness or manufactured outrage miss the mechanic. The humor has to be true. It has to name something real.

5. What’s the shareable mechanicism? The #ChilisFastFoodFinancing hashtag turned every frustrated fast food customer into Chili’s content. What’s your version of that user-generated pain engine?

The humanizing act inside the payday loan office

Here’s something of a contemplative marketing angle on this.

Frans de Waal, the primatologist, spent years studying capuchin monkeys and what he found made a lot of economists uncomfortable.

When one monkey received a smaller reward than another for completing the same task, the underpaid monkey went on strike. It stopped performing entirely. It refused to cooperate. It sulked.

De Waal called it a “moral calculation.” (Levitin, The Organized Mind, p. 283) The monkey was responding to something older than rational self-interest: the sense that a social contract had been broken.

Sound familiar?

Consumer frustration with fast food pricing runs through that same ancient circuitry.

The $15 combo carried the weight of a broken promise. The deal that used to exist — cheap, fast, reliable — had been quietly abandoned while the drive-thru kept running. As Levitin puts it, the rationality we bring to economic decisions is “partly illusory.” (p. 277) The sense of betrayal lands first, fast, and in the body.

Chili’s named that betrayal publicly, with humor, and then handed someone a better burger.

Here’s what 15 years in chaplaincy taught me about what to do with that kind of wound.

The answer is to name it. Name it when it’s happening. Not later.

The most effective thing I watched chaplains do across thousands of difficult conversations (with dying patients, with families in waiting rooms, with medical teams carrying impossible burdens) was to say: I see what’s happening to you. And it’s as bad as it feels. That act of accurate witnessing was itself the relief.

Chili’s Fast Food Financing was exactly that act.

“We opened Fast Food Financing to help customers in their time of need.” George Felix was doing humanizing work in a payday loan storefront next to a McDonald’s. He named the injury accurately. He showed up where the wound was. And then he offered something tangible.

The brands that win the next consumer loyalty cycle will have the courage to name what’s actually happening to their customers’ lives, accurately, in public, without flinching.

That’s the play. It’s older than marketing.

Close

By now you’re either nodding or you’re running a mental audit of your own category.

That second group is who this is for.

The question that follows every issue of The Strategy Signal is the same one: does this pattern fit my situation? Is there a window in my category right now? Am I the challenger with the opening, or the incumbent with the wound?

That’s exactly what the Category Crasher Playbook GPT was built to answer. Give it your industry, your competitive context, and what’s shifting in your category right now. It maps your situation against the full pattern, tells you whether the conditions are in place, and shows you where this play has worked and where it has broken.

It’s the fastest way to go from “interesting pattern” to “here’s whether and how I run it.”

If this issue sparked something, forward it to someone who’s been watching their category quietly betray its customers and doesn’t have a name for what they’re watching.

See you next week.

Matt

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Sources

de Waal, F. B. M., K. Leimgruber, and A. R. Greenberg. “Giving Is Self-Rewarding for Monkeys.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36 (2008): 13685–13689.

van Wolkenten, M., S. F. Brosnan, and F. B. M. de Waal. “Inequity Responses of Monkeys Modified by Effort.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 47 (2007): 18854–18859.

Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. New York: Dutton, 2014.

Research sources: Marketing Dive (Chili’s campaign mechanics and results), Brinker International Q3 2025 earnings, Restaurant Business Online (traffic attribution data), DesignRush (agency credits, George Felix quotes), LBBOnline (Edelman confirmation). Cross-industry case data: PlanetFitness investor reports, Droga5 campaign documentation for Newcastle, Inc. Magazine and public filings for Dollar Shave Club.

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In March 2021, Under Armour launched something that didn’t feel like marketing.

54,000 runners. 30 miles. 30 days. One challenge that required something real from the people who entered it.

The results: 127 million Instagram views, a 35% footwear revenue lift, and $5.7 billion in total revenue, the highest in Under Armour’s history.

Then they stopped.

By 2025, revenue had dropped 9% and the CEO was asking the company publicly: “How do we reignite the brand’s relevance?”

That question only gets asked when you’ve forgotten what you built.

Here’s what they had built. I call it Memory Equity.

Memory Equity is the collection of shared experiences your audience carries in their body. The memory of becoming someone through your product. Those 54,000 runners finished something genuinely hard, side by side with 53,999 strangers, with data to prove they’d done it. The log. The badge. The AR rings trailing behind them. That’s not a product memory. That’s an identity.

In this video, I walk through exactly how Under Armour built it, why Nike never stopped building it, and what three brands did that completely unraveled the strategy. HP, Lego, and McDonald’s are all in here: three different industries, one pattern, two very different outcomes.

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Four questions to ask before you build it:

1. Own the platform. Social media is rented real estate. The challenge needs a home you control, with data you own.

2. Performance promise. Does your challenge tie directly to what your brand actually stands for? Not a cause. A claim.

3. Aspirational prize. Is the reward worth training toward — or just impressive on paper?

4. Sustained commitment. Can you run it again next year, and the year after?

That last one is where this strategy lives or dies.

I also want to pull back the curtain on something the metrics don’t fully capture.

Robin Dunbar, Oxford’s social bonding scientist, found that synchronized movement toward a shared goal releases endorphins and deepens social bonds faster than almost any other human activity. The body registers finishing together as social evidence.

What’s interesting is that this maps almost exactly onto what spiritual communities have always known about pilgrimage. Same structure, same mechanics, same result. Different vocabulary. People walk the same path, share the same ordeal, reach the same defined end. And they come out different.

The brands that understand this at that level aren’t designing campaigns anymore. They’re designing rites.

Under Armour stumbled onto something ancient in 2021. The real tragedy was not knowing what they’d built.

→ Run your campaign through the Memory Equity Strategy Analyzer GPT

Take your campaign (or your client’s) through the full strategy tour. Find out why it worked. Generate a client-ready strategy deck in Mermaid Markdown, ready to upload to Gamma for Monday morning.

The full newsletter breakdown is over at The Strategy Signal. Same campaign. More depth. A GPT and a YouTube video, all in one place.

See you on the next one.

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In 2021, Under Armour had a new shoe ready, the Flow Velociti Wind.

They had a marketing budget. They had a choice: run ads or build something different.

They built a running challenge. Thirty miles in thirty days. Log every run through the MapMyRun app. Three winners get a dream running trip for two.

54,000 people completed the challenge. 127 million views on Instagram. Footwear revenue grew 35% that year. Overall company revenue hit $5.7 billion. A record.

Four years later, Under Armour reported a 9% revenue decline in FY2025. Company leadership began publicly asking how to “reignite brand relevance.”

That’s a Memory Equity problem.

If you’re a watch-it person, I broke this down on video.

Watch the Memory Equity breakdown on Youtube

Same pattern, different format.

Memory Equity: what is and how it works

As sourced from https://wearesocial.com/ca-en/case-study/under-armour-flow-state-challenge/ along with the campaign Brief.

Memory Equity is the collection of shared experiences your audience carries about your brand.

Brand equity lives in the market. Memory equity lives in the body. It’s the difference between someone who recognizes your logo and someone who remembers finishing something hard while wearing your product.

The mechanism: a brand uses an owned digital platform to host a time-limited, goal-oriented challenge tied to its core performance promise. Participants document progress.

That content brings in new participants.

The cycle builds.

The pattern produces four things at once:

1. owned behavioral data,

2. user-generated content that handles distribution,

3. emotional loyalty, and

4. premium brand positioning through community belonging.

Loyalty members spent roughly 50% more per transaction than average customers.

Shared achievement builds a different kind of customer than a discount does.

How Under Armour built it

Calendar notification demonstrates how Under Armour turned routine running into anticipated community events. The #FLOWSTATECHALLENGE hashtag shows how memory equity campaigns create lasting digital engagement beyond their original timeline. Source: Under Armour Via We Are Social Canada Case Study

The setup mattered as much as the mechanics.

By early 2021, MapMyRun had grown 51% in active workout users during the pandemic. 47% more workouts logged that year. Under Armour had an existing, engaged community of runners who’d been training alone for twelve months, with no races to train toward, no group runs, none of the social infrastructure that gives solo training its meaning. They were fit. They were disconnected. The conditions for something like this had never been better.

Three things were missing from their lives:

1. a goal worth chasing,

2. people to chase it with, and

3. something aspirational to look forward to once travel restrictions lifted.

   Under Armour built the challenge architecture around all three.

The Flow State Challenge addressed all three at once.

The challenge structure gave runners a clear, achievable goal (30 miles in 30 days) with a defined finish line. The MapMyRun platform gave them community, 54,000 people logging miles, watching each other’s progress, moving toward the same thing. The prize, a dream running trip for two, destination selected by Under Armour, redeemable once travel opened, hit something deeper than a gift card ever could.

The psychological concept anchoring it all was flow state. The research came from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the actual science of peak performance, the state where effort feels effortless and focus becomes total. Under Armour built an entire visual identity around making that invisible mental state visible: a custom AR Instagram filter that let runners overlay 3D rings trailing their run path after finishing. A badge you could share. Every element of the experience designed to make the invisible visible: proof the moment happened, proof it was yours.

An invisible experience, made tangible and shareable.

The launch video earned its 127 million views because the athletes in it looked exactly like the runners watching it. Shot by twelve elite athletes across four continents during pandemic restrictions, raw footage, no production crew, no director telling them where to look. Sweat and effort visible on every face.

The runners watching it say more than a campaign.

They saw themselves.

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Timeline execution

March 3, 2021: Challenge launches on MapMyRun.

March 3–April 2: 54,000 runners log miles, share progress, and generate UGC across 30 days.

April 2: Challenge closes. Three winners announced. The AR filter content keeps circulating for weeks.

Why Memory Equity works right now

Three converging forces are making this pattern more valuable every year.

First, the owned data problem.

iOS changes and cookie deprecation have made paid audience targeting more expensive and less precise every year since 2021. The brand that owns its community owns its data. Every one of those 54,000 MapMyRun challenge participants gave Under Armour behavioral insight (athletic habits, geographic spread, run frequency, shoe preferences) at near-zero acquisition cost.

Paid targeting builds none of that.

Second, peer signal beats brand signal.

The average consumer sees somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 brand messages per day. Most don’t register. When 54,000 people publicly complete something hard together, that’s a different kind of signal. People trust peer behavior over brand messages at roughly a 4:1 ratio.

Memory Equity converts your marketing budget from broadcasting into proof.

Third, the premium positioning ceiling.

Brands competing on product features run into commodity pricing eventually. The challenge architecture builds identity attachment that product specs can’t replicate.

The shoe becomes the tool that helped you finish something worth finishing.

Cross-industry proof: the same pattern, three industries

Memory Equity works in sports apparel. The architecture runs across categories, and the results scale regardless of audience size.

1. Nike Run Club

Nike runs this continuously through the Nike Run Club app.

Weekly challenges, monthly distance goals, digital achievement badges. The incentive is social status and community belonging, the same things race day used to provide before the app replaced it. Every challenge completed feeds an owned behavioral dataset while reinforcing Nike’s performance identity in ways no ad buy can replicate.

Millions of active athletes logging challenges across a global owned platform. The data stays with Nike.

The loyalty stays with the app.

Same pattern. Sports technology.

2. HP #HPRadicalReuse

HP challenged TikTok creators to show how they reuse materials in everyday life, tied to their use of ocean-collected plastics and corporate sustainability commitment. The incentive was social recognition on a platform built around transformation content.

A sustainability message that would have died as a press release became a cultural conversation because the mechanic turned spectators into participants.

1.4 billion views. 1.2 million user-created videos. 5.9% lift in ad recall. 1.9% lift in brand favorability.

Same pattern. Consumer technology.

3. LEGO Ideas

LEGO made the challenge permanent. Submit an original set design, build community support up to 10,000 votes, get reviewed for official production. Winners see their creation manufactured and sold worldwide, plus a royalty percentage.

LEGO turned their most passionate customers into their product development pipeline, not just once, but as the standing architecture of how new products get built.

Fan-submitted designs with 10,000 votes advance to production review. LEGO’s most engaged customers now shape what gets built next.

Same pattern but for consumer goods.

Three companies. Three industries.

One mechanism: build a platform where participation produces something worth keeping.

The architecture doesn’t care what product you make.

Where it breaks: three campaigns with the receipts

Memory Equity breaks in predictable ways. Three campaigns left the receipts.

1. McDonald’s #McDStories (2012)

McDonald’s invited customers to share warm memories on Twitter. No owned platform, just a public square. Within an hour, replies documented food poisoning and worse.

72,788 negative tweets in under an hour. Campaign cancelled the day it launched.

Same break. No owned platform.

2. The Pepsi Refresh Project (2010)

Pepsi redirected $20 million into a community voting platform for grassroots social causes. The engagement was genuine. Memory Equity requires the shared experience to run through the brand’s actual promise, and the experience of drinking Pepsi was never part of it.

80 million votes. 18 million unique visitors. Pepsi sales declined 6%. Campaign discontinued after two years.

Same break. Challenge disconnected from the brand’s promise.

3. YouTube Rewind 2018

YouTube positioned their annual Rewind as a community reflection. Creators immediately recognized a corporate production filtering out everything genuinely popular. The community had no real voice in it.

Over 20 million dislikes before YouTube removed the counter. Format discontinued after 2019.

Same break. Community voice under management.

The failure condition is always structural. The diagnostic question before you build this: which of these three vulnerabilities does your client face? And the harder lesson from Under Armour’s FY2025: a single activation builds a campaign. Continuous activation builds Memory Equity. Memory Equity erodes when you stop earning it.

Four questions before you build it

Before recommending this pattern to any client, I run four diagnostics.

1. Does the brand have an owned platform (app, loyalty program, or engaged community hub) where the challenge can live? No platform, no architecture.

2. Does the challenge connect authentically to the brand’s actual performance promise? A hollow challenge disconnected from brand identity reads as a marketing stunt.

3. Is the prize aspirational to this specific audience? You need to know what the audience’s life could look like, the thing they’d actually work toward and feel proud of finishing.

4. Does the brand have the infrastructure to run this continuously? One activation builds buzz. Continuous activation builds Memory Equity.

If the answer to any of these is no, the conditions need work before the pattern can run.

What the body remembers

Here’s what I keep coming back to with this campaign.

People carry what they did together. That’s the memory.

54,000 runners did more than buy a shoe after the Flow State Challenge. They finished something hard, side by side with 53,999 strangers, and they had the data to prove it. The run log. The badge. The AR rings trailing behind them in the Instagram post. Memory with a body.

Those 54,000 runners had been training alone for twelve months without a race date, without a group, without anyone counting on them to show up. Research on social isolation is consistent: people chronically underestimate how much they need connection until they’re back in it.

In one study, commuters asked to choose between sitting alone or talking to a stranger almost universally preferred solitude, then reported a significantly more enjoyable commute when assigned to connect. (Levitin, The Organized Mind, p. 126; Epley, Mindwise, pp. 58–59) Under Armour built the challenge directly into that gap.

There’s a second layer the challenge brief didn’t account for. Coordinated movement toward a shared goal triggers oxytocin alongside the endorphins. It’s the bonding chemical the brain typically reserves for its closest relationships. Research shows it measurably increases trust toward others even in brief social encounters. (Levitin, The Organized Mind, p. 142) The body registers finishing together as social evidence: proof that this person can be counted on. Twelve months of solo miles had produced the endorphins.

The oxytocin requires a witness.

The neuroscience here is worth sitting with. The psychologist Robin Dunbar found that synchronized physical activity, moving together toward a shared goal, releases endorphins and deepens social bonds faster than almost any other human activity. Rowers who trained in synchrony showed significantly elevated pain thresholds compared to those rowing alone, a physiological marker of social bonding. (Dunbar et al., Biology Letters, 2010) It’s why finishing a race with strangers feels like more than finishing a race alone.

Memory Equity borrows that mechanic and builds it into brand architecture.

What Under Armour assembled in March 2021 was, in the language of depth psychology, a container: a bounded space where transformation becomes possible. Thirty days. A defined distance. A community tracking the same finish line. Every element of that structure is ancient. Pilgrimage works the same way. A shared ordeal with a defined end works the same way. The brands that understand this are designing something closer to a rite than a campaign.

Under Armour, in 2021, earned belonging. That’s the thing most brands are still trying to buy.

The question worth asking for your clients: which of them has an owned platform, a real performance promise, and a community already forming around something meaningful?

Because the conditions for building Memory Equity might be sitting there unused, waiting for someone to see that the pieces are already in place.

Sources

Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Dutton, 2014. pp. 126, 142.

Epley, Nicholas. Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pp. 58–59.

Cohen, E., Ejsmond-Frey, R., Knight, N., & Dunbar, R.I.M. (2010). Rowers’ high: Behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology Letters, 6, 106–108.

Run your client through the Memory Equity Analyzer

I built a GPT that applies this pattern to your client situations.

Paste in what you know about their owned platform, their core performance promise, and the community forming around their product.

It runs the four diagnostics and tells you whether the conditions are there, what’s missing, and what to fix first.

[[Memory Equity Analyzer GPT →]] Click here for the Free GPT.

If this pattern surfaces in a client conversation this week, I’d love to hear what you’re seeing. Hit reply.

See you next issue.

Matt

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