The internet doesn't reward perfect marketing. It rewards attention. We study the posts brand teams hate and the algorithm loves.
What marketers call ragebait, clickbait, engagement bait, and snarky brand voice are all the same game with different costumes. Pattern interruption is the cleaner name. It's also more honest.
Attention drives engagement. Engagement drives distribution. Distribution drives awareness. Awareness creates the only thing that ever mattered: the chance to sell.
BAD MARKETING is the operating manual for that loop — a media brand and a lab studying the posts everyone screenshots.
Pick a brand. Pick a moment. Pick a tone. The Engine drafts the post, scores it 1–35 on the Chernobyl Scorecard, and tells you how to push it harder.
A 90-second hack about pricing the deli rotisserie chicken hit cross-platform virality. Publix reportedly issued a company-wide memo to shut it down. A free post moved policy at a $50B grocer.
Compared the assembly-line choreography at Chipotle to corporate teamwork dysfunction. Workplace nerve + universal food-court familiarity = compounding shares.
One opinion about reclining seats. Eight thousand comments arguing over armrests. The post barely mattered — the comment section was the post.
Why grown adults drive an hour out of the way for a gas station. Regional identity made tradable to a national audience.
Every framework we publish at Bad Marketing comes from operating real businesses. These are the receipts.
$0 on ads. The customer-as-content engine.
OPEN FILE →Pandemic pivot. NBA seeding. 25M monthly views.
OPEN FILE →