Every trick, performed in the wild.
Real campaigns, deconstructed. Hover, click, and scroll through each one to see exactly how it works — and how to do it yourself.
A skincare brand turns a moisturizer into a transformation story using social proof, specificity, and a perfectly placed scarcity cue.
An anchor, a decoy, and a default — three tricks that make the middle plan feel inevitable.
Six lines. Four tricks. One reply rate that beats the agency average by 4×.
How a single carousel ad layers urgency, anchoring, and pattern interrupt to stop the scroll on the busiest ad day of the year.
How sponsored content borrows authority and reciprocity to land harder than any ad.
Endowed progress, smart defaults, and loss-aversion turn an abandonment cliff into a smooth glide.
Curiosity gap, authority, and reciprocity converge on a single low-friction ask.
A teardown of the worst kind of magic: friction asymmetry that traps customers in subscriptions they tried to leave.
How a five-screen wizard turns a blank canvas into a personalized workspace — and into emotional sunk-cost before you've sent a single doc.
How a single number on a mobile home screen turns a casual app into a daily habit — by weaponizing what you'd lose, not what you'd gain.
Status signaling, named villains, and pristine fluency turn a project tracker into an identity decision.
A six-line outreach that lands because every line is doing one job — specificity, reciprocity, and a small-yes ask in that order.
How a 75-year-old brand became cool again by naming a villain ('the man your man could smell like'), breaking every ad pattern in the category, and making women the buyer.
How a newsletter grew to 4M subscribers using a curiosity-gap-and-payoff formula in every subject line — and why it doesn't feel like clickbait.
A $89 ticket becomes $164 across four screens — anchoring, sunk-cost, and drip pricing weaponized in sequence.
How a single consent modal uses Von Restorff, confirmshaming, and obstruction to manufacture 'consent' that wouldn't survive a regulator screenshot.
A B2C app's onboarding stacks small-yes commitments with forced continuity to convert curiosity into an annual charge — without the user noticing.
Billy McFarland and Ja Rule sold $26M of tickets to a festival that didn't exist using 400 influencers, one orange tile, and zero disclosure. The blueprint for every influencer scam since.
VW spent a decade telling the world its diesels were green while shipping software that cheated emissions tests. The marketing was the cover for the fraud — and it cost $33B+ in fines.
Sam Bankman-Fried bought A-list reassurance to make a fraudulent exchange feel as safe as a checking account. The 'Don't miss out' Super Bowl spot is now Exhibit A in a class action.
A leaked internal email from founder Sunday Riley instructed employees to write fake five-star Sephora reviews — including how to use VPNs and dislike negative reviews. The FTC settled, the receipts went viral.
A sales-quota slogan, weaponized down through every branch, turned a marketing target into 3.5M unauthorized accounts and $7B in fines. Marketing didn't open the accounts — but marketing made the goal that did.
BetterHelp marketed clinical-grade confidentiality, then shared mental health intake data with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo for ad targeting. FTC fined $7.8M and banned the practice.
An influencer with 23M YouTube subs sold an NFT 'game' that didn't exist, used scarcity hype to drive $2.5M+ in token sales, then blamed his developers for a year. Class action filed Feb 2023.
Sportsbook ads promised 'risk-free' bets that returned site credit, not cash, with rollover requirements buried in 8-point type. NY AG forced rewording; multiple states now ban the phrase outright.
Fortnite's UI made it one tap to spend V-Bucks, near-impossible to refund, and trapped kids in 'unwanted purchases' confirm screens with no cancel. Largest FTC consumer refund in history.