I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion that the folks behind Cards Against Humanity are marketing geniuses. Whatever you think of their game, they sure know how to get it in front of your eyeballs. This goes beyond your typical Facebook ads though — CaH takes pride in using the vast amounts of money that people throw at them to play pranks on everybody. Most of the time, these pranks are brilliant and clever, especially when they turn an established expectation on its head (their Black Friday sale where they charged $5 for “nothing,” for example). Other times, they are dumb and border on wasteful (like last year’s promotion where they…dug a big hole?). But their track record is pretty solid, especially with their Holiday mailing promotion.
Each year for the past several, CaH have asked people for $15 in exchange for a number of mystery prizes sent through the mail. It’s always a gamble what you get, but for 15 bucks, it’s usually worth it just for the promo cards they send you. This was the first time I accidentally forgot to sign up for it in time before they sold out, so instead of crying about it I’d thought I’d go back through the promotion and review it. I’ll be reviewing each day of this year’s holiday giveaway, titled Cards Against Humanity Saves America, focusing on a couple things:
Cleverness: How brilliant of an idea was this from a marketing perspective?
Funnyness: How funny was it, obviously.
Value: 150,000 customers x $15 = $2,225,000 raised for this promo. Divide that by 6 days (after factoring in some arbitrary amount for administrative expenses that happens to make it an even two mill) we get $333,333.33 of an approximate cost per day. How well was that money spent? Also, did each customer get approximately $2.50 worth of shit?
For simplicity’s sake, let’s rate these on a scale from 1–4 good ‘ol American stars.
(Here’s the link to all the promos, so you can follow along)
Day One: Cards Against Humanity Stops The Wall
CaH walked away from the 2016 election with a bit of egg on their face: they put out a satirical Donald Trump Survival Kit that fall, with all proceeds going towards Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President. Spoiler alert: that didn’t quite work out. At the time, I thought this was kindof a risky move for their brand. There’s no way they expected Trump to win, which means they were explicitly backing what would soon become “the establishment” while also continuing to tear it down on a daily basis. If a brand does get that deeply involved in politics, which is risky even without CaH’s reputation, it’s probably a good idea to at least punch up at power, not get in bed with it. Since Trump won though, they got to hang on to their street cred, but they wasted an ungodly amount of money.
The first day of this promo appears to be a mea culpa of sorts. It feels almost like revenge. The crew decided to buy up some land near the Mexican border and retain a law firm in order to make it as time consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall.
Cleverness: * * *
This was a great promo to start with, as it got nationwide press coverage and brought them a lot of attention.
However, the payoff of this promo is another big gamble. First of all, let’s just be honest here…Trump’s wall is probably not happening anyway. As of this writing, Congress has not funded the project, which amounts to a handful of prototypes sitting in a desert. Secondly, even if the wall got the green light, it’s going to be a massive undertaking, and Trump probably isn’t going to be around long enough to see it though. Even the lawyers admit that in their statement. So what’s the end game here if the project just died? That being said, if Trump ever did try to take CaH’s land, it certainly would be interesting and would probably get them back in the news.
Funnyness: * *
This is supposed to be more practical than straight up funny, but they buried one of the funniest pieces of it further down the page: they actually built a damn trebuchet!
I wonder what would have happened if CaH took a more satirical stance here: what if they had bought the land and then set up a series of antique defenses to “help” Trump stop all the invaders from Mexico? Imagine if they built a compound right at the border, complete with a moat, castle, working catapults, and hired some guys to patrol as knights. Take Trump’s idea to its extreme, and then have the world watch as Trump tries to tear down this extremely secure blockade to build a simple wall!
Value: * * *
I would guess it cost a poop-load to buy the land and hire the law firm pretty much indefinitely, plus that trebuchet. I’d say that gets us pretty close to $300K.
From the customer perspective, they got a map of the land and the lawyer’s statement, which is kinda cool, but the bulk of the material is also available online, which we’ll see follows a bit of a pattern here.
All images owned by Cards Against Humanity.
