Cards Against Humanity Holiday Bullshit: Anti-Marketing as the Most Effective Marketing
Every holiday season, Cards Against Humanity does something deliberately absurd — selling 'nothing,' raising prices on Black Friday, digging a hole for no reason — and every year the press coverage is worth millions in earned media. It is anti-marketing executed with more marketing discipline than most conventional campaigns.
Cards Against Humanity has never run a conventional holiday promotion. No percentage-off deals, no gift-with-purchase bundles, no countdown timers. Instead, every year around Black Friday and Christmas, the company does something that makes journalists type “wait, they actually did what?” into their search bars. That pattern — consistent absurdity, annual repetition, earned media worth many multiples of production cost — is one of the more quietly brilliant marketing programs of the past decade.
The paradox is that the anti-marketing is deeply intentional. Every stunt is chosen, planned, and executed with the kind of discipline that most brands reserve for conventional campaigns. The irreverence isn’t accidental. It’s the product.
The Context
Cards Against Humanity launched on Kickstarter in 2011 and grew into a cultural phenomenon partly through word of mouth, partly through the game’s inherent shareability (it’s designed to produce moments people immediately want to describe to friends who weren’t there), and partly through a consistent refusal to behave like a normal company. The founders — Max Temkin, Josh Dillon, David Munk, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, Daniel Piccolo, and Ambrose, who remained relatively low-profile individually — built the brand’s public identity around a specific worldview: that most corporate behavior is absurd, that consumers mostly know it, and that a company willing to say so loudly will be rewarded with attention.
By 2013, the game was already a bestseller. The founders didn’t need a holiday marketing campaign to drive sales. They ran stunts anyway. The distinction matters: the stunts weren’t desperate bids for attention from a company that needed help. They were the behavior of a brand confident enough to treat its own marketing as a creative project worth doing well.
The Campaign
The stunts accumulate into a tradition that’s worth understanding as a whole rather than as individual incidents.
In 2013, on Black Friday, Cards Against Humanity sent an email to their list announcing a special sale. The sale was nothing. Literally nothing. For $5, you received zero product, zero acknowledgment, and zero refund. The company was explicit about this: “We’re selling absolutely nothing.” More than 11,000 people paid $5 for it. The press covered the stunt extensively because it was both funny and, in a sideways way, a genuine comment on the performative absurdity of Black Friday shopping.
In 2014, they went further. Instead of offering a discount on Black Friday, they raised the price by $5. Cards Against Humanity was now more expensive on the biggest shopping day of the year than it was on any other day. Sales went up. They made more money that Black Friday than they had the year before. The lesson they drew from this — that their audience found the stunt charming enough to participate in — shaped everything that followed.
2015 brought the “Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah” (a relatively mild year of actual small gifts, which in context felt like a punchline). 2016 was the hole. Cards Against Humanity asked people to donate money to dig a hole in the ground. No stated purpose. No destination. Just a hole. They livestreamed the digging for 72 hours. Donors could add more time by giving more money. They raised over $100,000. The hole was dug. It served no function. When asked what the hole was for, the company’s official response was: “The hole is a hole.”
The 2017 stunt was the most consequential. In the weeks after the 2016 US presidential election, Cards Against Humanity ran “Cards Against Humanity Saves America.” For $15, buyers received six surprise gifts. One of those gifts was a deed to a small plot of land on the US-Mexico border, purchased by the company specifically to complicate the construction of a border wall. They also hired a law firm and engineers to make the land as legally difficult to acquire via eminent domain as possible. The campaign raised $2.5 million. The press coverage was extensive — not just in advertising trade publications, but in political journalism, legal journalism, and mainstream news outlets that normally wouldn’t cover a party game company’s marketing.
Why It Worked
The stunts work for three reasons, and all three have to be present simultaneously.
First, they’re consistent with the product. Cards Against Humanity is a game built around the premise that polite fictions are funnier when punctured. The game doesn’t have a wholesome mode. Its humor comes from the collision between socially acceptable framing and the most inappropriate possible content. A company that makes that game raising money to dig a purposeless hole is behaving in exactly the way you’d expect. If Hallmark pulled the same stunt, it would be dissonant to the point of confusion. When Cards Against Humanity does it, it feels like brand expression.
Second, the stunts treat the audience as co-conspirators rather than targets. When the company announced it was selling nothing for $5, the copy acknowledged the joke explicitly. When they raised prices on Black Friday, they explained why in a tone that was equal parts mock-serious and genuinely funny. The audience understood they were being invited into a bit, not manipulated by a promotion. That distinction is the difference between a stunt that generates warmth and one that generates resentment.
Third, the stunts are actually executed. The hole got dug. The border land got purchased. The nothing got delivered (or rather, didn’t get delivered, which was the point). There’s a version of this kind of campaign that stops at the announcement and hopes the premise is enough. Cards Against Humanity always followed through, which meant the press could cover not just the announcement but the result.
The escalation problem is real and worth acknowledging. Each year’s stunt had to be at least as interesting as the last year’s, which creates structural pressure. A hole is harder to top than selling nothing. A land purchase is harder to top than a hole. The 2018 and subsequent stunts showed some strain against this constraint — they remained interesting, but the early stunts had a freshness that couldn’t fully be replicated.
The Results
The measurable results are approximate because Cards Against Humanity is a private company that doesn’t publish revenue figures, but the outlines are clear. The 2013 “nothing” stunt generated over 11,000 purchases at $5 each, plus press coverage in outlets including Forbes, The Guardian, and dozens of technology and marketing publications. The 2016 hole raised more than $100,000 with no promised return. The 2017 border land campaign raised $2.5 million and was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and major international news outlets. The cost to produce and execute each of these stunts was, in media value terms, a fraction of the coverage they generated.
The broader result is that Cards Against Humanity built a brand with strong recall and genuine affection in a category (party games) where brands are normally interchangeable. When you ask someone what card game they want for Christmas, they name the brand. That’s not common in the games category.
The Lesson for Today’s Marketers
The obvious lesson — “do a weird stunt and get press coverage” — is not the lesson. Weird stunts fail constantly. What makes Cards Against Humanity’s approach work is that it passes a test most brands can’t pass: every stunt could only have come from this brand.
Imagine the “Five Dollars of Nothing” being offered by State Farm. Or a hole being dug by Kraft. The absurdity wouldn’t be funny because it wouldn’t be consistent with anything we know about those brands. It would read as a brand trying to be interesting rather than a brand being itself.
The real lesson is about authenticity as a strategic asset. Cards Against Humanity spent years building a reputation for a specific kind of wit, a specific relationship with its audience, and a specific willingness to be openly ridiculous. The holiday stunts didn’t build that reputation — they expressed it. The credibility came first. The stunts were only possible because the groundwork existed.
Brands that want to run anti-marketing campaigns should ask whether their existing reputation could support the joke before they try to make it. The answer is usually no — and that’s important information. For most companies, the better question isn’t “how do we do something weird like Cards Against Humanity did” but rather “what’s the most honest, direct expression of what we actually are?” That answer will be different for every brand. For Cards Against Humanity, it happened to be digging a hole. For your brand, it’s probably something else entirely. The principle transfers. The specific stunt doesn’t.
Key Results
- 2013 Black Friday stunt: Sold 'nothing' for $5 — over 11,000 people bought it
- 2016 'Dig a Hole' stunt: Raised over $100,000 to dig a pointless hole; streamed live for 72 hours
- 2017 'Save America' campaign: Raised $2.5 million to purchase land on the US-Mexico border to impede wall construction
- Annual coverage: Each stunt covered by major press outlets with minimal paid media spend
SWOT Analysis
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Key Takeaway
Cards Against Humanity's stunts work because they're true to the product. A game that's about being willfully inappropriate sells itself best by being willfully inappropriate. The most effective brand marketing amplifies what you already are rather than performing something you're not.
