Insurgent Campaign

Insurgent Campaign

A campaign-design skill for organizations and people who cannot win by outspending. It ideates campaign concepts across every major archetype, audits the user's spend asymmetry against their competition, assembles an insurgent channel stack, sets strict boost gates on any paid spend, and produces a lift-test plan so the user measures incremental impact rather than vanity metrics.

Core Premise

Paid media scales attention. Organic narrative and grassroots networks scale trust. When trust is the bottleneck — and in 2025–2026, for most underdogs, it is — additional ad spend hits diminishing and then negative returns. Saturation, inauthenticity, and narrative incoherence produce reactance, not persuasion. The leverage point is not reach; it is credibility and message-market fit.

Empirical spine:

• Academic field experiments show digital ad ROI confidence intervals are so wide that most campaigns cannot be statistically distinguished from zero lift (Lewis & Rao, "The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising," Quarterly Journal of Economics 2015). Meta and Google both ship Conversion Lift / Brand Lift tools precisely because they distinguish attributed conversions from incremental conversions — the platforms' own tooling is the tacit admission that dashboard ROAS is not causal.
• Across 18,000+ brands, CPA rose in 13/14 industries in 2025; ROAS fell in 13/14; conversion rates fell in 13/14. More money is buying fewer results.
• Facebook organic engagement sits near 0.15%, Instagram ~0.50%, X ~0.15%, TikTok ~2.50% — still the best organic window but compressing fast.
• Meta and Google both ended political/issue ads in the EU in October 2025, removing paid channels entirely for large categories and forcing organic to carry the campaign.
• Under the most extreme spending asymmetry imaginable (a grassroots party vs. a €4B state-backed communications apparatus with foreign support), the side with near-zero paid media won a parliamentary supermajority in Hungary in April 2026 — see references/hungarian-case-study.md.

The same curve bends commercial advertising. The skill treats paid as an amplifier of proven organic winners, never as a standalone channel.

When to Apply This Skill

Apply when the user:

• Asks to plan any campaign (marketing, launch, fundraising, mobilization, awareness, turnout).
• Describes being outspent by a competitor, incumbent, or adversary.
• Is considering ad spend, boosts, influencer deals, or scaling a paid channel.
• Is watching their organic reach collapse and wondering what to do.
• Is preparing for a launch, election, fundraise, product push, or cause-led moment.
• Is deciding between paid and organic allocation, or between channels.

Also apply when no explicit "campaign" is named but the user is debating where to invest time and money for distribution.

Workflow

The skill runs in seven stages (1, 2, 3, 3a, 4, 5, 5b). Do not skip stages; later stages depend on the user's answers and selections from earlier ones. Stage 3a (MMF Gate) can refuse the full campaign plan and route the user to validation work instead. Stage 5 ends with a shape selection — Stage 5b only begins once the user has picked one of the three shapes.

This skill is designed to be portable across agent environments. Where the workflow says "ask the user," use whatever structured-question facility your environment provides (in Claude Code that is the AskUserQuestion tool, batching up to 4 questions per call); if no structured tool exists, ask in plain text and wait for the user to reply before continuing. Either way, never invent answers.

Resume Protocol (idempotency). Before producing any output, scan the conversation for prior skill output. If a section's heading (## N. <name>) is already present in the conversation, do not regenerate it. Pick up at the first stage whose Contract preconditions are satisfied AND whose output section(s) are not yet in the conversation. If the user explicitly asks to restart, restart from Stage 1; otherwise resume rather than rerun. This makes the skill safely re-invokable: a second call in the same conversation produces only the next incremental section, never duplicates or regressions to earlier stages. Scope: idempotency holds within a single conversation; if prior output exists only in an external file or a previous session, paste it into the conversation first or restart from Stage 1.

Stage Contracts. Each stage below opens with a Contract block declaring inputs, outputs, preconditions, postconditions, and failure modes. The contract is the structural boundary — it is what makes the stage retry-safe, error- explicit, and self-describing. Treat the contract as binding: if the preconditions are not met, do not enter the stage; if a failure-mode trigger fires, take the declared action rather than improvising.

Stage 1 — Interview / Brief Capture

Contract

• Inputs: user's initial brief (free text, any length).
• Outputs: Section 0 (Assumptions table) under Mode C; mode-tag (A/B/C) and the 8 fields captured in working memory for downstream stages.
• Preconditions: none (entry stage).
• Postconditions: all 8 fields have a value (captured, defaulted, or flagged as [ask] for a still-pending question); mode is determined.
• Failure modes:
  • any always-capture field missing under Mode C → add it to the question batch; do not default silently.
  • a missing field would change Stage 3 asymmetry classification OR Stage 4 function choice → escalate it into the batch even if it would normally default.
  • user gives contradictory values for the same field → ask one clarifying question; do not pick one silently.

The skill has three intake modes. Pick the mode that matches the user's brief before asking any questions.

Mode A — Full-brief mode. The user has volunteered all 8 fields below up front (in a pasted brief, a prior plan, a detailed message). Skip the interview entirely, confirm understanding in one sentence, and proceed to Stage 2.

Mode B — Interview mode. The user explicitly asks to be scoped ("help me figure out what this campaign should be," "walk me through it," "interview me"). Ask the 8 questions below in batches of ≤4 per turn, using the environment's structured question facility if one exists (see the structured-tool note in the Workflow section above). Do not invent answers. Do not merge questions.

Mode C — Default mode (for terse briefs). The user gave a short brief (≤2 sentences) without asking for an interview. This is the common case. Do NOT run the full 8-question interview — it turns a 12-word prompt into an interrogation. Instead:

1. Always-capture fields (ask once, batched). Four fields are too material to default silently; getting them wrong produces a generic plan. Ask the user in one batch of up to 4 questions covering:

   • Outcome — what specific action is the campaign driving (signups, ticket sales, votes, donations, attendance, pre-orders, qualified demos)?
   • Audience — who is the target? Who experiences the problem? Geography, seniority, community membership. "Everyone interested in AI" is not an audience; "London-based senior AI/ML engineers at Series A–C startups" is.
   • Sector — pick from the 6 riders in references/sector-riders.md (cohort-education, b2b-saas, ngo, consumer-brand, political-civic, personal-brand), or other with a one-sentence description. The sector rider materially changes Stage 4 channel weighting and Stage 5 archetype defaults.
   • Budget — what can you actually spend per month (€0 / <€1k / €1k–10k / €10k+) and what is the competitor's rough spend (unknown / similar / 5× ours / 50×+ ours)? Budget materially changes Stage 3 asymmetry classification and Stage 4 paid-channel availability. Never default this silently.

   If one of these four fields is already clearly present in the user's brief, drop it from the question batch. Only ask what is missing.

2. Default-with-flag fields. The remaining fields default silently but are surfaced in an Assumptions table at the top of the final deliverable (Stage 5 output). The user can confirm or adjust inline after reading the plan:

   Field	Default under terse brief
   Competition (specifics)	Abstract — "cohort-based courses in the category," "mid-size SaaS competitors," etc. Use the heuristic questions in references/asymmetry-audit-table.md to classify asymmetry qualitatively. Never invent specific competitor names.
   Existing channels / traction	"Starting from zero" unless the user's brief, working directory, or CLAUDE.md clearly indicates an existing newsletter, community, or follower base.
   Bottleneck	Trust (the 2025–2026 default for almost every underdog campaign).
   Time window	60 days to a single dated anchor moment (event, launch, election), then recurring cadence.
   Capacity	6h/week.

3. Escalation rule. If a missing field would materially change the Stage 3 asymmetry classification or the Stage 4 primary-function choice, do not default it — add it to the question batch. Example: if the user mentions "our whole team is posting already" but does not specify which channels, ask, because it changes the channel stack.

4. Assumptions table is mandatory under Mode C. Open the final deliverable with a table listing every defaulted field and its assumed value. End the deliverable with: "Confirm or adjust any row in the Assumptions table and I will re-run the affected stages."

The 8 Fields

Regardless of mode, the campaign plan is grounded in these 8 fields:

1. Sector and outcome — which of the 6 sector riders applies, and the specific action the campaign drives. (Sector is ask-once in Mode C; outcome is ask-once in Mode C.)
2. Audience — who is the target, with enough specificity to picture them. (Ask-once in Mode C.)
3. Competition / incumbent — name 3–5 specific competitors, or say "unknown" / "I'll describe them abstractly." If unknown, stay at category level and use references/asymmetry-audit-table.md heuristics. Never invent names. (Defaults in Mode C; user can sharpen in the Assumptions confirmation.)
4. Budget — user's and competitor's, in numbers or rough ratios. (Ask-once in Mode C.)
5. Existing channels and traction — where does the user already reach the audience (newsletter size, community size, follower counts that matter, warm email list, prior press). (Defaults in Mode C.)
6. Bottleneck — reach / trust / conversion / turnout / retention — pick one. (Defaults to trust in Mode C.)
7. Time window — evergreen / 30 / 60 / 90 days / tied to a dated event or launch. (Defaults to 60 days in Mode C.)
8. Capacity — realistic hours per week. Hard-constrains Stage 5's first-30-days action list; lowest-ROI actions get cut until total weekly effort fits. (Defaults to 6h/week in Mode C.)

Stage 2 — Ideation (generate 5+ campaign concepts across archetypes)

Contract

• Inputs: 8 fields from Stage 1 (especially sector, audience, competition descriptor).
• Outputs: Section 1 (Campaign Ideas) with ≥5 concepts across distinct archetypes; an explicit ask to the user to pick one or more.
• Preconditions: Stage 1 complete; sector field has a value (named or other).
• Postconditions: ≥5 distinct-archetype concepts presented; user has been prompted to select.
• Failure modes:
  • competitor unnamed in brief → use [incumbent] placeholder or category descriptor in every concept; never invent a name.
  • cannot produce 5 genuinely distinct archetypes for this audience/sector → say so plainly, present what you have, do not pad with cosmetic variants of one archetype.
  • user's brief names one dominant player but expects industry peers → do not auto-name the obvious #2/#3; use the escape-hatch phrasings from the Industry-peer rule.

Before any audit or channel work, generate at least five distinct campaign concepts, drawn from different archetypes in references/campaign-archetypes.md. Do not converge early. The point is to give the user a shaped menu to choose from.

For each concept, produce:

• Name — short, memorable, in the user's voice.
• One-line thesis — why this campaign works for this user against this competitor right now.
• Archetype — which archetype it draws from (e.g., founder-story arc, counter-narrative, earned-media stunt, referral flywheel, community-build, coalition play).
• Primary channel tier — which tier from references/channel-tier-stack.md this concept leans on (Tier 1/2/3/4).
• Authenticity hook — the specific real-world detail, person, story, or action that makes it credible and hard to fake.
• Minimum viable version — the smallest possible execution that proves the concept works in two weeks or less.

Anti-fabrication rule for concept names, theses, and hooks. If the user named a specific competitor in the brief, use the name. If the user said "well-known incumbent," "market leader," "the dominant player," or otherwise did not name one, do not fill in the blank with your best guess. Stay at the level of abstraction the brief gave you. Use the category descriptor (e.g., "the $400-per-seat monitor"), the behavior ("the enterprise billing tax"), or a bracketed placeholder ([incumbent]) that the user will fill in. Concept names like "We Quit Sentry" or "DataDog Alternative" — invented from the category description rather than the brief — violate the Stage 1 anti-fabrication rule and must not appear in Stage 2 output. This applies equally to SEO keyword lists, earned-media pitch hooks, and any downstream section that inherits the concept name.

Industry-peer rule. The anti-fabrication rule covers any competitor name absent from the brief — not only invented names, but widely-known industry peers to a brief-named incumbent. If the brief names one dominant player (e.g., the user says "we're outspent 100x by [market leader]"), do not add the obvious #2 or #3 from the same category on your own ("LexisNexis and Westlaw," "Salesforce and HubSpot," "Datadog and New Relic") as if their presence were implied context. Use escape-hatch phrasing instead: "the other major [category] platforms," "[incumbent]-class tools," or "the dominant [category] incumbents." This applies in every section — Stage 2 concepts, Stage 4 SEO, Stage 5 competitor saturation, Stage 5b earned-media targets and ad-copy hooks, and any other downstream output. The discipline does not relax in any later stage. "Everyone in the industry knows it exists" is not a licence to name it.

After presenting the five concepts, ask the user to pick one (or more) to push through Stage 3–5.

Stage 3 — Asymmetry Audit

Contract

• Inputs: budget (user's + competitor's), or heuristic answers from references/asymmetry-audit-table.md; the concept(s) the user selected from Stage 2.
• Outputs: Section 3 (Spend Asymmetry Verdict) — one-sentence classification + preconditions score (0–6).
• Preconditions: Stage 2 complete; user has named one or more concepts to push forward.
• Postconditions: asymmetry classified as mild / severe / categorical; preconditions count is in {0..6}; downstream stages know which playbook scale to run.
• Failure modes:
  • 0–2 preconditions → name the missing ones, refuse the full playbook, route the user to building the missing preconditions as the campaign itself.
  • asymmetry numbers absent → ask the heuristic questions in the reference file; do not assume a level.
  • user gives competitor spend in a non-comparable form (e.g., revenue, headcount) → ask one clarifying question to convert to spend ratio; do not estimate silently.

Classify the user's spend asymmetry using the table in references/asymmetry-audit-table.md.

• If the user gave numbers: compute the ratio (competitor spend ÷ user spend) and map it to mild (1:2–1:5), severe (1:5–1:50), or categorical (1:50+).
• If the user did not give numbers: ask the heuristic questions from the reference file (state-backing? can they afford billboards? do they dominate your category's search ads?) and classify qualitatively.

Report back one sentence: Your asymmetry is <level>. This means <what it means for your strategy>. Do not hedge. Do not offer a "balanced" recommendation if the user is at categorical — it would be misleading.

Then run a Preconditions Check. The insurgent playbook wins when preconditions are present; asymmetry alone is not enough. Score the user's situation against the six factors that made the Hungarian case work (see references/hungarian-case-study.md for the full mechanism). Ask or infer:

1. Credible insider / founder-story / defector equivalent. Is there a real person whose authenticity the competitor cannot manufacture?
2. Accumulated grievance or unmet demand. Is there anger the incumbent has ignored long enough that it only needs a vehicle?
3. Consolidated challenger field. Is the user the one clear alternative, or one of many? Fragmented fields dilute organic narrative.
4. Felt pain, not abstract pain. Does every target experience the cost directly (price, time, trust, service failure), or is the grievance distributed?
5. Threshold-rewarding market / platform / system. Does the distribution system reward consolidation once a share crosses some threshold (network effects, category leadership, algorithm-bound attention, electoral math)?
6. Incumbent overplaying a fear / saturation hand. Is the competitor running past the curve — more ads, more fear, more polished content — in a way the user can counter-position against?

Score 0–6. Tell the user the count plainly and what it implies:

• 5–6 preconditions: run the insurgent playbook at full scale. Proceed to Stage 4.
• 3–4 preconditions: proceed, but flag the missing ones as campaign sub-goals — the user will need to build them during the campaign (e.g., find a credible voice, surface the grievance) for organic to compound.
• 0–2 preconditions: refuse to execute the playbook at full scale. Building the preconditions is the campaign. Recruit the credible voice, consolidate the coalition, surface and name the grievance, find the felt-pain story. Until those are present, the insurgent playbook will underperform and burn the volunteer/community energy it depends on. Say this out loud. Do not soften it.

Stage 3a — Message-Market-Fit Gate

Contract

• Inputs: three yes/no signals (revenue/commitment, audience-language, close) from the user.
• Outputs: Section 3a (3 signals + 0–3 score + explicit verdict).
• Preconditions: Stage 3 complete.
• Postconditions: verdict ∈ {3/3 proceed, 2/3 validation-cycle, 0–1/3 refuse}; downstream stages know whether to proceed, insert a validation cycle, or stop.
• Failure modes:
  • score 0–1/3 → produce only Section 3a + refusal text; do NOT generate Sections 4–11. Route the user to a discovery cycle.
  • score 2/3 → produce Section 3a + the validation-cycle pre-task description; allow Stage 4 only after the validation cycle is named.
  • user does not know the answer to a signal → treat that signal as a "no" (absence of evidence is evidence of absence for MMF); do not skip the question.

Before assembling a channel stack, verify the campaign is solving a distribution problem, not an MMF problem. Distribution amplifies signal; it cannot manufacture it. A founder's great LinkedIn post cannot sell a product nobody wants, and a movement's best volunteer network cannot turn out voters for a message that does not name their pain.

Ask the user three yes/no questions. Do not skip any. If the user does not know the answer to one, treat that as a "no" — absence of evidence is evidence of absence for MMF.

1. Revenue/commitment signal: Have ≥10 people in the target audience paid, signed up, pre-registered, or directly asked (without your prompting) for what you are offering? For events: ≥10 past attendees or paid waitlist. For products: ≥10 customers or pre-orders. For movements: ≥10 signed volunteers/members.
2. Language signal: Can you name a specific pain the audience articulates in their own words before you pitch them? Not a pain you infer — a sentence someone in the audience has actually said, written, or posted about.
3. Close signal: If you asked 5 people in the target audience to commit today (at the intended price / format / ask level), would at least 3 say yes?

Scoring:

• 3/3 — MMF confirmed. The campaign is a distribution problem. Proceed to Stage 4.
• 2/3 — Borderline. Name the weak link and insert a 1–2 week validation cycle into the plan as a pre-campaign task before running the full Stage 4–5 playbook. Examples: if question 2 fails, do 5 customer discovery conversations and extract the language; if question 1 fails, run a paid waitlist or pre-order test. Revisit the MMF gate after the validation cycle.
• 0–1/3 — Refuse the full campaign plan. MMF is the bottleneck, not distribution. Route the user to a discovery cycle: 5 structured customer conversations, a pre-order or paid-waitlist test, a small-room live demo. Explain plainly: "The insurgent playbook scales trust. It cannot manufacture demand for a product, event, or cause people do not already want. Running a full campaign now will burn the volunteer/community energy that Stage 5 depends on. Come back when at least 2/3 of these signals are present." Do not soften this. Do not produce the full Stage 4–5 deliverable.

Report the MMF verdict at the top of the Stage 3 section of the final output so the user sees it before the channel stack.

Stage 4 — Channel Tier Stack + 70/30 Allocation

Contract

• Inputs: bottleneck (Stage 1 Q6), sector (Stage 1 Q1), asymmetry verdict (Stage 3), MMF verdict (Stage 3a).
• Outputs: Section 4 (Channel Tier Stack) + Section 5 (70/30 or 80/20 Allocation).
• Preconditions: Stage 3a verdict is 3/3 proceed OR 2/3 with validation cycle attached. If verdict is 0–1/3 refuse, this stage MUST NOT execute.
• Postconditions: primary function chosen (demand-capture / paid-amplification / trust-compounding); sector rider applied; channels listed with weekly effort estimates; allocation split stated in plain numbers.
• Failure modes:
  • asymmetry is categorical AND user requests broad cold-paid Tier 4 → refuse, route to Tier 1/2 + counter-positioning, explain the diminishing-returns curve from references/authenticity-playbook.md.
  • sector = other → flag rider mismatch in Assumptions table, proceed with the closest rider, name which rider assumptions do not apply.
  • function choice conflicts with sector rider (e.g., B2B SaaS rider biases founder-LinkedIn, function choice is demand-capture) → surface the conflict, present both paths, do not collapse silently.

Function before cost. Before picking channels, pick the campaign's primary function against the user's bottleneck (from Stage 1 Q6). Use the function table at the top of references/channel-tier-stack.md:

• Demand capture — bottleneck is "people already want this, they can't find us." Primary function for small or unknown challengers with addressable existing intent. Leads with non-brand Google Search, SEO, directory presence. Never brand-keyword bidding without a lift test (see Stage 5).
• Paid amplification — bottleneck is "our organic content works but reaches too few people." Primary function only after organic winners exist (24–48h traction gate). Leads with retargeting, warm lookalikes, Spark Ads on proven TikTok content.
• Trust compounding — bottleneck is "people find us, sometimes click, but don't convert, refer, or come back." Primary function for the majority of underdog campaigns. Leads with Tier 1: founder content, community nodes, newsletters, volunteer networks.

A mild-asymmetry user with a trust bottleneck should not be routed to paid amplification just because they can afford it. Route by function first; allocate within that function by cost/asymmetry second.

Apply the sector rider. After the function choice but before allocation, open references/sector-riders.md and apply the rider matching the user's sector (captured in Stage 1). The rider adjusts:

• Archetype defaults — which campaign archetypes fit this sector best (e.g., cohort-education biases toward community-build + referral flywheel; B2B SaaS biases toward founder-LinkedIn + demand capture).
• Channel weighting — which Tier 1/2 channels compound fastest in this sector (e.g., consumer brands lean on UGC flywheels; political campaigns lean on ground game and counter-media; NGOs lean on volunteer networks + earned media on named-beneficiary stories).
• Failure-mode warning — the sector-specific way the insurgent playbook underperforms when misapplied, which becomes a standing warning in Stage 5's anti-vanity dashboard.

Do not overwrite the function-first choice. The rider layers on top. If the rider and the function choice conflict (e.g., B2B SaaS rider biases toward founder-LinkedIn but the function choice is demand capture), surface the conflict and name both paths rather than collapsing to one.

If the user picked "other" for sector, flag the mismatch in the Assumptions table and proceed with the closest rider — naming which of the rider's structural assumptions do not apply.

Then assemble the channel stack using references/channel-tier-stack.md. Allocation rules layer on top of the function choice and the sector rider:

• Mild asymmetry → stack can include Tier 1, 2, 3, and selective Tier 4. Allocate ~70% effort to organic (Tier 1 + 2), 30% to paid amplification (Tier 3, with rare Tier 4).
• Severe asymmetry → Tier 1, 2, and targeted Tier 3. Avoid broad Tier 4. 80/20 split toward organic is often safer.
• Categorical asymmetry → Tier 1 and 2 only. Refuse to draft broad cold-paid Tier 4 creative — it will not work and it will burn runway. If the user insists, explain the diminishing-returns curve and the counter-positioning move (see references/authenticity-playbook.md) before reconsidering.

Output the stack as a prioritized list with: (a) the primary function chosen, (b) the channels mapped to that function, (c) an estimated weekly effort commitment per channel, (d) the 70/30 (or 80/20) split in plain numbers.

Anti-fabrication carries through. The Stage 2 anti-fabrication rule applies to every element of the Stage 4 output: SEO keyword examples, long-tail query lists, directory/review-site references, competitor saturation descriptions, and any sample copy shown inline with the stack. If the brief did not name the incumbent, the incumbent's proper noun must not appear in this stage in any casing — not title-case ("Sentry alternative"), not lowercase ("sentry alternative"), not hyphenated, not as part of a compound keyword or URL. Search-query examples that would otherwise require a brand name must either retain the [incumbent] bracketed placeholder for the user to fill in, or be rewritten as non-brand equivalents ("error monitoring for small teams," "application monitoring under $100/seat", "lightweight APM for node.js"). This applies equally to Stage 5's competitor saturation map and to every Stage 5b output section (## 8–## 11): the banned-token discipline does not relax downstream of Stage 2.