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- The most honest Black Friday ad ever
The most honest Black Friday ad ever
Also: Marketing “standards” are shockingly recent.
Marketing Qualified
November 28, 2025
Welcome back to Marketing Qualified! Here’s what we’re talking about this week:
The most honest Black Friday ad ever. A quick trip into the marketing hall of fame.
Marketing “standards” are shockingly recent. Almost everything is newer than it seems.
🖤 The most honest Black Friday ad ever.
On this Black Friday, a quick trip into the marketing hall of fame.
It’s Black Friday 2011.
Patagonia puts out an ad in the New York Times. Full page.
The headline: "Don't Buy This Jacket”
They explain exactly how much water, energy, and waste goes into making it.
They ask readers to think twice and only buy one if they truly need it.
People assume they’ve lost their minds.
But sales went up 30%.
Why?
Because when a brand says something that obviously costs them, people actually listen.
Telling customers not to buy is the last thing anyone expects.
It feels honest in a way most marketing doesn’t. It builds trust.
And when people trust you, they buy more.
Most teams won’t (and shouldn’t) do the Patagonia move.
But a smaller version works almost everywhere in B2B:
Be clear about who shouldn’t buy.
A few places to use it:
On pricing pages: “Skip this plan if you send fewer than 10K emails a month.”
In demos: “If you only need basic reporting, we’re not the right tool.”
On product pages: “Not for teams who want an out-of-the-box template.”
These callouts do two things:
They make the right buyers more confident.
They stop the wrong buyers before they waste any of your time
Great marketing isn’t about convincing everyone.
It’s about helping the right people feel sure.
📰 In the news this week.
📊 Key trends for social media marketing in 2026 [infographic].
🔮 The future of marketing looks a lot like engineering and AI roles.
💸 Media buying trends—where brands plan to spend more, and less.
🗓 Marketing “standards” are shockingly recent.
This tweet lists 100+ products that didn’t exist 27 years ago.
iPhone. YouTube. Wikipedia. Gmail.
All things we now treat as life’s basic infrastructure.
Do the same exercise for marketing and the list gets even wilder.
None of this existed:
Social media
Paid search ads
SEO
Canva
CRMs
Marketing automation
Google Analytics
Landing pages
Podcasts
Programmatic advertising
Retargeting
Attribution software
Product-led growth
Influencer marketing
AI writing and research tools
Short form video
Chatbots
UGC
The list goes on.
Almost everything teams today call “the fundamentals” is newer than most marketers’ careers.
That’s the part worth paying attention to.
Channels don’t start as essentials.
They start as experiments.
They start on the edges.
They start where no one is paying attention.
And then they become the norm very rapidly.
But by then, the biggest marketing arbitrage opportunities have usually passed.
The next “standard” channel is already forming somewhere right now. It just doesn’t look standard yet.
😂 Marketing meme of the week.
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