Organic-First Campaign

Core Premise

• 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

  .

When to Apply This Skill

• 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.

Workflow

Stage 1 — Interview / Brief Capture

AskUserQuestion

1. Always-capture fields (ask once, batched). Four fields are too material to default silently; getting them wrong produces a generic plan. Send one

   AskUserQuestion

   call with 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

   AskUserQuestion

   call. 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

   AskUserQuestion

   call. 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

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)

references/campaign-archetypes.md

• 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.

Stage 3 — Asymmetry Audit

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.

Your asymmetry is <level>. This means <what it means for your strategy>.

references/hungarian-case-study.md

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?

• 5–6 preconditions: run the organic-first 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 organic-first 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

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?

• 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 organic-first 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.

Stage 4 — Channel Tier Stack + 70/30 Allocation

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.

references/sector-riders.md

• 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 organic-first playbook underperforms when misapplied, which becomes a standing warning in Stage 5's anti-vanity dashboard.

references/channel-tier-stack.md

• 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.

Stage 5 — Alternative Shapes, Ad Copy, Boost Rules, Measurement

1. Competitor saturation map. Before shapes, before ad copy, before anything: for each of the top 2 named competitors (or top 2 competitor categories if the user did not name specific ones — see Principles), produce:
   (a) What they saturate — the channels, visual style, message tropes, production value, and emotional register the competitor is flooding. Be specific: "paid-heavy LinkedIn carousels with stock illustrations and growth-hack CTAs," not "social media ads."
   (b) The absence that becomes your signal. What is the competitor doing that your refusal to do becomes the positioning? Worked examples:
   • "Fidesz saturated billboards → Tisza's absence from billboards was the message."
   • "Cohort bootcamps saturate paid LinkedIn funnels + affiliate links → our refusal to advertise and our free open curriculum is the message."
   • "SaaS competitors saturate agency-produced demo videos → our terminal-only raw-footage weekly changelog is the message."
   (c) One-sentence positioning line the user commits to holding across the campaign. This is the single sentence every piece of content must reinforce.
2. Three alternative campaign shapes for executing the concept, with tradeoffs. Examples of shapes: community-first (start with 100 real people, grow through word of mouth), earned-media-first (one newsworthy action drives press + organic amplification), search-capture-first (dominate long-tail high-intent queries where demand already exists). Use the

   alternative-generator

   pattern — do not collapse to one recommendation prematurely; let the user choose. Each shape must include at least one flagship piece of content structured as Self / Us / Now (Marshall Ganz's organizing framework — see

   references/authenticity-playbook.md

   ): the leader's lived experience, the shared community reality, and the specific time-bound ask. If the user cannot tell their Self story, drop the founder-led shape and route to community-first, earned-media-first, or search-capture-first instead.
3. First-30-days action list — concrete weekly actions for weeks 1–4, mapped to the chosen shape. Each action has an owner (if multiple people), an effort estimate, and a clear success signal.
   Capacity is a hard constraint. After drafting the week-by-week list, sum total weekly effort. If it exceeds the user's stated capacity (Stage 1 Q8, default 6h/week), cut the lowest-ROI actions until total effort fits inside the ceiling. Name the cuts explicitly: "I am cutting X and Y because the draft came to 14h/week and you said 6h/week. These are the actions to re-add if you can carve out more time later." Do not ship a plan the user cannot execute.
   Earned-media actions must be specific or flagged. Every earned-media action in the list must include:
   • (a) A named target (e.g., "Latent Space podcast, The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter"), or an explicit "target TBD — research is the week-1 action" flag. Never pitch "5 podcasts in the niche" without naming them; that is not an action, that is a wish.
   • (b) A one-sentence pitch hook matched to the target's recent content — not a generic bio blast.
   • (c) Success criteria — reply, mention, guest spot, cross-post, podcast booking, or newsletter feature.
   • (d) Outreach day and channel — Tuesday morning via email, Thursday via LinkedIn DM, etc.
   If the skill does not know specific targets in the user's niche (because the user did not name them and the skill cannot invent names — see Principles), assign target research as the week-1 action and set success criteria for the research itself (e.g., "produce a ranked list of 15 targets with RSS + contact channel by Friday").
   Community-build is a multi-week sub-campaign, not a line item. If a Slack / Discord / WhatsApp / Circle community node is in the channel stack, it gets its own block in the first-30-days list, not one line at 1h/week:
   • Week 0 (before public announcement): pick the platform, write the rules, seed with 10 personal invites from the user's existing network. Dead rooms are worse than no room.
   • Weeks 1–2: founder posts daily for 14 consecutive days. Non-negotiable. Without the founder's daily presence, the community never reaches escape velocity.
   • Weeks 3–4: hand off three recurring rituals (weekly thread, AMA cadence, member spotlight) to 2–3 engaged early members. If no members step up, the community will die when the founder stops; surface this as a validation failure, not a staffing problem.
   • Month 2+: budget 3–4h/week sustained — moderation, weekly post, member welcomes, pruning dead accounts. Underinvest and the community dies.
4. Ad copy + boost rules — only if paid has a role in the chosen stack:
   • Creative direction in the user's authentic voice (see

     references/authenticity-playbook.md

     ).
   • The explicit 24–48h organic traction gate: do not boost a post until it has demonstrated genuine organic signal (saves, shares, sustained watch time, thread-depth comments — not raw likes). Likes are cheap and lie.
   • Audience definition: warm retargeting first, lookalikes second, cold audiences only for proven winners with a lift-test plan attached.
   • Frequency cap and creative refresh cadence to avoid fatigue (see ad fatigue section in

     references/channel-tier-stack.md

     ).
   • Do not bid on your own brand-name keywords without a lift test. Blake, Nosko & Tadelis's eBay field experiment (2015) found weak or no incremental lift from brand- keyword bidding — the traffic arrives organically anyway. Platform-reported ROAS on brand keywords is always excellent because the traffic would have converted regardless. This is one of the most reliable ways established brands waste paid budget. If the user is already bidding on their own brand, require a geo-holdout test (Template 4 in

     references/lift-test-templates.md

     ) before continued spend.
   • If asymmetry is categorical, refuse to produce broad cold-paid copy. Offer Tier 1/2 content instead and explain why.
5. Lift-test / measurement plan — mandatory, no exceptions. One concrete experiment using the templates in

   references/lift-test-templates.md

   . Template selection:
   • Budget exists: Template 1 (geo-holdout) or Template 2/3 (conversion-lift).
   • Brand-keyword bidding already in play: Template 4 (brand-keyword holdout).
   • Zero budget: Template 5 (organic-source attribution) — directional, UTM-tagged, 30-day window, per-channel conversion-rate ranking, cut-the-bottom-20%-reinvest- in-the-top decision rule. Specify:
   • The hypothesis (paid channel X drives incremental action Y on top of organic baseline — or, for Template 5, "channel X outperforms channel Y on conversion rate per unique visitor").
   • Control vs. test group definition (or channel-comparison definition for Template 5).
   • Holdout percentage, duration, and minimum sample size.
   • The incremental metric (not attributed; not platform-reported ROAS). For Template 5, per-channel conversion rate, with the explicit caveat that it is directional only.
   • The decision threshold: what lift level justifies continued spend, what level means stop. For Template 5: top channel → double effort; bottom <20% → drop.
6. Anti-vanity metric dashboard — the short list of metrics the user should track and the longer list of metrics they should explicitly ignore. Examples:
   • Track: saves, shares, sustained watch time, signed-up volunteers/subscribers, incremental conversions from the lift test, word-of-mouth referrals.
   • Ignore: impressions, CPM, follower count, raw likes, platform-reported attributed ROAS, vanity engagement rate without segmentation.

Output Template

# Organic-First Campaign Plan — <user / project name>

## 0. Assumptions  (required under Mode C — default mode; omit under Mode A/B)
<table: field → assumed value, flagging every default applied from Stage 1 so the user can confirm or adjust inline at the end>

## 1. Campaign Ideas (5+ concepts across archetypes)
<concepts with thesis, archetype, primary tier, authenticity hook, MVP>

## 2. Selected Concept
<the one (or more) the user picked>

## 3. Spend Asymmetry Verdict
<mild / severe / categorical, one sentence explaining what it means>

## 3a. Message-Market-Fit Gate
<3-question score, verdict (confirmed / borderline / failed), and — if borderline or failed — the validation cycle the user must run before proceeding>

## 4. Channel Tier Stack
<prioritized channel list with weekly effort>

## 5. 70/30 (or 80/20) Allocation
<organic % / paid %, with rationale>

## 6. Competitor Saturation Map
<per competitor: what they saturate, the absence that becomes your signal, one-sentence positioning line>

## 7. Three Alternative Campaign Shapes
<three shapes with tradeoffs>

## 8. First-30-Days Action List
<week 1–4 concrete actions, scaled to stated capacity with cuts named>

## 9. Ad Copy + Boost Rules  (if paid applies)
<creative direction + 24–48h gate + frequency cap + refusal note if categorical>

## 10. Lift-Test / Measurement Plan
<one concrete experiment with threshold>

## 11. Anti-Vanity Metric Dashboard
<track list / ignore list>

Principles to Hold Throughout

• Do not sell reach as persuasion. Reach above the first 5–6 impressions does not persuade; it annoys. Say this out loud when recommending frequency caps.
• Do not propose broad cold-paid as a primary channel for severe or categorical asymmetry. It will not work. Refuse and explain the alternative.
• Do not generate content that impersonates authenticity the user does not have. If there is no real founder, no real volunteer network, no real earned-media hook, say so and propose how to build one — do not fake it with AI-generated "real-looking" content.
• Do not accept platform-reported ROAS as proof. Insist on an incremental lift test. Platforms are graded on attributed conversions; the user is graded on actual lift. Academic field experiments (Lewis & Rao 2015, QJE) show digital ad ROI confidence intervals are so wide most campaigns cannot be distinguished from zero. Meta and Google ship Conversion Lift / Brand Lift precisely because they admit this. Cite the work when a user pushes back.
• Always produce alternatives, not a single recommendation. The user has information you do not; give them a shaped menu and let them choose.
• Explain the why. When refusing a paid push or a channel, explain the diminishing-returns curve, the counter-positioning move, or the fatigue dynamic. A user who understands the mechanism will hold the discipline after the skill run ends.
• Do not invent specifics the user did not give. No made-up competitor names, no fabricated budgets, no invented past-campaign references, no hallucinated podcasts or newsletters in the user's niche. If the user did not name them, stay abstract ("cohort- based courses in the category," "mid-size SaaS competitors with paid-growth teams") and say what you are doing: "I am describing competitors at the category level because you did not name specific ones — name them if you want sharper positioning."
• Vague earned-media targets produce vague results. Force specificity (named target, matched hook, success criteria, outreach day) or flag research as a week-1 action. "Pitch 5 podcasts" is not a plan.
• A plan the user cannot execute is not a plan. Respect stated weekly capacity; name the cuts required to fit inside it. A 6h/week plan that succeeds beats a 14h/week plan that collapses in week 3.
• If MMF is failing, the campaign is the wrong problem to solve. Say so. Distribution amplifies signal; it cannot manufacture it. If the MMF gate (Stage 3a) returns 0–1 / 3, refuse the full campaign plan and route the user to a discovery / validation cycle. Running a full organic-first campaign against a broken offer burns the volunteer, community, and founder-attention capital the playbook depends on.
• Do not over-generalize the Hungarian case. Organic beats paid saturation when preconditions are present: credible insider, accumulated grievance, consolidated challenger, felt pain, threshold-rewarding system, overplayed incumbent. Absent most of these, the playbook alone will not win — name the missing preconditions and recommend building them first.
• Propaganda and paid advertising sit on the same curve. Troll farms, state disinformation, and commercial ad buys all operate on one diminishing-returns curve and all face the same authenticity collapse at saturation. You can buy reach; you cannot buy belief; above a threshold, buying more reach makes belief harder. The troll farms have not gone away — they have learned this lesson too and will adapt (smaller networks, embedded authenticity, parasocial mimicry). Design for the adapted adversary, not the 2020-era one: lean on verifiable authenticity (real people, real places, real time), narrative coherence, and provenance signals the adversary cannot manufacture without being caught.

References (read when relevant)

• references/campaign-archetypes.md

  — 15+ archetypes the ideation engine draws from.

• references/asymmetry-audit-table.md

  — decision table for classifying spend asymmetry.

• references/channel-tier-stack.md

  — Tier 1–4 channels with 2025–2026 benchmark data.

• references/authenticity-playbook.md

  — founder voice, kitchen-table framing, counter-positioning, narrative coherence.

• references/lift-test-templates.md

  — geo-holdout and conversion-lift experiment templates.

• references/sector-riders.md

  — six sector-specific overlays applied in Stage 4.

• references/hungarian-case-study.md

  — Tisza vs. Fidesz 2026 worked example.