/insurgent-campaign

name: insurgent-campaign
description: >
  Grassroots-first campaign design for anyone being outspent — startups vs. incumbents,
  NGOs vs. corporate comms, movements vs. state-backed machines, solo brands vs.
  big-budget competitors. Ideates awareness, launch, fundraising, mobilization,
  community-build, counter-narrative, referral, founder-story, and coalition campaigns.
  Triggers on "campaign plan", "marketing strategy", "ad budget", "should I advertise",
  "paid vs organic", "launch plan", "grassroots", "low budget marketing", "NGO campaign",
  "outspent", "competitor has bigger budget", "how do I compete without money". Also
  trigger on any spend asymmetry, collapsing organic reach, rising CPAs, or a
  trust/credibility problem — even without the word "campaign". Nudge activation when
  the user debates buying ads, boosting posts, or hiring influencers; they are likely
  about to burn money on a channel that will not persuade.

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).
• Ou