Debate-led campaigns pick a point of tension — a norm, a phrase, a cultural habit, an institutional absurdity — and make the brand or the cause the thing that forces it into the open. Here are eight tactics designed to bait you.
- Divide the Nation
- Hijack a Norm
- Reclaim the Phrase
- Verbal Ambush
- Fictional Authority
- Use Culture as a Mirror
- Make Unfairness Physically Felt
- Turn Policy Into Provocation
1. Divide the Nation
Force a binary choice — and let the audience fight it out.
Walkers — #CrispIN or #CrispOUT
Walkers revived a question the British public had apparently been suppressing for decades: do crisps belong inside a sandwich? The campaign didn't try to answer it. It handed the question to the nation and watched the sides form. The playfulness of the stakes made public commitment easier — nobody felt they were risking anything by going loud on their crisp position — but the engagement numbers were serious.
Paddy Power's "Nobody Does Football Better Than Us" ran the same binary at national-identity temperature — England vs American sporting culture, Danny Dyer vs Rob Lowe — with the World Cup hosted on US soil as the trigger. The brand didn't pick a side. The pronoun in the title did it for them. KitKat asked whether you bite or snap. Oscar Mayer ran mock-serious hotdog debates about grilling versus boiling. While McDonald's Nordics — Pickle It Forward (Nord Copenhagen, 2026) turned the longstanding pickle divide into a shared economy. Haters could donate unwanted pickles to a digital bank; lovers could claim up to four free. Real-time data showed which cities were donating and which were raiding. The debate was already there — TikTok had been amplifying pickle culture for years
2. Hijack a Norm
Challenge an accepted tradition — then make the challenge impossible to ignore.
Vienna Tourist Board — Vienna Strips on OnlyFans (Jung von Matt DONAU, 2022)
Instagram's algorithm kept flagging Viennese museum art — Schiele, Klimt, canonical works — as sexually explicit content. The Vienna Tourist Board's response was to publish the same art on adult entertainment site OnlyFans. The stunt forced a simple question into global circulation: if OnlyFans has more editorial tolerance for Schiele than Instagram, who is actually protecting culture? Jung von Matt DONAU reported over 2.5 billion impressions and 730 million worldwide reach.
Heinz petitioned to end Roman numerals for Super Bowl events — a tongue-in-cheek challenge to a sports tradition nobody had thought to question. NFL x Tide asked Americans to move laundry day from Sunday to make room for football. Aldi turned a legal dispute over lookalike cakes into a meme war — the Free Cuthbert campaign reframed a cease-and-desist as an act of rebellion. Absurd Promises (ASDRA / VML Argentina, 2024) hijacked Argentina's presidential debate culture to force a single question: why do people with Down syndrome have to renew a certificate for a permanent genetic condition?
3. Reclaim the Phrase
Take language that was used against your audience — and give it back with the power reversed.
#LikeAGirl — Always (Leo Burnett / MSLGROUP, 2014–2015)
“Like a girl” had spent years functioning as casual shorthand for weakness, but Always and Leo Burnett didn’t argue with the phrase — they made the bias perform itself. In the film, older participants acted out running, fighting and throwing “like a girl” as weak, silly or incompetent, while younger girls performed the same actions with power and total sincerity. The gap between those responses was the whole campaign: not boys versus girls, but culture versus confidence. By exposing how puberty and social conditioning can turn girlhood into something shameful, #LikeAGirl reclaimed the phrase as a badge of strength and sparked a global conversation about gender stereotyping. P&G reported that after watching the film, 76% of women aged 16–24 said they no longer saw “like a girl” as an insult.
Monica Lewinsky's #DefyTheName (BBDO) invited people to reclaim the names they'd been bullied with online, turning individual shame into collective identity. Rimmel's I Will Not Be Deleted had real people read aloud the hateful comments they'd received, converting trolling into defiance. Ariel's #ShareTheLoad (BBDO India, 2015) asked whether laundry was only a woman's job — not as an accusation but as a question that Indian culture hadn't actually answered yet earning $9.5M in free PR and 60% sales growth.
4. Verbal Ambush
Weaponise a word already in innocent circulation — and use its double register to deliver a truth that a straight argument never could.
So Many Dicks — e.l.f. Beauty (Oberland)
e.l.f. Beauty revealed that there were more men named Richard — who go by Dick — on corporate boards than entire underrepresented groups combined. The campaign didn't name the statistic and move on. It weaponised the word 'Dick' itself: a name in perfectly ordinary corporate use, a slur in ordinary social use, and a punchline that nobody could look away from. The debate wasn't really about the word. The word was the delivery mechanism for data about gender and power that, framed differently, would have been easy to scroll past. See campaign ->
I Wish My Son Had Cancer (Harrison's Fund / AIS London, 2013–2014) ran the same ambush in a darker register — a father's statement that read as monstrous until you understood it was exposing the hierarchy of public empathy between conditions.
