The Offer That Sounded Like a Joke

On Black Friday, Cards Against Humanity has raised prices, sold literally nothing for five dollars, and dug a very large hole in the ground. The stunts are famous. The mechanism underneath them is copyable.

The company's Black Friday history reads like a list of things a marketing department would veto. One year they took the product off sale entirely. One year they raised the price and sales went up. One year they sold a box containing nothing at all, for five dollars, and thousands of people bought it.

It is tempting to file this under stunts by a company whose product is already a joke. That reading misses what is actually happening, and what is actually happening works in serious industries too.