Marketing When All The Platforms Hate You | An XX-XY Case Study

You cannot build non-woke brands the same way the woke do.

Anti-woke brands must fight an uphill battle against social media regulation, platform prejudice, and all manner of disadvantages to market themselves.

But that's ok, because these brands are doing it anyway.

Brands like XX-XY

Jennifer Sey is the founder of XX XY, an athletic clothing company dedicated to preserving women's sports. The company is growing despite the petty and hypocritical nerfs advertising platforms have leveled against them.

Here are a few of the headwinds Jennifer Sey and the Xx-xy team have faced, and keep in mind, this is what happens when any brand tries to market conservative values.

• Permanently banned from advertising on TikTok.

• Cannot tag conservative influencers in Meta targeting (This is actually a really big deal)

• Comcast tried to force them to add a “paid for by” political disclaimer even though they are an athletic brand, not a political campaign.

• Banned or censored on three platforms

• One sustained campaign of harassment

Those are just a few of the challenges that are public knowledge. I’m sure there are plenty more.

And yet, they are growing.

Here are the results after just four months post-launch as reported by Jen:

Our 4 months in numbers look like this:

• Over 600 stories in the press (614 to be exact!)

• Nearly 20K email subscribers

• Almost 1000 reviews on our website

• Reviews all average 4.75 starts (out of 5!)

• 18.5K X followers

• 14.3K IG followers

• Two product drops and one limited edition collection

By what strategy are they achieving such incredible growth?

I would love to see under the hood, but what I can see from the outside:

Guerilla marketing, influencer marketing, insane amounts of earned media, and great organic content on X.

All of these tactics are what marketing people call “brand advertising,” which focuses on growing market awareness and affinity instead of immediate sales.

Though Jen does discuss that they run Meta ads, I haven’t been able to locate them. I also wasn’t able to see any Twitter ads from their twitter account.

They are spending about a 3k per month on Google Adwords. Their Adwords strategy leans heavily on the influencers on their roster, with paying for search keywords like "Riley Gains Merch.”

What does this tell us?

XX-XY’s strategy seems to focus heavily on brand marketing with digital ads running aircover.

Why this works

Even if you are a conservative building a politically neutral business, you should take note of this strategy. Here’s why:

Digital marketing, i.e., running Google, Meta, LinkedIn, or TickTock ads, is not the money printer that big tech would have you think.

Marketers and business owners have been taught that running ads with messages like “buy this new athletic wear t-shirt and support women’s sports,” is an easy way to make a buck. That may still be true in some cases, but not for most.

Digital marketing has been providing worse returns every year for years now.

Nest’s readout report showed a 32% year-over-year DECLINE in Return on Advertising Spend for brands that focused on digital “buy now” type ads. In marketing we call that “performance marketing.”

For instance, Casper, one of the industry’s darling direct-to-consumer brands spent huge amounts of money on digital ads, and has consistently reported net losses of between 80 and 90 million every year for years.

Nike, another brand that went all in on digital marketing, lost 25bn off their market cap in a single day in June 2024.

On the other hand, when Airbnb invested heavily in brand marketing in 2023, its revenue increased they grew revenue by 24%.

XX-XY is being forced to build brands the old-fashioned way, by finding creative ways to build raving fans. The impact of this is that it will likely take XX-XY longer to scale than it would have otherwise, but their audience will have been earned rather than bought. That means more durability and better long term growth , and when and if they regain greater ability to run ads and target conservatives, those ads will be much more powerful.

Building a parallel economy brand

So, here’s the lesson: if you are building a conservative brand, you HAVE to get creative, which is something conservatives are not generally known for.

Performance-based digital marketing should not be your primary strategy if your brand runs against the woke mind virus. It’s easy for your enemies to turn off the faucet, and the returns were not all that great anyway.

Creativity is the only way, by the way.

The inability to run ads is certainly a loss, but the best strategy to get fit isn’t all liposuction and anabolic steroids. The natural pathway may lead parallel brands to become durable in ways that their woke counterparts are not.

Marketers used to have to be inventors, magicians, and showmen before Google and Meta taught us that digital marketing was all that mattered.

It's time to bring that back.

“If no-one hates it, no-one really loves it.”

Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit

We’ve been helping parallel enterprises market themselves despite the bull crap these platforms have been throwing at us for over a decade. If you want a firm that can help you give the middle finger to the man while you build your company, we're your guys.