Most marketing campaigns start with a brainstorm. Ours started with a toilet door.
Seriously.
Early in 2025, while I was living in Biarritz, France, I was doing some work from the local Deus Ex Machina cafe. For an Australian living on the other side of the world, the fact that this very Sydney brand had a cafe in Biarritz already felt a little bit like it was calling me.
It was the kind of place filled with laptops and digital nomads, so one day I was sitting there doing some work when nature called.
The back of the toilet door was plastered with stickers from local businesses. One in particular caught my attention: BRC. Biarritz Run Club. That was basically it, three letters and a QR code.
Naturally, I scanned it… I am completely unashamed to admit that I take my phone to the toilet (don’t @ me).
The QR code took me to the Biarritz Run Club Instagram page, where I found all the details about their runs. I started going along, made some friends and got the chance to practise my French in a much more colloquial, everyday setting.
All because of one very simple sticker on the back of a toilet door.
I loved how uncomplicated it was. It caught me in a moment where it already had my attention and gave me something interesting to look at. And it planted a question in my head: could I do something like this for Collective Catalysts?
More specifically: could I use toilet humour in our marketing? Could I finally find a legitimate professional use for the poo emoji?
The first attempt was… questionable
The first version of the idea was a sticker that said:
“Sick of shitty marketing? Let the pros wipe it up.”
Complete with a poo emoji, obviously.
A few weeks later, I was in Bournemouth in the south of England and thought it would be the perfect place to test the idea. There are plenty of people commuting directly into London, so I figured train stations, cab ranks, cafes and bars could be a great testing ground.
I started putting the stickers up.
Then, while I was in a local Starbucks, I noticed I had about five missed calls from my husband, Henry. I knew I was going to be back at the car in two minutes, so I ignored them. He kept calling.
When I got back to the car, I asked what on earth he was calling me for.
He said he had just realised he hadn’t seen any other stickers around town and had decided to Google whether putting them up was actually legal.
Turns out: not at all.
In the UK, putting stickers or posters up in public places without permission can fall under fly-posting rules, with some pretty serious fines attached.
So, just as quickly as we had put them up, we retraced our steps and scraped every single sticker back off.
A slightly traumatic, yet very educational event.
The campaign was shelved for a while, but the idea never really went away.
Fast-forward 12 months
When I came back to Australia, I kept thinking about it.
The original idea was still good. The execution just needed to be smarter.
Instead of stickers, we would create posters. Instead of putting them up without permission, we would work directly with venue owners. And rather than asking businesses to simply give us wall space, we would make the campaign collaborative.
As a thank you for being involved, we would create videos with participating businesses that they could use on their own social media too.
And that is how the Shitty Marketing campaign was properly (re)born.
It was deliberately ridiculous, a little bit unhinged and very on-brand for us. But underneath the toilet jokes was a very real experiment: could a creative, community-led campaign create tangible business results without relying on paid advertising?
Month one: the results
The short answer: yes.
| MONTH ONE, AT A GLANCE $0 spent on paid advertising $24,310 in annual revenue generated from work directly attributed to the campaign 83%: website traffic increase 101%: social media engagement increase 142: number of Instagram shares/saves/comments 11: number of participating venues |
The financial result is the obvious headline. In month one alone, work generated off the back of the campaign equated to $24,310 in annual revenue.
And we didn’t spend a single cent on advertising.
But the revenue was only one part of the result.
For us, the community response mattered because the campaign was never designed to behave like a traditional ad. We wanted people to notice it, laugh, talk about it and hopefully remember who was behind it.
That is exactly what started happening.
The biggest takeaway? Marketing should be fun.
A few weeks into the campaign, I was chatting with another business owner who was laughing about the Shitty Marketing posters and asking how the hell we had come up with the idea.
After I told him the story, he said something that has stuck with me since.
He told me he could see that we were genuinely having fun with what we were doing, but, more importantly, that we were making marketing feel fun too.
That, for me, has probably been the biggest lesson from the campaign.
You are allowed to have fun in business.
You are allowed to have fun with your marketing.
In fact, I think your marketing should be fun.
That doesn’t mean every brand needs to use toilet humour or start plastering poo emojis across its content. It means marketing should have some life in it. It should sound like real people. It should give your audience something to feel, react to or talk about.
And it should be enjoyable for the people creating it too.
Because when you genuinely enjoy what you are doing, people can tell. That energy is infectious. People lean in. They engage. They remember you.
The Shitty Marketing campaign may have started as a slightly ridiculous idea inspired by a toilet door in France, but month one proved something we have believed for a long time:
Good marketing doesn’t have to be boring, overly polished or backed by a huge advertising budget to generate real business results.
Sometimes, you just need an idea people actually want to talk about.
