The news: 2026 is already seeing a trend of combative marketing, with high-profile brands leaning into negative depictions of competitors—even if they don’t name names—to capture attention and drive social engagement.

• After McDonald’s released a viral video of its CEO eating a burger that drew mockery, rival restaurants Wendy’s and Burger King swiftly released videos of their CEOs poking fun and promoting their own food.
• Ahead of the Super Bowl, Anthropic aired an ad emphasizing Claude’s ad-free structure—a pointed contrast to OpenAI, albeit without name-dropping—and mocked the idea of chatbots inserting sponsored responses into user conversations.
• BMW and Audi have a long-running, out-of-home sparring match, with dueling billboards where each brand responds to the other’s creative—a classic visual example of brands using physical media as a public battlefield.

Zooming out: In a fragmented attention economy, jabs at competitors can be cheaper—and more likely to catch on—than large-scale brand campaigns and social posts.

• Punching up used to be the hallmark of scrappy brands. Now, companies do it to come across as culturally relevant and to raise brand awareness.
• A single pointed video or ad, if culturally timed, can generate substantial earned reach and virality.

There’s also a structural shift underway: Leaders are now frontline content talent. As executive visibility rises across LinkedIn, X, and short-form video, CEOs aren’t insulated from the meme cycle and can become fodder for competitors and users alike.

The caveat: One risk is that engineered conflict prioritizes short-term engagement over long-term brand equity, or could create a negative brand perception. Shade can spark conversation while also elevating the competitor it aims to diminish.

Striking this tone requires extreme scrutiny: Support for brands seen as wronged could reflect poorly on companies that take jabs, and making directly aggressive shots against a competitor may not be as effective.

Implications for brands: Combative marketing straddles a delicate line between wit and mean-spiritedness, and if the message isn’t received clearly by the public, it could be difficult and expensive to walk back.

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