THE 9 COMPANIES I OBSESSIVELY FOLLOW FOR MARKETING INSPIRATION

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

5 moves show up repeatedly across the 9 marketing teams most worth studying in 2026, consistent enough to function as a playbook rather than category-specific tactics. The most common is making the product itself the marketing rather than describing it, which Anthropic executes through Google ads on developer error messages and a Twitch stream of Claude failing at Pokémon, while Decart ships every product as a free, public, playable link on launch day. The other consistent moves are building recurring characters rather than one-off campaigns, turning community into distribution rather than separate paid channels, and picking a public fight with a competitor's category as a positioning play.