What Is Pattern Interrupt Marketing?

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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I once saw a man at a festival hand a complete stranger one of his two flip-flops. The stranger, confused but polite, accepted it. The man looked him dead in the eyes and said: "So you want to have a flip-flop fight, do you?" Then slapped him clean across the face with the one he'd kept.

Let's not focus on the man who threw the slap. Let's focus on the stranger who received it. One second he was wandering through a festival, completely on autopilot. The next, his spine was straight, his eyes were wide, and he was fully, completely present. His attention had been captured—violently, unexpectedly, and without warning. That's the pattern interrupt.

It's also, if you know how to harness it, one of the most powerful tools available to you as a marketer. The goal of this piece is simple: by the end of it, you'll know exactly how to stop your audience mid-scroll the same way that stranger got stopped mid-step. Just hopefully with a little less face contact.

I first encountered the pattern interrupt the way most people do—not by studying it, but by falling for it. I was served the Dollar Beard Club ad: a shirtless, bearded founder named Chris Stoikos walking through their beard care products while openly mocking the original Dollar Shave Club ad that inspired it.

Why does it work so well? Because it never lets go. Every few seconds, something new pulls you back in. Here's how it plays out in your brain:

The video reportedly cost less than $1,500 to make. It grew Dollar Beard Club's subscriber base by 15,000 in under four weeks and hit two million views within nine months. I was so taken by it that I ended up on a webinar with Chris himself, where he put a name to exactly what they'd done: the pattern interrupt. It's been the lens I see marketing through ever since.

Here are a few examples of brands and campaigns that nailed it. Starting with a floating QR code that broke the internet.

The first example that hits me is Coinbase's 2022 Super Bowl ad. While Budweiser, Taco Bell, and Nissan were writing seven-figure checks to the best creative agencies money could buy, Coinbase put a QR code on a black screen and let it bounce around for 60 seconds. That's it. That was the ad.

Note: Coinbase worked with Accenture on the campaign—but the whole point was how deceptively simple the idea was.

Once scanned, the code sent viewers to a landing page offering $15 in free Bitcoin to new sign-ups and a $3 million giveaway to sweeten the deal. They followed it up with a tweet to make sure no one missed it. Within the 60-second runtime of the ad, over 20 million people hit the site. It crashed, predictably, under the load. But it didn't matter. The stunt drove 445,000+ new sign-ups and shot Coinbase to the #2 spot on the Apple App Store charts.

It worked because it was the last thing anyone expected to see. Every other brand showed up with a spectacle. Coinbase showed up with a screensaver, and completely owned the room.

Few marketing teams operate with the creative confidence of Burger King. Where most brands play it safe, Burger King has built an entire identity around doing the unexpected, and making their biggest competitor the unwilling co-star.

Their 2018 'Whopper Detour' campaign is the clearest proof of that. By geo-fencing over 14,000 McDonald's locations and offering a Whopper for just $0.01 to anyone who ordered through their app while standing near one, Burger King turned every single McDonald's in America into a Burger King billboard. The results: 37:1 return on ad spend, 1.5 million app downloads in 48 hours, and a 300% increase in mobile order sales.

But the Whopper Detour was just one move in a much longer game. Burger King has built a habit of campaigns people can't stop talking about:

The spine across all of it: punch up, make the competition part of the story, and give people something worth talking about. The Whopper Detour didn't just drive sales. It made McDonald's real estate work for Burger King. That's not marketing. That's a heist.

Those campaigns are memorable. But Coinbase and Burger King aren't pattern interrupt brands; they're conventional brands that ran pattern interrupt campaigns. There's a difference. The more interesting question is: what does it look like when the interrupt isn't a one-off stunt, but baked into the brand itself? The color palette, the copywriting, the design, the entire identity. My favourite example is Magic Spoon.

On paper, it's cereal. Zero sugar, high protein, and up to $40 a box. To justify that price point—and stand apart from every other ‘healthy’ option crowding the shelf—they partnered with psychedelic artist Levi Jacobs to build the brand from the ground up. The result looks like nothing else in the category. Not just on the shelf, but in any feed.

The New York Times put it best: "I breezed past all of the ads for keto-this and paleo-that without much thought. But Magic Spoon stopped me mid-scroll."

Two other brands that do this just as well: Who Gives A Crap, a toilet paper company, and Up, a bank. Both built brands so distinct they turn heads in categories that have no business turning heads.

Think about that for a second. Cereal. Toilet paper. Banking. Three of the most aggressively boring product categories on the planet, all made genuinely interesting through brand alone. That's not just cool. Cool is nice, but it's not a strategy. What these brands understood is that distinctiveness is a growth lever, nd that's where the real conversation starts.

The internet isn't getting quieter: feeds are more crowded, content is cheaper to produce, and the average attention span has been carved up by a decade of short-form video. In that environment, blending in isn't just uninspiring, it's expensive. Pattern interrupts thrive here. They break the monotony before the brain has a chance to filter them out.

Here's what that looks like when you put it up against a conventional Meta Ads campaign:

The reason for the gap comes down to how Meta's algorithm works, where engagement is the currency. When your ad stops someone mid-scroll—when they comment, share, or even just pause—Meta interprets that as a signal of quality and rewards you with lower distribution costs. That alone can cut your cost per click by up to 50%.

Layer on top of that the Von Restorff Effect: the well-documented psychological principle that the thing which breaks the pattern is the thing that gets remembered. When your creative looks nothing like the polished, templated ads surrounding it, it doesn't just get noticed, it sticks.

Put those two forces together and you've fundamentally changed the economics of your advertising.

When I founded Athyna, I knew from the start that I wanted to build a brand that stopped people. Not just a clean logo and a consistent color palette; something genuinely unexpected for the category. A couple of years in, after laying the brand foundations, we decided to go all in on a rebrand. Same name, completely new look.

His first draft was exactly what we were looking for. We didn't go back and forth for weeks. He nailed it.

What followed were years of people remembering us and, in a crowded market, that's not a small thing. Paired with a personal brand that leans into the same energy, the goal was simple: whoever you are—a candidate, an investor, a startup looking to hire—when you think global talent, you think Athyna.

The same thinking went into this newsletter. The earliest draft of the brand direction was honestly a little too far out there, even for me, so I pulled it back slightly.

That's the pattern interrupt. From a flip-flop to the face at a festival to a bouncing QR code that crashed a website watched by millions; the principle is the same throughout. Break the expectation, capture the attention, and make it impossible to look away. Your challenge now is simple: go build something worth stopping for. Something that makes the right person pause mid-scroll and think what is this? Do that well, and the lower CPMs are just a bonus.

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