We’re entering a strange and exciting new era in marketing.
Brands aren’t just producing ads anymore, they’re producing play. And this week, 50 marketers gathered in one room to prove just how fast that shift is happening.
This was Rosebud’s second No Slop Hackathon, where the rules are simple: you have one hour to prototype a game. Except this time, the game had to be a playable brand campaign.
And once again, the results surprised all of us.
The Winners 🏆
Marketers don’t usually think of themselves as game designers. But give them a tool that lets them create interactively and suddenly the room feels like an arcade of ideas.
1st Place: Kaiser’s Adidas Fruit Ninja
A branded slicing game with a twist, built in under an hour.
2nd Place: Swathi’s Airbnb Promo Game
A playable stay-discovery experience that could genuinely run as an ad unit.
3rd Place: Stella’s Luma Story Game
A narrative-driven mini-adventure imagining Luma as the solution to all exclusive events.
Honorable Mentions
Yoofi, Puja, Alejandro + Kaycee — all shipped creative, thoughtful, brand-ready prototypes we wish we had more prizes for.
A huge thank-you to Photalabs, Humanic, and Machine Cinema for supporting the No Slop movement and helping us bring creative marketers together by partnering with Rosebud AI on this event.
Why This Matters for Marketers
Gamified marketing isn’t new, but it is accelerating. Poppi, McDonalds, fashion brands, and CPG giants are all experimenting with playable ads, microgames, and interactive story formats.
The reason is simple: People remember what they play more than what they scroll past.
What changed is the speed and accessibility. With Rosebud, a marketer doesn’t need a developer in the loop. They can describe the campaign concept, tweak the mechanics, adjust the visuals, and test it live, all in the browser.
What used to take weeks now takes minutes, and what used to require teams now requires only taste. Seeing 50 marketers build campaigns side-by-side — each one completely different — made something very clear:
The next marketing department will have “game designer” energy as a service.
The Movement: No Slop
“No Slop” started as a tiny challenge: Stop shipping low-effort content. Start shipping creative, high-quality experiences.
But it quickly grew into a mentality that gets everyone in the room excited. It turns the room into a place where marketers, founders, and creators push their craft just a little further than expected. The hackathon series isn’t about perfection. It’s about discovering what happens when you remove every blocker between an idea and a playable version of it.
And once people see what they can make in under an hour, their entire sense of what’s possible shifts.
Join Us for the Next One
If you want to build alongside this community — whether you’re a marketer, creative, or someone who just wants to make cool interactive stuff — here’s your next step:
👉 Subscribe to the Luma calendar
And start working on high-quality AI content, no shortcuts, no slop.
Finally, if game-based marketing becomes the norm, it will be because communities like this one proved that creation doesn’t need permission anymore.
Andi Bucescu
Andi is a marketer at Rosebud, where she writes about the intersection of AI, creativity, and brand storytelling. She explores how generative AI is reshaping marketing strategies and creative workflows, with a focus on making complex technology accessible and cutting through the noise of modern campaigns. Her perspective is informed by undergraduate research on effective social media content and consumer psychology.