A badge count that includes marketing no longer means real, unfinished work
Aliases: promotional badge · campaign unread · growth badge
What it is
Marketing must not enter the unread count: discounts, feature pitches, editorial slots, re-engagement campaigns. Those items are not to-dos whose completion removes a risk from the world. Counting them borrows trust from the pending-work channel to buy opens. Once people notice, they demote the whole numeral to advertising and stop using it for real unread threads as well.
This is an inclusion rule: marketing is not pending work. It does not forbid marketing notices from existing, and it is not about how large a red dot control should be or whether a dot is enough.
Why it happens
The numeral is watched because it used to predict closable work. Marketing breaks the prediction: opens often land on a campaign page with no queue to clear. After a few rounds, the likelihood ratio slides from "there is work" to "someone wants a click." Attention stops treating that spot as a scheduler.
Marketing also carries an asymmetric product incentive: growth metrics reward nonzero. Without isolation, campaigns will keep the counter up. Technically it can stay "accurate" (the campaign was never tapped); semantically it has stopped being unread. Isolation means marketing may have its own door. It must not enter the pending numeral.
Studying it
Split the home-screen numeral into "messages and transactions only" versus "those plus campaigns." Compare how often the numeral is cited as the reason to open, and the delay before message-class arrivals are opened.
Independent variables: whether marketing is counted, whether it can be switched off on its own, how many days it occupies the numeral. Dependent variables: whether an open-because-of-numeral finds handleable work, message open delay, whole-app notification disable.
Calling the campaign page a "task" in the lab contaminates the measure. Allow people to treat campaigns as irrelevant. Campaign conversion does not justify inclusion—that is ad efficiency paid for with the pending channel's credibility.
Where it stops holding
Price-drop or back-in-stock alerts the user subscribed to are transactions in their loss function, not marketing; they may enter the count if they can be left independently and the title names the item. System notices (terms, security) are not marketing and may count if opening actually completes "acknowledged / go to settings." Treating every unbrowsed item in a Discover feed as unread is content consumption, not pending work, and must not occupy the notification numeral.
Applying it
- Whitelist only types people can treat as work: messages, approvals, billing, security. Campaigns, recommendations, and achievements stay out by default.
- Deliver marketing on a separate channel or an in-app surface; do not +1 merely to be seen.
- If legacy counting already includes campaigns, offer one "clear campaign items" that will not add them back, rather than making people open each campaign page.
- Verify by dropping campaigns from the count for a week and watching whether message arrivals open faster and whether "opened to find nothing handleable" falls. If the numeral shrinks but transactional opens speed up, marketing was polluting scheduling.