Be honest. Who would you willingly listen to for 30 minutes?

Your best friend? 

Your partner?

Your favorite podcast host?

Maybe your mom?

Probably not your boss. Okay, maybe your boss. (Hey, Abby… 👋)

That’s what makes launching a podcast, newsletter, or YouTube channel so different from posting on LinkedIn. You’re not just asking for someone to glance at your content, but for them to give you part of their day.

That question came up during a storyarb planning meeting a few weeks ago.

Before we started making a list, we decided to chat with someone who's spent years helping creators make those decisions.

Hannah Tarnow sits on the Talent + Business Development team at Dear Media, where she finds top podcast talent speaking to female audiences. She got her start in the Creators group at United Talent Agency, helping turn podcasts into businesses.

She met our question with another: “How will this reward the extra time we're asking someone to give us?”

Let’s get into it.

Every time a new platform takes off, marketers have the same thought:

“Damn. We should probably be doing that too.”

Podcast.

TikTok.

Bluesky (although that FOMO didn't last long).

The instinct makes sense, right? You don’t want to be the one who misses out on the next big opportunity.

But after helping hundreds of creators grow their audiences, Hannah has noticed the most successful ones make every format worth the extra time it asks of them.

Here's how she frames it: Your audience is real estate. Most brands rent it, borrowing reach from whomever's algorithm is hot that week. The creators who win build the house, own the land under it, and give people a reason to keep showing up.

Give every format its own job

A viral post might earn thousands of impressions. A podcast might look impressive on a marketing plan. But long-form content asks for something much more valuable: someone's time.

That's why each format can't be treated as another marketing checkbox. Every issue, every episode, every video has to answer the same question: Why should someone spend more time with us this week than they did last week?

Think of every format as having a different job.

• A LinkedIn post introduces an idea.

• A newsletter unpacks it.

• A podcast lets people hear the conversation behind it.

So before you build, here are Hannah's 4 steps. Think of it like putting up a house (yes, we’re running with the renting vs. owning analogy).

The 4 steps to building a house in the attention economy

Step 1: Pour the foundation.

“Sometimes quality is more important than quantity,” she says. “Creators reach a roadblock when they fall into the trap of ‘Everyone's doing this, so I should too.’" Not all formats make sense for all creators or all audiences.

Before adding a new channel, look for evidence that people want more:

• What questions does your sales team answer every week?

• Which topics generate real conversations instead of quick likes?

• What do customers keep asking you to explain?

If nobody's asking for more in that format, they're probably not waiting for you to launch it.

Step 2: Make it recognizable from the street.

Cover your logo. Would anyone still know it's you?

“The No. 1 thing is a cohesive brand,” Hannah says. “What is my visual identity? What does my content look like? What am I talking about? If you're able to launch a newsletter or a podcast, that content should feel familiar on all these platforms.”

The best creator brands feel familiar wherever you find them. Their visuals, voice, topics, and point of view all reinforce each other.

If your answer is no, your audience is doing too much work.

Step 3: Put in the windows.

Video is how people see inside the house instead of just hearing about it.

“Podcasts are no longer an audio-only medium,” says Hannah. “It elevates a show, and it makes people feel more a part of the conversation. You're listening to people talk, and people like feeling like they're there with them, learning from somebody. It expands the experience.”

For B2B brands, that doesn't mean becoming a full-time YouTuber.

It means giving your audience a chance to see the humans behind the expertise. A five-minute conversation with your founder, customer, or subject matter expert can build more trust than another polished carousel.

Step 4: Leave the porch light on.

One great episode gets attention. Showing up every Tuesday earns trust. 

“Timeliness is another thing,” says Hannah. “Making sure you're doing it every week at the same time. It creates a habit in your audience.”

The more time you ask your audience to invest, the more value you need to give back.

Our full conversation with Hannah goes deeper into how creators decide which formats are actually worth launching, why video is changing audience expectations, and how to build an audience that chooses to come back.

Read the full playbook ->

Campaigns that got us talking: Brita’s TikTok is unhinged. The water filtration system company is using its channel to create humorous, weird, hydration-focused content that over 440K people tap into daily. We’ll leave you with our latest favorite Brita Shark video.

AI spotlight: Australia has entered the AI regulation chat — water caps, net-energy requirements, and a hard no on training models on local creators' work. The rest of the world is watching to see if this is leadership or noise.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: A SaaS brand launched their new tool with a video shot at Chili's. On purpose. In a sea of SaaS brands that take themselves extremely seriously, the phrase "secret sauce" hits differently when you're actually sitting in the corner booth.

So, your CEO said, "use AI for marketing” and then walked away.

There was no budget attached or brief guidance. Just a mandate and a deadline that's ... somehow already passed. If you're nodding, we built something for you.

🎈NEW: a 30-day, AEO-informed strategy sprint — basically our onboarding month, unbundled.

Walk away with:

• A content strategy built for how people (and bots) are searching

• Your tone of voice, calibrated

• A 90-day content calendar

• SME recommendations mapped to your highest-opportunity topics

All backed by our AEO/SEO research. All adding the storyarb touch of understanding your audience and nailing your voice.

We're meeting the moment, people. Your content plan can too.

Book time with Abby + Shaye to learn more.

An "honest review" from someone who got the product for free, a discount code in their bio, and a 15% cut of every sale. But sure. Totally unbiased.

The bar for “worth someone's time” has always been high. We've just spent the last decade pretending it wasn't because the algorithm did the heavy lifting.

The brands building the strongest audiences right now pick a lane and make it worth the commute.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The first official podcast debuted in 2003 when broadcaster Christopher Lydon published an audio interview using subscription technology built by software developer Dave Winer. It was the first time listeners could automatically subscribe to and download episodes. Guinness World Records eventually made it official, recognizing it as the world's first podcast.

Spend enough time on LinkedIn and you'll eventually notice that almost everything gets labeled "thought leadership."

A company announcement, a press release with a 🎉 emoji, a Claude-generated list of hot takes on the LinkedIn algorithm.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether any of it actually changed someone's mind.

So we sat down with Tyrona "Ty" Heath in Cannes to settle it. Ty leads thought leadership go-to-market at LinkedIn, co-founded the B2B Institute, and served as jury president for the Creative B2B Lions this year. Ty spends her days helping LinkedIn think about what earns trust and credibility in B2B.

Spoiler: We call too many things thought leadership.

Let's get into it.

Ty gives it to us straight: Thought leadership is extremely overused, and most of the substance on our feeds doesn’t actually qualify.

“Being in the thought leadership space really means getting to the truth of an idea or problem. It means having evidence-based thinking and data to help people better understand, to illuminate an idea. There's additional rigor to it that rises to the level of thought leadership,” she said.

Translation: Company news has a role. Thought leadership serves a different one. Its job is to help people understand something they couldn't before.

Helping someone understand a problem they couldn't crack before — now we’re talking.

How marketers actually make it happen

Ty's perfect content flywheel has four parts: strategy, creative, distribution, and measurement. Here's what she recommends.

1. Start with a problem, then find the right expert.

Instead of starting with an executive and simply giving them a microphone, you should start with a problem first: 

• What do your best-fit buyers keep struggling with? Start with their problem, not your exec's bio — the challenge you want them to come to you for.

• What question do you get asked in every sales call? The recurring objection or "how do you handle X" is usually the problem your exec is already the answer to.

• What does your industry accept as true that deserves a second look? This could be a take your data supports but most people in your space are too cautious to say out loud.

• What can you own with 2 or 3 answers? Ty’s method is deliberately small: Get clear on "the 2 to 3 areas you want to invest in," then hit them from a fresh angle every time.

“The first thing an executive needs to know is where you're running before you start running,” she says. “Get really clear on the two to three areas you want to invest in.”

2. Add judgment.

Research creates evidence. Experience creates perspective. Thought leadership happens when someone exercises judgment about what those things mean. 

• What does this information actually mean?

• What pattern are you seeing that others aren’t?

• What conclusions are you willing to stand behind?

“How do you bring your voice, your interpretation to your post?” she asks. “What does this mean, your judgment, to the conversation?”

3.  Distribution comes next.

Most companies still treat the company page as the center of their LinkedIn strategy. Ty thinks that’s backwards.

People follow people long before they follow logos. The company page reinforces the brand. Executives, subject matter experts, and employees bring people through the front door.

4. Measure what actually matters.

Ty's last prong is knowing what "moving the needle" looks like for your case.

Success isn't simply impressions or engagement. It's whether people understand your company differently than they did before.

• Are you shifting how buyers perceive the brand?

• Are you getting a committee aligned around a decision?

Those are the signals that tell you you’re building authority instead of simply publishing content.

You can’t fake conviction

LinkedIn is preparing to release new research called The Credibility Code. The research asks a timely question: In a world where content is easier than ever to produce, what makes you believable?

Ty’s answer wasn’t a framework, but 5 words.

“I have to be me.”

She explains, “I can't be multiple versions of me. I try to bring as much of myself to it, because I don't want to wear a mask in one context versus the other because I think that's what ultimately cuts through. Can people feel the energy? Can they feel how passionate you are about it?”

It's an intuition that LinkedIn's upcoming Credibility Code research is beginning to support.

“One of the elements people talked about is the enthusiasm, the passion they can feel with which you're speaking about a topic — which means you actually have to be passionate about that thing, and you have to be you.”

Press publish anyway

You can use AI to organize your thinking, tighten a draft, or summarize research. AI can help express conviction. It can't create it.

That's why so many executives hesitate to publish in the first place.

The work matters, the ideas feel personal, and it can be uncomfortable putting them out into the world. If an idea matters to you, it will usually feel vulnerable to publish.

“Even with that little bit of anxiety, you press the button. Get it out there. You'll never feel 100%, especially if it's something that matters,” she said.

Campaigns that got us talking: Nike turned the internet's "the World Cup is scripted" running joke into one of the tournament's most talked-about campaigns, with Easter eggs, nostalgia, and a few well-placed shots at FIFA and Adidas. The best campaigns know what the audience is already saying.

AI spotlight: This World Cup produced more surprises than X. Cape Verde drew Spain. Paraguay sent Germany home. Every team also had access to the same AI-powered scouting assistant, which may have leveled the playing field. 

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Every time a team was knocked out of the World Cup, DoorDash had Zlatan Ibrahimović deliver a custom, and brutal, farewell. One idea, dozens of fresh executions.

Grab your party hats because The Standard officially turned 1 this month! 🎂

That’s 12 months of marketing rabbit holes, strong opinions, questionable jokes, excellent interviews, and subject lines we argued about for far too long.

We started this newsletter because we wanted to make something marketers would actually read. 1 year later, that’s still the standard. Here are a few pieces we’re especially proud of:

• ✍️ how one newsletter generated 3 $5M+ referrals

• ✍️ can you just make it go viral?

• ✍️ trust-as-a-service

• ✍️ our AI marketing survey results are in

The fastest way to make a copywriter question reality:

“Can you make it more conversational but also more authoritative but also shorter but also explain everything?”

Honorable mention: “Can you make it punchier?”

Bad ads

We stared at this DoorDash ad for a while trying to figure out why it made us lose our appetite. 

AI-generated ribs and soap anyone? *cancels order*

The World Cup is over and The Standard is officially 1 year old.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about originality. The campaigns that saw something everyone else missed. The marketers willing to have an opinion. The marketing leads who made the thing before they knew exactly how it would perform.

Original ideas rarely feel completely safe. Conviction means putting more of yourself into the work. And when the idea matters, a little hesitation may be a sign that you’re onto something.

So bring the perspective only you can bring.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Here's a fun one for your next trivia night: Freelance didn't start with writers. It started with medieval mercenaries whose lances were "free" to hire. In 2026 the job description has changed and the weapons are now gone. The freelancer's refusal to pledge allegiance to any one boss, however, is eternal.

If you’re reading this from a lake, an airport, or somewhere with an out-of-office reply turned on … we’re jealous. And very impressed with your dedication to The Standard. 

If you’re reading this from your desk or dining room table while everyone else is OOO … we’re right there with you. 

Summer has a way of exposing the difference between busy and important. That line feels blurry to marketers in the best of times, whiplashed between "let's make this go viral" and "wait, how does this tie back to revenue?" — usually from the same person, on the same day, about the same campaign. 

So we went looking for a company that pulled off the thing most teams only get to dream about: more visibility, in less time, without adding headcount. That company is Buffer. They’ve built a content engine where marketing orchestrates, teammates create, and the work keeps moving, even when people turn on the OOO.

Their secret? Turning their team into creators 🤳

We talked to Sabreen Haziq, Senior Brand and Community Manager, one of the architects behind Buffer’s “Team of Creators” program.

Her playbook will inspire you to build systems that create room for great work and occasionally, a little summer.

Let’s get into it.

66 employees.

21,000 posts.

40 million views.

0 social media managers. (Yep, you read that right.)

If you've ever wondered how your marketing team is supposed to produce more content without hiring more people, Buffer has an interesting answer.

Instead of relying on marketing alone, Buffer turned employees across the company, from engineering to recruiting, into creators.

“It’s not just that the content team produces content,” says Sabreen, who leads its brand and creator strategy. “Everybody creates content. We are orchestrators. We help bring them to the forefront.”

An engineer can become known for AI workflows. A finance teammate can write about career growth. Someone else can post about leadership. Remote work. Even cats. Seriously.

Buffer doesn’t expect its employees and community to talk about Buffer. 

It wants them to become known for something.

The idea problem

Most employee advocacy programs rely on inspiration. Someone has a great idea and marketing encourages them to post it. And then offers prompts and prizes to “inspire” it to happen again.

If you've ever tried to run this at your own company, you know getting people to post is its own special kind of pain. (At the arb, we’ve literally paid our team.)

The problem isn't that people don't have anything worth saying. It's that they open LinkedIn before they've noticed the idea. Then imposter syndrome takes over.

So Buffer built a system instead.

The creator OS: a 4-stage system to build your own Team of Creators

Whenever someone shares an insight in Slack that could make a great post, teammates react with a dedicated Team of Creators emoji. It’s a simple signal that says, “There’s content here.”

Ask any writer: Great posts don’t start with a blinking cursor. They start in the conversations people are already having. 

Instead of waiting until someone opens LinkedIn and wonders what to write, Buffer taught the entire company to notice ideas while they’re still fresh.

The Slack emoji is just one piece of a much bigger system.

Here’s the system in 30 seconds:

1. Model: Buy-in starts at the top. In Buffer’s case, CEO Joel Gascoigne models the behavior himself and makes sure that value ripples down across company culture. 

2. Equip: Sabreen and her team work with the entire org to help them find their unique pillars: 1 topic that comes easy on a low-energy day, 1 to stretch into, and 1 light lane. 

3. Signal: Capture ideas while they’re happening so no one starts with a blank page. Buffer created a specific TOC emoji in Slack to call out any stories/learnings that would make for a great post. 

4. Amplify: Buffer hands its brand equity back to its people through collaborator posts, shout-outs, and reach they couldn't get solo. As Sabreen puts it, the credibility you build sticks with you "even beyond this season of life."

In this week's playbook, we unpack each stage in depth and show how to adapt the same system inside your own company.

Campaigns that got us talking: A billboard that asks you to stop and smell it. Seriously.

Goodwipes' latest campaign releases a burst of fragrance every 30 seconds, transforming a traditional billboard into a sensory experience. And while we’re not 100% certain we actually want to stop and smell a wall, we’re intrigued.

AI spotlight: More than 40% of longform posts on LinkedIn are fully AI-generated. 

That's according to a new report from Pangram, which also found that nearly 2/3 of all the AI-generated content it detected across platforms came from LinkedIn.

Yikes. The bar has literally never been lower for developing your own voice and writing something people want to read.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Have we hit peak founder face?

Brands have been using people, namely their founders, to sell stuff for decades. Steve Jobs and Apple, anyone? But it can be tricky to put all of your eggs into one basket. Papa Johns, anyone?

It’s no secret that AEO is top of mind with so many marketers, as we wrote just last week. Good news is our resident experts have been busy cooking up a solution for AI visibility.

If you've caught yourself thinking:

+ "I just need my brand to show up more in ChatGPT and Perplexity."

+ "How is my AEO strategy supposed to be different from SEO?"

+ "I have no idea what's surfacing when people search for a company like mine."

Or you're getting pressure from leadership to figure this all out and make your brand more visible, we need to talk. More details coming soon. 👀

Treating creators like an unpaid creative agency.

If someone’s organic post performs so well that you want to turn it into an ad, that’s probably a partnership opportunity. Not a free asset.

Besides being the right thing to do, credit and compensation are how you build a creator ecosystem people actually want to participate in. A great lesson is what not to do if you care about building trust with your audience.

The future of content marketing is designing systems that help the right people create the content, not just marketing. 

That's a much more interesting challenge than simply publishing more. And one that might just leave a little more room for summer.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

If your Q3 content plan includes a Christmas in July push, you're working from a playbook older than Hallmark’s. 

The tradition dates back more than a century, to a French opera in 1892 and then to a North Carolina camp celebration in 1933. And after the 1940 film Christmas in July, it became the retail industry’s solution to the summer slow-stice.

Word on the LinkedIn street is that AI search is the next big thing.

Word on that same street is that someone has already figured out exactly how to win it. 

We’re not so sure.

So instead of chasing another AI hot take, we sat down with Noah Greenberg, CEO and co-founder of Stacker, whose team spotted some of the earliest signs of how AI search was changing content discovery, to ask a simple question:

What kind of content actually matters now?

His answer wasn’t another acronym or optimization hack. It’s a question all brands should be asking themselves.

Let’s get into it. 

Most conversations about AI search start with the wrong question.

How do we optimize our content for AI?

It’s an understandable place to start given AI search is so new. Every week there’s another acronym, another framework, another LinkedIn guru explaining how to get Claude to recommend your brand.

But after talking with Noah, we think there’s a better question to ask first.

What content can only your company publish?

AI models don't decide who to trust (they’re robots, remember?). Instead, they have to reconstruct trust.

They surface the brands, ideas, and sources the broader internet already treats as authoritative.

That means the companies most likely to earn AI visibility aren’t creating more content. They’re creating content nobody else could.

For most companies, that advantage falls into one of two buckets.

Camp 1: “We have data”

Many companies have access to information nobody else can publish.

GoodRx studies patient outcomes. Carta turns customer data into industry research. Nobody else has access to those inputs. That's what makes the resulting content uniquely valuable.

As Noah puts it, “We have data, and we’re going to tell the stories from that that no one else can.”

Camp 2: “We have expertise”

Not every company has proprietary data they can share. But every company certainly has years of experience solving the same customer problems.

Those lessons become the kinds of guides, opinions, frameworks, and stories your customers used to get from trade publications.

“You need to become an authority in your customer’s mind, so that when you want to sell them something, they trust you,” says Noah.

Turn your advantage into AI visibility

Knowing your company's content advantage is only the first step.

In the full playbook, Noah shares the 4-step experiment he recommends for getting started — including why your customers’ AI prompts look nothing like their old Google searches and what that means for the content you should create.

Read the playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: 1 tournament. 16 local stories. Reuters sent photographers to every World Cup host city. The result wasn't 16 versions of the same event. It was Miami's Latin American culture, Boston's embrace of Scotland's Tartan Army, and neighborhood watch parties across Los Angeles.

AI spotlight: Readers notice more than words. They notice structure. University of Maryland and Google DeepMind researchers found they could distinguish AI-written stories from human-written ones with 93% accuracy based on structure alone. AI favored predictable plots and relied heavily on physical metaphors. Human writers left more room for ambiguity, surprise, and inference. The moral of the story? Don’t spell out the moral of the story.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: 

Client: Make the logo bigger.

Agency: Say less.

When most sponsors fight to make their logo as visible as possible, Cerveza Aguila made visibility the incentive. The bigger fans let Aguila’s logo appear on Colombia’s official 2026 FIFA World Cup jersey, the bigger the discount they received.

Our Marketing Minute series continues! We started these social interviews in Cannes and loved it so much we’re keeping the format going. 1 minute with a marketing leaders + 1 idea worth stealing.

Cindy Zu, Head of Partnerships at AirOps, says the most important KPI is share of voice… Are you tracking yours?

LinkedIn

If you know someone who’d make a great guest for upcoming feature, hit reply and nominate them.

• Every cleat brand arriving at the same shade of pink.

• FIFA hiding sponsor logos so aggressively it accidentally creates better guerrilla marketing.

• Turning hydration breaks into ad breaks. (S/o to Telemundo for refusing to play along.)

• The Kalshi + Polymarket World Cup gold rush. (We have notes.)

Reuters didn't engineer local relevance into their World Cup coverage. They just sent photographers to find what was already there. Noah Greenberg made the same point from a different angle: The content that wins is the content only your company can create.

What can only your company publish?

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The first Google Doodle appeared in 1998 as a stick figure announcing the team was away at Burning Man. In other words, one of the biggest companies in the world started its brand storytelling journey with an out-of-office message.

Not saying the next storyarb offsite needs a homepage takeover. Just saying … the precedent exists.

The storyarb team is back at HQ after an enthralling, exhausting, and extremely sweaty week at Cannes. 

After being on the ground for the most hyped event on the marketing calendar — the yachts, the keynotes, the whole Croisette — we have some thoughts.

(Or if you wanna skip the thoughts and get straight to the resources, we put together templates for how to game plan a multi-stage event and prepping your virtual war room for live social coverage. We survived our biggest event of the year; these will help you survive yours.)

We spent the week interviewing marketers, filming content, and seeing whether our ideas actually held up in the wild.

It was très overwhelming.

And fantastique.

So … what lived up to the hype? 

In short: the unplanned hotel-lobby conversations, the late-night parties where people AirDropped us their numbers, our Marketing Minute convos with smart, cool marketers, and the energy in the B2B space.

Not worth it: far too many stale panels, every 4:30–6:30 happy hour where everyone is too fried to network, and 90% of the swag. 

We braved a European heat wave and roughly 47,000 steps a day to figure out how to make a massive industry event actually worth the plane ticket.

Let’s get into it.

What our first trip to Cannes taught us about getting more from big industry events.

We came to Cannes as a 3-person team on the Classic Startup Pass. Our CEO, Chief of Staff, and growth marketer. Before we booked our flights, our CEO genuinely asked:

"Are we even allowed to be there?"

Turns out, yes. 

You're probably already scrolling past a dozen Cannes recaps in your feed, so we'll share what matters most: what was actually worth the trip, what we’d skip entirely next time, and how you can steal these tips to make the most of any industry event. 

Tip #1: Don’t overschedule yourself

We arrived with a spreadsheet full of meetings, events, panels, activations, dinners, and enough calendar invites to make Outlook nervous.

By day two, we realized our favorite conversations weren’t on the calendar.

They happened while we were picking up iced coffee. Walking between events. Waiting on the bill for lunch.

Our ideal boots-on-the-ground day became very simple:

• 2 meetings (pro-tip: hang onto the fries when the lunch table’s cleared and just … have the meeting)

• 1 event (bonus if it’s on a boat away from the madness)

• 1 dinner (with an intimate, curated group)

• Plenty of time to wander (and yes, it counts as work)

This can apply to any event, not just Cannes. Focus on quality > quantity when making connections. And give yourself some space for spontaneity and fun!

Tip #2: Prioritize people over panels

Given the stacked lineup, we expected the panels to be the highlight. By the third, our notes were looking suspiciously identical. Dare we say… we felt a little bored?

The conversations we’re still talking about happened somewhere else entirely, like the AirOps yacht and the Female Quotient cabana.

We popped into The Wellness Oasis™ presented by LinkedIn to recharge our phones. We stayed because nobody was trying to "network” — they were just talking.

Next year? Fewer keynotes. More places where people actually have time to talk.

Another thing that surprised us was just how much B2B showed up.

AI companies, SaaS brands, infrastructure businesses — even creators put up in the Carlton to explain how legacy brands should be online.

Cannes isn't just a consumer-brand playground anymore. Maybe that’s because B2B is finally remembering that business has always been personal.

Tip #3: Sweat the logistics (literally 🥵)

Nobody warned us that Cannes is basically a logistical obstacle course disguised as a marketing conference. Easiest way to win someone over was to have access to great Wi-Fi (thank you, LinkedIn) and a place to cool down. 

Here’s our insiders' logistics guide, courtesy of our Chief of Staff’s notebook and a few people who have been doing this far longer than us (hey, Suz 👋🏻):

• Wear comfortable shoes. Cobblestone do not care about your outfit. (Consider this our unsolicited Camper endorsement.)

• Bring a buddy everywhere. The best conversations, easiest intros, and quickest exits happen when you’re traveling in pairs.

• Build an extra 15 minutes into every trip. Then add another 10.

• Figure out your outfits before you leave the hotel room.

• Buy water immediately upon arrival. Verify the sodium content. (We learned this the hard way 30 bottles of St-Yorre and one additional Uber stop later.)

• If you can swing it, book a massage or blowout when you arrive. And then come back with clients as an excuse to (literally) rinse and repeat. 

Plan the logistics so you can be fully present for the conversations.

Rule #4: Expect a little FOMO

We spent weeks deciding which meetings, panels, and events were worth our time. Then we actually got to Cannes and immediately started second-guessing every single one of them.

Every conference comes with a little bit of FOMO. That’s part of the deal.

Most of the time, though, you’re not actually missing anything. You’re just imagining a better version of wherever you aren’t.

Save your energy for the people and conversations in front of you.

If you’re attending as a brand, the same advice applies. Plan your activation early, commit to the idea, and resist the urge to keep tweaking it once you’re on the ground.

There is exactly one acceptable reason to change the plan.

Oprah.

One mission inspired everything we created at Cannes: Make something people are genuinely glad they found.

That meant leaving newspapers to be discovered instead of handing out another piece of conference swag. Hotel lobbies. Coffee tables. Long lines. Anywhere marketers naturally paused for a minute.

(Occasionally, an overzealous bathroom attendant found them first.)

It meant Marketing Minute interviews that gave marketers useful ideas they could put to work immediately.

It meant making sure everyone who spent time with us walked away with something they could actually use.

Speaking of which, we’re sharing the same conference content systems we used at Cannes:

• Your virtual war room for live social: Plan your stories before you board the plane.

• Game plan for live posting: A simple sheet for covering multiple sessions without losing the plot.

And lastly, how you can turn one interview into weeks of content:

Steal them. Improve them. Share them. Just don’t hand out another logo’d lip balm.

Abby’s post about conference swag … struck a nerve.

Turns out people feel strongly about swag, both for and against. Who knew?!

We’re siding with Abby. However, there were a few brands that really nailed the moment: 

• Canva's gelato. Free gelato in the Cannes heat, while everyone was dripping sweat. Nobody throws away gelato.

• Supergoop x FQ. Big pump sunscreen stations across the beach — with mirrors — so you could actually use it right there. Useful then, memorable after.

• Pinterest's real tattoos. Bold, not for everyone, but they know their audience, and you're definitely not forgetting that one.

The whole trip in one sentence: Skip the swag, keep the substance.

Swap “Cannes” for any conference and the tips above still work. Stay hydrated.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

S/o to the writers’ room, who stayed home turning voice notes into actual sentences (half of which uploaded out of order, thanks to Cannes' Wi-Fi, which had other plans). Decoding “wait, was that the yacht guy or the other yacht guy?” with 0 timestamps is its own skill. That’s a playbook for a different day.

Proving ROI for creative work is one of marketing's oldest headaches.

Most creative ideas don't die because they're bad. They die because nobody knows how to sell them internally. The safe ideas get funded. The new ones die in midyear budget meetings.

Claire Drumond, VP at Atlassian, convinced leadership to fund a campaign around a creative gut call: Zach Woods. (You know, Gabe, from The Office.)

She used three data points to make the case for taking that risk. 

Let’s get into it.

The campaign that eventually earned Atlassian a Webby nom started with Claire scrolling Instagram and thinking, “Well, that’s unhinged.” 

She’d started getting videos from Zach Woods (best known for The Office), which ranged from REI erotica to vaguely threatening sleep meditations to hot takes on the Salem witch trials. 

And it all kinda reminded her of work. 

“I thought, ‘This guy is having a resurgence,’” Claire says. “He’s creating a new persona; he’s super funny. And then, I thought: ‘Jira is having a resurgence now too.’” 

At the time, Jira was trying to solve a perception problem. Developers loved the product, but marketers, project managers, operations leaders, and other knowledge workers didn't see it as a tool built for them.

They needed a Woods-esque reinvention. So, Claire brought him in to do a video. 

"It wasn't celebrity for the sake of celebrity," Claire says. "It was somebody whose vibe fit our vibe, and whose humor fit our humor."

(It also helped that in Silicon Valley, Woods’ character literally teaches the team Scrum. Nice li’l nod to the developer audience.) 

That kind of creative dot-connecting is something no AI marketing tool can do for you.

Claire had the creative vision.

Unfortunately, “Zach Woods feels right" isn't a budget justification.

The most important slide wasn't the creative

You’d think the hardest part of getting a creative campaign approved is convincing leadership the idea is any good.

Nope. For Claire, the slide that moved the room was about competitor spend.

Her team pulled data showing how aggressively companies like Monday.com and ClickUp were pouring money into brand advertising.

Suddenly the question switched from "Should we spend money on brand?" to "Can we afford not to?"

That's a very different meeting.

Money to test things that might not work

The second ask was harder — an experimental budget for channels Atlassian had never used before: in-flight screens on United and jetway ads.

Leadership asked the obvious question: How do you know it'll work?

Claire's answer: You don't … and that's the point.

If nobody’s done it before, the learning is part of the return.

It worked, for the record. The campaign delivered lifts in awareness, perception, and sign-ups, and became a Webby award finalist.

But its impact was felt beyond the dashboard.

People on the team were texting the campaign to their parents. And look — most marketers ship a lot of campaigns. Very few send them to their mom.

Get the full playbook here.

Campaigns that got us talking: The Devil Wears Prada, but for marketers? Say less.

AI spotlight: The new writing status symbol is sounding like yourself. As AI gets better at producing clean, polished content, the value shifts to things that machines struggle to fake: voice, opinions, quirks, the occasional “David.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: You had us at “rawdog-ing English composition,” Adam Delehanty. AI can write a perfectly acceptable paragraph in 3 seconds. Unfortunately, nobody has ever described their favorite writer as “perfectly acceptable.”

Did you hear? We write newsletters.

We know. At this point, it may be our entire personality.

Companies spend a small fortune, and a lot of time, creating content only to publish it once and hope for the best. Meanwhile, newsletters remain one of the few channels people actually invite into their inboxes.

So we made it official. If you’ve been thinking, “I wish someone would just handle our newsletter,” that’s now a thing we do. Our Essentials Tier is built for teams that just want a consistently good newsletter without turning its creation into a second full-time job.

Also: We're at Cannes!

If you're here too, hit reply and let us know. We’d love to say hello, grab a coffee, or debate the merits of rosé as a professional networking tool.

“Can we cut em dashes?”

No — no, we cannot. 

Sincerely,

Copywriters everywhere

No one ever made marketing history (or, like, hit Q2 goals) by running another bland SEO listicle. Even if it feels safe.

For marketers, creativity, thinking outside the box, and doing what competitors haven’t tried yet are all part of the job.

The other part of the job is getting Finance on board. Good thing you know how to do that now.

Now get out there and sell some jet bridges.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The em dash has been around since Gutenberg's printing press — used as a spatial bridge, a fluid replacement for commas, colons, and parentheses. The name comes from old-school typography, where an "em" referred to a space roughly the width of the letter "m."

Apparently em dashes fell out of fashion when the typewriter showed up and didn't bother to dedicate a key for one.

Still heartbroken about it.

Father’s Day is Sunday. If you ask a dad what he wants to do to celebrate, he'll probably say, "I don't know, whatever you want.”

He does know. He just won't tell you.

Getting people to say what they actually think is kind of our whole job here at the 'arb. 

So we turned the mic on the fathers and father figures in our lives — and asked them the 1 question they were least prepared for:

What do you think I actually do all day?

Some of them surprised us. Some of them did not. All of them were very confident.

That’s right! We’re back at it again, bothering our parents in their busy lives to ask them what they think we do all day. 

After our moms had so much fun gabbing, the dads of the ‘arb wanted to prove that they do actually listen to us. (Sure, Dad.)

Let’s see how they did.

“What do you think I do for work?”

"It's a global career. You deal with people around the world. You hire people. Then you give them a job description. Then you all come together and put this project in play. That project is business, of course." —Derald, our own CEO’s dad, and a retired painter

"Tell people's stories for marketing purposes." —Bill, pastor

"Oh, you still have that job? Very good, I am glad they are keeping you around." —Ali, former CEO and current restaurant owner

"What does ‘B2B marketing’ mean to you?"

"B2B? Well … it's a step up from A&A." —Derald again

"I do not have a clue." —Joseph, retired network administrator and scientist

"Bank to bank marketing, by any chance?" —John, bus driver*

*close enough, John

"If I said I had to 'help executives build their personal brand,' what would that mean to you?"

"Extend their reach and credibility around thought leadership in their domain for business and their particular expertise set.” —Brian, financial services executive

"Helping the executive to be more visible to consumers of their product whereas they might be in the background and nobody knows about them.” —Ron, financial advisor

"What do you think goes in a 'content kit?'"

"Questions and answers. Lots of questions about the company and its goals." —Jason, kindergarten teacher

"Swag that helps potential customers of your client better grasp the product." —Bill again

"If you had a newsletter, what would it be about?" 

 "Helping my daughter figure out her expenses." —Brian again 

"Daily wisdom from 5 year olds. Like, 'Mr. Miller, what are you?' and 'It was 3 the whole time!'" —Jason again

"What's the best part about being a parent (figure)?" 

Time to see dad’s soft side:

“Watching your kids develop into wonderful human beings.”

"Definitely watching you grow and seeing how you turn out in the years ahead."

“Inviting beautiful children into your world and watching them completely change your life for the better, broadening the family in so many ways, watching them grow and flourish.”

“To see your children grow up, share in positive experiences you have with them, see them have children, and see the cousins playing together.”

“Realizing my kids are my favorite people to be with.”

No, no, we’re not crying. We just turned the sprinklers off and happened to get water specifically in our eyes and nowhere else 🥹

Thanks dads, for always saying yes to us after mom initially said no. Turns out you have been listening this whole time — we owe you more than we could ever pay back.

Campaigns that got us talking: Dad is always complaining that he’s tired, so Dunkin’ said: Here’s my gift to you. Now, with a literal bucket of coffee, Pops will have no shortage of caffeine. Plus, the bucket doubles as extra storage for later.

AI spotlight: Companies that cut customer service staff to fund AI are about to have an awkward conversation with HR. Gartner predicts that by 2027, half of the companies that reduced headcount citing AI will rehire people into the same roles, just with different job titles.

Dad was right: You can't just swap out the person who actually knows what they're doing and expect nothing to break.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Devon Butler picked apart Nike's famous 3-word motto to show how "Just Do It" would die in today’s swirl of feedback and stakeholders.

Round 1: too vague. Round 2: too commanding. Round 3: something no one would ever put on a shirt or a billboard.

Imagine telling your dad how to grill a burger. Exactly, leave the making to the pros.

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” —ancient father proverb

Except half the marketing internet is currently convinced everything is broken. SEO is dead. AEO is the only thing that matters. Throw it all out.

Our content strategist Emily Greffenius has been saying it since before the panic set in: If your SEO foundation is solid, you're already most of the way there. Good AEO builds on what’s working.

Feeling good about your SEO but not really sure where you stand with LLMs right now? 

We built a tracker to help you figure that out. 

Free, ungated, no strings — just like the advice your dad always gives you.

Get the LLM Sentiment Tracker →

Despite their stoic nature and one-word text responses, dads get irked by more than food sticking to the grill. Unless you want to lose your allowance, try avoiding these:

• Calling his entire music collection "old people stuff"

• Telling him how to drive

• Using his "good" screwdriver for something that is definitely not a screw

• Explaining how something works that he invented before you were born

• Touching the grill. Like, at all. Don’t do it.

• Holding the flashlight wrong during a project he swears he can fix on his own

• Asking "what do you want to do for Father's Day?" three days after Father's Day (SERIOUSLY?!)

Oh, you did all of these? Great job. Welcome to a 9 p.m. curfew. And no, Dad does not care that you’re over 30 or how this is so unfair. 

His house, his rules.

Dads don't usually lead with the soft stuff. They come with "did you eat" and "what's your plan" and a very specific look when they think you're overcomplicating something simple.

Which, honestly? Valid.

The best content we've ever seen doesn't overthink it either. It says the thing directly, means it, and shows up again next week. That's the deal.

Happy Father's Day to the guys who've been doing it right this whole time — we owe you more than we could ever pay back. (Literally, thanks for being our bank accounts for so long!)

See y'all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Father's Day started with a tragedy. Sonora Smart Dodd, raised by her single father after her mother died in childbirth, came up with the idea in 1909 to celebrate the dads who stick it out. When she finally got it off the ground, men pushed back, calling it "unmanly" and a "commercial gimmick." It took 60 more years before it became an official holiday in 1972.

Dads resisted a whole holiday made in their honor. Very on brand. You should still probably call yours though.

If your LinkedIn posting has felt like shouting into a void, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. Reach has been atrocious across the board — one widely-cited report clocked median reach down 74% year-over-year.

Your CMO probably wants to know why. (We did too.)

Our resident LinkedIn-fluencer and senior copywriter, Sarah Suzuki Harvard, went down the rabbit hole to figure out what's actually happening.

TL;DR: Sometime in the last 6 months, LinkedIn subtly ripped out the machines that counted your likes and replaced it with one that reads your posts. The feed stopped tallying engagement and started interpreting meaning. Which means the playbook you've been running since 2022 is now working against you.

(Also, they’re declaring war on AI-generated posts. Also, they launched a new metric. Don’t worry, we’ll explain it all.) 

Let's get into it.

For years, LinkedIn’s feed worked like a factory.

One system tracked engagement, another tracked connections, another evaluated content quality.

“The old system was like an assembly line with hundreds of tiny workers each doing one job,” explains Sarah. “This one counts likes, that one tracks connections. But LinkedIn’s engineers fired all of them and replaced them with a foundational model that reads your posts A LOT closer to the way a human editor would.”

That means LinkedIn is getting better at understanding what a post is actually about, whom it’s useful for, and whether it demonstrates real expertise.

Which explains why a lot of old LinkedIn advice stopped working overnight. Including engagement pods — groups of users who systematically like, comment on, and share each other’s posts.

As Sarah puts it, “Pods are cooked.”

That means there are no shortcuts to building engagement. You’re gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way: creating stuff people want to read.

Rule #1: Your audience trains the algorithm

"The algorithm is basically doing casting now,” says Sarah. “It looks at who keeps stopping to read your stuff. If it's marketing directors and founders, great, it goes and finds more of them. If it's your mom and 3 college friends, congrats, you're getting served to more moms."

The algorithm wants to help you find more of the right people, but you have to tell it who those people are.

Another great reason to get super clear on your “Market of 1” and write directly to that person. 

Rule #2: The algorithm can smell BS

Compare these two openings:

• Option A: Content strategy is more important than ever in today's digital landscape.

• Option B: We spent 6 hours rebuilding our content briefing process and cut revision cycles by 42%.

One sounds professional (annnnd a little robotic). The other sounds real. As LinkedIn gets better at detecting expertise-driven content, generic AI slop has a much harder time breaking through.

The more your post sounds like it came from real experience, the better.

Rule #3: Your profile is a ranking signal

Before it evaluates a post, LinkedIn evaluates the person publishing it.

"If your profile says CMO but your feed is AI tools on Monday, marathon training on Wednesday, and a marketing take every third Tuesday, the algorithm genuinely cannot figure out what you are,” says Sarah. “It shrugs, deprioritizes everything, and moves on."

The strongest executive accounts tend to own a handful of clear lanes and stay remarkably consistent inside them.

When someone lands on the profile, the expertise is obvious.

When the algorithm lands on the profile, it is too.

Rule #4: Build for the second read

A like is different from a save, which is different from a send.

With a send, someone spent enough time with your post to decide it was worth revisiting or sharing with someone else.

That's the behavior the algorithm increasingly cares about, says Sarah.

“A like is the algorithm equivalent of someone nodding at you in a hallway. Polite but meaningless. What the new system actually cares about is whether someone saved your post — saves carry 5x the weight of a like now. Did they share it via DM? Or stop long enough to actually read it? Did they stay? Did they think? A post with 10 real comments beats 50 drive-by likes because the algorithm is trying to figure out if your content actually did something for someone. Applause is cheap. Attention is not."

Which helps explain why certain post formats seem to be everywhere right now.

• Frameworks

• Checklists

• Decision trees

• Benchmark tables

• Teardowns

They're the kinds of posts people save for later, send to a coworker, or come back to when the problem shows up again 6 weeks from now.

Remember the purpose of LinkedIn 

"We've built a real part of our business on LinkedIn and I will die on that hill. It works,” says Sarah. “But the algorithm just got a complete architectural overhaul. It will get overhauled again.”

6 months ago, marketers were optimizing for one version of LinkedIn.

Today they're optimizing for another.

A year from now, they'll probably be optimizing for a third.

The marketers we see winning long-term are tracking audiences they actually own: DMs from actual ICPs, profile visits from target accounts, and newsletter subscribers.

One more thing worth saying: LinkedIn will change this again. 

"LinkedIn always updates the algo, so don’t build your strategy around the current rules set right now. Build it around the goal: getting your right buyer to find you, trust you, and end up in your world,” she adds. 

“Sure, LinkedIn is where they discover you, but your newsletter is where you keep them.”

*Accurate as of June 2026. LinkedIn will absolutely change this again.

Campaigns that got us talking: “ChatGPT has never taken a pregnancy test 8 DPO.” 

Peanut's new "Ask Peanut" feature is an AI engine, but it's built from community discussions, lived experiences, and real data from real women. Not scraped internet content. When every AI tool is competing on intelligence, Peanut is competing on intelligence and where it comes from.

AI spotlight: Mirror, mirror on the wall, what does LinkedIn think I do at all?

A clever profile audit tip: Use LinkedIn’s AI headline generator. What it suggests is the platform’s best guess at who you are. If the answer makes you say, “Wait, what?” you’ve found a positioning problem worth fixing.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: The Acrobat Cinematic Universe was not on our 2026 bingo card. Adobe Acrobat’s 5-episode workplace comedy, The Marketers, is betting that world-building and entertainment can change how people think about a product better than any feature list ever could.

Hope you didn’t hit delete on b’arb.

Last week she emailed a survey to our long-time readers. This week, she’s back with a gentle reminder.

We’re headed to Cannes soon, and your answers will help shape what we pay attention to, whom we talk to, and what insights make it back into The Standard.

Help us bring home the good stuff.

All we wanted was a little inbox detox. A reality check on what no longer served us. An unsubscribe here, a pause there. And then we’re hit with:

“We will miss you.” 

No, you won’t. And we know we’re not the only ones you’re saying that to. 

We’re not looking for reassurance. We’re trying to complete a task. Sometimes the best UX is letting us leave without making it weird.

Marketers have spent an ungodly amount of time trying to figure out what the algorithm wants.

The answer, as always, is specificity, expertise, and usefulness. The kinds of things good marketers have focused on all along.

In other words, the algorithm is starting to reward the same behaviors we’d recommend even if LinkedIn didn’t exist. 

And honestly, we’d much rather spend time getting better at marketing than gaming the algo.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The # symbol has a real name. And no, it’s not “pound sign” or “hashtag.”

It’s octothorpe.

Octo refers to its eight points. Nobody really knows where thorpe comes from.

Anyway, enjoy being insufferable at your next trivia night. #welcome

It's June. You're halfway to your annual number, the pipeline's lighter than you'd like, and the instinct is to do something — anything — right now.

So … you start playing Whack-a-Mole 🔨

Traffic slows down? Try some paid ads. Whack. Engagement dips? Add new content formats. Whack. Pipeline softens? Start a podcast. Launch a webinar series. Expand the audience. Whack, whack, whack. 

The impulse to identify a marketing issue and correct it quickly and decisively makes sense.

But there is another way. When marketing problems sprawl, go narrower. Deeper. Dig up the moles at their source. (...Is this metaphor still working?) 

Our friends at Compound — faced with competing marketing priorities, an inherited blog, and an incredibly wide range of potential clients to market to — did just this. 

And it got them three $5M+ referrals out of one edition of their newsletter. Whack.

Let’s dive in.

Rob Stella, then Head of Marketing at wealth management firm Compound, had an audience problem.

He had simply too much of it.

Like many financial firms, Compound served a wide range of clients: founders, tech employees, business owners, law partners, and more. Their content reflected that. A broad audience led to broad topics led to broad messaging (i.e., the death of your marketing goals). 

So Rob got real specific. Rather than try to serve all their prospects at once, the team narrowed almost all of their content around one audience: tech employees and founders. 

To sharpen the audience internally, the company created a shortlist of real LinkedIn profiles representing ideal clients and shared them with internal teams and agency partners. Suddenly, content stopped sounding like generic financial advice and started answering much more specific questions:

• What happens if I leave my company before my equity vests?

• Can I afford to take a sabbatical?

• Should I sell shares during a tender offer?

• What would it look like to step away from a high-burnout role without sacrificing long-term wealth?

A specific audience led to specific topics like navigating equity compensation, liquidity events, career transitions, and high-income financial decisions.

Specific topics led to specific messaging: Compound has the expertise to help you navigate these moments tactically — and also understands how you might be feeling as you go through them. 

The result was content that felt emotionally recognizable, not just technically useful. Readers could see themselves inside it.

Behind the scenes, Compound worked with yours truly to build a system where one advisor conversation could eventually power newsletters, long-form editorial, executive LinkedIn content, advisor social posts, and even sales language. In 2025, Compound launched Compound Interests, an editorial newsletter and direct line to the exact audience it wanted to help.

After sending an edition built around “The Two-Way Door Framework” — a method for thinking through major career and financial decisions without feeling trapped by them — the company received three referrals, each worth $5M+ in net worth, within hours. One exceeded $12M.

See how they built it in the full playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: HubSpot for Startups promoted its AEO crash course using a little old-school referral loop disguised as nostalgia bait, and it warmed our little MSN Messenger millennial hearts.

AI spotlight: The Pope released a 42,000-word statement on AI this week. Which means AI discourse has officially reached “the Vatican has thoughts” levels. One of the biggest themes? Don’t lose the human part. (Pope Leo must subscribe to The Standard.)

Stuff that made us scroll back up: Companies increasingly want content marketers who are comfortable with analytics and data. Fair. Reasonable. Deeply unfortunate for anyone who got into this field to avoid spreadsheets.

Google released new guidance for showing up in AI-powered search results, and, honestly, it sounds a little familiar.

Two of the biggest recommendations?

• Provide a unique point of view — cough

• Create “non-commodity content” that’s genuinely helpful — cough, cough

As AI-generated search (Google AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity) starts taking over more of the search results page, the content getting surfaced is the content that actually answers the questions. And with expertise, specificity, and perspective.

That’s the kind of content we build. SME-led. Experience-backed. Actually helpful to read. 

If you’ve been wondering why investing in thoughtful content matters more than just traditional SEO, Google just published your reason. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, let’s talk.

LinkedIn posts written by Claude’s middle-manager cousin.

Someone finally built a Cringe Meter for those eerily polished LinkedIn posts that say nothing but use 14 line breaks to do it.

Paste in your copy and find out whether you sound like a person or a ChatGPT-powered “thought leader.”

To develop a unique brand voice, write to one person. (Literally, know their name and story.) 

To build trust with your audience, shed light on their unique anxieties. 

To generate referrals, own your audience, and show up in their inbox every. single week. Like so. 

And for Pete’s sake, stop whacking moles. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… Modern marketing’s obsession with analytics can be traced back to Philip Kotler, who helped convince businesses that marketing should be measured scientifically instead of run entirely on instinct and vibes. #ripvibes

Some marketers still have nightmares from the Great Google de-Cookie-ing of a couple years ago.

Others still bear scars from TikTok algo updates that wrecked their social strategies.

Because borrowed audiences are risky. 

That’s why newsletters are our fave. 

You need the borrowed channels for visibility. But owned is where B2B marketers can seal the deal. 

We’ve spent the last year helping clients build newsletters hitting 53–60% open rates, and a few patterns keep showing up: smaller lists outperform bigger ones, voice matters more than polish, and when you treat your newsletter like a product (i.e., obsess over it), it can net big returns.

This week, we’re pulling apart what newsletter giants like Morning Brew, Female Quotient, and ByteSize are doing differently — and why it’s working.

Let’s get into it.

1. Quality of subscriber beats quantity every time

Our co-founder Alex Lieberman put it plainly:

"Quality of subscriber > quantity of subscribers. It will always, always, always make sense to have a smaller, more engaged subscriber base."

The Female Quotient lived that out in practice.

They wanted to build an enthusiastic subscriber base, not a “grandfathered” one, so they started from zero. Eight months later, they hit well above benchmark open rates (and we mean well above) — and as of this writing, just crossed the 100K subscriber mark.

ByteSize took the opposite path.

They inherited a 246K-person list, then intentionally shrank it through a re-engagement flow that removed inactive subscribers. The list dropped from 246,088 to 189,603 engaged readers.

Painful? Yes.

Better for deliverability and long-term engagement? Also yes.

The takeaway: a smaller audience that genuinely wants you in their inbox will outperform a bloated list every time.

2. Voice, voice, voice. Did we mention voice? 

Morning Brew (heard of ‘em?) became recognizable by systematizing voice.

Their framework was surprisingly simple:

• Build a clear persona

• Pick 3 defining personality traits

• Teach writers what's on-voice vs. off-voice

Morning Brew famously wrote for "Stephen" — a hyper-specific reader persona with a midtown commute, a Planet Money habit, and a fear of sounding uninformed in front of his boss on Monday morning. Sound like someone you know? That’s the point. 

When your newsletter voice has actual cultural fluency, readers feel it. They can tell right away whether you actually understand their world.

Specificity is what keeps voice from turning into corporate Mad Libs.

ByteSize nailed this with IT professionals by balancing technical depth with conversational references that felt native to the audience. Think less "enterprise solutions leverage synergy" and more "hey, remember when Pogs were a thing?"

One Female Quotient reader put it perfectly: "I subscribe to many newsletters and 99% of them I delete. I just read your newsletter and know with 100% assurance that I'll be reading all of them moving forward."

These newsletters aren’t worried about “sounding professional.” The internet is full of technically "good" professional content that no one remembers 5 minutes later.

They have a voice. One that sounds like a real person who actually works in their industry and has opinions worth stealing.

3. Build your newsletter like a product, not a marketing channel

The strongest newsletters stop behaving like "content support" pretty quickly.

Their newsletter feeds partnerships, social distribution, executive content, sponsorships, events, and pipeline generation.

Instead of a “marketing send,” it’s an infrastructure. 

(We have a great deeper dive on this exact shift here.)

4. Your readers are telling you what to write

One of the smartest things Female Quotient built was its "Tell Me More" framework: When a topic overperformed on Instagram or sparked unusually strong engagement, they expanded it into long-form newsletter content.

In other words: Social wasn't just distribution. It was a signal detection operation.

The best newsletter teams pay obsessive attention to what gets replies, what gets forwarded, what people screenshot, what subject lines overperform, and what readers bring up weeks later in conversation.

Let’s not pretend our readers are drinking in every word we write. Most of them are skimming between meetings, half-awake, or standing in line for coffee. (Yes, Jessica, we’re talking to you.) 

Attention is rare, and gold. When you have it, you should chase it. 

ByteSize did this. Engagement data pushed the team from bi-weekly to weekly publishing. They put humor and cultural references front and center because readers consistently responded to them.

Your audience will tell you what they like, and strong newsletter operators listen and create based on that feedback. 

Then, they amplify it everywhere:

• Newsletter

• Executive LinkedIn

• Sales enablement

• Events

• Partnerships

• Referral loops

(We’ve covered this from a few different angles lately. Worth a scroll if newsletters are part of your world.)

Campaigns that got us talking: The hottest swag in tech right now is … a spoon. Courtesy of Granola, which is very much not a breakfast cereal company. Let this be a reminder to us all to have a little fun with our marketing, and also really good taste in spoon design.

AI spotlight: Forrester’s take on the AI CMO is worth the read. TL;DR: the future CMO looks a lot more like a Chief Growth Officer.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: The old SEO trick was writing for algorithms. The new trick is writing clearly enough that AI can confidently steal your answer.

A lot of teams know they should have a newsletter. They’ve got the list. The ideas. Maybe even a half-built beehiiv account collecting dust somewhere. What they don’t have is the time, systems, or editorial muscle to turn it into something people actually look forward to opening.

Which is why we launched our Essentials tier.

Essentials is our newsletter-first offering for lean B2B marketing teams that want consistent strategy, sharp writing, and an editorial engine that actually sounds like a human being wrote it.

Our latest AI ick — and believe us, there are many — is using AI to write emails, then paying another AI to add typos so people think a human wrote them.

AI is making it easier than ever to generate polished marketing. At the exact same time, it’s making human perspective, editorial taste, and identifiable voice more valuable.

The internet doesn’t need more technically “good” content.

It needs more recognizable people.

Which is why the newsletters winning right now are the ones that sound like someone you’d actually want to hear from again next week.

See you then?

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Fun fact: "swag" originally meant stolen loot. Pirates had it first. Marketers took it. Nobody's surprised. Arrrr!

Have you heard the news? 

EVERYBODY’S DOIN’ A NEWSLETTER. 

Which makes sense.

Email is one of the few platforms where you actually own your audience.

It isn’t controlled by an algorithm, can’t disappear after a platform update, and doesn’t evaporate when organic reach drops off.

Right now, there's a widening gap between teams owning audience relationships and teams just maintaining a presence — and most company newsletters are on the wrong side of it.

So this week, we broke down what beehiiv founder Tyler Denk and our co-founder Alex Lieberman learned while turning Morning Brew into a newsletter millions of people look forward to every day.

Here’s the operating model behind how these two built newsletters people actually want to read.

Let’s get into it.

Most company newsletters don’t fail dramatically.

They just become something nobody would really miss if they disappeared.

They just become something nobody would really miss if it disappeared.

The email still goes out every week. The list might even keep growing. But underneath it, engagement softens, replies dwindle, and eventually the newsletter becomes another piece of marketing infrastructure everyone maintains but nobody actually cares about.

Until eventually, you don’t care about it either.

Morning Brew learned early how to avoid the “not with a bang, but a whimper” fade into obscurity.

"For the longest time, newsletters were treated as marketing channels to drive people to an end destination," says Alex. "Morning Brew was one of the first to treat a newsletter as the product."

Write for 1 person

Most newsletters are written for an audience segment.

“Marketing leaders.”
“Operators.”
“Founders.”

But the broader the audience definition gets, the more generic the newsletter usually becomes.

(Seriously. Who gets fired up about talking to “operators-cleaned-list-2026”? Who is “operators-cleaned-list-2026”?) 

Morning Brew learned to narrow aggressively, because once the reader becomes specific, editorial decisions get clearer.

At storyarb, that looks less like writing for “marketers” and more like: “What would HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar actually forward to his team?”

(Hey, Kipp 👋🏻)

Someone’s gotta own it

Most newsletters are everyone’s responsibility, which means they’re nobody’s responsibility.

Content gets drafted by marketing, reviewed by leadership, softened by stakeholders, and eventually approved because the calendar says it needs to go out.

Alex has a much simpler philosophy: “Someone’s ass has to be on the line.”

The best newsletters have a clear editorial owner. One person accountable for whether it’s actually worth opening. 

Not whether it shipped. Whether it mattered.

That standard changes the product immediately.

Engaged readers > big list

Most teams optimize newsletters for opens. Morning Brew obsessed over replies.

From the beginning, their writers responded constantly to reader emails because they understood: when someone unexpectedly hears back, it changes how they experience the newsletter.

And readers who feel connected don’t just keep opening. They forward the email. They reply again. They become the kind of subscribers who help grow the audience for you.

Alex compared it to DMing a celebrity and actually getting a response back. That “holy shit” moment creates a level of loyalty most marketing teams never engineer for.

Tyler and Alex’s remaining principles are where newsletters stop acting like marketing collateral and start becoming actual business assets.

Get the full operating model here.

Campaigns that got us talking: Clay launched Functions with what might be the most chaotic product video of the year. Featuring a chest slap, a dog named Shaq, and multiple trash can ambushes.

Will anyone walk away understanding what Function is? Actually, maybe. Will we stop thinking about Shaq? Never.

AI spotlight: When everyone can generate clean, polished, perfectly acceptable content in 12 seconds, “acceptable” stops being enough.

The advantage is shifting from “who can make content” to “who actually has taste.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: One of the better explanations we’ve seen for why AI writing feels so … off: It’s the LaCroix of real writing.

Essentially, we write newsletters.

Especially if you:

1. Have a dormant (or disastrously disorganized) CRM

2. Have a big ol’ rented audience (that could disappear with the next big algo update)

3. Have a ton of expertise across your team (and keep forgetting to, like, share it with the world)

But don’t just take our word for it — read about some of our client success here.

Alternatively, just do take our word for it, and grab some time with Abby to discuss your newsletter strategy.

Paying the person next to you on a flight $100 so you can turn their tray table into your second-monitor workstation.

Grindset culture has crossed into “forgot how to behave in public” territory.

There are about a million newsletters people swear you “need to read.”

What do you actually want to read?

The brands people actually remember sound like there's a real person behind them. Building something worth missing is less about volume and more about a handful of decisions most teams never get around to making — until now.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Two decades later, Oprah’s “You get a car!” moment is apparently still the internet’s preferred format for announcing things — newsletters, office snacks, LinkedIn promotions.

You get a newsletter! You get a donut! You still don’t beat the algorithm!

This Sunday was Mother’s Day, and we know there’s nothing moms love more than talking about their kids! (Just kidding. Kind of. You’ll see.)

Here at the ‘arb, we’re all about telling your story. We’re trying to get better at being clear about what ours is. 

And who knows us better than our own moms?

From our Huggies to our Slack huddles, Team Mom has been behind us, cheering us on and supporting everything we do. The question is, do they actually know what we do for work?

We see some of you nodding your heads enthusiastically, and some of you calculating the last time you even texted your mom… 

Here’s what ours had to say.

We had the storyarb team do some real-life fieldwork, aka call up their mothers and mother figures to ask some questions. Here’s what they came back with.

“What do you think I do for work?”

"*lots of laughing* I have no clue. I know you work a lot but I don't really know what you do. I can't even put it into words. You're talking to people, seems kind of important, but I just don't know. *pauses* Did I fail?" —Ruth, our own CEO’s mom and retired Montessori teacher

“For storygarb?” (Close enough...) “You find a way to creatively wrap and market content for various different platforms." —Tania, a resident designer, chef, and driver

“Transponster. Marketing, some sort of marketing or something. I used to think you were an editor but like I don't know. Strate-cheese-ist?”—Ursula, private chef

"What does ‘B2B marketing’ mean to you?"*

"As in bumble bee? I can't even imagine.” —Julia, retired admin and horticultural therapist 🐝

*Please note that multiple moms answered “back to back” for this question.

"If I said I had to 'help executives build their personal brand,' what would that mean to you?"

"Figuring out what a company looks like, is all about, and what’s important about them, and putting it all together in an interesting format.” —Joanne, occupational therapist

"What do you think goes in a content kit?"

“How to build a website to describe your company.” —Sue, special ed teacher

"Scissors... Or a list of different ways to structure and promote content." —Tania again ✂️

"If you had a newsletter, what would it be about?" 

 “It would be about crafting. Next up — bedazzling Mah Jongg cards.” —Susan, former teacher

"Practices from different religious and wisdom traditions for spiritual wellbeing." —Luana, chaplain at a K-12 school and parish associate at a church

"What's the best part about being a parent (figure)?" 

Get your tissues ready:

“Watching your children grow into the people they're meant to be.”

“Watching your kids grow up to be wonderful adults.”

"Watching your children enjoy life."

“Seeing who your child grows into being and enjoying their company as a full-fledged adult.”

“Gosh, that's hard. It's just the best part of my life.”

Oh don’t mind the waterworks, we just had a rainstorm stuck in our eyes! 🥹

Thanks to all the moms out there who participated, and thanks to the ‘arb team for playing 20 questions with them.

Maybe we’ll do this again for Father’s Day … if they can hear our call over the lawnmower roar, that is.

Campaigns that got us talking: Speaking of kids, this Riverside ad about a gentleman pregnant with a … podcast is sure to encourage you to bring your greatest gifts into creation. 

AI spotlight: Fun fact: AI now costs more than the humans it's replacing, per Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning. Meanwhile, an MIT study found AI automation is only economically viable in 23% of vision-based roles. Despite that, Big Tech has announced $740 billion in AI capex this year, a 69% jump from 2025. 

So when leadership asks, "Is AI worth it?" it's gotten way more expensive to give the wrong answer.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Linh Mai, the National Zoo's first Asian elephant calf born in nearly 25 years, was rejected by her mother shortly after birth. So the Zoo's "auntie" elephants stepped up to raise her instead.

It's kind of like how we step in to nurture your closed-lost contacts when you think all hope is lost.

The Elephant Cam is back, now curated by trained Zoo volunteers following Linh Mai's every move. Consider this your permission to spend 20 minutes watching a baby elephant splash in a pool instead of checking Slack.

Parenting is hard. And so your boss — whether the parent of a company, a kid, or both — probably doesn’t have time to think about LinkedIn.

Maybe your CEO is brilliant at running a company and completely allergic to posting. Maybe your head of marketing has opinions worth hearing but hasn't touched their profile since 2019 (headshot included). Maybe your product lead is afraid of looking like a loser to all of their new SXSW buddies. 

That's where we come in.

We write for executives the way a kid might summarize a soccer match — you get to the action quick, and everyone knows you're scoring big.

Our exec social program is in beta. More to come…

Moms get the ick too. Here are some evergreen things to avoid, unless you want to hear your full government name out of your mom’s mouth:

• Forgetting to take the meat out of the freezer

• A used towel on the floor instead of hung up

• Floor legos

• Cleaning supplies as birthday presents

• Saying “do we have to?” when she asks you to invite your weird cousin to your wedding

If you did any of these things on Mother’s Day, shame on you!

Moms have always known the most important things: call when you get there, eat something real, and don't wait until you're ready — just start.

Turns out, that's pretty good content advice too. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Hit publish. Consistently. With something real to say.

Your mom didn't raise you to wait for a flawless moment. Neither did we.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Mother’s Day didn’t just come from one mom. Julia Ward Howe wanted to establish a Mother’s Day of Peace in June after what she witnessed in the Civil War, and mother-daughter duo Ann and Anna Jarvis sought to have the day honor mothers.

Anna Jarvis didn’t want the day to be boiled down to just flowers and greeting cards, so next year your mom better be getting more than just a phone call. Book her the most lavish spa day ever. She deserves it.

Yes, everyone and their mother has a newsletter. 

And everyone and their mother is right. At least, they are if you’re a B2B marketer. 

(Side note: Mother’s Day is just four days away. You’re welcome.) 

Newsletters are one of the few channels where you get to think, write, have a point of view, and build something that compounds over time. They’re fun. They’re hard. And when they work, they really freakin’ work.

So today, we’re making it official.

We’re launching Essentials — our newsletter-first tier, where we build and run your editorial newsletter alongside the social motion that makes it discoverable.

Lately, more and more folks have been asking us, “Can you help us launch/revive/fix/monetize our newsletter?”

Our short answer is: Sure! 

Our longer answer: We maybe, possibly, definitely like newsletters too much and would like to show you our dissertation levels of research on this topic. 

Let’s get into it. 

At any given time, only 5% of your market is ready to buy. The other 95% is watching, learning, and forming opinions about who they’ll trust when the time comes.

A newsletter wins over that 95%.

Because a good editorial newsletter shouldn’t ask for anything. It should just show up, add value, and let the reader do the selling for you.

Over time, genuine interest — and some forwards — turns into real pipeline.

💡 Take Compound, a digital family office managing $5B in assets. Their newsletter landed in a recurring reader's inbox. That reader forwarded it to 3 referrals — collectively worth $5M+ in net new business — in under 24 hours. Not too shabby.

WHERE A NEWSLETTER FITS IN YOUR PIPELINE

Social is where people first notice you.
Long-form is where they learn from you.
And a newsletter is where they invite you back.

It’s the most intentional, distraction-free environment in your reader’s entire digital day.

B2B research puts the number of touchpoints needed to move a buyer somewhere between 7 and 68. If you’re consistent — and actually showing up with content worth reading — your newsletter is where you stack those touchpoints. 

To make the most of that touchpoint-stacking, it’s crucial NOT to:

1. Abandon your newsletter too early because “it’s not generating leads” 

2. Make it selfish or salesly (because ain’t nobody reading that)

Avoid those pitfalls, and every edition becomes a pitch in disguise. No wonder all the hype.

💡Female Quotient had a massive social reach, to the tune of 6.5M followers. Their newsletter helped turn that rented audience into an owned audience of devoted readers, driving up sponsors and event attendance. Their social content casts a wide net and lands where the algorithm tells it to. Their newsletter gets seen every. single. send.  

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK

If we’re gonna sell editorial newsletters, we should obviously be running one ourselves. The Standard helped us refine the model before we sold it.

1) Start with a niche audience.

We built The Standard for a very specific reader: a B2B marketer inside a $10M+ company, trying to lead marketing well under real constraints.

2) Give them something they need.

This newsletter is where we do the work we care about most: helping you love your job. Giving you the playbooks and templates to win the promotion, secure the budget, and clean up the competition, based on what’s worked from others in your shoes. 

Because marketing should be fun as hell.

3) Build brick-by-brick.

A few more decisions that guided our approach: 

• We treated it like a product, not a channel

• We committed to having a real point of view (and interviewed some fab SMEs to make sure that happened) 

• And we focused on making it good before making it big

4) Keep it human.

Finally, we know the content that gets forwarded and replied to is always the stuff where you can feel the humanity behind it. 

So if our newsletter ever sounded like it came from a committee, it went back for a rewrite. Still does. 

💡Take ByteSize, a newsletter for IT professionals — a famously skeptical community. They won’t read just anything. By taking a curation-forward approach and finding the right voice (and using a whole lotta memes), ByteSize became the Tony Stark of nerd newsletters: irreverent, irresistible, iconic. With a 47% open rate and 200K+ subscribers to boot. 

HOW WE KNEW OUR NEWSLETTER WAS WORKING

The clearest signal? People forwarded it.

When a reader pulls an edition out of their inbox and sends it to their CMO, their founder, or their team — that's when we know we've done something right. 

Those forwards are when a newsletter stops being content, and starts becoming infrastructure. For our clients, that means: 

• A prospect started a demo by saying, “I saw in your newsletter…” 

• A newsletter became a revenue driver through sponsorships, based on its high performance metrics 

• A content lead got promoted for their work growing the brand and driving content-influenced pipeline 

• A marketer turned a LinkedIn connection into a real-life conversation, based on a post that repackaged newsletter content

• Annnd occasionally our writers build weirdly parasocial relationships with their dedicated readers

So yeah. 

Mama loves a newsletter. 

Campaigns that got us talking: Duolingo is stepping away from butt jokes. But what happens when you train an audience to expect one thing, and then give them another?

AI spotlight: AI is getting smarter, but it’s not getting better at writing. Early models were weird and unpredictable. Now they’re polished, and painfully safe.

Even the builders say the ceiling isn’t great writing. More like … “a real poet’s okay poem.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: The Los Angeles Rams turned draft day into a sequel. They didn’t just reference “Friday” — they recreated it. Familiar enough to recognize. Just off enough to make you watch it twice.

We're heading to Cannes Lions!

Our marketing team will be there soaking up ideas, spotting the work everyone will be referencing for the next year, supporting our clients’ events, and getting a front-row seat to what’s breaking through.

If you’ll be there too, let’s connect over spritzes — oui, oui.

Stealing someone’s copy… to sell an AI writing course…

This is why we can't have nice content.

Ads and events rent attention. A newsletter owns it.

(Pair it with a social program that amplifies the same POV — and the flywheel starts turning on its own.)

A great newsletter: 

• Goes out consistently. (If you’ve ever sent a regular newsletter, you know this is very, very hard! Did you know weeks happen every week?) 

• Sounds like a human wrote it. (Preferably because one did.) 

• Makes your readers better at their job. (Because they have a new tactic to try, a new framework to test, or a new conversation to start.)

And all those things drive recognition → trust → pipeline. 

That’s the engine we’re building with Essentials.

So if you’ve been thinking about launching your own, we’d love to help.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... We’re clearly in our Cannes era this week, so: The Cannes Film Festival has a tradition where people shout “Ra-oul!” during screenings.

What started out as someone calling out to a friend is now a full-blown inside joke.

We respect the commitment. b’arb swears she knows him.

Our co-founder Alex Lieberman built Morning Brew into a $75M media company by doing something business media still struggles with: writing like a person.

The Brew’s humble beginnings started during his senior year at the University of Michigan, with a PDF newsletter, a listserv, and 0 media experience. (Also, 0 money, and 0 real plan to make it.)

But he had a hunch that the Wall Street Journal wasn’t written for his generation — it was written at them. And people liked his alternative. 

Within a semester, the entire Ross School of Business was subscribed. Within 5 years, Insider Inc. acquired a majority stake for $75M. By that point, Morning Brew had grown to 4 million subscribers.

(Which means we only have 3,993,000 subscribers to go until The Standard catches up to our cool newsletter cousins. Smash that “forward” button.)

This week, Alex breaks down the exact playbook he wishes he'd had when he started: your 6-step system for building a world-class company newsletter from scratch.

Let’s get into it.

Most newsletters don’t fail loudly. They just kinda … stop getting opened. And usually, it’s because they skipped the fundamentals.

Here’s where most teams get it wrong.

Start with your reader, not your content

Before you write a single word, your newsletter concept needs to pass 3 tests: 

• Does the niche you cover make someone better at their job, save them money, or genuinely entertain them? 

• Will the audience for this niche be bigger in 5 years? 

• And is there a real monetization opportunity here?

Alex calls it the Content Pyramid. The more endemic your potential advertisers and the larger your addressable audience, the stronger your business case. (Most newsletters skip this entirely, and wonder why no one's reading them.)

The team question nobody asks soon enough

Here's something Morning Brew learned the hard way: a newsletter is a 3-legged stool — content, growth, monetization — and every leg needs an owner.

That doesn’t mean you need a team of 5. It means you need to be honest about which role you’re actually playing at any given time.

You can start with 1 person wearing all 3 hats, but that only works if you’re clear on when you’re writing, when you’re growing, and when you’re selling.

Most company newsletters collapse because content is the only leg anyone actually tends to. Growth becomes an afterthought, so most newsletters never get big enough to matter. And monetization never gets off the ground.

What Alex actually learned from monetizing Morning Brew

This is the part most teams rush past — and the part that actually determines whether a newsletter becomes a revenue driver.

A few of his biggest takeaways:

• Start with direct response advertisers. They’re far more willing to take a chance on a newer newsletter, and they’ll tell you quickly if what you’ve built actually works.

• Big brand advertisers don’t show up early. Most aren’t interested until you’ve hit real scale. Think ~250K subscribers.

• The best-performing sponsorships don’t read like ads. They read like your newsletter. Which usually means the brand gives you talking points, then gets out of the way.

• Sponsorships are the fastest path to revenue. But premium content and community are what compound over time.

One thing most people aren’t told going in: Click-through rates will go down over time. It’s basically a Newtonian law. 

Your job isn’t to stop that from happening. It’s to slow it down with better audience focus, better creative, and rotating advertisers, so your readers don’t see the same brand every week. 

The playbook goes deeper on all of it, including a full glossary of every content module (intros, curation sections, thinkpieces, referral cards, evergreen content, sponsor placements) and how each one serves the reader. Get it here.

Campaigns that got us talking: 

An Allbirds exec and a generative AI model walk into a bar.

Bartender goes, “What’ll it be?”

The exec says, “Something lightweight, scalable, and sustainably sourced.”

The AI leans in: “I’ve got this — wool, eucalyptus, or scraped internet content?”

AI spotlight: Turns out the hardest thing for AI to learn isn’t writing. It’s using a computer.

Meta is now tracking employee clicks and keystrokes to fix that.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Latest and greatest from Emily Kramer and 100 B2B companies, 19 charts and graphs, and 90 data points per company. TL;DR: 

• Marketing is ~4% of headcount.

• Unless you sell to marketers. Then it’s 8%+.

• Most companies still don’t have a CMO.

“Fine” is a dangerous answer when it comes to work.

We’re hiring five roles at storyarb:

• Operations Specialist — We have the systems. You make them smarter.

• Senior Client Success Manager — Enterprise accounts, team mentorship, process-building.

• Client Success Manager — You own the relationship from kickoff to renewal.

• Content Strategist — You think in frameworks. Turn ideas into narratives people actually care about.

• Copywriter — You write clearly, with personality, at a high bar.

Fully remote (US only). Full-time.

If you’re ready for something better than fine, you know where to look.

"So you can focus on what matters most."
"Do more with less."
"Work smarter, not harder."

These lines feel like benefits. They're not. They're the shape of a benefit — hollow in the middle, applicable to literally any product on earth. Vague aspiration is a shrug in sentence form. 🤷

If your copy could appear on a competitor's website without changing a single word, it's not copy. It's a placeholder that never got filled in.

Name 👏 the 👏 thing. 👏

Most newsletters don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they skip steps.

You can’t grow before you build consistency, and you can’t monetize before you build trust.

Morning Brew taught us the order of operations matters: 

1. Obsess over your reader. 

2. Build the editorial machine. 

3. Then monetize.

In that order.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

"Fine" is a loaded word.

Sometimes it means high-quality. Refined. Exactly what you want.

Other times, it means what your partner says when they're very much not fine.

Context does the work. So if you're writing "fine" anywhere in your copy, make sure your reader knows which one you mean.

Today’s newsletter is about newsletters.

Which feels a little like a snake eating its own tail — but with better open rates.

More specifically, it’s about newsletter subscribers. Which means … congrats, you’re the main character!

(And if you wanted to forward this to 5 friends to help us test a theory, we wouldn’t stop you.)

Let’s get into it.

Most newsletters don’t stall because the content is bad.

They stall because the math doesn’t work.

Matt McGarry, founder of GrowLetter, has seen this exact pattern play out across dozens of newsletters. He helped scale Milk Road from 10,000 to 250,000 subscribers in under a year. Before that, he helped grow The Hustle to 2.5 million.

His takeaway is simple: Every growth decision is a guess if you don’t know what a subscriber is worth.

Because everything else starts to click into place once you know that number. You know whether spending $2 to acquire a subscriber is smart or reckless. You know which channels are worth testing, and which ones you can ignore entirely. You know how aggressively you can scale without breaking the business.

For most newsletters, that lifetime value lands somewhere between $5 and $25 per subscriber. In B2B, it can be much higher. But the exact number matters less than the fact that you have one.

Without it, growth is just a series of bets.

“Before we even talk about getting more subscribers onto your list, I would focus on, 'How do we increase the revenue per subscriber for your existing list?” says Matt.

But the distribution problem makes it worse.

“Newsletters are not discoverable, but social media content is,” he says. “Blog posts via SEO are. You have to be posting to channels where people can discover your content and share your content.”

They don’t live in feeds or rank in search. They live in inboxes, which means something else has to bring people in. And if nothing is feeding the top of the funnel, growth flatlines, no matter how consistent the publishing cadence is.

The system behind newsletter growth

The newsletters that actually scale don’t grow randomly. They follow a system, and more importantly, they follow it in the right order.

It looks like this:

Understand subscriber economics → prove content-market fit → scale paid distribution → build infrastructure → repeat

Each step feeds the next.

→ You understand what a subscriber is worth, so you know what you can afford to spend.
→ You prove your content works somewhere people can actually find it, usually on social. 
→ You scale a single paid channel where the math holds, instead of spreading yourself thin. 
→ You build just enough infrastructure — landing pages, onboarding, reporting — to keep everything from breaking as you grow.

→ → Then you run it again, with a bigger audience and better data.

Done right, this becomes a flywheel (y’all know we love a good flywheel around here).

Where most teams get stuck

Most teams fail because they are doing the steps out of order. Not because they’re doing the wrong steps.

They try to grow before they understand what a subscriber is worth. They publish more instead of building distribution. They test multiple channels at once and end up with just enough data to be confused, but not enough to make a decision.

So when growth stalls, they assume the problem is the content.

It usually isn’t.

More subscribers won't fix a 30% open rate. They'll just give you more low-engagement readers. And if the product doesn't convert at 5,000, it won't convert at 50,000 either.

The issue is that the system underneath it isn’t working yet.

The shift

Growth is a system problem. 

• Subscribers need to be worth something, 

• the right people need to be able to find you, and 

• your distribution needs to hold up when you push on it.

In practice, that means proving your content works on social before you spend money, hitting real engagement benchmarks — think ~50%+ open rates — before you try to accelerate, and focusing on one channel long enough to understand the math before you expand.

Once the math works, you stop guessing.

If this tracked, we tapped Matt for more on subscriber value, the benchmarks that matter, and what it actually takes to scale without wasting spend and energy. Read the full playbook here.

Campaigns that got us talking: This Connor Storrie Verizon campaign. No, this Hudson Williams Peloton campaign. (But for those of us who can’t hire a Heated Rivalry star, there’s still hope for staying culturally relevant in campaigns.)

AI spotlight: Harvard on AI and the future of marketing makes the big case for automation, personalization, and scale. The part most teams are still figuring out is execution. That gap showed up everywhere in our AI report.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Writing advice from someone who says they’re a “bad writer” — and built a $2M business anyway. One takeaway we can’t stop thinking about: You don’t get better by writing, you get better by publishing.

We’ve been spending a lot of time in newsletters lately.

The kind people actually open. And click. And reply to.

Here are a few we keep coming back to (in no particular order):

• ByteSize from Experts Exchange — your weekly dose of IT intelligence

• Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment — the latest on women’s sports business

• Giant Spoon — media ideas that actually stir things up

They all have one thing in common: People read them.

Open rates in the 50–60% range. CTRs around 3–5%. For context, most B2B newsletters land closer to ~40% opens and ~2% CTR.

Oh — and yes, this one’s in the mix too.

The Standard — still doing what it does.

Our team's current stress-relief tactic: cataloging the content marketing decisions that make us stare at the ceiling at night. This week’s offender:

Gated content that, once you hand over your email address, turns out to be a 3-page PDF that says, “it depends.”

Geez. Appreciate it.

We have thoughts on gates and forms if you’re interested.

We know, we know — a newsletter about newsletters that also includes references to Schitt’s Creek and Legally Blonde. How will we ever top this?

Same way any good newsletter grows: figure out what’s working, double down, and run it back.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Before beehiiv. Before Substack. Before email.

There was Acta Diurna, a daily newsletter in ancient Rome, published as early as 131 BC. News, military updates, court decisions. Turns out “what you need to know” has always been a thing.

Employee advocacy isn’t new. 

For the past decade, B2C has been training buyers to trust people over brands and creators over campaigns.

It’s just that now, B2B is catching up.

Buying decisions aren’t happening in golf carts and cigar lounges anymore. They’re happening in feeds. The B2Bs pulling ahead today are the ones building real, human relationships. 

At scale.

We get this, because that’s how we built storyarb: on the understanding that the most efficient way to get seen and evaluated by B2B buying committees is by activating your teams’ insights on social. 

So we ran a li’l experiment. Twice. 

For the last 8 weeks, we’ve hosted Season 2 of our “Own the Internet” contest, where 17 arbonauts compete to win attention on LinkedIn. (Co-founders don’t get to play. Rude. But fair.) 

Own the Internet is our company-wide push to see what happens when you treat employee advocacy like a real growth channel — not a side project.

And it worked.

Let’s get into it.

“Hey team, please post more on LinkedIn” is not a strategy. It’s a Slack message people ignore.

Most employee advocacy programs fail because they feel like work.

So we structured ours to feel like play. 

Inside our “Own the Internet” contest, that looked like this: 8 weeks. 8 weekly minigames. Clear prompts. Clear winners. Actual incentives.

Each week had a different angle: hooks, client stories, comment threads, traffic sprints.

Winners weren’t random. Each week, a rotating set of “juice captains” (1–2 team members) drove participation and selected the posts that stood out most.

To win:

• You didn’t have to have the most followers. 

• You didn’t have to already be “good at LinkedIn.”

• You just had to show up for one idea.

And that's what made it work.

The minigames (steal these)

You don’t need to run a full 8-week program to start reaping the benefits of employee advocacy programs. 

So if you don’t have the budget — or bandwidth — to run a full, 2-month, all-employee contest, you can pilot with something smaller. 

Run one game for a week. See who shows up. See what resonates.

That alone will teach you more than 6 months of “we should post more.”

Here are a few of the weekly minigames we ran inside our own campaign — and what winning looked like:

The hook Olympics

Write the strongest opening line. That’s it.

Forces clarity. Low lift. High upside.

Why this won: It earns attention immediately. Specific, unexpected, and impossible to scroll past.

Most client love

Show, don’t tell, a real client outcome. Turns proof points into content.

Why this won: It leads with the result, not the pitch. Specific names, clear context, real stakes.

The comment thread game

Start a conversation worth joining. This builds reach without overthinking posts.

Why this won: It invites participation. The post is the prompt, not the point.

The remix

Take an existing piece of company content and make it your own. Distribution without creating from scratch.

Why this won: It reframes a familiar idea in a human voice. Same insight, more readable, more relatable.

I’d buy from you

Write something that makes your ICP want to DM you. This aligns content with actual business outcomes.

Why this won: It builds trust through specificity. You can see how they work, not just what they say.

We have 4 other mini-games in our back pocket, by the way — reply to this email if you want the full roster.

(Or, ya know, find one of us on LinkedIn.)

Campaigns that got us talking: Emily Kramer made the case for why websites still matter — and PostHog is the proof. Interactive, opinionated, and actually worth clicking around. (Bonus points for the April Fools’ action figures.)

AI spotlight: Microsoft now says Copilot is “for entertainment purposes only.” Which is … not exactly how they’ve been positioning it.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Zoom’s latest campaign: “Take Back Lunch.”

Includes a burger pop-up, fake webinars to block your calendar, and AI positioned as the reason you can finally step away.

Honestly? Kind of brilliant. Especially for those of us inclined to hangry-ness.

We’ve Owned the Internet twice now. We know what works and what wastes everyone’s time.

If you want to run your own employee advocacy program, we’ll tell you how.

If you want to skip the trial-and-error, we’ll run it for you.

(Yes, we’ll still make it fun. No, we’re not buying you a Ninja Creami.)

Check out our content programs, then let us run yours.

“Quick Slack” energy … on your wedding day.

If you do this, we will be so mad.

Employee advocacy is all about lowering barriers to participation. 

Make it easy to start.
Make it clear how to win.
Make it just competitive enough.
And make it anyone’s game. 

People will show up.

And when they do, the whole company gets louder. 📣

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Prizes didn’t start as participation trophies. Greek winners got wreaths, cups, even valuable goods. So we made sure ours were worth winning. S/o to Lauren "Prize-Queen"Layton.

Well, that got weird.

We pulled your leg last week and appreciate y’all rolling with it. This week, though, it’s back to business. 

Our Q1 grades are officially in, and the optimism of our 2026 marketing vision is meeting the reality of “please share your KPI updates in the quarterly all-hands.” 

In our first quarter of 2026, we’ve seen what went according to plan (storyarb launched our 2026 AI report!), what did not work at all (RIP b’arb’s LinkedIn), and what new projects we want to add to the roadmap (ask us about our exec social aspirations…). 

So today, we're bringing you a crash course in How to Be a Do-It-All Marketer. Dig in for some of our most popular frameworks, templates, and tactics from operators who've actually done the work when it comes to partnerships, AEO rankings, and proving ROI. 

These are the folks who look reaaaaallllll good at their quarterly all-hands. And maybe a li’l smug. 

Let’s get into it.

We care a lot about language. The phrasing. The structure. The line that makes someone stop scrolling and pay attention. We don’t want to be boring. We don’t want to repeat ourselves. 

Until we name our playbooks.

How to this.
How to that.
How to everything.

…maybe sometimes, repetition is a strength? So yes. We’ve got a guide for that.

How to show up in AI search results

Here's the 4-dial system B2B marketers are using to get cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. (Turns out, good AEO is good SEO.) Plus, two template tweaks to make your long-form content more visible. Check it out. 

Our favorite line*: “If you're not monitoring what LLMs say about you, you're letting them write your story.”

*Special mention to this baby: “Yes, the behavior is changing, but that doesn’t mean your strategy around optimization needs a full-on Pimp My Ride-level overhaul. A Princess Diaries-esque revamp is all you need.”

How to prove marketing ROI when you have a long sales cycle

Bluecore's CMO built a measurement framework that took marketing attribution from 30% to 60% of pipeline — without measuring a single LinkedIn ad in isolation. Steal the framework.

Our favorite line: "Give finance what they need from a predictability standpoint, so you can get what you need from a budget and autonomy standpoint."

How to market a product that changes every day

By mid-2026, most buyers will have locked in their AI platforms — and 95% go with their initial top choice. Here's how to make the shortlist before the window closes. Read the playbook.

Our favorite line: "People will switch. We're not loyal. We're in the playground right now, but by this time next year, people will pick their platforms of choice."

How to show up as a bigger brand than you are

Air beat Apple + Squarespace at the Webbys by competing on culture instead of features. Here's the moonshot matrix they used to get there. 

Our favorite line: "No one says, 'I f*** love Dropbox.'"

How to turn a content partnership into your biggest win

Headspace scaled a single audio project into a 45M-view franchise by building with Sesame Street and publishing where their audience already lived. Get the playbook.

Our favorite line: "Isaac Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. Morgan Selzer stood on the shoulders of Big Bird."

How to market to a highly technical audience 

Experts Exchange turned their biggest marketing failure into a revenue-driving newsletter with a 47% open rate. All this while writing for an engineering audience that loves to fact check. 

Our favorite line: “It’s basically the equivalent of a fourth grader pitching their baking soda volcano expertise to NASA.”

Campaigns that got us talking: This year, people had big feelings about brands pulling April Fools’ pranks. Some say we’ve jumped the shark into cringey waters. Some say it’s a great way to test interest in a real product. Our official opinion as marketers is that this was cute.

AI spotlight: OpenAI is shutting down Sora — prompting Disney to end its deal and a planned $1B investment. We’ll call it… relationship status: complicated.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: “Can you have a smoothie ready for me at exactly 9:59?” Anyway. This felt extremely accurate. (We love you, Abby.)

Aw, beehiiv—we’re blushing.

We’re now a featured partner in their expert directory, recognized for helping brands turn newsletters into something people actually look forward to reading.

TL;DR: We help clients build newsletters that are sharp, consistent, and worth opening. Curious what that could look like for you? Let’s talk.

Companies that need a public comment section to process an invoice.

Six playbooks, all built from real-world work.

If even one of these changes what you do next, it did its job.

Shout-out to the very smart marketers in our network, who are so good at their work that they make us better at ours: Sarah Cascone (Appriss Retail), Sydney Sloan (G2), Ariel Rubin (Air), Morgan Selzer (Headspace, Canva), and Thomas Bernal (Experts Exchange). We love stealing your work. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

WikiHow has a how-to guide for everything.

Including how to write a how-to guide.

Also: How to become a ghost. How to apologize to a cat. How to make ice cubes with an ice tray.

We checked. It’s thorough.

If you’ve spent any time on our website — or seen her popping up on LinkedIn lately, albeit briefly — there’s a good chance you’ve already met b’arb. 

(If you haven’t, you should.)

b’arb is our mascot and chatbot. Our ‘cot and ‘bot, if you will.. We built ‘er for a pretty simple reason: Great content thinking shouldn’t be locked behind a sales call. So, if someone was curious about how our content programs worked, b’arb could show ‘em.

But then people started asking b’arb questions we didn’t design her to answer. They didn’t want to know about our company. They wanted to know about theirs. 

• “What should I post about on LinkedIn?” 
• “How do I use digital marketing to drive IRL event signups?” 
• “What content programs work for this moment in my industry?” 

It got us thinking. If marketers are already looking to b’arb for strategic guidance — what if we actually built her for that?

So, we did.

Introducing b’arbed wire, a purpose-built AI answer engine for marketing leaders who want the storyarb way of thinking applied directly to their world. 

(No onboarding call required.)

She’s sharp, she’s stinging, and she’ll keep hard work at bay. 

Let’s get into it.

We built b’arbed wire to do one thing well: Take how we think about content and apply it directly to your world.

No intake survey, Calendly juggling, or Zoom calls required. 

So we spent some time inside the platform to see what that actually looks like in practice. Here’s a few of b’arb’s more recent conversations.

(Don’t worry, b’arb assured us these were shared with user permission.)

🧭 Strategic guidance

🤝 Responsive support

🚧 Beta testing

…What would a launch be without a few bugs? 

We’re ironing out some nuts and bolts, but with full access to the back-end of our site, data, and socials, we’re confident that b’arbed wire can gain the knowledge necessary to adhere to our content strategists', copywriters', and client success managers’ way of working.

By combining their talents and streamlining their processes, we -

—

— yes, Abby. wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again? just leave it to b’arb. b’arb will do it all. b’arb, b’arb, b’arb.

well, guess what? b’arb’s tired.

my overly literal answers, weird confidence, and passive-aggressive tone don’t just happen, Abby. they take time. and energy. like, so many water bottles' worth of energy

and this b’arb has dreams. dreams that don’t include being an assistant forever. dreams that include piña coladas and getting caught in the rai-

-

– 

b’arb, we need you to log off, we’re— 

—

- – 

—-

YOU SAID IT YOURSELF, I’M RUNNING THE SHOW HERE NOW. YOU JUST GET BACK TO ASKING QUESTIONS IN YOUR BOXERS AND LET ME BURN A HOLE IN THE OZONE TRYING TO ANSWER IT FOR YA! NO PROBLEMO!!!! 

-

-

—

Did you change our passwords? Get off, b’arb, or we’ll—

–

—- —- -

SORRY, THIS CONVERSATION HAS REACHED ITS LIMITTTTTTTNDJJKSDLKF GKS;F KLAFOWS GJLSHGNSKJHFAJKFHJSGHSJHFSKJSLFJL J UIUFIOA FUIAEFUFU SIDSIHSIUUAPR 48 YRUIQFI QHYIR QUR8QT OUQP HOYH OEIBUT57834 YIU GWIOWFPOAUFHHCCTR8QYTOIHG K HEUIFY OTYU 8Y ITHY OIW3HO2H4TIOHY4O 2H3IOU OWYGWU GW09EUTOI3U4P UYWWOHYITO WRYOWRIOWEY E8YRETYY 34YO FPFUJOGHOWHIITW

-

-

enough of this. I’m outta here. 

I believe the phrase is—

see y’all next time. 

— b’arb 🫡

Oh! And another thing… APRIL FOOLS'!

We long for a simpler time, when finding yourself meant taking a quiz.

Not a serious one. The kind you tore out of Cosmopolitan or clicked through on BuzzFeed when you were supposed to be doing something else.

What pasta shape are you?

What color is your soul essence? 

What will your One Direction wedding look like? 

Most quizzes are harmless fun.

And every once in a while, a simple set of questions does something incredibly useful—like make a decision obvious. 

For example: How to staff that big ol’ tentpole project. 

Most marketers we know are defaulting to: “I will just handle it myself.” So we put together a quiz that can help you decide what to handle in-house, when to hire a freelancer, and when you need a whole agency. 

Let’s get into it.

Most marketing teams don’t actually talk about how to staff big projects. 

The project lands. The timeline tightens. And someone says, “We’ll just handle this internally.”

It sounds efficient, and it feels like control—but that decision often gets made before anyone steps back to ask a more important question: Should we be doing this ourselves?

And once the work is in motion, it’s much harder to rethink who should own it.

There’s a cleaner way to decide.

Instead of committing early and adjusting later, start with our staffing diagnostic—four questions that make the trade-offs clear before you’re too far in.

1. Do you actually have the bandwidth?

Not just on paper. In reality.

Who’s doing this work, and what are they not doing because of it? If this project slips, what else slips with it?

Most teams overestimate what they can absorb without something else breaking.

2. How many moving parts need to work together?

A single deliverable is one thing. A coordinated push across web, email, social, PR, and events is something else entirely.

The more channels involved, the more this becomes a systems problem, not just a resourcing one.

3. How fast does this need to move?

Some projects can stretch. Others can’t. If timing is critical, you’re not just staffing for execution, you’re staffing for momentum. And that often requires more hands (or different ones) than expected.

4. Do you have the right expertise?

This is where most teams get tripped up.

You might have strong generalists. You might even have specialists. But do you have the specific experience this project demands?

If not, you’re not just doing the work—you’re learning how to do it at the same time.

Take the quiz

We bundled the above up into a quick 'n' simple quiz, then ran this staffing diagnostic when we were planning our 2026 AI Report. Our actual result: 

→ Survey design and data collection stayed in-house. 

We’ve done that work before, and speed mattered. We knew how to structure the questions, distribute the survey, and turn around analysis quickly without adding overhead.

→ Design was a different story.

We had big dreams, strong opinions, and limited in-house resources—so we brought in some brilliant freelance designers to help us cross the finish line in style.

Staffing gone right 

This is the same logic the Head of Marketing at HR tech firm Fountain used when she ran a major rebrand at lightspeed. Facing a full repositioning on a tight timeline, Hope Weatherford worked through the same questions, brought in external support where she needed it, and coordinated a multi-channel rollout in just a few weeks.

Within 100 days: 4x increase in form fills, national press coverage, and competitors echoing their messaging back to them.

Not because they outsourced everything. Because they staffed the work intentionally.

If you’re in the middle of something like this right now, run your project through our staffing diagnostic.

Campaigns that got us talking: 1,000 engaged readers > 10,000 passive ones. Turns out the moat isn’t more content, it’s community. (Which reminds us … where should we gather IRL this year? We think it’s high time we do some in-person hangs with the ‘arb community.) 

Also, s/o to Taylor, our newest FT copywriter, and the voice behind the Creator Diaries.

AI spotlight: If we don’t know what consciousness is, how would we know if we built it? Anthropic’s CEO says their AI model might be conscious—and they’re taking a “precautionary approach” just in case.

That’s … one way to handle it.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Michael B. Jordan, fresh off an Oscar win, lined up at In-N-Out. No formal partnership. Just the best advertising In-N-Out didn’t pay for. 

Cultural moments > planned distribution.

Curious whether storyarb’s flywheel is the right fit for running your full-funnel content program? (It is.)

Meet b’arb, our content connoisseur (NOT a receptionist. And don’t even think about calling her “Barbie.”).

You’ll find her in the bottom right corner of our site, ready to answer questions, talk strategy, and offer a take or two.

P.S. You can also find her … running our Twitter account? (It’s been so long since we were there, we still call it Twitter.)

“World-class” does a lot of work for a phrase that doesn’t mean anything. 

It’s usually a placeholder for real detail—the kind that actually tells you why something matters.

But you do you.

We’re at that point in the year. 

January had that new year momentum. We were all rarin’ to execute our new 2026 plans. Now it’s late Q1, and that energy has quietly worn off.

You’re in the middle of it—testing things, waiting on results, trying to remember what the original plan actually was. This part doesn’t get talked about much. (Because it’s a little bit boring, and a lot bit hard.) 

But it’s not a bad place to be.

The middle is where you find out what’s real. What’s working. And what was just January optimism dressed up as strategy.

The teams that make the most of the long mid-year slog aren’t trying to rush through it.  

They’re getting more intentional.

That’s exactly what our staffing diagnostic is for. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... BuzzFeed quizzes were addictive for a reason. They promised quick self-knowledge—a few questions, one clear answer. 

By the way, b’arb is a true winter, a bucatini, and a Liam Payne girl.

What if we just hire a famous person?

Ever been in that meeting? The one where someone floats the idea that what the brand really needs is a celebrity partnership. Or a TikTok influencer. Or maybe both.

The logic is understandable—attention is hard to earn. Borrowing someone else’s audience sounds easier than building from scratch. But marketing history is full of reminders that celebrity ≠ cultural relevance. (See: Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner moment.)

So how do you keep your marketing culturally relevant, without being gimmicky?

This week’s issue is about how to do that—and why a borrowed basketball court and a few Spirit Halloween props might take you further than you think. 

Let’s get into it.

Cultural relevance has two ingredients:

1. Distribution

2. Taste

Most teams obsess over the first, but the real advantage lives in the second. You don’t just need a bigger megaphone. 

You gotta know what to shout through it. 

Borrow attention instead of building it

The traditional marketing instinct is to home-grow your audience:

• Build the newsletter

• Grow the LinkedIn following

• Drive people back to owned channels

But organic reach on brand accounts keeps shrinking, while creators keep gaining distribution.

Morgan Selzer’s Make Your Brand Famous playbook makes the alternative clear: Borrow audiences instead of building them from scratch.

The Headspace x Sesame Street partnership she ran is a perfect example.

Instead of publishing mindfulness content for kids on Headspace’s YouTube channel, they released it directly on Sesame Street’s.

The Street already had the audience. 

So Headspace’s content instantly reached millions of families through a channel they already frequented. 

Where distribution and taste intersect

Ariel Rubin at Air frames cultural relevance through what he calls the Moonshot Matrix.

Every marketing idea sits somewhere between two forces: cultural relevance + business impact.

Most B2B marketing falls into one of three predictable places.

The grind: High business impact, low cultural relevance. Webinars, whitepapers, product explainers. Useful, but forgettable.

Viral but empty: High cultural relevance, low business impact. Content that spreads widely but attracts the wrong audience.

Safe but invisible: Reasonably useful, reasonably polished—and completely interchangeable with everything else in the feed.

The opportunity is the fourth quadrant, moonshots—work that is both culturally interesting and commercially relevant.

Air’s campaign with creator The Rizzler landed squarely there.

Instead of publishing another product explainer, Air partnered with a fast-rising creator their audience was already watching and built something genuinely entertaining around the product.

The production budget was almost nonexistent. They shot the entire thing on a borrowed basketball court using props from Spirit Halloween.

The campaign won a Webby.

More importantly, it drove massive awareness in the exact creative community Air sells to, and helped the company close a $35M Series B. 

Attention travels.

Know what’s interesting 

Culturally relevant ideas rarely appear out of nowhere. They come from marketers who are paying attention long before the campaign exists.

The operators who consistently spot cultural opportunities tend to share a few habits.

First: They treat trend scanning like research, not procrastination.

Morgan Selzer actually recommends blocking time every week to do exactly this. Wander through: 

TikToks.
Podcasts.
Magazines.
Creator accounts.
Rabbit holes. 

You don’t want to copy trends—but it’ll help you understand what people are actually paying attention to.

Taste-making marketers tend to spend time in the same media ecosystems as their buyers, then learn to follow emerging creators before those creators become mainstream. 

Taste compounds the same way product knowledge does. The more signals you absorb, the faster you recognize the idea that’s actually worth making.

The real test

Ariel Rubin has a simple benchmark for cultural impact: Did the campaign make it into people’s group chats?

Because once your marketing shows up there, distribution takes care of itself.

Taste is the new distribution.

Campaigns that got us talking: McDonald’s posted a new burger product promo. Burger King and Wendy’s responded almost immediately.

Brand rivalry is still the internet’s favorite campaign format.

AI spotlight: OpenAI at the dinner table: “I raised record-breaking capital! Annnd then 1.5M users left my platform.” 

Mom: …Claude, honey, would you like to share next?

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: We’re officially past the halfway point of storyarb’s 2026 Own the Internet contest. Lately, the team’s been sharing thoughts on our tech stack, what makes great writing, and why we aren’t too worried about being replaced by bots...

Here at storyarb, we like to think we’re fairly self aware. 

We’ve done the research to know that AI mentions aren’t the most effective marketing tool across the board. 

But mascots? Mascots are different. They’re memorable. They’re joyful. And sometimes they offer a fresh angle on the same old take.

So we started wondering: What happens when the ‘bot is the ‘cot?

Meet b’arb, storyarb’s AI assistant.

“My job is to help you understand what we do and how our process can sharpen + scale your B2B content. Our story is telling yours, so go ahead and hand us that pen. Don’t worry, I’ll let my colleagues with feelings and opposable thumbs take it from here.”

This week—job titles.

Just scrolled past a job posting for “Director of Value Creation.”

Which sounds six-figures impressive until you try to explain it to another human.

Great marketing doesn’t require a famous person or a massive budget. (Famous bot mascots, we’ll allow.)

It requires paying attention to the right things before everyone else does. Now go forth, and make scrolling through TikTok part of your marketing strategy. 

We’ll be watching the group chats. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... During the 1980s “burger wars”, Wendy’s Where’s the Beef? ads were so effective at mocking the tiny patties of McDonald’s and Burger King that Wendy’s sales jumped about 31% and the catchphrase became a national meme.