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.

Your content ain’t the problem.

Most B2B marketing teams already know what makes a good insight. Their POV is sharp. The analysis holds up.

But they’re hemorrhaging readers at the CTA.

The handoff is broken—but you can un-break it. The first step is recognizing what your readers actually want to get out of different content types.

(Because they aren’t on your website out of pure love for the case study format. Or if they are, call us, because we want to know how you’re doing that.)

Readers come in with momentum. When the next step you offer them doesn’t match what they need, attention drops right off.

Don’t let that moment—the space between attention and action—be where good content goes to die.

Let’s get into it.

Like a relay race, moving clients through the funnel requires a series of careful handoffs.

Content teams pour serious energy into what they publish. They debate tone. Refine the hook. Polish and edit.

But if the accompanying offer—download the report, grab the template, book a demo—isn’t engineered right from the start, that ask becomes an afterthought, and you end up with a generic promo stapled onto really thoughtful work. 

The baton hits the track.

Most teams feel the symptoms before they find the cause. Sales reports lesser lead quality. Marketing scratches their head over poor conversion rates. But the gap isn’t in the funnel; it’s in the handoff between what someone just read and what you ask them to do next.

‍Kyle Denhoff, Senior Director of Marketing, ran into this tension at HubSpot. His team’s reach was massive. Content was strong. Engagement numbers were healthy. But conversion varied widely by channel.

The issue was sequencing.

“For many teams, the offer comes last,” says Kyle. “Oh, I have this great media product—now what can I plug in to monetize it?”

That makes for a worse reader experience. If your offer (CTA) doesn’t naturally answer the reader’s next question, it feels like an interruption instead of an extension.

That’s where most “bad leads” are born. Not at the top of the funnel, but at the handoff.

Kyle’s response became the ACOM framework: Audience–Content–Offer Match.

If you can’t draw a straight line between those four questions, the baton’s already wobbling.

The offer comes late in the reader experience, but it shouldn’t be the last thought in yours.

Get ahead of low conversions by engineering new content offers early and often.

Read Kyle's full breakdown here.

Campaigns that got us talking: Figs didn’t wait for the podium. The brand built a Winter Olympics campaign around Lindsey Vonn, and then had to adjust when the storyline didn’t unfold as planned. Instead of forcing a pre-written narrative, the team pivoted in real time, shifting from medal hype to a broader story about heart and resiliency.

AI Spotlight: Anthropic just blinked. The founder of Claude dropped its flagship AI safety pledge, a commitment many saw as a differentiator in the race to scale. Translation: Even the companies positioning themselves as “the responsible ones” are feeling competitive pressure. 

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: A sales rep promised ink for every qualified lead marketing delivered. Spoiler: clean skin. 🤦‍♀️

This joke’s less funny when you’re proving ROI on a 6–9 month sales cycle. But our friend Sarah Cascone reframed her whole pipeline motion, and saw marketing’s contribution double to 60%.

Tattoo parlor, anyone?

Our AI report broke our leads tracker. 🤕

8.56% CTR (highest in this newsletter’s history). Inbound from marketing leaders at Fidelity Investments, Amazon, Progressive, Cushman & Wakefield, Coca-Cola, Paramount Pictures—and plenty more folks sharing it without being asked.

The report itself was the culmination of two months of research, 1,000+ lines of coded data, and a distribution plan designed to compound, not spike. When your message is sharp and distribution is engineered from day one, attention follows.

(Don’t worry, the marketing dashboard is feeling much better now.)

Two-parter for you today: 

“Minutes, not days.”

“So you can focus on what matters most.”

Minutes doing what? Filing taxes? Launching rockets? Rewriting your childhood?

And what, exactly, matters most? Revenue? Sleep? World peace? Your sourdough starter?

If you can’t name it, you don’t get to promise it. That’s 2014 landing page energy—polished, pleasant, aggressively non-specific.

What readers type into the search bar isn’t always what they actually need. The metrics that teams celebrate don’t always translate into revenue. And the promises brands make don’t always line up with what buyers care about.

You can publish the fastest content in your category. You can win the first click. You can dominate reach. If the offer handoff is sloppy, though, the momentum disappears, and you lose your audience.

Design the second step before you run the first. Make the CTA feel like the natural next move instead of a sharp left turn.

Remember, conversion happens at the handoff.

See y’all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... “OK” began as a 19th-century joke among journalists — “oll korrect” for “all correct.” And then it survived a presidential campaign and became the world’s go-to approval stamp. Turns out inside jokes can scale.

The Standard is officially 30 issues old. 

If you’ve been here since the beginning, you might remember we once sent you the actual brief we used to launch this newsletter, with the scope, the structure, and the guardrails that keep us truckin’. 

30 sends later, we’re still using that Google Doc. Still get a creative brief for every issue. And still get the elusive edit: Can we punch up the copy? 

For issue 30, we’re pulling from you—every open-text response from our Trade Secrets: AI Marketing in 2026 survey. 

The numbers told us what’s happening. The comments told us what you actually think. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to Marketing Summer Camp. It’s late. The lake is still. Someone brought contraband LaCroix. And people are finally saying the quiet part out loud. 

Let’s take a wander from cabin to cabin to hear what your fellow marketers are whispering about.

Blue Cabin: The Pragmatists

These campers are calm, mildly annoyed, and drinking black coffee.

Translation: You don’t lead with your database architecture either.

“Speed, AI and technical advances don’t substitute for taste and properly reading the market,” adds a marketing leader at a mid-size fintech company.

There it is. The thing most LinkedIn posts will never admit. The anti-hype crowd isn’t really anti-AI. 

They’re anti-confetti. 

They want AI to feel like plumbing—necessary, invisible, expected. 

Yellow Cabin: The Lost Boys

These campers have more spreadsheets than all the other cabins put together. You can also hear them sighing loudly all the way from the mess hall. 

“Our messaging is not cohesive, clear, or simple,” says a marketing manager at a global fintech company. “It feels extremely fragmented.”

That fragmentation is often because of a disconnect between marketing and the larger organization.

This is a governance problem dressed up like a marketing problem. The deep frustration is about alignment. Or rather, the absence of it.

Green Cabin: The Compass Holders

This group is thoughtful, with a dash of self-awareness on top.

“Narrowing down our ICP has been the biggest needle mover,” explains one respondent. Simple. Surgical. Not sexy at all. 

“We communicate tangible outcomes (not just features), which helps our audience quickly understand what’s in it for them,” adds a C-level leader at a growing edtech co. 

Or the obvious, yet constantly overlooked:

Marketers already know what doesn’t work. Unfortunately, pressure + timelines + executive enthusiasm for buzzwords can override those instincts. 

Red Cabin: The Overthinkers

These campers like their ghost stories to be a mix of humor and existential dread.

“Knowing how AI search will evolve over the next year, it feels like we're in the early days of SEO again,” says a marketing manager at a mid-size martech company.

Remember stuffing keywords into footer copy and pretending it was strategy? Yeah. That. It sends a shiver down the spine. 

Or how about the respondent who said: “We worry that ‘normal’ folks don’t understand why our products exist.”

Or maybe our biggest fear:

Boo!

Campaigns that got us talking: Equinox dropped an AI-tinged campaign that’s as deliberate as it is unhinged. Is it polarizing? Yes. Is it a little unsettling? Also yes. But when most brands are playing it safe with AI, Equinox’s approach got people talking.

AI Spotlight: Among marketing teams struggling to hit their goals after launching AI products, 100% were already leading with AI language. Turns out using the word “AI” more doesn’t help at all. 

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Ah, the two-speed life of social media managers—high-volume on the timeline, high-empathy in the replies.

So if your homepage currently reflects:

• C-suite pressure

• competitor copycatting

• half-tested assumptions

• your own existential dread about AI 

…we should talk.

Gmail keeps suggesting edits that remove all traces of our personality.

Original: “Let me know how that all sounds to ya!”

Suggested: “Tell me what you think.” 

Can’t a girl have a little joie de vivre these days? Stop trying to make all our emails wear khakis*.

Our AI report started as a question: How do you market something everyone feels pressured to talk about, but no one can talk about well?

Across one report, three special issues of The Standard, and 84 marketers, here’s the best answer we got: 

• Say what you mean. 

• Test what you’re unsure about. 

• Lead with the stakes for the buyer. No one else. 

Buzzwords come and go. But the teams who pause, test, and anchor their messaging in proof will always move forward with steadier footing.

See y’all at next year’s campfire.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... “Beige” has been used as shorthand for “boring” since at least the mid-20th century. Which is unfair to beige, but deeply relevant to business casual.

*No khakis were harmed in the making of this issue.

Ever feel like marketing has turned into a never-ending round of Chutes & Ladders?

You finally climb a ladder—messaging that feels clear, grounded, human. And then someone slides in from the C-suite with a, “Hey, can we say ‘AI’ more?” 

Straight down the chute. Back to square one.

After months of digging through data for our hot-off-the-press Trade Secrets: Marketing “AI” in 2026 report, we realized: Marketers don’t need another framework. They need time to think. So we went into the storyarb games closet.

Inside the report, we included three fan favorites—DND, Taboo, and Clue—built for marketers who know what works, but are tired of not being allowed to do it.

Let’s deal the cards and get into it.

We could’ve packaged these tips as an “AI Messaging Optimization Plan™,” but we didn’t.

Because marketers are creatives, and creativity doesn’t thrive under C-suite panic, endless LinkedIn hot takes, or another 47-slide deck.

Playing creates breathing room. It lowers the stakes just enough to get you out of your head. Buyers can feel when something was written under pressure versus with care.

When we analyzed the data from Trade Secrets: Marketing “AI” in 2026, one pattern kept surfacing: Marketers aren’t confused—they’re holding back.

We know outcomes matter. Buyers want proof. And “AI-powered” isn’t magic anymore. And yet… gestures emphatically at everything.

So we built three games you can use to pressure-test your 2026 messaging, without another panic-induced repositioning.

Game on.

Let’s start here: Your ICP is not a list of bullet points. 

She’s not:

• Mid-market decision maker

• Marketing leader at SaaS org

• AI-curious buyer

She’s a person. Her laptop crashed because she has too many tabs open. She reheats her coffee twice and leaves it in the microwave. She wants to get promoted before Q4. She’s trying to prove something to her buyers, her boss, and herself. 

In DND: B2B Edition, we help you build a character sheet instead of a persona.

• What’s the first thought your ICP has in the morning?

• What does she panic-search five minutes before a board call?

• What would make her exhale?

Because when you see the whole person, you stop defaulting to “AI-powered analytics platform” and start saying, “We can help you pull the data to nail that client call and rock your performance review.”

Same product, different posture, and waaay more fun to write.

This one is exactly what it sounds like.

Open your most recent brand messaging doc. CTRL+F “AI.” 

…and then delete everywhere it appears.

Read it out loud. Does the value still make sense? If yes, amazing. If not, that’s a signal that you’re leaning on the tech label instead of articulating the outcome.

If removing one word collapses your value prop, that word was doing more explaining than your messaging. And buyers can feel that.

For our readers with a competitive streak, we suggest playing this in your next team meeting. Every time someone says “AI,” someone else gets to hit the buzzer.

It’s funny for about 30 seconds.

Here’s the mystery: Does talking about AI actually help your sales team close more deals?

The victim: Your sales pipeline. 

The suspects:

• “AI-powered integration”

• “Automated insights engine”

• “Reports ready before your first meeting”

The twist? 9 in 10 marketers haven’t tested whether saying “AI” makes any difference in sales. Which means most of us are making big messaging decisions based on instinct, pressure, and whatever we think our competitors are doing this quarter.

But if most teams aren’t testing yet, that’s your opportunity!

Start small. Pick one page or campaign. Test AI-heavy language against outcome-focused language for two weeks. Let the numbers tell you something useful.

Campaigns that got us talking: AI feature. Super Bowl stage. Internet side-eye. Ring’s pet-finding ad ran headfirst into surveillance concerns, and led to the cancellation of a partnership with Flock Safety. Positioning travels. So do assumptions.

AI Spotlight: AI runs on energy. This breakdown looks at the full system—from power generation to cooling to GPUs—and shows where the real constraints are stacking up.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: This LinkedIn post drove 83 new followers in a day—not because it celebrated a win, but because it gave people something they could actually use. A good reminder that native value beats vanity metrics every time.

If you notice a sudden surge of storyarb hot takes on your LinkedIn feed … no you didn’t.

Season 2 of “Own the Internet” is officially underway. What started as a slightly chaotic experiment in employee advocacy (but, like, make it fun) is back—eight weeks of posts, mini-games, and a leaderboard that keeps us humble.

The rules are simple: All storyarb employees are eligible. Everyone posts. Everyone juices each other’s content (comments > likes, always). And yes, there’s a cash prize at the end, because we believe in incentives and a little friendly chaos.

Last time we ran it, we saw 100,000 impressions in 24 hours—and one of our teammates with 4,400 followers outperformed our co-founder with 181K+. So it really is anyone’s game. 

(Here’s the full playbook for how we run this thing, btw. Feel free to steal for your own org.)

“Fractional.”

As in “fractional CFO.”

Somewhere along the way, “freelance” got all boardroom-y and put on a puffy vest. 

If you’re part-time, say part-time. If you’re contract, say contract.

Clarity > costume.*

If AI marketing starts feeling like Chutes and Ladders—one step forward, three slides back—change the game.

You don’t need another mandate. You need time to think, test, and write something that actually sounds like you. 

We’ll keep bringing the data. You bring the curiosity. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... The oldest playable board game on record dates back to 2600–2400 BC: The Royal Game of Ur. Four-sided dice. A race to the end of the board. No way to predict who will win, not even in the final moves. Humans have been trying to out-strategize chance for 4,000 years. The difference now?

We can test before we roll.

We see your AI marketing confusion and raise you a deck of data. 🤓

Lots of opinions out there on how, and where, and how much to talk about AI. 

Clarity? Still playing hard to get.

All last year, we heard marketing teams ask: How do you market AI products when…

• C-suites want you to talk more about AI

• buyers are sick and tired of hearing about it

• and almost no one is testing what actually works?

And as one marketer we know pointed out: “An ‘AI’ label slapped on a product doesn’t make it a better product.”

So today, we’re launching Trade Secrets: Marketing “AI” in 2026. Our biggest research project yet, digging into what marketers talk about when they talk about AI. 

What the data suggests: Stop leading with the ingredient. Lead with the result. If “AI” disappeared from your headline tomorrow, would your value still land?

When we analyzed our survey results, the same contradictions kept surfacing across teams of every size. Not one catastrophic mistake, but four patterns quietly undermining performance.

Problem #1: Leadership wants “more AI.” Marketers don’t think that works. 

Many of you (43%, in fact) are facing pressure to talk about AI more in your messaging. 

Twice as many of you (83%) think that’s a dumb idea. 

And you’re right! Those instincts bear out in the results. Two key trends show up for marketing teams who have struggled to hit their goals since launching an AI product. 

First, most of them face significant leadership pressure to use “AI language” in their marketing. 

Second, 100% of them already do.

Problem #2: We’re explaining the process. Buyers want the point.

Most marketers talking about AI focus on how it works, harping on efficiency, automation, mechanics, etc. But when asked what actually resonates with buyers:

• 52% say ROI and proven results matter most

• …yet only 23% actually lead with those outcomes

And it’s not an easy gap to close. “The hardest part is answering: ‘Why should anyone care?’”

The shift: Make your first sentence about what changes for the buyer, not how your system works. Save the mechanics for the demo.

Problem #3: Everyone’s making big bets without evidence.

We’ve been bad. 

Marketers say we love data, and yet 9 in 10 of us haven’t A/B tested AI-focused messaging against literally anything else. 

That means our brand positioning decisions are driven by pressure + instinct + competitive noise—not data.

And yet, marketers rate their ability to explain value without “AI” at 7.7/10. They believe different messaging could work. They just haven’t tested it.

“We’re always told to do what our competitors are doing—but better.”

The simplest fix: Before rewriting your entire positioning around AI, test one page. One segment. One headline. Two weeks. Then let the numbers argue for you.

Problem #4: Curiosity is up. So is exhaustion.

AI marketing isn’t causing panic. It’s causing burnout. Heading into 2026, marketers said they feel:

• Curious (46%)

• Exhausted (33%)

• Hopeful (31%)

This fatigue largely seems to stem from the mismatch between hype and proof.

We’re running experiments we don’t believe in, balancing gobbledygook from our C-suite overlords, and don’t have data on jack. Marketers still believe in the promise of AI innovation. They’re just also pretty tired of hearing nonsense. 

How do we start to solve these major problems? Dig into the full report for some of our ideas.

Campaigns that got us talking: Some of us were there for the football (meh), some for the wings, the rest (hey 👋) for the ads. We’d still swap Rocket and Redfin for Pringles, though. Sorry, Sabrina.

AI spotlight: You know that friend who tells a long story and never quite lands it? That’s an LLM explaining itself. It’s not showing its reasoning. It’s generating a convincing narrative. So when an AI tool sounds persuasive, it helps to remember: that’s not insight—it’s autocomplete with a good speaking voice.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Disney could’ve treated AI like one of its wicked witches. Instead, the House of Mouse gave OpenAI a $1B seat at the table.

We upped the ante on a favorite childhood game: Memory.

This time, instead of matching pencils or circus tents to win, you’re matching messaging angles worth testing, pulled straight from our new report.

Flip a card to find strategies to:

• Demote “AI”

• Tame the chaos

• Name the fatigue

• Build proof, not hype

• Mark your territory

• Use the founder voice

…and generally stop guessing in the dark.

There’s good content, great content, and then there’s the email that makes your head tilt. Consider this a small public service announcement:

Subject line: “So grateful for you.” 

Sender: a brand we have zero relationship with. If the only thing connecting us is a one-time checkout from years ago (or, honestly, nothing at all), let’s skip the emotional intimacy.

The lesson in all this is something you already know: Confusion is expensive. It’s also very, very common. Our AI report gives you the patterns, the proof, and the plays you need to find clarity instead.

Most teams aren’t testing yet. ➡️ That’s your opportunity.

Many still lead with process. ➡️ So go lead with outcomes instead.

And while others pile on AI language under pressure… ➡️ You can strip it back and show your work. 

We’ll lead by example here by showing about 4 months, 3,544 scrubbed data cells, $500 of coffee gift cards, a handful of late nights, and 26 pages of our own legwork. (Possibly while singing that song from Rent.)  

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... This big ol’ honkin report was truly a labor of love. Also, a labor of labor. So much appreciation to (in no particular order) Julia, Olivia, Valentina, Lia, Emma, Abby, Ayo, Ari, Caitlin, Sarah, Jules, Jen, and the many marketers who took our survey.

“It’s a great day to uplevel my efficiency,” you think.

“I can’t wait to create more shareholder value,” you think.

“Surely AI can do this for me,” you think. 

So you open 40 tabs.
You see every company under the sun is “AI-powered.”
Every headline promises major change. 

Annnnnnd you can’t tell what anyone does from their homepage. 

AI solutions have a messaging problem. It’s the same problem Alex Lieberman ran into when he launched Tenex: 

How do you market yourself when the word du jour—”AI”—doesn’t actually tell anyone what you do?

Alex had some ideas. 

Here’s the marketing playbook for the unmarketable product. 

BTW, since we get asked a lot… Alex Lieberman, cofounder of Tenex (your AI implementation partner), is yes, that same guy who co-founded Morning Brew (your favorite business media brand), and yes again, also co-founded us, storyarb (your B2B marketer’s BFF). While we’re all very different companies, we do have a couple things in common: Alex as a founding partner with rockin’ newsletters, if we may say so.

Okay, enough family tree. Let’s get into it.

Buyers aren’t looking for a long, overwrought explanation about why your product is technologically superior. They need the SparkNotes on why product good. 

If you’re marketing something new or complicated (like an AI implementation service), a familiar reference can also help, anchoring readers in something they already understand. In short:

In a world where “AI” has stopped meaning anything on its own, Tenex leaned into this equation to shape their messaging. 

Earn attention with binary thinking 

If your first line doesn’t stop the scroll, nothing else matters.

Binary positioning creates that interruption.

Tenex presents a clear tension: Companies that avoid becoming AI-native risk falling behind, while those that adopt it position themselves to win the next decade. The language draws a line. Some readers step toward it. Others step away. Both reactions matter less than the pause itself.

“Win the next decade” works because it hasn’t been sanded down by repetition. It still sounds like something a human would say.

Either/or language earns attention. Fuzzy language disappears.

“Healthy beef marketing”: Let references do the heavy lifting 

Tenex describes itself as “McKinsey for AI.”

That phrase does immediate work. McKinsey already signals strategy, credibility, and executive-level involvement. Borrowing that reference helps buyers know roughly what kind of partner Tenex intends to be before reading any further.

Alex calls this “healthy beef marketing.” Not conflict for its own sake, but clarity through contrast.

This tactic works best when the reference point:

• Already lives in the buyer’s head

• Shortens explanation time

• Sharpens understanding instead of muddying it

“AI” doesn’t do anything anymore  

People don’t buy tech solutions out of love for the technology. (Usually.) People buy tools to make their lives easier. 

Outcomes-based messaging works because it reflects what actually matters to buyers—what the tool changes, not the how the tool works.

Tenex doesn’t spotlight features, models, or jargony promises. Their marketing skips over technical proof and keeps the attention on results: time saved, money saved, capacity created.

A year ago, calling out AI pulled attention. Now, we’re all sick of hearing about it. Tenex bets that serious buyers can connect those dots on their own. 

Playing with pricing 

Tenex heard “outcomes-based messaging” and upped the ante to “outcomes-based pricing.” Here’s why. 

Alex’s co-founder, Arman Hezarkhani, lived through a pivot that showed him that, with the right AI workflows in place, one engineer could perform like 50. 

When output jumps that much, hourly pricing stops making sense. You can raise prices and lose buyers, or keep prices steady and sell your value short. Either way, the model rewards time spent, not progress. 

With this in mind, Tenex turned toward outcomes-based pricing, a model where:  

• Speed of work matters more than time logged 

• AI has to accelerate work instead of complicating it

• Clients pay for progress, not presence

And that’s how you market a real-deal AI implementation platform in a sea of fluffy pretenders.

Campaigns that got us talking: Does AI search traffic actually convert better than organic? One study says AI traffic converts better. Another says the opposite. Very “Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick”. Joe Lazer plays detective, unpacking why the data disagrees. Handy if AI search is creeping into your budget conversations.

AI Spotlight: If agents were the headline in 2025, then context is the plot twist in 2026. This recent LinkedIn thread reframed the AI platform debate. The real shift isn’t AI layered onto your CRM. It’s what happens when systems start learning from decisions over time.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: AI didn’t write this performance review. It helped someone think through an entire year of their own work faster and more clearly. Big difference.

We’ve been deep in survey data for our upcoming AI report, and one finding keeps sticking with us: The marketing teams hitting their targets are actually using less AI language, not more.

Meanwhile, the teams under the most pressure to talk more about AI are (1) already doing it, and (2) still struggling. Almost no one is testing whether any of this messaging works, which means a lot of big positioning decisions are being made on…vibes.

We unpack what’s really going on—and what to do instead—in our Trade Secrets: Marketing “AI” in 2026 report, dropping next week.

Gdoc comments that haunt our dreams: 

“Can we make this pop more?”

“Hmm”

“This feels long...”

“I rewrote this quickly — feel free to ignore.”

“Let’s punch this up.”

“Sound more human”

“This is good, but what if it were… better?”

We love collaboration, don’t we, Andrew Boulton? And a good font.

Can someone tell what your company does from your homepage? 

The answer is “no” more often than you’d think. And when that’s the case, the fix usually isn’t more language—it’s grounding your messaging in references, outcomes, and a little bit of pizzaz. 

We’ll dig deeper on all this in our upcoming report on marketing “AI” in 2026, where the data starts to back up some of the marketer spidey senses we’ve already had. Y’all aren’t ready for this. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... More than 8 billion conversation hearts are made for Valentine’s Day each year. While the nostalgic sugar hearts feature classic sayings like “Be Mine,” “XOXO,” and “True Love,” we have a few suggestions of our own: “Say the Thing,” “Vibes ≠ Data,” and “AI Implied.”

What would yours say?

P.S. We're hiring a Senior Editor. A little bit of writing, a little bit of editing, a lot of being the arbiter of what's actually good content. Slide into our creative director's DMs if you're interested or know someone we should talk to.

Q1 has a way of doing marketers dirty.

The 2026 plan is underway. The goals are the clearest they’re gonna be all year. We haven’t even made it to Valentine’s Day.

…and yet, it’s already been long enough to see what isn’t clicking.

One reason marketing has felt so hard lately (it’s not only us, right? 😅) is because a lot of us are trying to sell products that have never existed before. The AI boom unlocked this flood of innovation—annnnd no one really knows how to talk about the results yet. Your buyers included.

It’s damn hard to sell something that’s never existed before.

But that novelty can also bring some major opportunity.

Case in point: Nick Lafferty, Head of Growth Marketing at Profound, a platform that helps businesses show up in AI search. (AEO: something that notably didn’t really exist until about 10 minutes ago.)

Working in this emerging space, Nick realized that buyers needed significant education before they were ready to sign on the dotted line.

This week, we’re showing you how he took ‘em to school. 🎓️ 

Profound’s audience had a problem.

Specifically, it was that they were being told to “figure out AI search visibility” when no one had explained:

• what AI search visibility actually was

• how it differed from traditional SEO

• or how teams should evaluate solutions in a category that barely existed yet.

Nick didn’t solve this by shipping more campaigns. He changed how Profound helped buyers make sense of the category itself.

Here’s the system he built:

1. Let a trusted SME own the narrative.

Instead of starting with his own thought leadership, Nick identified a colleague whose technical depth and audience already matched Profound’s ICP. Josh Blyskal, who leads AI strategy and research, became the primary voice sharing the company’s proprietary research and defining the category.

2. Make original research the backbone of your content strategy.

Profound committed to publishing original research on a steady cadence, sharing insights buyers couldn’t get anywhere else. The goal was to give prospects something concrete they could reference in their own internal conversations about AI strategy and budget.

3. Distribute, then redistribute.

Each research drop fueled LinkedIn posts, sales conversations, conference talks, newsletters, and earned media. Nick stopped obsessing over channel-level attribution and focused on one signal: Are buyers showing up to sales calls more informed?

The outcome was better conversations with buyers who now had the context, clarity, and confidence to evaluate Profound’s solution before sales ever entered the picture.

That’s how Profound went from selling into a new category to becoming the default reference point for it.

Check out the full playbook of Nick’s trust-building flywheel. (aka, how to help those buyers who are still figuring out what on earth it is y’all do)

Campaigns that got us talking: Atlassian launched a new spot for its Teamwork Collection that opens like a classic enterprise testimonial… then swerves hard. Enter Zach Woods from The Office. It’s awkward. It’s intentional. And you’ll leave wondering about “Shared Goalz’s” album.

AI Spotlight: Anthropic (you may know them as Claude) is reportedly raising $10B. The signal: We’re watching a handful of AI platforms move from “interesting tools” to “the thing you open first.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Somewhere along the way, B2B decided that “enterprise” means “boring.” It doesn’t. People don’t lose their sense of humor, emotions, or scrolling habits just because they work at a big company. The brands that stand out talk to enterprise audiences like actual humans, not faceless committees.

We asked the team what keeps them here. The answers were different, but the theme was consistent:

“Writing is such a solitary act—but here, you get to do the lonely parts together. You suffer through the first drafts together. And you celebrate the final ones together.” — Nish, Copywriter

“I’ve never worked anywhere where you can roll up your sleeves, build from scratch, and actually do the work. That’s where I’m happiest.” — Valentina, Operations Manager

“We get to have real conversations, with each other and with smart people outside the company. It feels like being a journalist, just not in the way I expected.” — Morgan, Senior Content Strategist

“Our clients care about content. They invest in it. They trust us with real insights about their businesses, and we get to tell those stories well.” — Shaye, Customer Success Manager

That’s the job, more or less. Do the work. Talk to smart people. Make something worth reading.

If that sounds like your speed, we’re hiring.

meet the storyarb crew | your content creation partners

Get to know our skilled content strategists and writers. We're the minds behind your ICP-obsessed content and storytelling, collaborating to strategize and craft compelling content that builds brand love and drives revenue.

www.storyarb.com/careers#career-openings

Kerri Amodio’s amazing list of marketing icks is something we can’t unsee. You’re welcome. Or sorry. You choose.

• Homepages that don’t explain what your product does or who it’s for

• Asking for a phone number on forms

• Brands trying too hard to hop on social media trends

• Homepages that don’t explain what your product does or who it’s for

• Getting retargeted by companies you’re already a customer of

• Overdone swag—we have reached Yeti cup saturation

• Homepages that don’t explain what your product does or who it’s for

Glad it’s not just us, Kerri.

When you’re building something new, buyers need education before they need the sales pitch.

Ads aren’t designed to do the heavy lift of education. Jargony product pages don’t convert. And no amount of budget fixes a fuzzy narrative.

So go deeper. Pass the mic to subject matter experts, publish your own findings, and when you have something important to say, say it on every. single. channel.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... While the ’arb’s favorite Super Bowl noshes vary (Team Buffalo wings, anyone?), the economics of attention are harder to ignore. A single 30-second spot in the 2026 game now runs around $8 million—more than 200× the cost of the same airtime in 1967. When attention costs that much, authority starts to look like the better long game.

Here’s a riddle for you: How do you market when the market won’t sit still?

It’s a question worth asking, because anyone who’s trying to market an AI product right now is up against two major speed challenges:

1. AI products evolve at warp speed as users ask for adjustments and expansions. How the product looks today is not how it will look in a month. (Or maybe even a minute.)
   

2. AI buyers are making decisions, like, now. They’re tired of testing out new tools and making shorter shortlists, and 95% of them select their initial top choice. You have less time to catch their attention.

In 2026, the AI tools buyers choose will become part of the DNA of their company. Once they're locked in, they're nearly impossible to replace.  

The window’s closing fast, but many marketers feel stuck in a loop—juggling constant product roadmap updates and chasing clarity instead of leading with it. 

As CMO advisor to G2, Sydney Sloan has a front-row seat to how millions of buyers research, test, shortlist, and ultimately decide which tools earn a permanent place in their tech stack. 

This week’s playbook is about what happens before the decision windows close. How to design positioning that keeps pace with AI development cycles—and GET. ON. THAT. LIST.

The doorway is the AI tool shopping window. The hat is your product.
You’re Indiana Jones.

The market’s moving faster than traditional marketing rhythms were designed to support. 

When customers see value in one workflow, they immediately push for more. Product decisions follow. Positioning shifts. Before the new messaging settles, the cycle repeats. 

From Sydney Sloan’s vantage point: AI products don’t evolve like traditional SaaS. 

At the same time, shortlists are shrinking. If you don’t secure a spot—while buyers are still testing and exploring AI tools—it’s going to be harder to break in once the “playground” phase ends.

The marketing teams that hold their ground don’t try to freeze messaging in place. They plan for change. 

They align four decisions on a regular cadence:

• Swim lane + expansion pull: Define the workflow you own today and track where customers expect you to expand next.
  

• Build vs. partner decisions: Be part of the “are we building this in-house or partnering with a vendor” conversations, because those choices help shape what you can really promise.
  

• AI buying committee: Position for a new IT-heavy buying committee where technical fit rules product consideration.
  

• Layered positioning: Align messaging for IT, business decision makers, and practitioners so each audience sees clear value. (And so you sound like the same company to everyone you talk to.)

Faster development cycles mean marketing needs to be in the room with product, engineering, and IT as they debate expansion paths, not after the decisions have been made. 

That cross-functional coordination keeps products relevant during this closing window where buyers are still exploring new AI tools.

We break down what it takes to market with clarity, stay on top of product changes, and earn your spot on buyers’ shortlists in our latest playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: Calm learned that blanket re-engagement can backfire, and waking up “quiet” users did more harm than good. Knowing who you’re reaching out to > reaching out to everyone.  

AI Spotlight: Two-thirds of Americans now use AI chatbots to get information. Those tools rely heavily on news outlets to answer questions. Some newsrooms are blocking bots. Others are leaning in, treating AI as earned distribution. In 2026, that divide is must-see TV.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: 50+ growth experiments: Outbound, ABM, partnerships, events—all the usual suspects. All powered by content. The kind that gives context before the outreach and momentum after.

Over the past year, we’ve been doing what we ask marketers everywhere to do: Testing our own content systems and tracking what actually moves pipeline, showing up deep in client work that makes us grin, and building a team that finally got together IRL and remembered why this work is so freakin’ fun. 

The work is clicking, the people behind it care how it gets done, and that right there is why we’re growing. We’re looking for:

A Content Strategist
⚡the superpower: turns big ideas into clear, cross-channel strategies that perform

A Copywriter 
⚡the superpower: makes complex ideas sing across formats

A Client Success Manager
⚡ the superpower: turns great work into lasting client momentum and growth

Open roles are here.

There's good content, great content, and then there’s the content feedback we are sick and tired of:

“Can we make this sound less like AI?”

Said about copy written by a human who just enjoys clarity and punctuation. And fine, maybe a little parallelism. Sue me.

We’re gonna say this hard thing because we care: No one is excited to test 47 new AI tools in 2026.

The “shopping window” on AI tools is closing, as shortlists get shorter and buyers double down on their final answers. Meanwhile, products continue to change in the blink of an eye.

Markets don’t wait for marketing to catch up. The advantage right now isn’t louder messaging or faster pivots. It’s clarity, flexibility, and being in the room earlier—being part of the decisions shaping the business before they happen. 

That’s the work that ultimately closes the deal.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Even Oxford has a shortlist. Before naming its 2025 Word of the Year, it floated contenders like aura farming and biohack. The final pick, rage bait, is memorable, but the almost-winners are just as revealing. Shortlists tell you where culture is headed, not just where it landed.

To love a Creative Director is to love their little soapboxes. 

For example, a few things our CD is always saying: 

“Give the client what they need, not what they ask for.” 

“I better not see any of you using the phrase ‘no fluff’ in a social post.” 

“Does this inspire you yet?” 

“Let’s try it. If it sucks then we’ll do something different.” 

“Just delete the whole paragraph.” 

“TKTKTK.”

She has thoughts. So we’re handing the mic over to Emma today to be our marketing oracle for the year ahead. 

No fluff.

Oh hi there. Emma here hijacking Abby’s email. 👋 It’s a new year, so here’s my forecast. 

First, a prediction: Companies that slashed marketing teams in 2025 because "AI can do it" are going to be in a tough spot as they realize AI cannot, in fact, do it. At least not without deep, thoughtful, human-led effort.

There are plenty of tech and strategy considerations here, but I'm more interested in the talent side of things. Employers have made it clear they have zero loyalty to smart, valuable, or longtime employees.

So the big question becomes: How do you attract, develop, and retain top talent when you've been so shitty to that talent?

As someone who entered the workforce at the height of the "ping pong tables are our most important employee benefit" era, it'll be interesting to see how companies in 2026 make themselves appealing to candidates who've been burned before—and are maximally skeptical, cautious, and disinterested in good ol' company loyalty.

Next, a truth that will remain unchanged: You cannot outsource thinking. Not to an algorithm, not to a contractor, not to a crowd.

Everyone wants to be known for original, useful content, but few are actually dedicating the time to think original, useful thoughts.

Here’s how I think about it. (I’m a marketer, so obviously my preferred metaphor is a funnel.) 

Social media and gen AI have made the top of the "public ideas funnel" wider than ever. Anyone can pump out endless bad-to-okay-quality content.

But the bottom of that funnel—the perspectives that genuinely make you think about something in a new light, the Pulitzer-winning novels that move you to tears, the jokes that make you laugh so hard your ribs hurt—is as narrow as ever.

It will always be that narrow. 

So the endlessly wide funnel-top is oversaturated and uninspiring, and continuing to pour mediocre stuff into it won’t help you meet your marketing goals. 

Real differentiation happens at the elite level. Remember: eternally narrow. 

Now, a pet peeve: Content that gets "optimized" to death at the expense of...well, the content.

This year, I made the viral "dumpling bake" after seeing about 42,000 videos of it on Instagram.

This was my bad.

Because that recipe is optimized to look pretty and simple, but it is not optimized to actually taste good.

(In fact, I don't think I've ever made a viral recipe that tasted 10/10. You know what recipes do taste 10/10? The ones in the 1973 Madhur Jaffrey cookbook my husband brought home from the NYPL.)

In marketing world, I see so much content optimized to look pretty/simple/SEO-y…

But when you dig in, the taste is utterly forgettable. 

And finally, a manifestation: We’re gonna hire a killer copywriter to join our content team as storyarb grows this year. 

No, we’re gonna hire two. 

They’ll be fast, and thorough, and sharp as a tack. And they’ll get to be part of the kindest, coolest, most creative group of writers in the biz. 

Phew.

Happy 2026. Let’s get to it.

Campaigns that got us talking: For a while there, Duolingo was the gold standard of “unhinged” marketing, hip corporate social, and virality. But this one was a miss. (Featuring a cameo from the original corporate edgelords, Wendy’s.) 

AI spotlight: Your AI-obsessessed LinkedIn connections are all talking about Claude Cowork, which is bringing “vibe coding” to the masses. Oh, and the tool mostly built itself, according to Claude’s engineers. HP Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, and Octavia Butler could not be reached for comment on this development. 

Stuff that made us scroll back up: We really like this marketing framework from Goldcast’s Sr. Director of Product Marketing.

Something we want The Standard readers to know? How to take back control of their marketing function with confidence, clarity, and leverage. 

Something we want you to feel? We’ve got your back. 

Something we want you to do? Book a demo with Abby. :)

Like we said, we’re hiring. A bunch. 

Currently in the market for: 

• A copywriter who loves language for its ability to spur action. 

• A content strategist who sees both the forest and the trees. 

• A client success manager ready to take this relationship to the next level.

• A marketing manager who helps us practice that sharp brand edge we preach. 

• A designer with style, grace, and impeccable taste. 

Job descriptions and application links all live here. Come run with us.

A few things yucking our yum in the marketing sphere these days: 

• vfinal_v5_REALLYFINAL_revised_USE-THIS-ONE 

• LinkedIn caps the number of jobs you can apply to, which feels…counterintuitive to helping people find jobs? 

• This one goes out to the designers we love: The feedback, “Can you just make it pop?”

The work that matters can't be delegated to algorithms or optimized into oblivion. It requires real thinking, real taste, and real humans who give a damn. So here's to hiring people who can do exactly that—and to making 2026 the year we stop confusing "viral" with "valuable."

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… The classic pound cake got its name because the original recipe used a pound of flour, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, and a pound of eggs. The home chefs in us respect that this recipe was designed to be tasty. The copywriters in us respect the parallelism.

Marketing teams aren’t short on ideas right now, they’re short on signal.

AI messaging is everywhere. Every platform, deck, and brainstorm seems to land on the same question: How much AI positioning do we need to lead with? Meanwhile, sales is still explaining what the product actually does, and pipeline doesn’t care how clever the positioning sounded in a doc.

That gap, between curiosity and conversion, is where a lot of B2B marketing is getting stuck.

Everett Butler ran straight into it at Lindy. Instead of debating positioning internally, he tested it in-market, running 10-15 messaging variants at once and letting the real buyer behavior decide what worked.

That experiment did more than settle a debate. It showed what happens when marketers stop guessing and start paying attention to the signals that actually move deals forward.

Most AI companies decide their positioning in a Google Doc. Then they launch it…and hope.

At Lindy, Everett Butler did something different. Instead of debating how much “AI” to lead with, he tested 10–15 messaging variants live—across ads, landing pages, and real buyer journeys—and let the market decide what worked.

The results were uncomfortable in the best way. AI-heavy language pulled attention. Outcome-driven language built pipeline. And the difference showed up where it mattered most: shorter sales calls, smoother demos, and buyers who could finally explain the product back in their own words.

Once Lindy followed the signal instead of the hype, the split became obvious.

• Messages like “Build AI Employees in Minutes” drove heavy click volume, but stalled at demo bookings. 

• Outcome-driven messages like “Get 2 hours of your day back” generated fewer clicks but converted to demos at 2–3x the rate.

Clicks weren’t wrong. They just weren’t the whole story.

If sales is spending too much time explaining your product and not enough time showing buyers what they can achieve, this one’s for you.

Campaigns that got us talking: Rippling didn’t plan a big moment. The NYC mayor gave them one. On his first day in office, Zohran Mamdani rode the subway, and Rippling showed up in every photo.

AI Spotlight: AI is scaling faster than the infrastructure built to support it (sound familiar, marketers?). New Nokia-commissioned research shows that today’s networks, designed for streaming and browsing, are buckling. Reminds us of other days: cloud adoption before bandwidth caught up, EV demand outpacing charging stations.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Sponsoring the podcast TBPN put Ramp inside conversations tech founders and finance leaders already trust. No heavy-handed product plugs, just presence where their buyers already spend time. A quiet reminder that in B2B, attention is earned by showing up. That, plus getting an “office” icon to role play expense analysis in the middle of NYC. 

Corporate America has a new favorite job title: storyteller. We’re all for it. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Notion are hiring dedicated storytelling teams—often at eye-popping salaries—as brands shift from chasing earned media to building their own. 

The signal is everywhere: 

• LinkedIn job posts using “storyteller” have doubled in the past year

• Executives now say “storytelling” on earnings calls more than 450 times annually

• Companies are using narrative to drive growth, trust, and relevance

If you’re curious what modern, scalable storytelling actually looks like in practice, we’re happy to show you.

There’s good content, great content, and then there’s the content equivalent of a January gym membership. Consider this our public service announcement. This week’s offenders:

• In & Out lists designed more for screenshots than substance. Extra credit for neutral palettes and overly familiar takes.

• “Out: busywork / In: impact” lists that stop at the slogan. We’re not mad at the idea, we just wish the proof showed up, too.

• Trend lists that trip over themselves. “Out: long content” sitting right next to “In: storytelling.” Pick a lane. And get an editor.

If there’s a theme running through all of this, it’s not “do more.” It’s pay closer attention.

Test before you commit. Watch what buyers actually respond to. Keep the things that shorten sales calls and quietly retire the ones that just sound good in a doc.

In a year already full of opinions, the edge belongs to teams who let the market do the talking.

See y’all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Google Drive hosts more than 2 trillion files. Docs, Sheets, Slides, videos, images. And yes, an embarrassing number of Google Docs titled “Final_v7_REALLYfinal.”

Ideas don’t fail because they’re written down. They fail because they stay in the doc. Strategy doesn’t move the needle until it meets the market.

Consider this your sign to test something before “v8_finalish.” We promise the doc will still be there.

We’re back, baby. Welcome to our first edition of 2026.

Some favorite 2025 memories? Rebuilding our entire offering in Q1… then drinking our own champagne in August when we started running our newsletter flywheel the same way we do for clients.

Content fed nurture.
Nurture fed demo requests.

The results:

• Over 3X more demo requests when the flywheel was spinning

• Week without content? Pipeline meh.

• Week with content? Pipeline humming.

BUT! The real highlight? Launching newsletters for a full year’s worth of clients, absorbing the smartest lessons from their networks of experts, then turning that expertise into a magnet for their ICP.

It’s so special to see a company’s thinking turn into momentum. And that’s exactly the muscle we see the best teams building right now.

Which brings us to 2026. Today, we’re looking at where marketing leaders are actually placing their bets, and spilling with y’all so you can go make yours.

We asked 17 CMOs, heads of content, and growth execs what they’re betting on this year. 

Here’s what they told us:

Bottom line:
2025 was AI chaos.
2026 is a return to fundamentals, with better tools, clearer metrics, and a lot more honesty about what actually works.

Read our predictions playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: Apparently, holiday AI ad wars are a thing now. Coca-Cola leveled up. McDonald’s… did worse than when they pulled the McRib. Toys “R” Us went straight for the nostalgia jugular.

The takeaway? AI commercials aren’t experimental anymore—they’re strategic. The real question isn’t “Should we use AI?” It’s “Who’s wielding it—and why?”

AI Spotlight: Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time available. G2’s new AI agent report suggests agents break the rule.

Companies report 23% velocity gains in mature workflows—not because agents save time, but because they don’t waste it. No coffee breaks. No Slack rabbit holes. Just output.

Translation: The way we work is about to change. Fast.

(We’re unpacking this for marketers in our upcoming Trade Secrets report.)

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Our own Own the Internet campaign got a little love recently. We’ve been running our own version of employee-generated content—getting the whole team active on LinkedIn instead of hiding behind the company account.

It’s working. Not bragging. Just saying: real humans > corporate speak. Always.

We know you’re drowning in “AI-powered this” and “AI-driven that.” Leadership wants more AI in the messaging. Your buyers… may not.

So we asked. (Thanks to the nearly 100 marketers who answered.)

Our forthcoming AI report digs into what’s actually landing, and what’s falling flat.

Here’s a preview of what we answer:

• Should you be using more “AI” in your messaging—or less?

• Why 89% of teams aren’t testing their AI positioning

• What teams hitting their quarterly targets do differently

• Whether buyers really want “AI-powered,” or just results that make their lives easier

👀 Full findings dropping soon. Keep an eye on your inbox.

There's good content, great content, and then there's whatever fresh hell we witnessed over the holiday break. Consider this our public service announcement. This week's offender:

Emails from companies you don’t know with subject lines like:

“We’re so grateful for you 🙏🏻”

Maybe you bought a pillow from them once. In 2015.
Maybe it was a last-minute gift for Aunt Susan.
Or maybe—you never signed up at all.

If your email strategy relies on recipients having amnesia about your relationship (or lack thereof), it’s time to rethink the approach.

When teams slow down long enough to clarify their thinking, everything else speeds up. Content compounds. AI amplifies instead of confuses. Buyers trust you faster.

That’s the work smart teams are doing right now, and it’s the bet we’re watching most closely as 2026 gets underway.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Most people have been making (and breaking) New Year’s resolutions far longer than gym memberships have existed. The tradition dates back to ancient Babylon, where people promised their gods they’d repay debts and return borrowed tools in exchange for good fortune.

Proof that “new year, new me” started as “new year, I swear I’ll give your stuff back.”

Every December, life slows down just enough for us to look up from the storytelling we obsess over. It’s a chance to reconnect with what makes the work meaningful: the experts we admire, the clients we root for, and the team that crafts magic week after week.

So for our holiday edition, we’re keeping it simple. 

We asked the ‘arb what’s on their wish lists. No strategy frameworks. No funnel math. Just the special humans behind the content.

Thanks for being part of our year! Happy Holidays from all of us at the ‘arb—and here’s to a 2026 worth building together.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🥂