✍️ culture-led acquisition

Last year, Air made a commercial. 

They had: 

• Costumes from Spirit Halloween

• A couple hours at an outdoor basketball court

• A-list meme-lebrity The Rizzler and comedy icon Kareem Rahma

• A $30K budget

• A box of donuts the creative director brought in

And they beat out Apple, Squarespace, and TBWA for the Webby award. 

Ariel Rubin, Head of Content at Air, is so over the bland SEO listicles and AI-generated sameness of traditional SaaS marketing. 

That’s why he built Air’s culture-led acquisition strategy.

It cut their marketing budget by 90%—and and tripled their revenue. More below.

Keyword stuffing isn’t working like it used to. 

(Although just in case, we put “best marketing newsletter ever” in the metadata of all our issues.) 

Whitepapers, generic ads, and product blogs are being drowned out by a sea of eerily similar AI-generated content. None of these things create any real brand affinity.

Or as Ariel puts it: "No one ever says, 'I f***ing love Dropbox.'"

Even digital asset management companies, who market to creatives, were churning out uninspiring content. 

“Our competitors’ social was atrocious,” Ariel adds. “I saw so many accounts with millions of followers getting 3 likes on posts. Truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.”

He figured that if his audience was creatives, Air was going to have to get a lot more creative themselves. 

So they turned to co-creators, not influencers, in a strategy they call culture-led acquisition. 

“We’re not going to blog you to death and give you the Top X Reasons to Do Y forever,” says Ariel. “We’re gonna think like a media brand. We’re gonna win you with The Rizzler. That’s the entire strategy.” 

Get a behind-the-scenes look at what makes Ariel’s popular campaigns—and his advice for running them yourself—in our latest playbook. 

Campaigns that got us talking: Yeah yeah, we're all sick of hearing about the Coldplay CEO affair fiasco. But we gotta share one last bit of lore: Astronomer's viral response, featuring Gwyneth Paltrow (frontman Chris Martin's ex), was orchestrated by Maximum Effort—Ryan Reynolds' marketing/mischief-making agency. As the saying goes, never waste a good crisis. Deadpool out.

AI tool you pretend to already know: The Head of Growth at voice AI unicorn ElevenLabs shares the AI playbook that helps him ship daily—from tool suggestions to prompt writing recs to how to connect AI assistants to your life so they can actually do stuff for you. Worth a watch. 

Saw it on LinkedIn: “b2b is understanding budgets. b2c is understanding consumer behavior.”

From winning Webbys with The Rizzler to 3X’ing Air’s revenue by ditching traditional B2B tactics, Ariel’s got more great stories than a New York taxi driver. 

Now that you’ve heard a little about his strategy, he wants to hear about yours. 

Have a marketing question you want the culture whisperer himself to answer? Go ahead and ask.

Who’s the most memorable commercial character? Vote here. 

• The Geico gecko

• Jake from State Farm 

• Old Spice guy

• Flo 

Last time we asked your thoughts about downloadable templates as a demand gen format.

You responded:

The bad news: AI is making SaaS brands look more and more the same. 

The good news: When everyone else matches, it’s all the easier for you to stand out. In the AI era, we’re not competing on quantity and keywords. We’re competing on creativity and charisma. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… Before there was “Influencers in the Wild,” there was the world_record_egg. Our OG influencer queen.