✍️ how Headspace + Sesame Street teamed up to put your kids to bed

When you’re competing with household names for consumer attention, it’s time to call in the big guns. 

Or in Headspace’s case, the Big Bird. 

As Chief Content Officer at Headspace, Morgan Selzer needed to support ambitious growth goals and their mandate to make the brand famous. What was supposed to be a one-off audio project in collaboration with Sesame Street became: 

• A multi-part video series for familiar characters (like Elmo) to teach mindfulness techniques to children 

• The Goodnight, World! podcast, with 6M+ downloads 

• Partnerships with the likes of the PTA, YouTube Kids, Penguin Random House, and Spotify 

• 175M media impressions across 225 media placements, with 100% positive sentiment

• An Emmy nomination for Outstanding Preschool Children's Program

And best of all: the knowledge that they were helping overwhelmed parents finally get their kids to sleep. 

It was a major win for preschool families—but also a major win for Headspace, who never could have pulled a children’s content campaign off alone. 

In today’s issue we share her playbook for how she pulled it off (and how you can adopt her framework for your company).

Growing companies generally don’t have the audience reach and brand recognition to break through today’s noisy airwaves—leaving enterprise competitors to dominate attention.

At the same time, traditional paid marketing is becoming a less sure bet. 

“Paid and performance marketing are less efficient than they used to be, because there’s just so much out there,” Morgan explains. “So the question becomes: How can you show up in buzzy, unexpected ways that spark real conversation?” 

She ran up against this question firsthand when Headspace set out to create content to teach parents and children mindfulness techniques. 

How could a meditation app compete for attention against Disney, Nickelodeon, and an infinite number of YouTube videos? (“Budget” was definitely not going to be the answer here.) 

The result, of course, was the Sesame Street collab of marketing dreams. 

Morgan shares what marketers can learn from this gangbusters campaign—how to choose partners, how to scope ambitiously, how to leverage partners’ distribution channels—in our latest marketing playbook.

And the results of this partnership speak for itself:

Campaigns that got us talking: Wholesome children’s television collabs are in the air. Bunnings (Australia’s Home Depot) is in for a round two of collaboration with Bluey (Australia’s favorite cartoon canines).

Weren’t able to snag one of these limited edition lawn gnomes? No worries. You can find them on Ebay for 20X the retail price. 🫠

AI hack you pretend to already know: Create a personal board of advisors using Claude Projects. Think: marketing advice straight from a custom “CMO Brain,” positioning recs from a “Target Influencer Brain,” maybe even life wisdom from your “Big Sister Brain.” An Anthropic marketer walks you through how to set it up.

Stuff that made us scroll back up: Vector’s Head of Marketing just shared her breakdown on how she’s spending her $45K ad budget. (She paid $0 for this mention in The Standard,btw.)

Okay, so you’re sold on the value of this content partnerships stuff. Now the hard part: figuring out who you want to partner with. 

That’s why we made this for you. 

Our partnership evaluation tool shares our 2-step process for identifying and evaluating potential partnerships—including a copy-pasteable LLM prompt for partner ideation and our scorecard for force ranking potential opportunities. 

Check it out here.

But if you know for certain you want a kick-ass agency running point on your content motion, that's us. Grab some time to talk content shop with Abby here.

When you’re thinking about content partnerships, what task presents the biggest roadblock? Vote here.

• Find values-aligned partners

• Partner w/ brands w/ big reach

• Properly scope the project

• Measure ROI across channels

We also recently asked how you prefer to staff a major marketing project—and most of you shared a preference for bringing in external support. (As a content agency, we aren’t mad at the results.) 

It’s nice to borrow someone else’s distribution channels. But it’s even better when you can partner to create something neither brand could have ever created alone. When you find someone who shares your values, can offer further audience reach, and can benefit from your expertise? That’s where the real magic happens.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… In the very first season of Sesame Street, our beloved Oscar the Grouch was Oscar the Orange. That’s right, the OG puppet was orange colored, due to limitations in early colorized television. (Later on, a vacation at Swamp Mushy Muddy helped give him his iconic, verdant hue.)