✍️ make your brand famous

Remember the halcyon days of early American Idol, when fame was a simple matter of Randy telling you, “You’re going to Hollywood?” 

Fast forward a couple decades, and fame is…everywhere. From the reality TV explosion to every TikToker and their mother chasing influencer status (literally, MomTok has survived), “make me famous” seems to have become everyone’s agenda. Even brands are asking for it. 

Fortunately, we at the ‘arb are well acquainted with marketing’s resident starmaker: Morgan Selzer, Canva’s brand new Global Head of Content Partnerships. 

Morgan’s speciality is in the places “where strategy meets cultural clout.” 

Here’s how to get a taste of the glamorous life.

Content is no longer a numbers game. 

Anyone has the tools to churn out endless AI slop content. The brands that rise to the top will be the ones who meet audiences where they already are—and create content worth talking about. 

Morgan’s recommendation for standing out: Instead of building your audience from scratch, follow attention.

In practice, this means pursuing partnerships that give you access to the spaces where your ICP is already spending their time. The next step is creating culturally relevant content that justifies your presence on those stages.

“This is why we see so many interesting collabs happening right now—they allow your brand to show up in another brand’s ecosystem,” says Morgan. “As you partner with influencers, creators, and talent, use their channels to speak about your brand.” 

When you redefine your content ecosystem beyond your own channels, your marketing universe suddenly gets a lot larger.

Read Morgan’s full strategy—including her framework for staying on top of trends—in our latest playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: Cardi B just shared her new job on LinkedIn: Chief Confidence Officer at infant formula company Bobbie. The Grammy-winning rapper has been manning the brand’s baby feeding hotline to share parenting advice and bring attention to issues like the lack of paid parental leave and maternal health. 

AI spotlight: Here’s what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks about the future of AI, from how it complements (not replaces) human work to how it could cure diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. 

Stuff that made us scroll back up: Take LinkedIn’s “Open to Work” banner to the next level.

ICYMI, we launched our AI Marketing in 2026 survey just last week. 

It’s just 5 minutes long, and it would make us very happy if you took it. (Also, our first 50 respondents get a $10 coffee gift card.) 

In honor of the Great Survey Launch, we’d like to present to you a quick round of Slop or Bop—a roundup of AI messaging we think is terrible, and how we’d fix it. 

• Slop: Calling your calculator “AI-powered math optimization.” 

• Bop: Showing me how to save three hours of spreadsheet hell per week. 
  

• Slop: Get 50 gigabytes of music on your device. 

• Bop: Get 1,000 songs in your pocket. 
  

• Slop: AI to replace all your human friends.  

• Bop: AI to replace all your human chores.

Have an AI marketing take you think is great—or terrible? Send it along and we’ll share in next week’s edition. Or tell us what messaging you think works directly in our survey.

We live in datasheets—but sometimes we leave the house. In fact, our very own Bex Jones attended Dreamforce to help Salesforce Ventures distill three days of star-packed panels into content. Her highlights: learning from a chess-playing robot and taking her first Waymo. 🚙

Check out the coverage here. 

Welcome to our new newsletter section: your weekly dose of "please make it stop" from the wild world of marketing + content creation. 

We're cataloging the trends that jumped the shark, the tactics that need a timeout, and the creative choices that make us question everything. If you've ever seen something online and thought, "Who approved this?"—this section is for you.

This week's inaugural ick list comes from our very own senior copywriter, Sarah Suzuki Harvard:

• AWS breakdown giving us a breakdown, while we frantically tell clients: "it's not us, it's them"

• Em-dash panic — as if Hemingway wasn't dropping those bad boys in 1926

• LinkedIn gurus posting "Unpopular opinion: be kind" for the 47th time

Stop building your own tiny stage. The fastest path to fame is showing up where your audience is already watching. 

Morgan’s playbook is simple: Strategic partnerships let you borrow audiences, cultural awareness helps you stay relevant, and value-first content keeps people talking about you long after a campaign ends. Adopt a collab-focused creator mindset, and your marketing universe can expand from a small sliver to the whole damn galaxy. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… On the topic of reality TV and simpler times: In 2001, dating game show Chains of Love debuted on UPN for six exquisite episodes. The premise of the show was physically chaining the episode’s lead, “The Picker,” to four members of the opposite sex, then making the Frankenstein’ed fivesome compete in various challenges. TV historians cite it as a product of reality television's experimental early-aughts phase. (We just think that if we have to know this exists, so do you.)