Happy (early) Birthday, Ed Sullivan!

The legendary host of The Ed Sullivan show was born about 125 years ago, and he had the single greatest job in the history of this industry: he decided what America saw, on a Sunday, and then America saw it. (Hey, he’s kinda like Crowd Work!)

He put Elvis on. He put The Beatles on. 73 million people watched, which is more than half the country then, sitting still, at the same time, in the same hour. 

And he did it with no tool or swarm of AI agents analyzing SEO trends or prediction forecasts. No dashboard! None! Zero! This man had a hunch about 4 boys with weird haircuts from Liverpool and introduced them to the world without so much as a focus group in a Hilton Garden Inn conference room. 

I started Crowd Work because I was not OK. 

I was on my couch at 11:40 p.m. on a Tuesday in a shirt I'd worn for an amount of days I will never disclose, eating shredded cheese out of the bag like a raccoon, after receiving some pretty gnarly “feedback” from a LinkedIn troll that sent me into a spiral of self-doubt.

I thought: I can't be the only one who feels this way. 

So obviously, when asked during our “Personal Branding” L&D sessions where I saw my ~personal brand~ in 5 years, I said:

But of course, the devil on my shoulder immediately whispered all those ugly thoughts that fed into my imposter syndrome and made me instinctively backtrack.

Thankfully, my manager — our wonderful content director Emma Miller — snapped me back to reality and said: 

That's Crowd Work’s whole origin story. There was no whiteboard, strategy docs, market research, or what-have-you. Just a kind person who believed in me, and gave me the opportunity and platform (and a little push) to believe in myself. 

How could I say no? Therapy was getting too expensive, so why not write my darkest (comedic) thoughts for 7,000 strangers? Pretty much the same thing as seeing a licensed therapist, right?!

But what got me feeling down in the first place, you ask? 

Well, take a look around…

*gestures broadly at everything*

Take your pick: climate change, the economy, wars, epidemics, parents getting older, AI taking our words, jobs, and oh, don’t forget that Anthropic engineer on podcasts calmly putting AI murdering humanity at 10% while some host says "wow" and goes to an ad read for Squarespace.

I could do 900 words on it (and I did, actually, but decided to cut some because I’m not trying to get you to sob and belt out Radiohead with me). You've been on the internet today, so I’m prettttty sure you're all caught up.

And yet, despite ALL of that, you log on at 9 a.m. and put a smile on your face and act like your No. 1 concern in this world is a quarterly KPI and a lead gen target and whether the CTA button should say "Get started" or "Get started now."

That's insane. That's an insane thing to ask of a human being, and we all do it, every day, and we're GOOD at it, because our job is to always put forth the best version — even of ourselves, which is somehow the hardest part to reckon with as marketers. But hey, the rent don’t pay itself, honey!

So that’s why I made Crowd Work. To deal with all that bullsh*t. 

I wanted to create a comedy newsletter about marketing to serve as a space for all of us to come together and laugh — even if it’s to stop us from crying.
(It was that or a weighted blanket.)

And sure, most Sundays we'll spend it on major brand fails or poking fun at a SaaS brand named after a Norse god, or a bot in your comments typing "Great stuff! 🙌" under a post about your cat dying. And you know, that's the job and I love the job.

But underneath the roasting, here's what I actually want you to know:

You are not your open rate.
Not your follower count, last performance review, the number on your quarterly reports, or one of the gazillion tabs opened behind this one.

What you are is something far more beautiful. Somebody in your life is going to remember that you texted back at 2 a.m. That you drove them to the airport. That you made them laugh on the worst day of their life, in a hospital parking lot, on purpose, when nobody else could. None of that will ever appear in a dashboard. No new AI model is coming for it. Not Fable 5.1, not GPT-6 Astra, not Perplexity Pro, and no, not even your old Tamagotchi. 

What you bring to this world, day in and day out, will outlast every platform that ever made you feel small and insignificant. 

And so, what we gotta remember is that in 5, 10, or 50 years from now, nobody will stand up at your funeral and say you “really moved the needle on MQLs in Q3.”

They’ll stand up and say you showed up. You were the reason they got through it. You made them laugh in the group chat. You stopped them from crying. 

That's the legacy you leave behind. That's what you're actually building. Everything else is just work.

Alright, that's my time.

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

The shape of infinite knowledge is, apparently, an anus

Alyx, a dudette on the internet spelling their name like that because it “hits different”, ran the numbers on whether AI company logos look like buttholes. Welp, 6 out of 7 scored a clean 0, and it’s the only rigorous piece of AI research published this year that I fully understand. Looks like they all went to the same design firm and came out with the same puckered little starburst, because every one of these guys wants a logo that says "portal to infinite knowledge," and the shape of infinite knowledge is, apparently, an anus?! Whaaaaaat.

But what I reaaaallly wanna talk about is the caption above it. Alexandr Wang is Chief AI Officer at Meta, is worth more than everyone I've ever loved COMBINED, and reposted and essentially launched his model with a tweet that said: "state of the art motherfuckers." The lord of our AI overlords told Claude “hold my beer” and ostensibly wrote one line himself on this one. Not a hook template, founder bro framework, clickbaity thread, or the dreaded lazy non-CTA CTA "thoughts?” in sight. A man with so much money he can probably sh*t gold wrote something a “thought leader” would shiver at the thought of posting, and 1.6 MILLION people looked at it.

I know a few folks out there who got their ghostwriting agencies to “write” up a 14-word caption through 3 different AI tools over 5 days, and it got 11 likes (4 from coworkers). Which makes me relieved that, at storyarb, we have the principles and talented writers backing our street cred — clients know to run to us to sound like a human again. 

h/t Yannis Psarras, who clocked it first.

Well, that was quite a long read! I’m happy to see you made it this far. Who am I kidding, I’m happy I made it this far. See you next week. 

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? The American Marketing Association surveyed 1,412 marketers and found they rated adaptability, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication as LESS important in 2026 than in 2025, even though those are the exact skills AI is worst at replicating. So they all looked at the one thing the machine can't do, as a group, out loud, and collectively said "eh”? Sounds like they need to read Crowd Work!