✍️ winning budget for an unproven marketing idea

Proving ROI for creative work is one of marketing's oldest headaches.

Most creative ideas don't die because they're bad. They die because nobody knows how to sell them internally. The safe ideas get funded. The new ones die in midyear budget meetings.

Claire Drumond, VP at Atlassian, convinced leadership to fund a campaign around a creative gut call: Zach Woods. (You know, Gabe, from The Office.)

She used three data points to make the case for taking that risk. 

Let’s get into it.

The campaign that eventually earned Atlassian a Webby nom started with Claire scrolling Instagram and thinking, “Well, that’s unhinged.” 

She’d started getting videos from Zach Woods (best known for The Office), which ranged from REI erotica to vaguely threatening sleep meditations to hot takes on the Salem witch trials. 

And it all kinda reminded her of work. 

“I thought, ‘This guy is having a resurgence,’” Claire says. “He’s creating a new persona; he’s super funny. And then, I thought: ‘Jira is having a resurgence now too.’” 

At the time, Jira was trying to solve a perception problem. Developers loved the product, but marketers, project managers, operations leaders, and other knowledge workers didn't see it as a tool built for them.

They needed a Woods-esque reinvention. So, Claire brought him in to do a video. 

"It wasn't celebrity for the sake of celebrity," Claire says. "It was somebody whose vibe fit our vibe, and whose humor fit our humor."

(It also helped that in Silicon Valley, Woods’ character literally teaches the team Scrum. Nice li’l nod to the developer audience.) 

That kind of creative dot-connecting is something no AI marketing tool can do for you.

Claire had the creative vision.

Unfortunately, “Zach Woods feels right" isn't a budget justification.

The most important slide wasn't the creative

You’d think the hardest part of getting a creative campaign approved is convincing leadership the idea is any good.

Nope. For Claire, the slide that moved the room was about competitor spend.

Her team pulled data showing how aggressively companies like Monday.com and ClickUp were pouring money into brand advertising.

Suddenly the question switched from "Should we spend money on brand?" to "Can we afford not to?"

That's a very different meeting.

Money to test things that might not work

The second ask was harder — an experimental budget for channels Atlassian had never used before: in-flight screens on United and jetway ads.

Leadership asked the obvious question: How do you know it'll work?

Claire's answer: You don't … and that's the point.

If nobody’s done it before, the learning is part of the return.

It worked, for the record. The campaign delivered lifts in awareness, perception, and sign-ups, and became a Webby award finalist.

But its impact was felt beyond the dashboard.

People on the team were texting the campaign to their parents. And look — most marketers ship a lot of campaigns. Very few send them to their mom.

Get the full playbook here.

Campaigns that got us talking: The Devil Wears Prada, but for marketers? Say less.

AI spotlight: The new writing status symbol is sounding like yourself. As AI gets better at producing clean, polished content, the value shifts to things that machines struggle to fake: voice, opinions, quirks, the occasional “David.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: You had us at “rawdog-ing English composition,” Adam Delehanty. AI can write a perfectly acceptable paragraph in 3 seconds. Unfortunately, nobody has ever described their favorite writer as “perfectly acceptable.”

Did you hear? We write newsletters.

We know. At this point, it may be our entire personality.

Companies spend a small fortune, and a lot of time, creating content only to publish it once and hope for the best. Meanwhile, newsletters remain one of the few channels people actually invite into their inboxes.

So we made it official. If you’ve been thinking, “I wish someone would just handle our newsletter,” that’s now a thing we do. Our Essentials Tier is built for teams that just want a consistently good newsletter without turning its creation into a second full-time job.

Also: We're at Cannes!

If you're here too, hit reply and let us know. We’d love to say hello, grab a coffee, or debate the merits of rosé as a professional networking tool.

“Can we cut em dashes?”

No — no, we cannot. 

Sincerely,

Copywriters everywhere

No one ever made marketing history (or, like, hit Q2 goals) by running another bland SEO listicle. Even if it feels safe.

For marketers, creativity, thinking outside the box, and doing what competitors haven’t tried yet are all part of the job.

The other part of the job is getting Finance on board. Good thing you know how to do that now.

Now get out there and sell some jet bridges.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The em dash has been around since Gutenberg's printing press — used as a spatial bridge, a fluid replacement for commas, colons, and parentheses. The name comes from old-school typography, where an "em" referred to a space roughly the width of the letter "m."

Apparently em dashes fell out of fashion when the typewriter showed up and didn't bother to dedicate a key for one.

Still heartbroken about it.