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🪩 Volume 129 | March 25, 2026

 

Ok let me be honest with you. When I sat down to write this, my brain was DEEP FRIED (in a bad way… not the way that results in perfectly fluffy Funnel Cakes.) Tough week, and I genuinely considered opening this newsletter with a photo of myself lying face down on the kitchen floor. 

 

 

But like all good big girls do, I picked myself up, slapped my face (gently), and pointed to myself in the mirror and said “you are smart, kind, valued and you have GREAT HAIR.”

 

So now we’re here. Week 4 of March Madness (missed 1-3? Check ‘em out below) and I will not let a poop of a week get in the way of the excitement I have for today’s coverage. 

 

We’ve spent March lookin’ at brands who scaled carefully, ones who stayed bootstrapped, and ones that had to course correct after scaling too fast. Today we’re looking at each campaign and talking about what made them memorable enough to have customers like: 👀👀👀. Get your notebooks ready—you’re gonna wanna apply these lessons to your own biz.

 

Let me show you what I mean (through three brands doing something really smart, right now). 

 

Week 1 | Volume 126 | 🥳 More money DOESN'T have to mean more problems

Week 2 | Volume 127 | 🥳 When the underdogs hit it BIG

Week 3 | Volume 128 | 🥳 Pleased to report: no successful robot takeovers *yet*

 

 

I want you to hold this in the front of your brain for the rest of this newsletter: The brands that stay most profitable, most authentic, and most recognizable aren't separating “creative” from ”financial”.

 

Every content decision, every casting call, every channel you choose—or don't—is a P&L move. Which brings me to...

 

If you haven’t seen Dairy Boy’s latest “audition” commercial—it’s freaking FUNNY. Watch it here. For context: Dairy Boy, founded by Paige Lorenze, is an American lifestyle brand built around a “cozy rebellion” aesthetic—farm-inspired, raw milk vibes, with an anti-hustle ethos. THIS is the kind of brand that makes you want to move to upstate NY and wear linen (or their sports line. Same thing).

 

But the audition commercial is just the fun part (and what caught my attention). The actual story behind Dairy Boy is what I want to talk about.

 

Paige started the brand in 2022 with money she'd saved working throughout college—no investors, no industry connections, no business plan. Just an audience she'd spent years building authentically and a $25 hat that said "Dairy Girl Summer" that sold out immediately. She built the whole thing from that moment—and grew 160% year over year in 2025 without ever taking outside money.

Her reason for resisting investors: "There are missteps you can take that break that trust, and it can just never come back."

 

THIS is financial discipline. When you're not chasing investor metrics, you can afford to move at the speed of trust. The audition commercial, the casting calls, the community content—all of it is downstream of that same decision.

 

The lesson for your business: Paige didn't scale the brand. She scaled the relationship first, and let revenue follow. That sequencing is erryythang.

 

Now I’ve known for a while that ClickUp hires actors for their content. And it’s HILARIOUS. One of my faves is (when the HR meeting goes too hard). 

 

But what I loved even more is when I came across the post from the ClickUp founder talking about how much money they spent on content and what results it gets for them. 

 

I can spare ya the click: $20K/mo on content that reportedly pulls 250M+ impressions. They stopped hiring content creators and started hiring unemployed actors from LA—specifically from The Groundlings, the improv school where Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig trained. Their strategy: find people with REAL performance training, teach them the product, let them act. And it's cheaper per video than a mid-tier influencer.

 

Now for  my personal existential crisis:  (Shit. I really wanted to be an actor but didn’t want the big stage. THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN A COOL GIG???? IS IT TOO LATE FOR ME????)

 

ANYWAY. What I LOVE about this isn’t the number, it’s the framing. They found a talent market that was undervalued (trained actors with no consistent work) and matched it to a need (content that performs). 

 

Creative move. ✅

Disciplined allocation of resources. ✅

 

Cool. Great. Most of us do not have a $20k/month content budget.

 

But the idea underneath it is actually very actionable for smaller brands: find undervalued channels and match them to your actual needs. You don't need to hire an actor. You need to stop overpaying for outcomes you could build smarter.

 

Here's what that looks like in practice—stuff we've actually seen work:

 

→ Automations over headcount. Tools like ManyChat let you build DM flows, lead qualification, and follow-up sequences that run while you sleep. You're not hiring a community manager to answer the same three questions at midnight. You're building a system for $49/month that never calls in sick.

 

→ Staking your claim with a non-brand-specific newsletter. Unsexy but wildly underused. Instead of running ads to build authority, you become the authority—by creating content that serves the industry, not just your brand. You're not buying attention. You're building the asset that makes people come to you. (Hi. You're reading one right now, how meta.)

 

→ Repurposing as a budget decision, not just a time-saver. One strong piece of content should be doing eight jobs. If it isn't, that's a resource leak—not a content problem.

 

The lesson for your business: The question isn't ”can I afford better marketing?” It's ”am I allocating what I already have to the highest-leverage moves?” ClickUp just figured that out at scale. You can do it this week.

 

Ok so this one is a little more cautionary—but it’s soooo well-timed with everything we’ve covered this month.

 

David Protein has been EVERYWHERE in the fitness/wellness space. (I first spotted it in the Hamptons last summer—bday cake flavor was a big hit in my fam).

 

The pitch: 28g protein, zero sugar, 150 calories. Beloved by wellness influencers, beloved by finance bros. (If you’re a real one here, you remember when I covered this back when Funnel Cake was The Good Marketer). 

 

Then… a class-action lawsuit dropped, alleging the bars contain 78-83% MORE CALORIES (lol omfg) and 400% MORE FAT than the label says. (The science is actually so genuinely complicated—it has to do with a novel ingredient called EPG and how calories are measured, but that nuance didn’t exactly stop the internet FROM GOING FOR THEIR THROATS).

 

The brand’s response is everything I would ever do as a sassy brand: they leaned soooooo hard into it with a Mean Girls reference. The CEO literally said, “No one is getting Regina Georged.” (The allegation LOL). A food scientist also weighed in.

 

The response was smart, funny, on brand, and fast. But the underlying issue—building your entire identity around a claim that’s now being legally contested—is the thing I want to flag.

The lesson for your business: Your brand promise has to be backed by your product reality. The more specific your claim, the more exposed you are if it shifts. Discipline before the pressure comes means you’re not scrambling to do reputation management later. Brand trust is slow to build and SUPER fast to lose.

 

Here’s where we land the plane. 🧑‍✈️

 

All three of these brands—whether they’re getting it right or navigating a mess—are dealing with the same core Q: what do you do once business is actually working? 

 

When you’re in grind mode, profit is not a reward; it’s leverage. And what you do with it—how you protect it, structure it, allocate it—that’s the creative work to be done.

 

Some things I’d have ya sit with:

 

1. Prove your economics before you expand. Dairy Boy could have gone fast and bought media. They build community instead. ClickUp could have kept paying $10K/video. They found a smarter model. Discipline is easier before the pressure hits. 

 

I’ll use an example here. At Brand Good Time, we built a diagnostic quiz that feeds directly into a paid entry offer—a “brand clarity diagnostic” of sorts. It’s $1000, and it does two things at once: it gives someone who is not quite ready for a full engagement a real, tangible place to start, AND it gates the relationship correctly. If someone won’t invest $1000 to get clarity on their own brand and marketing efforts, they’re probably not our $15K client anyway. 

 

 

We’re not selling a discovery call, we’re selling a prescription. They walk away with their #1 growth blocker identified and a clear recommendation for which service is the right fit. And that $1000 applies toward any BGT engagement if they move forward.

 

THE WHOLE THING is designed so that our marketing spend—the content, the newsletter, the LinkedIn presence—isn’t just brand-building in the abstract. It’s building the trust that makes someone say yes to that first $1000, and that $1000 is what makes someone say yes to $15K. This is what I’m talking about when I talk about financial architecture.

 

2. Independence buys optionality. ALL DAY EVERY DAY. The brands we’ve looked at all month that stayed most themselves—Basecamp, Spanx, Mailchimp in its early days—they all had one thing in common: they weren’t chained to someone else’s growth timeline. That is a BIG ASS GIFT. Guard it.

 

3. Sometimes the most creative move is restraint, after all. The Dairy Boy casting call. The ClickUp actor gamble—both examples of smart plays (not big-budget plays). When profit becomes real in your business, structure matters. 

 

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💰 Today's issue is brought to you by Samantha Smith Tax Advisory Co.—a tax advisory firm built specifically for creative businesses. If you've had a good year (or a complicated one), now is the time to get smart about what comes next. Opinions are my own.

 

 

I am TICKLED at the marketing campaigns that my eyeballs got to enjoy this last week. My faves below (and were totally popping off in my agency’s group chat)

 

Oura — The apartment window ad → Oura posted a pic to social that’s just a photo of an apartment building at night—windows lit up, city quiet—with small annotations pointing to individual windows. ”Room set to 67 degrees”. ”Curled up with the dog”. ”Scrolling to sleep”. ”On the phone with mom”. ”House finally quiet”. As an Oura wearer, I LOVED seeing this: A brand understands what it's actually selling isn't a ring—it's the feeling of finally being off the clock. This is what it looks like when a brand knows its mission well enough to not have to explain it. Incredible creative.

 

Canva — The Office, missing confetti, and a full spiral → Canva made a reel inspired by “The Office” about running out of confetti. Yes, confetti. Apparently someone on the social team used it all being silly on a security camera, and so they decided to make more. By hand. What followed was, by their own description, complete chaos—strips of paper everywhere, staff visibly spiraling, someone announcing they were quiet-quitting. All to restock the confetti supply before their conference. It's unhinged AND completely on brand, and IMO it works because it treats a tiny product detail—something most companies would never think to mention—as evidence of the company’s entire culture.

 

Disney Cruise Line — Midnight Magic → Ready to sob? Disney debuted this one during the Oscars, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. The commercial follows a father and son sharing a quiet late-night ritual on a Disney ship—starting when the son is an infant, and playing out across decades until he's a father himself, carrying his own daughter through those same dimly lit decks. It's set to the theme from Pixar's Up. Be warned: you will cry. What makes it brilliant from a marketing standpoint isn't the production value (though it's stunning). It's that Disney isn't selling a cruise. They're selling a tradition—one you haven't had yet but will recognize the moment it starts. The idea of a ritual that a parent and child carry across years, with a Disney ship as the constant. It's something Disney families actually experience. The ad works because it knows that.

 

One of our clients is a Travel Planner, and he said his phone was BLOWING UP after that Disney ad dropped (like he’s never seen before). THE POWER!! Of great!!! Marketing!!!!

 

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That’s a wrap on March, y’all (and a wrap on Q1). SEE YA ON APRIL FOOLS! 👀