Best Story Wins cover art

Best Story Wins

Best Story Wins

By: Column Five
Listen for free

Welcome to “Best Story Wins,” a podcast for marketing and branding professionals looking to unlock their growth potential. Hosted by Column Five—a B2B marketing agency that specializes in brand and content marketing for SaaS companies—each episode features insightful conversations with industry leaders who are winning customers’ hearts and minds by building world-class brands.

Tune in to hear expert insights, hard-won lessons, and key strategies to take your own marketing efforts to the next level.Column Five Career Success Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • AI Made Brand the Only Thing Left That Matters with Adam Morgan of Twilio

    AI Made Brand the Only Thing Left That Matters with Adam Morgan of Twilio
    Jun 25 2026
    Twilio used to read like a company built for developers and nobody else. Then it found one word that made every audience feel like they belonged to the same tribe.Adam Morgan, VP of Brand and Creative at Twilio, spent three months finding that word "builder" and watched it turn a stalled rebrand into what he calls lightning in a bottle. He explains why most companies chase logos and color palettes before they've earned the right to, and why brand resurgence isn't a reaction to AI fear — it's AI's actual byproduct. When everyone can generate a slick landing page for free, the thing AI can't fake becomes the whole game.We also cover:
    • Why Adam built Twilio's entire rebrand around a single emotional truth he found at Hearst Castle — not a brand workshop
    • The real reason AI is making brand storytelling more valuable, not less, and why "AI-resistant content" is the new differentiator
    • Why locking creatives into rigid brand guidelines backfires, and what a "systems approach" looks like instead
    Show More Show Less
    49 mins
  • Taste Is the Only Thing AI Can't Generate (Yet) with Matt Scribner of Atlassian

    Taste Is the Only Thing AI Can't Generate (Yet) with Matt Scribner of Atlassian
    Jun 18 2026
    Every brand team is being handed AI tools and told to do more with less. What they're not being told is that without taste and a real idea, the output is just sophisticated noise at scale.

    Matt Scribner is a growth designer at Atlassian — a company whose brand touches tens of thousands of visitors a week — and he's been inside the AI-enabled design workflow longer than most. His take isn't a sales pitch for the tools or a doomsday headline about job loss. It's something more useful: an honest account of where AI actually helps, where it quietly fails, and why the designers who thrive won't be the ones who prompt the best.

    We also cover:
    • AI can get you to 60% — but if you couldn't get past 60% without it, you're not getting past it with it either
    • We're heading toward a "singularity of design" where everything starts looking the same, and the only antidote is taste you built before the tools existed
    • The Arts and Crafts movement followed the Industrial Revolution for a reason — and the same correction is coming for brand
    Show More Show Less
    38 mins
  • Stop Measuring Brand Like a Performance Channel with Bill Kenney from Focus Lab

    Stop Measuring Brand Like a Performance Channel with Bill Kenney from Focus Lab
    Jun 11 2026
    Every quarter, someone asks you to prove the rebrand paid for itself in dollars. Bill Kenney's answer after 16 years: you're measuring the wrong thing, and the spreadsheet was never going to save you anyway.

    Bill built Focus Lab into one of B2B's sharpest branding shops by owning a single vertical back when everyone warned him that niching down would scare off clients. He makes the case that brand ROI behaves like going to the gym — you don't step on the scale the morning after — and that the real opportunity for agencies isn't using AI to ship work faster, it's handing clients the tooling to run their own brand without you in the room. He also says the quiet part out loud about why a weekend in an AI tool will never replace what actually happens inside a 16-week rebrand: the second-guessing, the cold feet, the "can we sit on this another week."

    We also cover:
    • The Apple test for why feature parity just turned product differentiation into a branding problem, not an engineering one
    • Why he shut down his own sub-agency after realizing clients "don't give a shit" how big or small your other clients are
    • The one belief he died on for years — that a brand has to launch in a single perfect moment — and why he now thinks a slow, slightly messy rollout works fine
    • The first-meeting question he asks every CEO that quietly decides whether the whole project survives
    Show More Show Less
    50 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet