BIG QUESTIONS
Does Legal water down your marketing?
It’s true that most brands need Legal to mitigate risk in their marketing. But sometimes lawyers can overreach – imagining unlikely interpretations of their company’s advertising and highly improbable litigants. Requested changes can sanitize a marketing message, making it less worthy of attention. Legal rarely shares their reasoning and Marketing doesn’t always have the time or bandwidth for a debate. Legal’s changes are applied wholecloth, and out the door watered-down creative goes.
For a better balance between legally defensible and intriguing marketing, start by developing a relationship with Legal. Then politely push back on comments that weaken your message. “No” is the easy route for Legal, so make it a bit harder. Negotiate. Sell your work to them. Make the case for why taking the risk is necessary. Request that they clarify their risk tolerance or any rubrics used to make calls. The simple act of engaging with them will give you more leeway to do what you want – within reason, of course.
TOOL JOY
The impressive rise of HubSpot
Across dozens of marketing-tool roundups and industry reports, HubSpot has long been the dominant favorite platform. With 38% of the global marketing automation market, HubSpot posted $3.13 billion in 2025 revenue (up 19% year-over-year), and serves nearly 289,000 customers in more than 135 countries. It appeared on every major “best marketing tools” list and is the platform most commonly cited as essential by marketers today. What we love about it, though, is their content: articles, podcasts, guides, courses, certifications, e-books, and so on.
Why marketers should care: HubSpot’s content is widely regarded as a gold standard for B2B marketing. The blog alone enjoys 4.5 million monthly readers, and their educational ecosystem (blog, Academy, The Hustle) is essentially what built their brand. It’s worth taking inspiration from.
BEEP BOOP
A game on a mission: You and 143 million others thought you were catching Pokémon. But you actually built the largest real-world visual dataset in history. Enough data to build a machine vision model of the physical world. For what use, we do not know.
The Newsletter Test: Could your company newsletter become a profit center? It could if people genuinely want what you’re sending. Whether you do that or not, it’s useful to think of your newsletter that way. In fact, think about your entire marketing program that way.
Make way for the super-poopers: A new stuntvertising idea from McCann brings together 18 Huggies-clad babies, chosen specifically for their intestinal prowess, to crawl all over half a million dollars in luxury goods in an effort to say, “Hey, these things don’t leak.” (Thanks to copywriter/marketer Diana Donovan for this one.)
Just boo it: Online retailer Sprvilln has developed the first-ever high-performance clown shoe. These limited-edition kicks are precision-engineered to provoke, confuse, and quietly detonate inside the cultural bloodstream. Boom.
What the what? 93% of marketers agree that third-party creator campaigns work best when creators use their own voice, but only 7% actually let them (according to a recent survey by Marketing Brew and Tracksuit of 250+ marketers).
WORD TO THE WISE
“The cause of the production of real art is the artist’s inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated.”
– Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer
BECAUSE WE CARE
Your content works, but AI gets the credit
Welcome to the zero-click crisis: where your content informs the buyer, powers the answer, and… gets you nowhere. In our first Pinwheel Monthly Weather Report, we look at why traffic is getting harder to earn, trust is getting harder to keep, and old content KPIs are getting harder to defend. Inside this March issue: the signals reshaping marketing, the new role of third-party validation, and the moves brands can make to stay in the conversation and influence the purchase. Get your free copy of The Zero Click Crisis here.
Note: The Pinwheel Monthly Weather Report is designed to help Pinwheel clients navigate the constantly shifting marketing environment.
