Hey, it’s Payton. 👋

I haven’t been satisfied with Christian Story Lab lately. I kept asking myself a question: would I open this newsletter if I didn’t write it?

Some weeks, no.

You deserve an email you’re excited to open. Something practical you can use the same day, whether you’re building a business, leading a ministry, or writing for an audience.

So for the next four editions (two weeks), I’m trying something new. Real marketing moves from this week, the mechanic underneath each one, and a verdict: steal it, leave it, or be careful.

There’s a one-question survey at the bottom for you to vote if you like the new format.

In 1948, psychology professor Bertram Forer told his students they’d each get a personalized personality profile, based on a questionnaire they’d taken the week before.

Every student got the same 13 sentences. He’d lifted them from a newspaper horoscope. “You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.” That kind of thing.

He asked the class to rate the accuracy from 0 to 5.

The average: 4.26.

The students took a questionnaire the week before. They invested, waited, and got “results.” That pre-action is what made generic words feel like X-ray vision.

That’s the engine under Spotify Wrapped. Twelve months of listening (your “test”), your real data, a personality label loose enough to fit anyone (“The Adventurer”), and a share button.

The formula is everywhere once you see it:

pre-action + real data + flattering label + easy sharing.

One SaaS team added a “What is your role?” box to their signup form that connected to nothing in the product. Replies and conversions climbed anyway, because everything after it felt personalized.

I’ve reached for this one. It’s all over Christian media too. “God has a specific word for YOU today,” followed by content identical for all 40,000 subscribers, is the Forer effect.

🟡 Verdict: steal the mechanic, leave the move. People value what they helped create, and questions create investment. Jesus asked questions he already knew the answers to. Manufacturing false intimacy is a séance, not a service. Fortune tellers have run this play on vulnerable people for centuries.

My take: use pre-action with real reflection. Before your next ask, give your audience one real question. A one-question poll (pssst, bottom of this email). A quick self-audit. Then reflect their actual answers back in the follow-up. If your output is identical for everyone, don’t imply it isn’t.

Content Rewards is a marketplace where brands pay creators for short-form content. They wanted to claim a position: billboards are dead.

Saying it would have been noise. So they spent $10,000 on a real billboard in downtown Toronto and used AI to count every person who walked past it.

20,948 people walked by.

62 scanned the QR code. That’s 0.3%.

They filmed the whole thing like a movie trailer, 73 seconds, called it “Experiment #1,” and posted it. Two million views and thousands of comments, for the price of the thing they were burying.

The experiment IS the content.

🟢 Verdict: steal it. Experiments in public are integrity made visible, and Christian creators should be the most at-home people in this genre. We’re supposed to be the ones who don’t shade the numbers.

(You’re inside my version right now. This format is Experiment #1 of 4.)

My take: pick one thing your channel, org, or business pays for out of habit and quietly suspects is broken. The newsletter. The boosted posts. The conference booth. Measure it honestly, and experiment in public.

Lunos is an AI accounting startup. Their pitch to CFOs: we tame the “wild west” of invoices.

So they hired an actual cowboy, put him on a horse, and sent him to Wall Street.

Cost: $3,500.

The result was thousands of site visits, hundreds of LinkedIn comments, and their head of growth says that every single prospect who entered the pipeline over the next three months mentioned seeing it.

I call it literal marketing: take your industry’s figure of speech and make it physical.

Preachers have known this one for three thousand years. Jeremiah wore the yoke. Ezekiel built the brick siege. Jesus put a child in the middle of the room. The acted metaphor predates marketing.

🟢 Verdict: steal it. One memorable physical metaphor beats forty thousand dollars of forgettable noise.

My take: write your value proposition as a figure of speech. If you had to act this out in a public place, what would it look like? That’s your angle.

Your work has three buckets: strategy, execution, judgment. Pre-AI, execution ate the week. Research, drafts, builds, tests, formatting. The thinking on either end got squeezed into whatever was left.

AI eats the middle. The execution bars collapse, and the job becomes the two ends: deciding what to point AI at, and judging whether what comes back is good enough, feels right, and ships.

And the two ends run on the exact skills that rot when you stop using them.

Aviation has long known that pilots who lean too hard on autopilot lose manual flying skills. Airlines now make them fly by hand on purpose.

The same pattern is showing up in the research on heavy AI use: it erodes the exact writing and judgment skills you need to use AI well.

I don’t get to be smug here. I build AI systems nearly every day to automate manual processes. There is a real danger in going full automation here.

🔴 Verdict: danger zone. Routine tasks can be automated. Judgment has to be practiced, or it rots. The trap is letting AI do the thinking God gave you the capacity for.

My take: fly by hand on schedule, not by accident. Write one piece this week start to finish with the AI off, and note where it hurt. That’s the muscle to keep. And if you run automated systems, give each one a heartbeat that tells you when it stops.

People can tell when something cost you something.

Pay attention for real, spend something real, and show the real numbers. It’s becoming the rarest move in marketing.

—Payton ✌️

P.S. Vote below, or just hit reply and tell me straight. Either one helps me build you something worth opening.