About
A marketing publication that runs a practice.
Column 13 is a publication first. We write about what marketing has forgotten — reach, frequency, message, strategy tied to a real objective — and the engagements we take on are how we keep the writing honest. Readers come before clients. That order matters.
The 13
The outcast column. Coming sideways.
Thirteen is the unlucky number. The outcast. The column nobody reads. That’s the one we write. The marketing answer that’s correct but uncomfortable, the position that’s contrarian but right, the basic that everyone skipped because it wasn’t new.
Our essays argue that boldness isn’t bravado, that simplicity isn’t shallow, that brand isn’t only marketing’s job, that completion isn’t strategy. The pattern is consistent: the senior, restrained version of a take you’ve probably heard loud and wrong.
What we publish
The body of work is the credential.
Twenty-five essays in ten months. Mostly Alex. Some Daniel. Some Peyton. All of it argued in public, all of it tied back to engagements we’ve actually run. We’d rather you read three of them than read a case study.
The newsletter goes out on a regular cadence. Subscribe and you’ll see the thinking we use inside engagements — before any sales conversation happens.
How we got here
“I spent more time making leadership happy through completion than doing strategy.”
Alex Benavides founded Column 13 in 2008 as a creative agency for healthcare, staffing, technology, and nonprofit clients. The agency grew. We merged in 2014 and expanded into software and digital systems.
In 2020 Alex stepped out to work in-house. Six years at growth-stage companies: Crucial Care through COVID, Optiwatt in clean-tech, Sevocity in EHR. He did the marketing leadership he used to advise from the outside.
What he saw from the inside: the basics of marketing get skipped because nobody slows down. Output demand crowds out strategy. Tactics get applied without it. Strategy stops getting applied at all. Most marketers spend more time satisfying leadership through completion than doing the work that would actually move the business.
That observation is what the publication is now arguing in public, one essay at a time. The agency exists to keep the argument tethered to real work.
The people
Who’s writing and working.
Alex Benavides
Alex is the founder of Column 13 and a marketing leader who helps companies grow on the strength of their actual economics, not their ad budget. He serves as fractional CMO for multiple clients and advises several early-stage startups, owning everything from positioning and channel strategy to the operating rhythm that keeps marketing accountable to revenue. He built Column 13 as the kind of outside partner companies should be able to call on: a small group of senior practitioners who own the work instead and capable of pitching in.
Before Column 13, Alex came up as an operator inside scrappy sales and marketing teams, most recently leading field marketing at Optiwatt. He loves writing about the compounding impacts of customer economics, channel discipline, and the long middle that many agencies skip.
In his free time, he runs multiple Dungeons & Dragons games and volunteers for NPOs serving homelessness and chronic poverty.
Daniel Benavides
Daniel is a partner at Column 13 and a growth strategist who makes complex businesses easier to understand, trust, and buy from. He has led high-stakes rebrands, product launches, go-to-market programs, demand generation, and sales enablement across aviation, emerging technology, associations, and professional services. His range is unusual. He can find the sharpest market position, turn it into a compelling creative system, align the people responsible for selling and delivering it, and build the operating discipline that makes the work scale.
Before Column 13, Daniel led marketing and brand strategy at AUVSI and served as senior creative director at Elva Marketing. He writes here about growth as a craft. What compounds, what burns out, and the disciplined work between them that separates momentum from noise.
Peyton Watford
Peyton is a partner at Column 13. Her work sits where marketing meets design (the layer where strategy becomes something a customer can actually see, read, and use). Before Column 13 she built hands-on brand and creative programs across both in-house and consulting roles. She writes here about the visible end of marketing: brand voice, creative quality, and why execution decides whether a strategy actually lands.
One receipt
From 30 to 90 patients per day. With no ad spend.
A multi-site healthcare provider needed to scale fast during COVID. We took patient visit volume from 30 to 90 per day across ten clinics through positioning, operational marketing, and owned channels. No paid media. The kind of work that’s available when strategy comes before completion.
Where we work.
Based in Jacksonville, Florida. Working with clients across North America. Founded 2008. Independent. Minority-owned.
Read first. Hire later.
The newsletter is the front door. If, after reading, you think we’d be useful inside your company, the conversation is thirty minutes and there’s no pitch.