The best piece of copy I ever read was a handwritten sign taped to a gas pump in rural Tennessee.
I do not remember what it was selling. I remember that it made me laugh out loud standing there in the heat with the nozzle in my hand, and I remember that I went inside and bought whatever it was. I have thought about that sign every fifth time I fill the tank for the last decade. The sign is still working on me. It is still doing the job it set out to do. Somewhere in Tennessee, a person I will never meet wrote three words on cardboard and something the words set loose is still hanging around inside my head all these years later.
Now think about the last piece of brand copy you read. Not the last one you liked. The last one you read. I bet you cannot quote a word. I bet you could not tell me if it was one paragraph or three. I bet each word disappeared behind the next one your eyes grazed.
The gas pump worked because it left behind the ghost of the hand that wrote it. The page did not work because there was no hand.
This is the whole argument. Everything else in this essay is just me tiptoeing around it.
The machines are slightly better at writing that kind of sentence now, and here we all are, looking for life in the output of bits and bots.
This is wrong. It has been wrong the whole time. The people running this have mistaken the container for the thing inside. A sentence is a box. What it holds is a tiny spark of the writer’s soul. When the packing is done well the reader opens it and the soul floats out to meet the reader’s. Done poorly, it is an empty box. A sentence with nobody home.
The industry’s response to this problem is to try harder to make the empty sentences sound like they mean something. Run them through filters. Check them against brand voice guides. Make sure they hit the keywords. Make sure they do not embarrass anybody. Make sure, above all, that nothing weird or specific or alive slips into them, because weird and specific and alive are the three things the filters are sent to snuff out.
This is how you end up with pages blaming their own audiences for needing sustenance when they left the audience starving. The audience has been sitting too long at a table that serves plate after plate of beautifully arranged air, and now they are gone, looking for a table that feeds them.
A content mill rejected the last piece I filed. HVAC copy, Columbus, actually pretty good. The filter flagged it for failing instruction compliance, which is corporate for something in here felt alive and we cannot allow life. Exterminate. I wrote back asking what the problem was. A human being read the reply, because the reply had a person in it and the filter let it through. The filter killed the work. The person read the response. That is the whole thing in one rejected HVAC piece.
So here is the pitch. If you want copy a reader scrolls past without noticing, there are machines that can do it for you, and more of them every day. I have to eat, so my rates cannot compete. If you want copy that a reader closes the tab and finds themselves thinking about in the grocery store three days later, that is a different service. Different economics. It requires a writer with a soul on the premises.
I do not know what the sign said. I know it worked. I know it is still working. It will still be working long after the ink on the cardboard has faded, long after everyone who passed the pump that day are gone, long after the sign itself is dust.