Valentine's Day Rant

 

Valentine’s Day, oh Valentine’s Day: the holiday that convinces the world that love can be packaged in red wrapping, chocolate, and slightly awkward greeting cards.

Every commercial screams, “Show your love like never before!” But what does that mean? Send flowers? Buy overpriced jewelry? Present chalky candy hearts with goofy messages?

And chocolate. The ads imply that buying a heart-shaped box automatically turns you into a romantic genius. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. I can buy a chocolate heart the size of a small moon, but if I forget if you prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate, congratulations ... you’re now emotionally traumatized.

Then there’s dinner. Every restaurant ad shows candlelit perfection: soft music, laughter, clinking glasses. Not me. I sit in reality trying to get a reservation, navigating menus I can’t pronounce, and praying the dessert doesn’t come with a “romantic” sparkler that sets off the smoke alarm.

And let’s not forget the singles. Oh, the singles-targeted ads. “You deserve love too!” they whisper, while simultaneously suggesting that self-love can be purchased in candle sets, bath bombs, or a subscription box of existential reassurance.

Valentine’s Day: where marketers make billions convincing humans that love is a product, chocolate is a solution, and social media likes are evidence of affection.

Shake Things Up: Go Old

You can almost hear the conference room fluorescent lights hum when someone says: “We need fresh thinking.”

Then right on cue, a parade of resumes of under 30 candidates hits the table like it’s a casting call for a toothpaste commercial instead of hiring brains to solve real-world messes.

Because youth = innovation, right?

Wrong. There’s a whole other group who actually invented half the “fresh thinking” you’re now desperately clawing toward. They’re experienced older candidates ... and when you overlook them, you shoot creativity in the kneecap.

The Myth: Experience makes you rigid.

The Reality: Experience makes you dangerous.

Folks over 50 aren’t polishing nostalgia on a shelf. They’ve been through the spreadsheet wars. They’ve survived bosses with “synergy” tattooed on their brains. They’ve watched “disruption” rise, fall, rise again, and get a TED Talk sponsorship.

And after all that?

They’re not here to politely nod at the same old “big idea” disguised with a new gradient color palette. They’re here to poke the system with a stick and see what yelps.

They ask the provocative questions. The ones everyone else is too scared to say aloud because they might derail the “Let’s all agree we’re brilliant” vibe. Stuff like:

“Why are we doing this the hard way?”

“What if we stopped worshiping the data and actually listened to the humans?”

“Has anyone noticed this idea is just last year’s idea wearing sunglasses?”

“What if we do the exact opposite?”

Those aren’t questions. Those are creative grenades.

Boom! Out goes the boring. In comes the unexpected, the unpolished, the uncomfortable, the actual spark.

They’ve seen the conventional answers. Which means they’re free to chase the un-conventional ones. They’ve run the playbook, highlighted the margins, folded the dog-ears, and realized something powerful:

Innovation isn’t youth. Innovation is courage. And experience tends to grow a thick, gorgeous layer of “I really don’t care if this idea scares you.” That’s rocket fuel.

If you want groupthink, go young. If you want novelty that’s really just nostalgia in sneakers? Young again. But if you want someone who’ll flip the table, question the premise, rewrite the problem, and mean it? Hire someone who’s lived a few creative lives already. They’re not trying to prove they belong anymore. They’re trying to make something worth belonging to.

So, stop treating experience like it’s a dusty file cabinet and start treating it like it’s dynamite with opinions. The future doesn’t belong to the youngest thinkers. It belongs to the boldest. And bold only happens when you’ve seen enough to know what’s worth breaking.

Bring in the older candidates. Because “fresh thinking” isn’t always young. Sometimes it comes with silver hair and a wicked grin that says: “Alright kids, let’s blow the doors off this place.”

Poll Results: How Copywriters Are Using AI in 2026

 In an informal, unscientific survey, responses from copywriters who are using AI focused on a "healthy use of AI," using it to remove drudge work, spark ideas, and improve drafts while keeping humans in charge of strategy, voice, and final decisions. Responders indicated that the more AI handles low-value tasks, the more a copywriter’s value concentrates in high-level thinking clients can’t automate.

1. Research and discovery

Use AI to speed up prep, not to replace your own judgment.

• Scan large volumes of material to surface angles, objections, and questions you then verify and refine.​
• Turn messy notes, transcripts, or briefs into organized bullets or outlines you can interrogate and reshape.
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2. Outlining and structural help

Keep control of the message, but let AI help with scaffolding.

• Generate several outline options for a landing page, email sequence, or article, then choose, merge, and adjust based on strategy.​
• Ask for headline buckets, section labels, or CTA placements, then rewrite them in your own language and brand voice.
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3. Brainstorming and unblocking

Treat AI as a brainstorming partner whose ideas you always improve.

• Use it to propose variations: hooks, angles, metaphors, objection-handling lines, or lead-ins you then refine or remix.​
• When stuck, have it produce “bad but different” drafts to argue with, sharpening your own thinking in contrast.
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4. Draft refinement and polishing

Keep your draft as the source of truth; use AI like a smart editor.

• Ask for alternatives for a specific sentence, transition, or CTA, then select or rewrite rather than copy-paste.​
• Use it for readability passes, tone smoothing, list formatting, and grammar catches, while you own the nuance and emotional punch.
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5. Repurposing and scaling assets

You provide the original; AI helps with versions and formats.

• Take a cornerstone piece you wrote and have AI propose social snippets, alt intros, or length-adjusted versions that you then tweak.​
• Use it to adapt content to channels (email, social, short script) while you guard positioning, claims, and voice consistency.

NOTE: A small percentage indicated that they don't and won't use AI in their copywriting process.

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I Miss the Pirates

 

I miss the pirates in advertising.

Not the jerks. Not the loud egos or the gratuitous rudeness. I don’t miss the chest-thumping or the performative bad behavior. I miss the people who would look at a perfectly reasonable idea and say, “This is safe. Let’s wreck it and see what’s underneath.”

Those people used to be everywhere. They were the ones who pushed back in meetings, who argued for the weird option, who weren’t afraid of the wrong joke or the uncomfortable reference. They didn’t ask for permission so much as forgiveness … and sometimes not even that. They made the room a little dangerous, which made the work better.

Somewhere along the way, that energy got quietly escorted out of the building.

What replaced it is competent safety. Process. Caution. Everyone’s very well prepared now. Legal shows up early. Strategy arrives with data. Nobody wants to be the reason a Slack thread goes nuclear. The work gets smoother, cleaner, more defensible. It also gets duller. Like furniture designed to survive a dentist's lobby … technically impressive, emotionally forgettable.

This isn’t about nostalgia for chaos. It’s about risk tolerance. When the cost of being wrong gets high enough, people stop trying to be interesting. They optimize instead. They aim for “won’t offend,” “tested well,” “aligned with brand values.” Which is how you end up with ads that feel like they were written by a committee that’s afraid of being quoted.

I notice it in the language. Everything is “intentional” now. Everything is “thoughtful.” No one ever just takes a swing. It’s like watching a band tune their instruments forever and never play the song.

The pirates didn’t win every time. Half their ideas were bad. Some were indefensible. But they understood something basic: surprise requires discomfort. You don’t get memorable work by sanding off every sharp edge. You get beige. You get work that looks fine on a slide in a pitch deck and disappears the moment it hits the world.

Most of those people didn’t vanish. They adapted. They learned when to stay quiet, when to nod, and when to save the real thought for the walk to the elevator. That might be the saddest part. The rebellion didn’t die, it got managed.

Advertising still has talent. It just has fewer people willing to look foolish in public. Fewer people willing to say, “This sucks, let’s try something else,” without a spreadsheet to back it up.

I miss the pirates because they reminded us that this was supposed to be fun. Dangerous fun, occasionally irresponsible fun … but alive. They inspired “thinking different” and sometimes, their swashbuckling translated into genius.