New Year’s Rant

 

New Year’ Eve: That magical moment when the world collectively agrees: “Let’s pretend we can actually change who we are at 11:59 PM.”

Every ad screams, “New Year, New You!” New me? I barely recognize current me. And yet, somehow, I’m supposed to buy kale, gym memberships, and a planner that will sit unused until June.

Then there’s the champagne. Bubbly everywhere. You see ads of people popping bottles in tuxedos and sparkly dresses, smiling like their resolutions are already fulfilled. Meanwhile, I’m in pajamas drinking a gin and tonic with a splash of regret, watching the ceiling like it owes me something.

The parties. Every commercial makes it look like we’re all dancing on rooftops, holding hands as slow-motion confetti falls. In reality, I’ll be stuck in the corner of a living room ... glad I'm not at one of those parties, but questioning if I should be where I actually am.

And, of course, resolutions. Ads love them. Lose weight! Travel! Learn a language! Meanwhile, my resolution is: Don’t lose the Wi-Fi password on January 2nd . 

Sure, new year, new me ... if by “new” you mean “slightly more tired but still trying.”

Wanna know what makes my day?

 A cold December morning. Waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. Sign in to LinkedIn to see this:

Accompanied by supportive words about using my book the way it was intended. Plus using it as an award. Wonderful surprise. Head-swelling compliment. Made my day before my day officially started.

Here's the rest of the LinkedIn post:

Thanks, Dmitry.

Happy Holidays, Copywriters

 

Happy Holidays, Copywriters.

May your headlines be tight, your clients decisive, and your “quick tweaks” limited to under three rounds. 

May your eggnog be strong, your briefs be short, and your inbox mercifully quiet until January.

If nothing else, remember: Santa believes in you. He’s been A/B testing messaging for centuries and still shows up every year.

Rest your brain. Sharpen your wit. We do this all again in Q1.

Christmas Rant

 

Christmas! The holly-jolly season of joy, cheer, and slowly losing all grip on reality as retail jingles drill directly into your cortex. “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” plays on loop while you develop mall PTSD and wonder how wrapping paper suddenly costs more than rent.

Every commercial wants you to buy a luxury SUV with a bow on it. A bow. Like someone woke up on Christmas morning and said, “Honey, I thought socks, a book, and seasonal depression weren’t enough … so I bought you a car we can’t afford.”

Also, the lights. The lights. I plug in one string and my house blows a fuse like it’s trying to protect me from holiday optimism. The neighbor’s display syncs to Trans-Siberian Orchestra and can be seen from space; mine flickers like a sad interrogation lamp.

And the decorating pressure! If a single pine needle falls, someone on Instagram will whisper, “Do they even love Christmas?” Yes, I love Christmas … I’m just losing a silent war with Scotch tape and ribbon that behaves like it has free will.

Meanwhile, Christmas cookies magically become currency. We trade them like sugary NFTs of seasonal affection. Here is a tin of baked love. Cherish it until New Year’s, when we transfer our emotional burdens to gym memberships.

But ultimately, it’s magical, right? We sit by the glow of tree lights, sip cocoa, and ignore receipts like they can’t hurt us if we don’t look directly at them.

Merry Christmas.

May your gift receipts be long and your tree water not smell like swamp soup by December 26th.

________________________

In my family, we celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, which basically means December is a festive emotional obstacle course with twice the candles, twice the carbs, and enough decorative lighting to make the neighbors question whether we're trying to signal passing aircraft. It’s chaotic. It’s beautiful. It’s glitter, menorah wax, and cookie crumbs everywhere. And honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

________________________

How 'bout a holiday song just for marketing writers? Grab a mug of hot chocolate and sing along to: "White Christmas (A Copywriter's Carol)" 

Marketers, grab a mug of hot chocolate and sing along.

Holiday music. 

Turn on the radio, walk into a store and you're surrounded by seasonal tunes: Jingle Bells, Let It Snow, Sleigh Ride, Feliz Navidad. 

But nothing specifically for the marketing community that has worked so hard to bring Jingling Hershey Kisses, Coca Cola swigging polar bears, and prancing Budweiser Clydesdales to life to support holiday consumerism.

Nothing until now.

Grab a mug of hot chocolate and sing along to: "White Christmas (A Copywriter's Carol)" 

Write Christmas (A Copywriter's Carol)

I'm dreaming of a Write Christmas

Just like the ads I used to know

Where the headlines glisten, and clients listen

To pitches that just seem to flow

I'm dreaming of a Write Christmas

With every landing page I draft

May your CTAs be focused and tight

And may all your copy be just right

I'm dreaming of a Write Christmas

Where deadlines don't fall Christmas Eve

Where stakeholders approve on the first review

And "one quick change" means what they say

I'm dreaming of a Write Christmas

With every content piece I type

May your concepts be strong and airtight

And may all your revisions be light

I'm dreaming of a Write Christmas

With every email blast I write

May your open rates excite and delight

And may all your campaigns convert tonight

_________________________

Behind the music: The goal was to write and produce a fun holiday song for marketing and advertising folks (focus on the writers) in the style of the Christmas songs of the 1940s and 1950s. This song was written by a human and produced with AI-assistance. The AI tools used were trained on unlicensed/not copyrighted material. The artwork of the snowman working on the laptop was generated 100% by AI.

Perfection

There’s a myth that keeps us chasing our tails. It comes dressed in motivational quotes slapped over sunset photos and Instagram grids where no one ever has spinach stuck in their teeth. It whispers, keep it together, polish the edges, never let them see you sweat. And if you can pull off the performance long enough, you’ll finally arrive at that golden finish line called perfection.

Here’s the truth: perfection is smoke. You can’t catch it. You can’t keep it. It’s a mirage somebody’s trying to sell you so you’ll buy their book, or their course, or their cream that promises to make you ten years younger.

Life isn’t marble floors and designer lighting. Life is the chipped mug you drink from every morning because it just feels right in your hand. It’s the dent in your car door from the time you misjudged the mailbox. It’s the day you thought you couldn’t keep going ... and somehow did.

Things break. You break. And that’s not the end of the story. It’s the part that makes the story worth telling.

Take crayons. Snap one in half and it doesn’t lose its purpose. It still makes marks, maybe bigger, maybe bolder, maybe less predictable. The box might look neat and orderly, but it’s the busted crayon that sprawls across the page and leaves a trail you can’t ignore.

People are no different. Scars, mistakes, screw-ups ... those aren’t blemishes on your record, they’re the fingerprints of resilience. Proof you’ve been knocked down and chose to stand back up anyway.

Perfection doesn’t move anyone. It might earn polite applause, but it won’t change a single soul. What does? The jagged edges. The cracks where the light sneaks out. The willingness to keep stepping forward when everything in you says stay down.

That’s what people rally around. That’s what gives somebody else permission to try, to risk, to show up even when they’re terrified of falling flat on their face.

So stop waiting until you’ve got it all figured out. Stop rehearsing for a flawless performance that doesn’t exist. Put your messy, dented, glorious self out there and make a mark.

Because in the end, nobody remembers the perfect ones. They remember the ones who bled, stumbled, laughed in the wrong places, and kept going anyway.

That’s not failure. That’s life. 

Hanukkah Rant

 

Ah yes, Hanukkah … that beautiful time of year when we honor miracles, light candles, and participate in the sacred tradition of making our kitchens smell like fried potatoes for eight to twelve business days.

When chain stores decide they're experts on Jewish tradition. “Celebrate Hanukkah with us!” they say, proudly displaying three sad blue gift bags, a menorah that looks like it was designed by someone who’s only seen Judaism from a distance, and a single box of matzo from last April because “it seemed close enough.”

Meanwhile, commercials act like Hanukkah is just Christmas Lite™ ... “Give BIG GIFTS for EIGHT NIGHTS!” Sorry, pal, we don’t do eight nights of giant presents. This isn't Santa’s endurance event. By night three we're already in “here’s socks and a chocolate coin, don’t get greedy” territory.

And the latkes. Oh, the latkes. Social media is alive with “Make perfect golden potato pancakes effortlessly!” Effortlessly?! Have you ever grated potatoes for latkes? By the end my knuckles look like I lost a bar fight with a cactus. I am sweating, crying, and questioning whether potatoes are worth emotional trauma. (They are. Always. But still.)

Then there’s the dreidel. Ads show elegant families spinning dreidels like it's some refined intellectual pastime. Meanwhile, in real life, someone is yelling because the chocolate gelt melted on the carpet and someone else is arguing about whether gimmel counts if the dreidel fell off the table.

You want the real miracle? Keeping track of which night we're on when opening the junk drawer, finding 14 Hanukkah candles, 3 birthday candles, and panicking until someone yells, “Alexa, how many nights of Hanukkah are left?”

But it’s wonderful. It's warm. It's light in the dark. It’s potatoes and songs and cozy sweaters and one cousin who takes latke-making way too seriously insisting theirs are crispier because they “felt the ancestors guiding their frying technique.”

Happy Hanukkah. May your candles burn bright, your oil not splatter like it’s trying to fight you, and your dreidel land on gimmel at least once when someone’s actually watching.

________________________

In my family, we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, which basically means December is a festive emotional obstacle course with twice the candles, twice the carbs, and enough decorative lighting to make the neighbors question whether we're trying to signal passing aircraft. It’s chaotic. It’s beautiful. It’s glitter, menorah wax, and cookie crumbs everywhere. And honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Speaking of Christmas, here's a Christmas rant and a Christmas song.

The US Government Declares War on a Typeface

 

Three days ago (12/9/2025), Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned the use of Calibri across all State Department communications, declaring the font “woke”

Before we get to the theatrics, let’s start with the boring, human part: the U.S. government originally shifted from Times New Roman to Calibri in 2023 because it was easier to read. Full stop. Better for people with dyslexia. Better for low-vision readers. Better for screen readers.

It was about access, not aesthetics.

But in the age of symbolic governance, even readability can’t escape the culture-war centrifuge. And so here we are, watching a Secretary of State dust off Times New Roman like it’s some ancient relic of civic virtue and not a perfectly fine typeface retired for perfectly practical reasons.

This is the new political circus: turn a typography choice into a tribal marker, frame accessibility as ideology, and cast Calibri as the villain skulking in the margins of American decline. A font, suddenly “informal,” “wasteful,” or somehow spiritually suspect … depending on which side of the outrage machine you’re standing near when it starts to smoke.

This is governance as stagecraft. The performance of decisiveness instead of the practice of it. Swap nuance for noise, and voilà: instant headline. A victory you can claim without solving a single real problem.

But the people who actually need accessible typography? They’re not on the playbill. They don’t get a spotlight. They’re collateral to the bit.

Because this was never about fonts. It’s about the irresistible lure of symbolic skirmishes ,,, easy battles fought for the cameras while the hard ones wait, gathering dust like an unused policy binder.

A country can survive a bad typeface. What’s harder is surviving leadership that confuses the theater for the mission, that mistakes the show for the work, that fights the font instead of fixing the world the font was meant to help people understand.

And that’s the part we should all read in bold.

4th Grade? Really?

 

You've heard it before: Write your copy at a fourth-grade reading level.

Good advice, but understand it before you follow it:

Write your copy at a fourth-grade reading level. Not like a fourth grader. It's not about dumbing down your message, it's about making it clear and easy to understand.

Make the words clean, frictionless, impossible to misunderstand. Let the sentences walk instead of wobble. Let the ideas breathe instead of wheeze.

People don’t crave complexity; they crave clarity. And clarity isn’t dumbing things down, it’s removing the clutter so the message can actually get through without wearing hiking boots.

Simple is strong. Simple is sharp.

Simple doesn’t talk down to anyone ... it just opens the door and says, “Come on in.”

8 Didn't Make the Cut

An impressive amount (or what my daughter would call a "crap ton") of what I write ends up n the editing room floor.

To get a headline or opening line right, I write 5 or 10 variations and then pick the best of the bunch ... or mix and match words from a couple and patch 'em together ... or, unsatisfied, write 5 or 10 more and start the process over again.

This process is a goulash of writing, thinking, and editing. 

Example:

Here's the first step for writing the headline/first line for a piece on editing:

Editing is just writing’s awkward next morning. You wake up, look at what you made, and whisper, “Oh… wow. Okay.”

 

Editing: because every writer deserves the humbling experience of realizing they are not, in fact, a genius.

 

Editing is where you meet the version of yourself who thought that sentence was a good idea.

 

Editing is where your brilliant ideas go to find out they weren’t that brilliant.

 

Editing is what separates the writers from the word-hoarders.

 

You don’t write a good piece. You edit until it stops embarrassing you.

 

The first draft says, “I’m a genius.” Editing says, “Calm down, Hemingway.”

 

Writing feels like creation. Editing feels like crime scene cleanup.

 

Editing: because someone has to protect readers from whatever the hell you thought was clever yesterday.

 

Which would you pick? 

Or would you do some mixing and matching?

Or would you push this list to the side and start over?

The Perfection Trap

 

“Perfect” is procrastination in designer shoes. It’s fear with a thesaurus.

“Done” is what gets campaigns launched and clients paid.

While “Perfect” sits on Google Docs like a diva refusing to leave the trailer until every comma sparkles, “Done” shows up, ships, learns, adjusts, and comes back swinging harder.

So hit publish.

Send the draft.

Ship the thing.

Perfect is a trap. Done is freedom.

Done > Perfect. Always.