Beverage Bucket

 

Dunkin' just launched a 48-ounce coffee bucket.

The Beverage Bucket (with a handle) is priced so you can hydrate like a suburban livestock animal on your morning commute and still pocket change from a 10-dollar bill.

"Beverage Bucket." The name grabbed my attention: “bucket.” Not “carafe.” Not “jug.” The word “bucket” used to imply utility. You got water from a well with it. Now it’s a lifestyle accessory.

We’ve skipped past “cup,” blown through “large,” laughed in the face of “extra large,” and landed squarely in hardware-store chic. What’s next? A kiddie pool of cold brew?

Oddly, however, calling it a bucket feels honest in a way that marketing rarely is. No artisanal backstory. No whisper about origin farms. Just aggressively honest. Like, yes, this is excessive. Here’s the handle. Commit.

I sort of get it. In an economy where everything feels smaller and more expensive, a bucket reads like a win. Look at all that abundance. It’s less a drink and more a declaration: “I will not be rationed.” It’s Costco energy in liquid form.

And in our social media driven world, a bucket fits the feed. It’s absurd enough to grab attention ... subtlety never goes viral. A sensible 12-ounce cup doesn’t stand a chance against a beverage container you could use to bail water out of a canoe.

Anyway, I’ll probably try one.

Not because I need 48 ounces of coffee. But because I want to see what it feels like to carry my morning around like construction equipment.

Sometimes you have to hold the absurdity in your own hand.

Preferably with a handle.

Prospect Participation

 

When writing, leave a little air in the room.

Because the moment your reader starts painting their own picture, the message stops being yours and becomes theirs.

And that’s when it sticks.

Your job is to sow the seeds. And then step back and let their brain do what it’s built to do.

Will my job exist in the future?

 

A fellow copywriter said something to me recently that stuck.

“We’re in a job that won’t exist in the future.”

She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being practical. Her reasoning boiled down to a simple question: who will care about great copy in the future?

At first, that sounds like heresy coming from inside the church. Copywriting is persuasion. Persuasion is timeless. Humans don’t suddenly stop responding to words.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized she wasn’t really talking about words. She was talking about where power will be coming from in the near future.

For most of advertising history, copy mattered because access mattered. If you controlled the message inside a limited set of media channels (TV, radio, print) you could shape perception. Great copy amplified that advantage.

But today, access is on its way to becoming infinite. We don’t have a media shortage problem. And that trend will continue. There are more outlets than anyone could possibly pay attention to. More brands publishing. More creators posting. More “content” than time. Audiences are becoming increasingly decentralized, fracturing into micro-communities, niches, group chats, and algorithmically-curated feeds.

And in that environment, traditional copy loses leverage.

Not because words don’t work, but because ownership of attention has shifted.

Influencers will continue to grow in power, carrying more trust than institutions. Already, word of mouth travels faster than campaigns: a single TikTok can out-deliver a million-dollar launch. And increasingly, AI summarizes, remixes, and reframes whatever you say.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth: great copy in traditional media can’t reposition/save a mediocre product anymore. In fact, it might not even get a chance to try.

Because what really moves the needle now is product quality experienced and shared. Increasingly, people aren’t discovering brands through ads as much as they are discovering them through other people. Through recommendations. Through screenshots. Through stories told without the brand’s permission. That’s where the real persuasion is settling in for the future.

And AI is accelerating this shift. It’s not just generating copy, it’s flattening it. When everyone can produce “good enough” words instantly, the value of words alone drops. The differentiator moves upstream. To the product. To the experience. To the story customers tell for you.

The Long Term View

So, does copywriting disappear?

No. But the role changes.

Copy stops being the hero and becomes the translator. The clarifier. The connective tissue between what a product actually does and how people actually talk about it.

The future copywriter isn’t a clever wordsmith hired to grab attention and ignite desire. They’re a strategist shaping narratives that already exist in the market … and making them easier to spread.

Great copy in the future won’t be about clever lines or viral hooks. It’ll be about:

• Understanding the customer better than the customer understands themselves
• Articulating truth so clearly it spreads
• Creating language people want to borrow, not avoid

So, the job doesn’t vanish. The illusion does. The illusion that persuasion starts at the headline. The illusion that marketing can out-run reality.

In the future, the best copy won’t convince people a product is good. It'll simply make it easier for people to notice that it already is.

The Short Term View

AI doesn’t kill this job. It exposes who never really had it.

AI can generate words. It can remix patterns. It can mimic tone.

What it can’t do -- at least not yet -- is decide what deserves to be said.

That decision still comes from judgment. From empathy. From strategy. From taste. And these have always been a scarce resources. Resources that strong, experienced copywriters know how to access.

So, for the time being … No, copywriting isn’t going away.

Creativity Loves Constraints

Freedom does not make you creative.

Freedom makes you distracted. Freedom makes you scroll. Freedom makes you open twelve tabs, rename the document “new_v4_final_final,” and wonder if maybe you should just go get another coffee before inspiration hits.

Christopher Nolan, the guy who can turn physics homework into cinema, once said,

“The highest form of creativity is found by improvising within a set of restrictions.”

Nir Eyal, the behavioral whisperer behind “Hooked,” backed him up from another angle:

“Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse -- abandonment.”

Combine those two and you’ve got the entire creative tragedy of modern marketing:

Option overwhelm crushes creativity, but constraints set it free.

The Tyranny of Infinite Choice

We’ve all sat in those brainstorms. Someone throws out an idea: “What if we…”  and before the sentence finishes, the whiteboard has twenty-seven more ideas scrawled randomly across its surface. Everyone nods. Everyone smiles. No one knows where to start.

You leave the room with ten campaigns, zero clarity, and a creeping sense that maybe “brand synergy” is the creative equivalent of beige paint.

Writers love to talk about “creative freedom,” but freedom without focus is chaos. Unlimited options don’t create genius. They create indecision. And indecision’s best friend is mediocrity. Because when everything is possible, nothing is essential.

Creativity Loves Constraints

A 30-second spot. A 120-character limit. A single idea that needs to land before someone’s thumb scrolls past it.

Restrictions aren't handcuffs. They’re scaffolding. They give your imagination something to push against.

Think of a haiku, 17 syllables. That’s it. Yet centuries later, we still feel something when we read about  Basho’s frog jumping into an old pond.

Think of a tweet that changed public opinion, or a six-word story that broke your heart.

Creativity thrives not despite limits, but because of them.

When you only have 50 characters for a headline, every letter matters. Every comma becomes a weapon. You become ruthless. Sharp. Dangerous.

That’s what great marketing writing is: the art of doing maximum damage with minimum words.

Option Overwhelm

Marketers love options.

“Let’s make ten versions of the campaign!”

“Let’s test all the CTAs!”

“Let’s brainstorm five hundred headlines and see what sticks!”

Translation: Let’s drown our clarity in a sea of possibilities.

Nir Eyal nailed it: too many choices paralyze people. That’s true for your audience, and it’s true for you. Too many directions and you freeze. Too many paths and you forget why you started walking.

Constraint, on the other hand, focuses the beam. You stop wandering and start aiming.

 

Relevance

The greatest weapon in a writer’s arsenal is not vocabulary, it’s discernment.

What to leave out.

What to cut.

What to refuse to say.

When the brief is tight, your writing gets sharper. Every line has to justify its oxygen. Every choice becomes deliberate. Limitation becomes liberation.

As a marketing writer, you’re not meant to explore every idea. You’re meant to choose one and make it unforgettable.

So …

The next time you get a brief with too many “maybes,” do the brave thing: cut them. Draw lines. Make rules. Put walls around your project  -- word count, tone, message, medium -- and then rage inside them. Push every inch of that boundary until it groans. That’s where originality lives. Not in endless possibility, but in deliberate constraint.

True creativity isn’t about having all the freedom in the world ... it’s about knowing exactly where the walls are …

… so you can blow the roof off.