Contractions

When I read marketing copy without contractions, I feel like I’ve wandered into “Pride and Prejudice” and someone’s about to discuss the price of lace.

“We are pleased to announce…” No one talks like that unless there’s a fainting couch nearby.

Just say it like a person. It’s, don’t, you’ll, can’t. Real words for real mouths in the real world (where we’re buying toothpaste on line while watching TV).

Formal isn’t trustworthy, it’s just distant. And distance is an ineffective way to have a conversation with a prospect. 

What happened to creative marketing?

No, creativity isn’t dead. But, in advertising and marketing, it has been evicted.

It’s been shoved out to the edges, crowded off the table by consolidation decks, metric dashboards, automation pipelines, KPIs with more decimals than soul, and the cult of “efficiency” that believes faster is automatically better. Creativity didn’t disappear. It just got buried under a landslide of well-intentioned optimization.

But here’s the thing no spreadsheet, no matter how color-coded or cleverly pivot-tabled, can keep underground:

Ideas still matter.
Taste still matters.
Craft still matters.
Human judgment (messy, instinctive, gloriously unquantifiable) still matters.

We don’t create great work by worshipping the frictionless. We create it by wrestling with the unpredictable, the subjective, the inconvenient spark that refuses to be reduced to a metric.

Efficiency can ship a product. But only creativity can make someone care that it exists.

And that’s something no dashboard can automate, consolidate, or KPI its way around.

Buckle Up

 

AI isn’t killing copywriting … but it is dismantling the old rules at speed.

We’re in the uncomfortable middle of a major shift. The tools are powerful, accessible, and moving faster than most people can think through their implications. As a result, confusion is everywhere. Copywriters are experimenting, overusing, underusing, or misunderstanding AI. Clients are doing the same … sometimes replacing judgment with automation, sometimes expecting “AI magic” without strategy.

Mistakes are inevitable. Some copy will get cheaper. A lot of it will get worse. And a smaller slice will get noticeably better … not because AI wrote it, but because someone knew what to ask, what to edit, and what to ignore.

This is how change always looks from the inside: messy, uneven, and uncomfortable. Entire categories of work will be devalued. New ones will emerge slowly and without clear labels. People who equate copywriting with typing words will struggle. People who understand positioning, persuasion, and context will still be needed. Maybe more than ever.

The future of copywriting isn’t clear yet. Anyone claiming certainty is selling something. But one thing is clear: the road there will be tough for many.

An Aging Warhorse Takes Stock

Seventy years old. Let that rattle around a minute. 

For a lot of businesses, that’s long past the expiration date they stamp on your forehead. Thanks for your service, now shuffle off to the golf course, maybe buy a recliner, fade politely into irrelevance.

Not me. Not yet.

I’m still here, still raising hell, still stringing words together like they owe me rent. Still laughing at the wrong jokes while also knowing when to button it up in a client meeting. Still learning, still cussing, still showing up.

And here’s the kicker: I like it better now. The pressure’s gone. I don’t have to pretend to be twenty-five with a full head of hair and a bulletproof plan. I get to be seventy, scars and all, and keep creating without asking permission. That’s freedom.

So if you think there’s an expiration date on relevance, think again. Age doesn’t close the door ... it blows it wide open.

Long live the ones who stay engaged. Long live the ones who keep swinging long after the crowd thinks they should’ve sat down.

I’m seventy. I've got places to be. Things to do. Get the fuck out of my way.