I've been rewriting our own marketing copy lately, which is a strange assignment for someone who runs an agency. You either do it way more often than makes sense or way less, and there's not much of a comfortable middle. This round, I got stuck on a question I don't normally ask: what our buyer is feeling that he's never said out loud.
We write for one specific person. A business owner who's had it with marketing being a box he can't see into, who wanted a report and was handed a deck, who asked where the money went and got a metaphor in return. Our copy answers that guy well on the logic. Transparency, real numbers, accountability, and all of it is true.
So I tried the other half, and I answered it as an owner rather than as a marketer. Here's the line I ended up writing in his voice:
I just want to be able to trust my numbers. I don't actually care if they're good or bad. I want to be able to make decisions from them.
Nowhere in there is an actual number. He isn't asking for math. He's asking to stop feeling like marketing is being done to him in a language he has no way to check. He wants to leave the meeting without wondering. That's a feeling wearing a KPI costume, and it's been the real request the whole time. We kept handing him the dashboard when what he wanted was to not need one, because the last one felt like decoding Tetris.
I'd answered the logic and told the feeling to wait.
Some context on why I was even asking. I spent most of the last two weeks sick on the couch, which I decided to lean into instead of resent. A lot of that time went to Slow Horses, the one about the MI5 castoffs run by Jackson Lamb, who is a slob and also the smartest person in any room he stumbles into.
What Lamb does that nobody around him can is catch the part of the story somebody left out. A person walks in with a tidy version of events, and he's already found the hole in it. Everybody upstairs has the better suit and the better intel, and they keep getting played anyway.
I wasn't watching it for work. It did leave me reading between the lines, though, and that's where my head was when that golf ad came back around my feed.
My gut turned over before I'd worked out what I was even looking at. No idea who any of those people were. No idea what was being sold, though I could guess. I hadn't read a single comment. It wasn't fully viral yet, I'd just seen someone call it horrible and got curious why. So I reacted to a few seconds of video and went hunting for the context afterward.
The part that stuck with me wasn't the ad. It was how hard the emotional reaction landed from every direction at once. Mine, everyone else's, and I'd bet the people who made it too, the second they saw what it had done.
If you'd asked me the week before who should have final say on a campaign, I'd have said logic, and I'd have been describing myself. I'm direct. I like a process; I like a number I can point at, and when somebody brings me a feeling, my first move is to ask what it's measuring. Then I sat on a couch, and my stomach voted before I did. Reading the explanation later didn't budge the reaction an inch. I could follow the intent; I could picture exactly how a room of capable people got to yes, and none of that reached the place where I'd already made up my mind. If my own gut beats me to it, I don't know why I'd assume anyone else's doesn't.
I'd been treating emotion and logic as a mix. Some percentage of each, adjusted per project. That's not how it works. They go in an order.
Emotion gets the first look, and that first look is where the audience decides. Logic comes after, because logic is what has to survive the meeting a month out when somebody asks what the spend bought. That golf ad ran it in reverse. Plenty of people reviewed it for brand and legal and product accuracy, and I'd love to know whether anybody was handed it cold, with no brief attached, and asked what their body did before their brain caught up.
My job is operations. I build systems. And I've mostly filed feelings under creative, a thing that lives over there and occasionally wanders in to complicate a timeline.
Sitting with that owner's sentence, I can't name one system I've built where that was actually true. The monthly review exists so somebody feels relief, and all the structure does is make relief show up on a schedule. Same story with a clean handoff between teams, which is respect turned into a process, or a dashboard the owner doesn't need translated, which is just trust in chart form. The logic in all of it is real, and I'm keeping every bit of it, but it was never why the system existed, just the vehicle the feeling rode in on.
The copy order flips. It leads now with the owner who wants to walk out of a meeting without a follow-up question, and the measurement talk moves down the page to back that up instead of carrying it.
And before anything goes out, somebody who hasn't touched the brief sees it cold and tells me what their gut did before anyone gets a chance to explain. Then the rest of us take our turn. Too early to say whether it works, and I'm not going to act as if I can predict it.
What I've stopped doing is assuming my buyer and I want different things. He wants to be able to trust the number. Same as me. It took a sick week, a fictional spy who hears what's missing before he opens the file, and an ad I probably shouldn't have watched for me to hear him say it.
So what's the last thing your copy answered logically that was never a logical question in the first place?
If this is the kind of thing you chew on, I write about running operations and leading people every week in String by String over on LinkedIn.