When they zig, you zag. When they scale with AI, you go au naturel, sourcing your client a prize-winning author, song in heart & ink under fingernails. When everyone’s efficient, you’re gorgeous.
This is creative that sweats, sparkles or seizes. And it’s a talent model for the ages.
Three ways to work with an author
Market-led voice and messaging, copywriting, and AI operationalisation — built with a published author, not a template.
Coffee table books, product inserts and other loved objets d’art, written by prize-winning authors.
SEO, GEO and paid media, run day to day — with writing that sounds like nobody else.
Because it feels good. Because we want to. Because you and I and all of them are bored by the same syntaxes droning on and on.
Because when you read this — this piece of copy, based on a poem out of the ’60s New York School — you’ll notice, just like I did, that the mind keys to the grooves between words and the half-rhymes slip past barely heard though registered… somewhere.
Where is that somewhere? It is pleasure. It is stillness.It is that place ‘copy’ reaches with stubby, one-track fingers, tugging always in the same direction. To buy. Please. Now. Wouldn’t you like to offer something different?
We think you would. We think you didn’t get into the business of experience, emotion and action because you were indifferent to the cognitive landscape they take place in; because you’re incurious about the way media changes; because you do not care if you supply something new or something essentially fungible.
This is the argument from beauty. And from aspiration. The above little flurry of rhythm, demonstrating, hopefully, that the devices of avant-garde poetry can entrance the reader as well or better than the scarcity principle or the confessions-of format. If you need more convincing on this point, please see our writers’ sample pages.
However, as an agency leader, you will be aware of the more pragmatic reason to pivot from ‘copy’.In 1888, the Kodak No. 1 became the first commercially viable, mass-market camera. The tagline, ‘you push a button; we do the rest,’ will be eerily resonant to anyone who’s prompted an LLM and watched as a blank mind performs a rapid simulacrum of thought.
The Kodak No. 1 gutted the traditional portrait market, and the Kodak Brownie (1900) was none too gentle, either.
This is the position in which many copywriters, and, by extension, their agencies, find themselves: staring down the barrel-shaped lens of a democratised technology.
We’re suggesting that zest, idiosyncrasy and the phrase well-turned, -hewn and -pruned may still command a premium, and now maybe more so than ever.
And in this, we find a helpful parallel in the Kodak revolution’s survivors, children and profiteers.
The ubiquity of the photograph decimated the portraitists. But it birthed the photographer. And today it is photographers — the mind behind the device — whose names title gallery shows and empty magazine racks. Portraitists didn’t vanish to a man, either. Today the industry survives, in watercolour, pastel and graphite. And the cost of a traditional portrait far exceeds that of a digital photograph.
So, this is a pitch for a ride back down Madison Avenue, in Ogilvy’s silent Rolls, via the timely reappropriation of another medium’s prestige: to deliver copy not at scale, but in style.
When your clients know good-enough copy is click-the-button-and-we’ll-do-the-rest accessible, why would they pay for something extraordinary? Because it feels good. Because they want to. Because you and I and all of them are thoroughly bored with the alternative.
Something old; something new; something borrowed
We matchmake agencies and their clients with prize-winning authors to deliver copy that drips with vim and brims with vigour. But we don’t stop there.
We’re not just a pretty (type) face. From voice of customer research based on UGC to integrated social campaigns, we can bake the cake as well as placing the cherry atop it.
We can lead on client calls, follow a brief or remain a distant sage. White label or big neon look-what-we-got-you label. It’s all the same to us. We’re here to flex, not filch.