Fiat Coupé
In Italy, no one grows up wanting to be a train driver.
Nobody buys an Italian car to get to Swindon.
The launch sold out in its first few months.
Everyone sounds the same now.
Machines can write.
They can’t notice.
The Copycourse is Gideon Todes, ex-Saatchi & Saatchi. We find the thing only your company could say, then rebuild the brand around it, top to bottom.
Job no. 05368324 / Final art v.37 / London N7
There’s something under the slop. Move your cursor.Drag a finger.
02 The argument
Machine text is a ready meal.
Machine text is well structured, with fewer mistakes than most human writers make. It summons the basic research in seconds. But, like the microwaveable fish pie you buy in the chiller section, it’s rarely great.
Ready meals can’t really have fresh herbs, because they go off. They can’t do crunch, because crunch goes soggy. The aromas come out muted, and after a while every meal tastes pretty much like every other meal.
That’s fine if you’re hungry. It’s a problem if you’re trying to be different, because your competitors are shopping in the same aisle.
The answer isn’t to ban the microwave. It’s to add the one ingredient the factory can’t get. A real conversation with a real customer. A detail so specific that nobody could have made it up, because nobody did.
03 A small test of nerve
The Slop Test.
Paste your text here and see how it scores.
Or try
0% slop
Your domain authority rests on this.
- 5% Chivas Regal, “Father’s Day” David Abbott, 1980
- 15% Goldman Sachs, on world models
- 15% Freshfields, on the NDA consultation
- 30% McKinsey, economic outlook
- 65% An accountant’s press release
- 85% An “HR trends” blog
This is a toy: a few dozen lines of JavaScript looking for a few dozen phrases, and nothing you type leaves your browser. The benchmarks come from our Slop Factor tracker, which is a proper audit, read properly. How we scored them.
04 Noticing
AI means proprietary information will beat proprietary data.
Michael Burtov NSU Broward Center of Innovation
The sticky note on the monitor.
The spreadsheet nobody admits is mission‑critical.
The late‑night phone call.
The exception the software never anticipated.
What noticing actually finds
Companies don’t buy office coffee machines to save a trip to Starbucks.
They buy them because the foyer becomes the watercooler. When a bank call centre had whole teams take their coffee breaks together, call-handling time fell by
0% overall
0%+ in the weaker teams
Alex Pentland, MIT. Harvard Business Review, 2012. The selling point was there all along. Someone just had to notice it.
What have you noticed that no one else has?
Gyms get left with all the lost property of their clients, yet with hundreds of brands of gym management software and their apps, there’s nowhere to post these items.
05 The lines
01 / 07
06 For companies thinking of a rebrand
Most rebrands stop at the logo.
A brand is that random but significant piece of behaviour your customers remembered long after the marketing people have gone home.
- 01The nameCan you say it down the phone without spelling it?
- 02The thoughtThe one sentence only you could say. Usually found in the customer’s mouth, not yours.
- 03The lookLogo, type, colour. Important. Also the bit everyone thinks is the whole job.
- 04The voiceHow you sound when you’re selling. And how you sound when you’re sorry.
- 05The campaignTelly, posters, the side of a bus. We’ve sold out a Fiat this way.
- 06The filmsComplicated things, made simple. We once explained geostationary orbits for SES Astra.
- 07The evidenceYour customers, filmed, in their own words. Then cut into video, articles and search content.
- 08The small printThe invoice. The out-of-office. The sign on the van. Nobody else will read them this closely.
07 Who’ll actually turn up
Gideon Todes
Gideon began as a copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi, then spent a career in some of the best agencies in London, taking big brands apart and putting them back together again.
He has launched an Italian coupé, explained satellites, sold wine with a joke in French and trained a great many people to think creatively.
He still does the interviews himself. It’s the bit he won’t hand to a machine, or to a junior.
08 Services
Talking to your customers.
AI can now write a competent article for almost nothing, and so can everyone you compete with. It has never sat down with one of your customers.
- 01
Customer interviews
Filmed conversations with the people who use your product, on Zoom or in person. We usually start with new customers. They’re the easiest to talk to, and full of fresh opinion.
- 02
Video
A finished film of each interview, plus short captioned clips you can use wherever your customers are.
- 03
Written content
Each interview becomes a blog piece in the customer’s own words, plus two spin-off articles aimed at searches people actually make.
- 04
What we notice
A short summary of what the interviews revealed: the workarounds, the unmet needs, the customer’s own language and the selling points you’ve been missing.
- 05
Content audit
We score your blog against your competitors for how much real substance it carries, so you can see where you stand. Then we hold our own work to the same score.
- 06
Campaigns, films and consultancy
We also make brand campaigns, event films and films that explain complicated things, for clients from Sainsbury’s to SES Astra satellites. See the work.
Next step: a one-hour call to work out who to talk to first. Get in touch.
09 A look at the data
Google likes quality.
The squeezed centre means there is an opportunity to differentiate.
We scored 161 articles from seven publishers (five blogs, plus Goldman Sachs and McKinsey as outside benchmarks) on a 1 to 10 scale for how much real substance they carry. The striking thing is not the average but the shape: almost everything is crushed into the middle. Inspect the raw data.
- Blog A
98% score 5 or 6
Average 5.5.
Gymdesk86% score 6 or 7
- Blog B
77% score 5 to 7
Average 5.8, with one in five at 4.
PerfectGym91% score 4 or 5
PushPress75% score 5 or 6
Average 5.2, with one in five at 4.
Goldman Sachs, outside benchmark, 10 pieces70% score 7 or 8
Average 6.8, none at 4 or below.
McKinsey, outside benchmark, 10 pieces70% score 6 or 7
Average 6.4, none at 4 or below.
Bars show how many articles earned each score, from 1 to 10, all on the same scale.
Across the 141 blog articles, one reached 8. Goldman reached 8 once, with an unedited podcast transcript of its head of oil research. McKinsey reached 8 once, with a survey of about 21,000 shoppers. None reached 9.
This is what Burtov’s observation predicts. When analysis costs nothing, everyone, with the exception of the Goldman outliers, produces the same competent, interchangeable middle. Nobody falls far below it, and only a few rise above it, because rising above it takes something a competitor cannot copy. The way out of the centre is not more articles. It is first-hand material.
Blog A has already started to move. Since we scored the blog, it has deleted around 40 empty articles and given its posts a named author, though so far only in the page code that search engines read, not visibly on the page. Both are good moves. But the deleted pages now return 404 errors instead of redirecting to related articles, so whatever rankings and links they had are lost. Redirecting each one to its closest live article would recover some of that. And the newest article covers ground an earlier article already does, so the two now compete for the same searches.
10 Making content
Making content.
Clients can say so much more about you and your product than you can. So why not let them do it? They have war stories, wins and losses, trials and tribulations, anecdotes and images to share that could be yours if we only ask. And the chances are they are going to waste. Untapped story is value left on the table.
The programme we’re offering puts that detail back. Keep your current publishing running, and add content that could only have come from your client and end-user relationships.
- EMS Exhibitions
Zara, an EMS Exhibitions client, shares her top tips.
- Interviews on Zoom
Talking to end users can be done on Zoom, like this collection of interview portraits for a gym management software company.
- King Swing
Anant who founded King Swing in Hawaii explains the business rationale for his virtual golfing offer.
Anant noticed two things that caught his attention. First, that golfing was picking up amongst “the younger crowd” and second that golf courses didn’t really fit into the calendar or diary of someone doing a regular job, except at weekends. That was the insight he needed for his new enterprise.
11 One last thing
We’ve been noticing.
THE COPYCOURSE LTD
NOTICING DEPT.
79A TABLEY ROAD, N7
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NOTHING WAS SENT ANYWHERE.
NOTHING WAS STORED.
THANK YOU FOR READING.
All of that took a few lines of code. It can tell us what you did. It has no idea why.
For that, someone has to sit down and ask.
What do your customers know that you don’t?
Next step: a one-hour call to work out who to talk to first.
+44 7802 859196 gideon@thecopycourse.com