Against fast copy
The case for writing fewer pieces slowly, against the very real pressure to ship faster. Notes on what we have measured, what we have stopped measuring, and what we are willing to lose by writing this way.
A senior marketing director told me recently that her team's velocity metric had become, in her own words, an embarrassment. The team was shipping twenty-six pieces of copy a month — landing pages, email drops, social posts, the usual list — and was unable to point to a single piece of writing the company would be poorer without. The metric was on the dashboard. The metric was going up. The work was, by any honest measurement, getting worse.
This is not an indictment of her team. It is an indictment of a habit that has spread quietly through marketing departments in the last decade: the habit of treating copy as a unit of throughput rather than as a unit of considered communication. The habit is supported by every dashboard in the room. The dashboards count pieces per quarter, pieces per writer, pieces per dollar. None of them count what each piece earned the brand in the reader's memory.
StrongBrandWords is, in part, a small protest against this habit. The studio ships, on average, twelve to fourteen pieces a month across all clients combined. We are slower than every freelance copywriter we know and slower than every in-house team we have ever worked alongside. We are also, by our own admission, more expensive per piece. The math is not a competitive math. It is a different math.
"Against fast copy" Lotta Salminen · October 2025
The math is: a piece of writing that a reader remembers two weeks later does more work for the brand than twenty pieces of writing that the same reader has scrolled past. We have not figured out how to measure this rigorously and I do not expect that we ever will. We have figured out, anecdotally, that brands that work with us in this way tend to renew, tend to refer, and tend to stop asking how many pieces a month they are getting. The brands that need to ask are the brands that did not need to hire us in the first place.
There is a cost to writing this way that I will name. We are not a good fit for a fast-growth marketing team that needs forty pieces of competent copy a month. We do not pitch against the agencies that serve that need. We refer those briefs to two freelancers we trust and one boutique agency we admire, and we go back to writing fewer pieces, slowly, for the brands we believe will benefit from being read carefully rather than scanned.