Not in a good way, but a dense, over-explaining kind of way. Where there used to be a beautiful image and a few evocative words, there is now a paragraph. Then another paragraph. Then a bullet-pointed list of guarantees. This shift in copy length is far from coincidental, so let's dig into it today - why brands choose the words they choose, and what their word count tells us about the state of the economy.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

CNN reports that Disney and TikTok have announced a first-of-its-kind global partnership. One letting creators make short-form videos using licensed Disney characters and content from Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, FX and more. Creator videos will live on both TikTok and Disney+, appearing inside Verts, Disney's vertical video feed launched in March. Disney said an average of 6.5 million film and TV-related posts were shared on TikTok daily last year. Half of survey respondents said TikTok videos had inspired them to watch something on Disney+.

The deal is a direct reversal of Disney's previous strategy: its last major content partnership was with OpenAI's Sora. This ended when the AI video generator was discontinued. Human creators are back in the brief.

Meanwhile, the week's most satisfying piece of brand marketing goes to DuckDuckGo. Futurism reports that the privacy-focused search engine has launched "Normal Sunglasses" in partnership with eyewear brand Knockaround. The product's a US$35 pair of glasses with zero cameras, zero AI, zero microphone, and no electronics whatsoever. The product is a direct satirical swipe at Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, which have been dubbed "pervert glasses" after being used to secretly film strangers in public.

DuckDuckGo had to post on X to confirm the product was real. The Onion's fictional review: "0/10, useless for perverts." A significant percentage of inventory has already sold. Sometimes the best product is just the absence of a product.

And finally, a piece of space news that is genuinely kind of spectacular. The Guardian reports that a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the moon on Wednesday morning at over 8,700 kilometres per hour, near Einstein Crater on the lunar surface. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope confirmed the impact. And it detected sodium and lithium gas in the plume for five to ten minutes after collision.

The rocket had been drifting in space since January 2025, when it delivered two lunar landers and was then abandoned with no disposal plan. The crash has reignited debate about space debris law and who is responsible for cleaning up after objects that nobody technically owns anymore. The moon now has a new crater approximately 18 metres wide. Nobody asked for it.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

It was once an interesting way to look at retail data to track the psychological state of a struggling market.

The underlying theory was elegant in its simplicity. When the economy hits a wall and inflation squeezes the middle class, consumers predictably downshift their luxury spending.

They stop paying for expensive vacations, pass on the designer handbag, skip the extravagant fine dining dinners.

And so we continue to buy the affordable thirty-dollar luxury lipstick as a small, emotional sanctuary of normalcy. It was a pop-culture indicator that treated vanity as a survival mechanism.

But now, as I look across the heavily saturated commercial landscape we find ourselves in today, that neat correlation has, well, smudged.

The traditional rules of consumer behaviour are breaking down under the weight of constant automation and digital noise. And, in this new reality, a fascinating new structural indicator emerges like a Pokémon from the bushes of Trainer Island.

The Copywriting Index maps the health of the economy by tracking a shift in corporate communications, that being, the dramatic increase in the literal length and clarity of advertising copy.

The core of this theory cuts straight through traditional marketing philosophy. Historically, when the economy was booming and trust was high, brands could afford to communicate in short, abstract, and emotional fragments.

They didn't need to explain how their product worked. They just needed to splash a beautiful image across a screen and hook it to a vague, inspirational three-word slogan. The consumer's defence mechanism was entirely down. This allowed them to buy into the vibe, the status, and the emotional narrative without demanding an explanation.

Audiences develop a sort of immunity to the performance of corporate warmth.

They look at a vague, feel-good ad campaign and instantly sense that they are being lied to. Or that a company is hiding a lack of substance behind a pretty picture.

To survive this wall of profound consumer scepticism, the market retreats into extreme advertising conservatism.

They have to explain the exact mechanics of their value proposition. Prove their utility with raw data. And spell out their guarantees in plain, un-massaged English.

Copy length explodes because clarity becomes the only remaining way to establish a baseline of trust with an exhausted buyer.

You win the sale not by making the consumer feel something vague, but by giving their brain an undeniable, logical argument that justifies the transaction.

When the world outside feels volatile and unpredictable, we stop looking for digital fantasies. We don't want a brand to tell us a story about a better future. We want them to look us dead in the eye and give us the exact details of what our money is actually purchasing today.

Hyper-explanation becomes a corporate defence mechanism. The textual armour used by companies that are terrified of being called out, flagged, or rejected by an audience that has run out of patience for marketing noise.

But on a much more human level, the rise of the Copywriting Index reveals a beautiful subcultural hunger for basic institutional honesty.

The fact that text is getting longer, more detailed, and more practical proves that premium currency in a broken market isn't a flashy aesthetic or a celebrity endorsement..

The premium currency is the integrity of a clear statement.

This is a stark reminder that when the structural architecture of society feels shaky, we must learn to slow down. Put down the templates. And have the confidence to explain ourselves in plain text once more.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The clip comes from The BlueTick Show, a UK podcast, where a former prison officer known as Jeff the Gov tells a story about seeing a prisoner boiling his own faeces in a kettle after being denied dinner. He describes the smell, the splatter (sorry), the whole thing, with real, visceral disgust in his voice. That exact tone of pure disgust became the audio people now use to describe anything they think is genuinely bad.

My fav examples include:

Using the sound, pick something you genuinely think is bad. Put it on screen, then lip sync the audio with full disgusted commitment. Let the smell and the splatter (sorry again) carry all the disdain you have for the subject.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

Hey Priya!

Every platform does have its own audience and culture, so content that does well one place may or may not perform as well somewhere else. And many big brands have platform-specific strategies, with different content going on each one. But for smaller brands that don't have the resources to do that, there's no downside to posting your videos everywhere and seeing what happens.

So if you're already creating content for TikTok, go ahead and try posting it on Reels, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube shorts. You may find an entirely new audience just by repurposing your content. Just make sure you're interacting with your audience when you do get engagement on those new platforms.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.