Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to grab attention in 2026 What if I told you that to capture attention in 2026, you don’t need a better hook, or to shout from the mountain top? Nope, for your messaging to stand out and convert, now you need to get better at one important skill: understanding what people are thinking, what they want, and how to give it to them in a way nobody does, when they stumble on your...
about 19 hours ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. The AI-proof way to write copy in 2026 (and beyond) We need to have more bad ideas. I just spent 2 days brainstorming headline variants with AI, and the thing that’s most obvious after hours of sweating over this work is that there’s no real substitute or shortcut for going through the hard mental slog. Which excites me because it says how important human creativity and thinking still...
8 days ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Do this before you build your GTM ecosystem I stumbled on a newsletter from GTM expert Maja Voje this week (she was on the podcast, a while ago) where she breaks down what she calls the "GTM ecosystem" — and honestly, it's one of the best frameworks I've seen for how fast-growing companies like Clay, Cursor, and Lovable are scaling so aggressively. Her model maps it out in rings: the...
15 days ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Welcome to the year of authorship Happy New Year! I haven’t written in a few weeks—partly the holidays, partly because I’ve been sitting with my annual review and planning. One big challenge stood out… The better AI gets, the more I’m questioning my own value. And you should too if you care about your craft. Not in a “robots are coming for your job” way. In a subtler, yet more annoying...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to differentiate when everyone claims the same thing Quick confession: I sometimes have to stop clients mid-sentence in positioning workshops. It’s not that they’re wrong on anything. And even if they were, those are the issues we want to bring up during the workshop. Rather, when working on their positioning, they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. During this collaborative...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to find the story you’re probably missing Here’s something I didn’t realize for way too long. Every customer review is a compressed story. Not just feedback. Not just sentiment. A narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Problem is, most of us read reviews like data points. We’re scanning for patterns. Looking for what comes up “a lot.” And in doing that, we miss that story. Let...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to write copy for your customers instead of at them “Do we really need to do interviews?” A client asked me this last month. We were scoping a messaging project, and when I mentioned customer interviews as part of the research, he paused. “Can’t we just use the data we have? The analytics? The surveys?” I get it. Interviews feel slow. They feel like a nice-to-have. And when you’re...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to systematically test your copy before it goes live Message testing has always meant one of two things: expensive user research you couldn’t afford, or shipping and hoping you got it right. You’d write the homepage. Get internal feedback. Maybe show a few friendly customers. Then launch and see what happened. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, you’d rewrite under pressure while...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. technology is a glittering lure. Don Draper Great copywriters used to spend hours fine-tuning a single line. Then AI made that seem obsolete. Last week I spent almost an hour editing a single headline, subheadline, and CTA with AI. While prepping for Team GPT’s webinar, I wrote a value proposition for a fictional company called CloudSync (a knowledge preservation platform for CTOs). The...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Why your AI outputs sound generic (and how to fix it) There’s a concept from Tor Nørretranders’ book The User Illusion that explains why a lot of marketers get crap results with AI. It’s called exformation. It’s the information you deliberately exclude when communicating, so the other person can actually process what you include. In short, good communication is knowing what to cut....
3 months ago • 4 min read