I help start-ups, tech giants, banks, and the occasional luxury sedan say what they mean.
I'm a creative director, copywriter, and content designer who started out in journalism. I take a channel-agnostic approach to solving creative problems. Which is an obnoxious way of saying I'm not dogmatic about whether the answer is a campaign, a manifesto, an expansive content strategy, or a really good tweet. I care that it works.
How I Work
Building a voice where none exists.
I've done it six times. The approach is always the same: read everything the brand has ever published, find the three sentences they keep trying to write, and build the system that lets them finish those sentences out loud. It's both simpler and harder than it sounds.
Partnering with clients.
Interviewing people for a living is the best preparation for sitting across from a CMO. I get the business problem first. The writing comes second.
Working in regulated categories.
Years of working in financial services taught me the discipline. The copy that moves a Goldman or AmEx product is the copy that doesn't get cut by legal. It's underrated work.
Writing for readers who aren't people.
Every line now has to work for a potential customer, a search engine, and the model deciding whether your brand is worth citing. Most of what gets sold as AEO and GEO is a brand voice problem dressed up as a technical one. A model cites only what it can extract cleanly and sees consistently stated everywhere it looks. Which means precise, authoritative writing on every touchpoint doesn't just carry the message, it recruits the messengers.
The fastest way to start something is dougblack1@gmail.com.
Clients