Hello there 👋

How's it going?

Before we get into today's email, quick update from our end: the new Do Words Good site is officially live (finally).

Since late October last year, we've been completely rethinking how we work with clients so that getting a hand with your copy and messaging doesn’t feel like doing the proposal Hokey Cokey.

(🎶 You put your intro call in, your "give us a few days to quote" out, in, out, in, out, that launch date's now in doubt...🎶)

So instead of custom quotes for every job, we've simplified everything down to 3 fixed-price, choose your own adventure type services:

• ​1-Day PDP Punch Up: we take your hero PDP from “meh” to “hell yeah” in one day. New messaging, new sections, top-to-bottom rewrite. All delivered in Figma with annotations so it's ready for design/dev.
• ​Copy & messaging sprints: this is the "proper project" option for when you’re launching, repositioning, refreshing key pages/email flows, or just sorting your messaging out once and for all. Done in focused sprints of 1, 2 or 4 weeks because we know scaling brands need good work done fast.
• ​Fractional support: get two senior copywriters on-call each month. Treat us like part of your team, brief in projects, keep everything on-brand, and hit us up with “hey, does this sound alright?” messages at 4:59pm.

So, if a launch or refresh or just doing your words gooder is on your 2026 to-do list, we'd love to have a virtual coffee and see how we can help.

​Grab a slot on our calendar here! 👋​

👋 3 more bits of copy for your swipe file (and why they're so good) If you're new here, every month or so we send one of these emails out that's full of bits of copy to add to your swipe file (and why we love them) TL;DR: the two of us spend a lot of time every week reading copy, sending each other screenshots and adding things to our swipe file. (Which sounds fancy, but it's just a Notion page full of copy that we like or find interesting or that might inspire us down the line.) And while some of those bits of copy find their way into the full deep-dives you get every week, some of them end up stuck in this weird limbo where they're interesting enough that they deserve to be talked about, but not quite deserving of a full deep-dive on their own. (Or they're a variation of something we've written about at length before.) But we realised that if we're keeping them as inspo for our work, then we should probably share that with you too. Because who knows what ideas will spark your next ad or moment of genius? So here are three of our favourite bits of copy we've seen over the last month or so (and why we're big fans)👇

#1: These NSFW ads from Female Tribes

We stumbled back across these amazing ads in our swipe file towards the end of December and couldn't believe we hadn't written about them yet.

(Bit of a NSFW warning here. They look rude at a glance, so if a co-worker walks past, you'll have a bit of explaining to do.)

In 2022, to raise awareness and conversation around how women are paid 25% less on average than men, Female Tribes created a provocative outdoor campaign that went up on International Women's Day.

And man, they're just unbelievably good.

Check them out 👇

Now, using shock to grab people's attention is nothing new at all. (In fact, the earliest example we found dated back to 1919 with an ad of a pig butchering itself.)

And most of the time, it's not all that clever either. Lots of mid-2010s challenger brands *cough Brewdog cough* used to love doing controversial stuff just for the sake of attention.

And 99% of the time, it amounted to little more than big Bart Simpson energy.

But the way Female Tribes use this controversy is super clever because the outrage is the point.

Once you read beneath the pink redactions and realise what the ad is actually saying, that "taking 25% away is offensive" makes everything click into place. And that initial shock you felt when you read it gets transferred over to their message on the gender pay gap, which is exactly what they want you to feel.

It's so clever.

And that (unsurprisingly) is because it's based on consumer psychology.

👉 Your brain going “ohh, it actually says Fund Girls and Fill Your Purse” triggers a “I need to remember that” signal in your brain called a reward-prediction-error signal.

In other words, rope-a-doping our brains makes them unable to not pay attention to the message and helps it stick long after we've walked away. In fact, studies show that prediction errors make our brains rewire themselves and commit the new information to memory.

👉 On top of that, the clever payoff creates a quick dopamine hit in our brains. That little click! moment where our brains reconcile the twist with the new meaning is called an “aha moment”. ​And fMRI scans show that our brain’s reward circuitry fires on all cylinders when this happens.

In other words, we feel good about ourselves for solving the puzzle and those feel goods transfer over to how we feel about the brand or organisation that made the ad. (This has been studied and proven to shift attitudes towards brands, making customers feel more positively towards brands and products.)

But most importantly, this ad works where other designed-to-shock ads fail because it's congruent.

Those shock-vertising ads fall flat because they’re designed to make noise, not build anything long-term. They’re basically a firework: a big bang, a quick “ooh”, then nada.

In other words, people remember the stunt and forget what you were actually trying to say.

(This is sometimes called the vampire effect, where the way the message is delivered overshadows the message completely, leading to lower recall.)

The Female Tribes ads, on the other hand, work because the provocation is congruent. AKA, the offence is the message, so it gets remembered and absorbed and understood on a gut-level.

And that's the big thing to remember if you're going to try shock-first advertising: research shows that these ads only really work when the shock is related to the payoff.

So make sure your shock tactics work on a meta level too.

Going for offensive, bold copy? Tie it back to offence somehow.

Think things like "we find it offensive that big brands are packing your kids' drinks with sugar" or "we're sorry to swear, but we find it more offensive that billions of tonnes of food are going to waste every year".

TLDR: Weaponise that initial shock and offence to drive home your point and bring customers into your worldview and you're cooking with gas.

#2: This very timely January Nationwide ad

OK, as you'll see in a sec, there's a bit of a theme going on here.

The mechanics of this ad are pretty similar to the Female Tribes one in many ways.

(We wish we could say that's clever content planning, but it's not. We just got very lucky seeing this ad out and about.)

Check it out 👇

Again, this ad is really clever.

That clever misdirect of pounds (lbs) to pounds is a clever bit of wordplay that ticks all of the same boxes as the Female Tribes ad: grabbing attention through a rope-a-dope and then tying it all up in a clever, congruent twist.

But we included it here to show that you don't need to go full controversy to get the same results as Female Tribes.

Whether it's big, bold controversial statement or a clever bit of wordplay, it's that initial prediction error that you're shooting for.

Your copy just needs to lead customers one way then have them land in another place that they didn't expect and have it all feel coherent and cohesive. That's how stuff gets committed to memory.

Which is why this Nationwide ad is such a good example: it's a fantastic demonstration of the research into these kinds of ads that shows that the effectiveness of incongruous ads tends to follow an inverted-U shape.

In other words, ads that are very plain and "I've heard this before" don't get remembered. Ads that are too loud and just going after eyeballs at all costs get noticed but the message gets lost.

But moderate incongruity — AKA something you can “get” in less than 3 seconds — tends to win on processing, recall, and attitude towards the brand.​

And that's why this works as more than just a cheap trick: nailing that twist means that your message can cut through (which, in an attention economy, is huge) while also reinforcing the things you want customers to remember about you.

Smaht. Wicked smaht.

#3: Another Instagram post by Surreal

It's no secret that we're big fans of Surreal's copy here at DWG HQ. They're probably the brand that we refer back to whenever we're talking about brands using the language and voice to stand out. (A bit like Oatly did before them.)

In fact, the thing we're looking at today is something we've looked at before: how they use the Generation Effect to grab attention.

(The Generation Effect is also at play in the Female Tribes ad too.)

Check out this post Surreal published promote launching in Tesco👇

Quick recap on the Generation Effect, in case you haven't read our original article on Surreal 👇 You can read the full breakdown here, but here's the TLDR... Although it sounds counter-intuitive in this world of tiny attention spans and keeping it super simple, adding a tiny bit of friction to your copy can sometimes be a good thing. ​Studies show that if people have to mentally finish the message themselves, they remember it better. That's because it taps into the Generation Effect which is where we remember stuff better when we have to finish it ourselves. And because they're designed to create an itch in our brains to “close the loop” (a clever one-two combo of the Zeigarnik effect + Information Gap Theory) we're more likely to pay attention to them in the first place too.

But the interesting bit here isn’t that Surreal are using it again, it’s that they’re only using this technique when they're doing a big announcement of retail listings or collaborations.

(They did the same technique to announce a Grind collab and the launch of their granola.)

In a way, Surreal have turned this wink-wink-nudge-nudge guessing game format from a clever social media template into a distinctive brand asset that's designed to draw attention to the stuff they really want to shout about.

And that's super clever because they’re getting the best of both worlds.

The fact that their followers start to recognise the format of these posts as a partnership/product announcement means they get all of the benefits of their posts being easy-to-process (processing fluency builds familiarity and affects how much we like a brand) while the fact that the puzzle takes a second or two to solve means we remember it longer too.

It's really smart.

Add onto that the fact that launches and partnerships are the some of most inherently buzzy announcements brands can make and you've got a recipe for practically guaranteeing engagement and hype and buzz all rolled into one.

Unsurprisingly, it works 👇

No notes.

Got a new launch or brand refresh in 2026? Let's chat.

If you're a scaling ecomm or FMCG brand in a place where it feels like you've built an awesome brand with great products, 5* reviews and you're gaining momentum but your messaging and copy feels like it’s holding you back... we'd love to help.

But we hate doing sales calls. And you hate being on sales calls.

​So let’s do a virtual coffee instead.​

Grab 30 mins on our calendar, make a brew, and we’ll do a live run-through of your website. We’ll look at what’s giving you headaches, throw out some ideas on the call and leave you with a few quick fixes you can make straight away.

And if teaming up feels like a good fit at the end of the call, we’ll follow up with a couple of ways we can work together.

See you next week for more ways to do words gooder!

Take it easy ✌️ Jack and Joe co-founders, co-brothers and co-pywriters at Do Words Good​