Hello there 👋

New logo, who dis?

If you've noticed we've been AWOL from your inbox for a little while, it's for a good reason: we've been heads-down completely reinventing what Do Words Good is, how we work and what we do.

It has been a lot.

(Heads up: this email has a little bit of a Bedtime Story feel to it. If you want to skip all that and jump straight to seeing how AI-ready your voice doc is, just click here.)

Now, a little bit of context: the way brands write and think about copy has fundamentally changed in the last few years.

Copy used to be written by people. And brand voice guidelines used to be written for those people to read, absorb and then combine with their own taste and judgement as they wrote the copy.

That's not really how it works anymore.

Odds on your team are already writing with AI all day every day.

In fact, I'd wager that almost all of the copy you've seen in ads, in your inbox and on your social feeds lately has been written – or at least drafted – by robots now.

And that’s making everything faster and more budget-friendly for growing brands. Love that.

It’s also helping those same brands punch above their weight, get more done and grow faster too. Love that as well.

But it’s also leading to the enshittification of copy.

Copy used to be something that brands would really sweat over. I mean, I've been in client meetings where we've discussed a single word for 30 minutes, taken a break and then jumped straight back into discussing it some more.

Now, almost everywhere you look you'll find the same kind of robot-y beige copy that sounds like it’s saying something insightful, but is actually super hollow.

And on the flip side, there are BIG brands whose voice has wobbled and slipped and lost its je ne sais quoi post-AI because getting AI to understand and use your voice is nowhere near as simple as all the tools that say “just upload examples of your writing and AI will figure it out” would have you believe.

(But man, wouldn't that be nice, though?)

Since Joe and I started Do Words Good 5 or so years ago – and for a decade before that as a freelance brand voice consultant – helping brands figure out what to say, how to say it and how to write their copy themselves has been my bread and butter.

And AI has fundamentally changed how that sausage gets made.

(That's too many food metaphors in a row. Can you tell I'm writing this before my lunch?)

The strategy and creative part where we help brands figure out what to say and how to stand out and what their distinctive voice sounds like? That part hasn’t changed at all. That’s still our absolute favourite thing to do.

But turning that into brand voice guidelines? That’s gone from documentation and team training to documentation and team training and all the AI enablement stuff that goes with it.

That means one doc for the team to use (because the people have to be the voice guardians) and another set of brand voice documents written so that AI can use them.

And it means using those docs to build and train copybots for clients that write on-voice and on-brand stuff every time.

It's been a learning curve, but we've got to the stage where we've gone from spending 20 minutes writing long AF prompts and getting copy like this:

To uploading in-depth voice guidelines and getting something like this:

Is it better? I guess. Marginally.

But it's very, very clear that AI doesn't get the brand voice at all.

It's picked up little things and nuances. It's aiming for chatty and peer-to-peer. It attempts to evoke the feeling of the colour and the Instagram reference is a decent (if inelegant) attempt at appealing to the customer avatar.

But the dominant voice here is still Claude's.

And I know there's debate around whether people can actually spot AI writing (I'm certain they can), but I think anyone would peg this bit of copy as AI from a thousand yards away.

Which was a bit of a shock for us, because this copy was written after we gave Claude 80-some pages of detailed, granular brand voice guidelines.

We'd broken down everything from voice to tone to branded phrases to copy philosophy to how to flex the voice across channels.

It was thorough.

But because that document was written for people, it left a lot of decisions to taste and judgement and lived experiences that AI just doesn't have.

AI needs rules. And detailed examples. And annotations. And lots of dos and don'ts. And goldilocks examples.

But it also needs to understand how your brand thinks about copy, the relationship with your customers, etc...

And without all of that stuff, you get AI copy with a half-arsed coat of something that sounds a little bit like your brand voice slapped over the top.

But once we started adapting and rewriting the voice guidelines so they gave AI what it needed, we started getting copy like this:

Much better, right?

It reads like a human wrote it. It's funny. It's got a personality. It clearly knows and understands the brand.

But to get to this stage, we had to spend the past two years fighting with AI tooth and nail.

We’ve read everything we could find on how these models work under the hood.

We’ve run hundreds – if not thousands – of experiments on how we can make AI write better copy and stop it regressing to its beloved AI-isms.

We were even lucky enough to chat with some AI engineers from big tech firms about how AI makes decisions and how to make sure we're not giving it too much information.

And now, we’ve rebuilt the whole studio around helping brands adapt to this brave new world of AI-first copywriting.

That can mean anything from working with you to figure out how you sound and what you say then training AI to write like you to taking your written-for-people brand voice guidelines, adapting them for AI and training a copybot to write for you.

And while we've been working on the rebrand and launching the new services, we've also been reverse-engineering all of that knowledge into a free AI brand voice readiness checker.

TLDR: we've taken everything we know about what AI really needs to nail your voice and trained a tool to check and score your doc to see how optimised it is for this new era of AI copywriting.

Check it out 👇

All you need to do is upload your voice document, let it do its thing and then (about 45 seconds, maybe a minute later depending on how in-depth your docs are) you'll get an overall AI readiness score plus a load of insights into how to improve your document and what you can do to make it more AI-ready.

​Upload your doc and give a go here!​

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See you next week for more tips on doing your words gooder.

Stay awesome ✌️

Jack Barclay​ Co-Founder & Creative Director ​Do Words Good​