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For a long time, I thought I was a marketing guy who could write decent copy. Turned out,…
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Scott Frothingham shared thisDave Saylor ran the110m hurdles for my university's track team. We called him "Willy D" after the Olympic gold medal winner Willie Davenport. One day I asked him: "When you're racing are you focused on the the goal line and winning the race or on a bigger goal like competing in the conference championships?" "Neither," he replied. "All I'm thinking about is my stride length, my stride frequency, and the next hurdle." _________________________ There's a lesson here. And like most folks who post on social media, I feel a compulsion to "teach" it here. But this quick story doesn't need further explanation and offers a useful message for both business and life without additional ornamentation.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisI don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game. These thoughts on rewriting are from William Zinsser _________________________ William Knowlton Zinsser (1922–2015) was an American writer, editor and teacher who authored numerous books including “On Writing Well” a style guide for non-fiction writers that sold an estimated 1.5 million copies.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisFor a while now, marketing has been losing its nerve. It’s been a gradual process: Creativity became content. Content became output. Output became deliverables. Brands started acting like software companies, agencies started selling scale instead of ideas, and smart people handed their instincts over to dashboards and algorithms like those things were better listeners. But brands aren’t machines. They’re not funnels or logos waiting for feedback. When they really work, they feel alive … and anything alive needs a soul. The next few years will make this painfully obvious. The brands that last won’t be the ones producing the most AI-generated noise before lunch. They’ll be the ones that stand for something. Meaning beats volume. Every time. Soul isn’t your tagline, color palette, or mission statement from the offsite no one remembers. It’s the conviction underneath all of it. The thing that makes people care, root for you, stick with you when you’re imperfect. People don’t connect to perfection. They connect to humanity. Tension. Ambition. Conviction. Vulnerability. The feeling that someone on the other side actually believes in what they’re doing. And what kills that soul is usually two things: speed and safety. SPEED leaves no room for insight, deep listening, unexpected connections, or the uncomfortable conversations where breakthrough ideas are born. SAFETY is sneakier. Safe partners avoid friction and deliver work that offends no one… which is exactly why no one remembers it. The antidote isn’t revolutionary. It’s just unfashionable: Real partnership. Honesty. Curiosity. Challenge. Collaboration. A commitment to the long game. Because connection compounds. Trust compounds. Meaning compounds. And that’s the moat no competitor can copy. The world doesn’t need more content. It needs more meaning. And the one thing no algorithm can manufacture, no shortcut can replace, and no competitor can copy is soul. The brands with the courage to honor it, articulate it, and express it will own the future.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisUniversities are concerned about AI cheating. But the problem isn’t AI. AI just held up a mirror. We’ve built a culture obsessed with outputs while neglecting the critical thinking needed to produce them. More content. More credentials. More polished little rectangles for LinkedIn. Meanwhile people are walking around undereducated. So, I suggest universities return to oral exams. If a student can’t sit in a room and explain what they think (clearly, spontaneously, and without consulting a prediction machine trained on the internet’s compost heap) then what exactly are we measuring? Formatting skills? Citation choreography? Oral exams test whether knowledge has actually entered the person. Can you explain something clearly? Can you defend an idea without collapsing into a haze of jargon? Can you think while another human being is looking directly at you? You can hear understanding in real time. As a writer, I believe that writing matters. Good writing sharpens thought and should be aggressively taught. But modern academia has built systems to generate, grade, summarize, and value documents nobody actually wants to read … bureaucratic fog with footnotes. Then AI arrived and said, “You mean this counts as intelligence? Hold my beer.” Educational institutions should start asking: “Has this person become wiser?” instead of: “Can this person generate acceptable artifacts at scale?” Oral examinations should be part of answering the former. They require presence, and you can’t outsource presence. You either know what you’re talking about or you don’t. The real purpose of education was never supposed to be producing polished effluvia on command. It was supposed to build a human being, someone more thoughtful, articulate, perceptive, difficult to fool. That’s much harder to fake live.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisYou've been seated at a restaurant ... as you determine your dinner order, you notice a typo on the menu. What do you do? Pretend you didn’t see it? Point it out to your dinner companion? Alert the waiter? Ask to speak to the manager? Approach the owner with an offer to re-do their menu? Order that item, but smugly pronounce it incorrectly to match the typo? Smile, and feel superior to whoever prepared the menu? Gasp as you remember an embarrassing typo from your past?
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Scott Frothingham posted thisBeing a freelancer has helped distance me from a frustrating feature of modern work: we have built increasingly sophisticated systems for measuring employee performance while remaining remarkably primitive at recognizing employee value. We have dashboards. We have metrics. We have quarterly objectives. We have calibration meetings. We have competency frameworks. We have seventeen different ways to say “good job.” And somehow the conversation about actually paying someone appropriately still seems to require the organizational equivalent of a hostage negotiation. I realize budgets are complicated. I realize businesses have constraints. I realize money doesn't grow on trees. But neither does expertise. And unlike money, expertise tends to walk out the door to be around people who understand that creativity needs oxygen, that good ideas rarely emerge from exhausted people staring at dashboards, and that human beings are not software licenses that can simply be reassigned when someone leaves. When I asked a friend why she just left a high profile job, her one line answer perfectly summed up a situation many of us find (or have found) ourselves in: “I want to remember what it feels like to finish a day without mentally drafting my resignation letter.”
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Scott Frothingham shared thisI dropped the phrase “pattern interrupt” in a meeting the last week. One of the execs in the room (who shouldn’t have been in the room, but marketing seems to be run by committee too often these days) asked what I meant. I responded with something along the lines of: “Pattern Interrupt is a psychological technique where you disrupt the audience’s routine thought patterns to grab their attention. In marketing, we use it to shift the prospect's focus to your message.” Even to me, that sounded more academic than helpful (maybe being in a room of "suits" brought that out of me), so I continued: “Imagine you're scrolling through your social media feed ... everything looks sort of the same. Suddenly, a bold, unexpected headline or a quirky image stops you mid-scroll. That’s pattern interrupt in action. It shakes up the ordinary and forces your brain to pay attention.” Ahh, that sounded better, so I capped it off with “The goal is to keep audiences engaged, curious, and wanting more ... to turn passive readers into active participants.” I had the room, but one person still had a “I’m not convinced” look on their face. So I added, “The human brain loves predictability but is wired to respond to novelty. By introducing something unexpected or unusual, you create a cognitive jolt that draws people in.” Now I was rolling. “Think about an unexpected headline or humor or shocking statistic that pushes people to not rely on their go to responses.” I was getting the nods I wanted … but knew that, even though I had made a small gain, the real challenge was going to be getting too large of a group of people, each with too much input (and ego), to approve a campaign without watering down the concept to a point where it would be anywhere close to pattern interrupt.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisI've been told that "The magic’s in the mess. But the paycheck’s in the precision." should be my catchphrase. I say it often. Sometimes, however, it doesn't land the way I'd like it to. Sometimes, the recipient of my oft repeated observation think I'm referring to the deliverable that will be handed to the client or presented to the public. But, I'm not referring to the end result of the creative process: what we'll use to market a product or service. I'm talking about what's going on in the mind of the creator: Creatives need both the "mess" and the "precision" to mold that "mess" into something that resonates with the intended audience.
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Scott Frothingham shared thisMake sure the door is locked before reaching for your lock picks. That was the opening line for this post on asking questions and doing research before you write. But I deleted the rest of the post. 'Cause the opening line made the point all by itself. In fact, on its own it’s sound advice for many aspects of your business and personal life. So, I'll say it again: Make sure the door is locked before reaching for your lock picks. Or battering ram.
Scott Frothingham commented on a post
3d
thanks for sharing, Charles
Scott Frothingham replied to a comment
1w
You asked why I used an Ai-generated image, Liz ... I thought it was a good representation of generic (on a number of levels) ... also, I'm not opposed to people (including students) using AI, I just worry about us outsourcing our thinking.
https://contentandcopywriters.blogspot.com/2025/09/dont-let-ai-kill-your-analog.html
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