Copywriting

The line is the job

Copy in a restricted category fails in two directions. Written by somebody who does not know the rules, it is rejected — usually over one specific phrase that could have been replaced without losing anything. Written by somebody frightened of the rules, it clears review and says nothing, which costs more: you now pay for impressions on a message that could belong to any competitor.

The useful skill is knowing exactly where the line runs, because then everything up to it is available. That is knowledge, not caution, and it is why we do not hand copy to a compliance pass afterwards. The person writing already knows.

What gets written

• Ad copy — primary text, headlines and descriptions in the volume testing requires, built around distinct angles rather than rephrasings of one.
• Landing pages — the full page, matched to the ad that produced the click, with the claim, the proof and the action in an order a reader can follow at speed.
• Lifecycle — email and messenger sequences for the part of the funnel after the click, which in most categories is where the margin actually is.
• Long-form and SEO — pages written to answer a question directly enough to be quoted, by a search engine or by an assistant summarising one.

English and Russian, written not translated

Both languages are written natively. A translated advertisement is audible as a translation within about one sentence, and the tell is never vocabulary — it is rhythm, and the fact that the examples were chosen for a different reader. The Russian version of a page is built from the same brief as the English one and then written independently. This site was made that way.

Where a market needs a register the source language did not have — formal versus familiar address, a different relationship to hedging — that is decided per market rather than inherited.

Angles before sentences

Before anything is written we agree the list of angles: what claim is being made, to whom, and what makes it credible in a category where the reader has been lied to before. That last part does more work than it sounds like. Someone choosing a surgeon, an immigration lawyer or a lender has usually already encountered somebody dishonest, and the copy is competing with that memory rather than with the competitor's copy.

Most weak writing is not badly written. It is well written from an angle nobody chose. The list is short, explicit, and the thing we test — polish is what happens to an angle that has already won.

Proof, and the things we will not write

Specific claims need something behind them. Where a number, a licence, a registration or a guarantee exists, it carries the page. Where it does not, we write around the gap rather than invent something plausible — not as a moral position but as a practical one, since an unsupportable claim is exactly what review and regulators look for first. Health claims that are untrue, invented testimonials, fabricated results and guaranteed outcomes are not on the menu.

What you get

Copy in the format the platform ingests, variants numbered so results can be traced, a written angle list you keep, and a note of which phrasings were rejected and what replaced them.