Copywriting Is Dead (Sort of): Why Volume Killed the Voice
- Maria Callahan
- May 2, 2025
- 2 min read
Somewhere between keyword stuffing and a thousand blogs titled “10 Tips to Crush Your Morning Routine”, something got lost.
It wasn’t grammar. It wasn’t spelling.
It was voice.
Once a prized skill in brand storytelling, copywriting has been quietly buried under the rubble of content calendars, SEO quotas, and AI-generated filler. And let’s be clear: the internet didn’t kill copywriting—mass production did.
Quantity Over Quality: The Rise of the Content Machine
The digital age promised open expression. What we got instead were algorithms that reward sameness and scale. Brands, desperate to climb the search rankings, turned to content mills, keyword overuse, and rapid-fire output. Suddenly, the question wasn’t “Is this good?” but “Can we publish this today?”
Even generative AI—yes, guilty as charged—can pump out paragraphs by the dozen, but if you’re not feeding it intention, you’ll just get… words.
Impactful Copy vs. Busy Copy
There’s a difference between writing and saying something. Busy copy fills space. Impactful copy creates space—it slows your reader down in the best way. It resonates.
Think about:
Apple, whose product descriptions read more like haiku than hardware specs.
Liquid Death, a brand that built a cult following by turning water into a punk-rock manifesto.
Mailchimp, whose onboarding emails feel more like a friend texting you than a CRM warming up.
These brands sound like something because they never stopped treating copy as part of their product.
Why Voice Still Matters
In a saturated world, clarity cuts through. Voice is your brand’s fingerprint. Without it, you’re just another blur in the feed.
According to the Harvard Business Review, what makes great writing isn’t fancy vocabulary or poetic flair—it’s clarity, simplicity, and emotional resonance. And those come from intention, not volume.
Reclaiming Brand Voice
If you’re managing a brand, here’s your call to action:
Audit your content. Are you saying something, or just saying a lot?
Reinvest in writers. People who ask the hard questions, not just deliver word count.
Choose quality over quantity. You don’t need 5 posts a week. You need 1 good one.
Copywriting isn’t dead. But it’s time to call off the SEO zombies and revive the voice that actually moves people.
Further Reading:
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