Weekly Round Up #113

Your once-a-week digest filled with copywriting insights, AI tips, must-read articles, pretty cool copy examples, and much more!

Feb 06, 2026

Welcome to the 113th edition of the Weekly Round-Up — your once-a-week digest filled with copywriting insights, AI tips, must-read articles, pretty cool copy examples, and much more!

In this week’s issue:

Copy Tip: Every Message Trains the Reader
AI Tip: The Single-Variable AI Method (and why it fixes bad A/B testing)
Survey Q!
Managing Brand Voice in a Politicized Public Square (via Branding Strategy Insider)
How to Structure Pages for AEO and Answer Engines: A Quick-Start Guide (via Hubspot)
What Makes People Like Video Ads? (via Science Says)
Keeping the Momentum: How Leaders Avoid the February Creative Slump
Podcast Pick: Loss Aversion: How to Ethically Drive Action, Urgency, and Sales with Buyer Psychology
Swipe File Additions

Copy Tip of the Week

Copy doesn’t just persuade in the moment. It trains your audience how to read you over time.

Every email, landing page, or SMS quietly sets expectations.

It teaches the reader how much attention you deserve, whether skimming is “safe,” whether urgency is real or performative, and whether clarity is coming—or more noise.

None of that happens intentionally, but it always happens.

This is why one-off wins rarely compound.

When messages consistently over-explain, hedge their claims, repeat the same urgency language, or try to cover every edge case, readers learn to tune out.

They skim harder. They trust less.

Even when the copy is technically “good,” the behavior it trains works against you.

Strong copy does the opposite. It conditions readers to expect clear thinking, a single coherent point, and words that actually do work.

Over time, that creates a quiet reading contract: when this brand shows up, it’s worth paying attention.

That kind of trust isn’t built through tone or polish or brand voice docs. It’s built through execution—message after message.

A useful gut check is this: if someone read only your last ten emails, what behavior would they be trained into? Skimming? Waiting for discounts? Bracing for filler? Or slowing down because clarity reliably shows up?

Great copywriters don’t just ask, “Will this convert?”

They ask, “What am I teaching the reader to expect next time?”

And that, my friends, is how copy compounds.

AI Insight of the Week

The Single-Variable AI Method (and why it fixes bad A/B testing)

Most marketers say they’re running A/B tests.

What they’re actually doing is changing everything at once and calling it learning.

New angle.
New offer.
New length.
New CTA.

When something works, nobody knows why.

This is where AI can be used differently.

Instead of asking AI to “improve” an ad, use it to change one variable on purpose.

Here’s the method.

First, lock the control.

You decide what cannot change. Offer, structure, CTA, format, length. Whatever you want to hold constant.

Then you tell AI it’s only allowed to touch one variable.

For example:

“Create 5 ad variants, but you are only allowed to change the framing. The offer, CTA, and length must stay identical.”

Or:

“Rewrite this ad by changing only the opening line. Everything else must remain untouched.”

Or:

“Generate variants where the only variable is emotional tone. No new claims. No new benefits.”

Now AI isn’t brainstorming. It’s isolating a variable.

This is especially powerful for A/B testing because:

You can actually attribute performance differences
Winning ads become reusable patterns, not one-offs
Losers teach you something instead of just being losers

Most ad accounts don’t suffer from a lack of ideas – they suffer from noisy testing.

AI turns into a testing assistant instead of a creative slot machine.

One more subtle benefit…

When you constrain AI this way, you start seeing how much impact small changes actually have. A single line. A single frame. A single emotional angle.

That’s how mature marketers scale.

Not by swinging harder, but by learning faster.

Survey Question

Must-Read Articles

Managing Brand Voice in a Politicized Public Square (via Branding Strategy Insider)

🔗 https://brandingstrategyinsider.com/managing-brand-voice-in-a-politicized-public-square/

Why I recommend it:
This is proof that marketing is always so much more about marketing. Given the tensions in the US in particular, it’s a timely read for anybody that touches marketing for a brand.

How to Structure Pages for AEO and Answer Engines: A Quick-Start Guide (via Hubspot)

🔗 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/aeo-page-structure

Why I recommend it:
Whether you write long-form content or edit for others who do, this is a bookmark-worthy tactical piece on how to get ~~the robots~~ LLMs to read and refer your work.

What Makes People Like Video Ads? (via Science Says)

🔗 https://app.sciencesays.com/p/what-makes-people-like-video-ads

Why I recommend it:
Writing a script or idea for a video ad? Use these science-backed insights to build it in a way that’s going to have an impact.

You Might Also Like:

CHOICE HACKING PODCAST
Loss Aversion: How to Ethically Drive Action, Urgency, and Sales with Buyer Psychology
🎧 Listen on iTunes | Listen on Spotify

Why I recommend it:
Copywriters, designers, strategists, marketers – you should listen to this. But how do you leverage buyer psychology (loss aversion specifically) ethically? That’s what this episode’s about.

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Pretty Fly Copy

BRILLIANT EARTH

Format: Email
Spotted By: Amanda Schumacher
Why I like it: Beautiful. Elegant. Thematic. It ticks all the right boxes in all the right ways.

FRESH SENDS

Format: Email
Spotted By: Samantha Gong
Why I like it: This email captures perfectly the sentiment of what the brand sells without actually showing the product at all. PERFECTION.

SENIQ

Format: Email
Spotted By: Nia Personette
Why I like it: Like Nia mentioned to our team – most “end of year” or “end of season” emails kind of suck. But this was a great capture of customer UGC while also showing the product. The GIF in the hero (which is broken in my screenshot) = 🤌

HelloFresh?

Format: Email Ad
Why I like it: I don’t remember the brand this was for (likely HelloFresh), but I thought the headline was brilliant. It addressed a problem we can all relate to and proposed a solution (we can also relate to) all in 11 words.