The internet is WHERE?!

“Wait,” I said. “The internet is on the bottom of the ocean??”

“Where did you think the internet came from?”

“I dunno. The air?”

“…Cass, how long have you been working here?”

🙃

So my first job out of uni was working for a telecommunications company.

If you’ve read my About page*—aptly titled The Last Resume I’ll Ever Write—I started in the call centre and eventually bullied my way into the budding social media team.

*Best viewed on desktop. Nick NAILED the whole 'last ever resume' design. 😁

From there, I got to write blogs and social media posts and ✨liaise✨ with the PR & Media Office. I felt very pompous and important.

And then I moved to Melbourne and I swear my career became a series of unfortunate events lol. But that’s not the point of this email.

The point is… before I worked at said telco, I had NFI how the internet worked.

I legit thought it was like the radio and just sorta existed as waves in the air. You could say I thought the cloud was literally IN THE CLOUDS. lol.

And then I got a job at this really massive telco, right in the midst of a nationwide upgrade from ADSL to Fibre to the—if you were lucky—Premises… and I suddenly discovered terms like Exchanges, Nodes, Points of Interconnect… and the big mind-boggling one: SUBSEA CABLE NETWORKS.

I talked about this concept in an email recently: The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. How we think we understand things we’re familiar with more than we actually do.

In that email, I explained how we often fall into this trap with our positioning and audience understanding.

But another example is how, in the early days of my career, I kinda thought persuasive writing was bullshit.

Yeah… weird opinion to have as a copywriter, right?

Obviously, I believed words could influence people. But most of what I’d seen up to that point presented “persuasion” as pressure, cheap tricks and increasingly desperate attempts to force an immediate conversion.

It also almost always had the exact same hustle bro tone that AI uses when you ask it to be edgy. 😝

On top of that, I was predominantly working on SEO copy, which, at its worst, was keyword stuffing and fluffing content to expand a word count… and, at its best, was educational.

Not a drop of “persuasion” in sight.

The longer I was in the industry though—and the further I moved away from SEO—the more I realised I’d spent years ASSUMING I knew what persuasive writing was… without ACTUALLY knowing.

Once I made it my mission to understand the difference, it completely changed how I thought about copywriting.

Which is why I wanted it to be the central idea behind Brief #1.

Across those 5,000ish words—or 30ish minutes, if you listen to the audio at normal speed—I’ve tried to capture that difference.

To me, it’s what being Aggressively Unoptimised actually looks like in practice. It rejects the pressure tactics, cheap tricks and algorithm-chasing crap... but it doesn’t swing so far in the other direction that marketing becomes throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks.

There are still real principles behind it. Real strategy. A reason for writing what you’re writing beyond feeding the content machine and hoping MORE eventually turns into RESULTS.

If marketing currently feels like a constant demand to produce more words, post more often and chase more results, this one’s for you.

Get in while it’s still only a $1 for the first month.

Cheers,
Cass