Where the voice lives

The Gulf is away until the second half of the month, and for the next fortnight the most-read line most companies send is one nobody wrote on purpose.

A date. A colleague's name, sometimes spelt wrong. Limited access. Now and then a joke, typed at the gate with one thumb, which will reach a client it was never meant for.

It goes out hundreds of times a day. Every supplier chasing an invoice, every customer with a complaint, every prospect who finally answered gets the same line, from a named person, at a moment they were already a little annoyed.

Somewhere in the same company there is a tone-of-voice document. Forty pages. Warm but not casual, confident but not loud, a section on Arabic register. It was written for the campaign, the website and the packaging, the things the company thinks of as its voice. It has never been near an out-of-office, and nobody would think to take it there.

Nobody owns the line. Marketing has never seen it. Each person writes their own, on the last afternoon, between the handover and the taxi, and the company's voice for a fortnight is whatever four hundred people typed in a hurry.

For those two weeks, the auto-reply is the brand. The billboard went past the customer with the windows up. The line that arrived in their inbox had a person's name on it, and it told them, in whatever register it happened to have, what this company is like when nobody is watching.

The copy that is guaranteed an audience is the copy that was never given a writer. A brand's voice is not in the document. It lives wherever nobody was looking.