The customer wrote it first

Saturday note. In most accounts the best line was not written by anybody on the payroll.

It was said by a customer. In a review under a delivery listing, in a reply under an ad, in a voice note a shop owner plays back twice because it is funnier than anything in the brief. Somebody noticed it, tidied it by about ten per cent, and put it on the ad. The noticing was the whole job.

You can tell the two kinds apart at a glance. Copy written inside a building describes the product from the outside: the ingredients, the process, the promise, the years of heritage. Copy that came from a customer describes the moment. What it saved them. Who they were with. What they had been dreading. How they put it to a cousin who asked.

The language is already out there, and it is local in a way a workshop never reaches. The Cairo way of saying a thing is worth the money without using the word cheap. The Gulf way of saying a place is respectable enough to take your mother to on a Friday. Nobody invents those. People say them every day, in public, at no charge, underneath the brand's own posts.

So a team that reads its own replies is never short of creative. It has more than the studio can produce.

A team that does not is paying somebody to guess at a language it already owns, then testing the guesses against each other, then wondering why the winner sounds translated.

The line has been sitting under last week's post the whole time, written by somebody who was not paid for it, read by nobody in the building.