The content strategy, copywriting
and communications consultancy
for organisations that
can’t afford to get it wrong.

We've seen an incredible amount of change over the time we've been operating. We opened our doors when the iPhone 4 was just 12 months old, Facebook had fewer than 800 million active users and content marketing was only just starting to become a thing. Digital advertising usually meant banner ads on websites.

Since then, we've had social media, smartphones, search, programmatic advertising, marketing automation, video everywhere, and now AI. Every few years, something comes along that's meant to change everything. Sometimes it actually does.

Through all of this, the basic job has stayed remarkably similar. You still need to understand what you're trying to say, why anyone should care, what evidence you've got for it and how to make it clear enough that somebody actually gets it.

The tools, channels and hype have changed. What matters hasn't.

At various points we could probably have built Antelope Media into a more conventional agency: more staff, more account managers, more layers between the person who wins the work and the person who actually does it.

We never really wanted to.

A lot of the work we do depends on getting deep into somebody else's world very quickly. You need to understand what the experts mean, recognise the thing they haven't quite articulated yet, push back when something doesn't stack up and know which details absolutely cannot get lost on the way through.

That's hard to do if the strategy happens in one room, the interview in another and the writing eventually lands on the desk of somebody who wasn't there for either.

So we've stayed deliberately senior and hands-on. It limits how much work we can take on at once, which is probably the opposite of sound agency economics. But we enjoy what we do. And it means the people you talk to at the start are still there when somebody is arguing over the final sentence.

We've never been especially interested in writing about things anyone can understand in five minutes.

Give us a dense regulatory document, a new financial product, a complicated legal issue, a scientist with 20 years of research in their head or an organisation that knows it's different but can't quite explain why, and we're much happier.

Partly that's curiosity. Partly it's because difficult subjects force you to do the job properly. You can't bluff your way through them with a nice turn of phrase and three adjectives from the brand workshop.

You have to ask better questions, understand what the expert is actually saying, work out what matters and then make it simpler without making it wrong.

That's probably why so much of our work has ended up in law, financial services, government, universities and other places where the subject matter doesn't politely simplify itself for the writer.

We’d be lying if we said AI hadn’t changed our business. It has. A lot of the writing that once required a professional writer can now be produced in seconds, and that has forced us to think much harder about where our value actually sits.

We started experimenting with generative AI almost as soon as ChatGPT appeared, partly because it was fascinating and partly because it was obviously going to change the economics of what we did.

What we’ve found is that the value has moved upstream. Producing competent sentences is easier than it has ever been. Working out what is worth saying, whether it is true, what evidence supports it, how it fits with everything else an organisation says and whether anybody should believe it is not.

So we use AI constantly. We also distrust it constantly. Both things can be true.

The machines have made writing cheaper. They’ve made judgement more valuable.