The screen glowed with the familiar, slightly nauseating blue of a competitor’s landing page. Across the table, Sarah, our junior designer, picked at a loose thread on her sweater. “So,” she began, her voice barely a whisper, “the ‘big idea’ for this quarter is… changing ‘Learn More’ to ‘Get Started’?”
It wasn’t a question, not really. It was an echoing sigh, a collective exasperation hanging in the air of the meeting room that smelled faintly of stale coffee and desperation. We were eight people, highly paid, highly caffeinated, and our groundbreaking strategy revolved around a button text tweak, all because a blog post – probably written by some AI – claimed a 0.58% CTR increase. I typed my password wrong five times trying to log into the analytics dashboard, the kind of repetitive, minor friction that sums up my day-to-day existence in performance marketing.
This is my life. This is *our* life. We spend all day, every single day, not crafting, not innovating, not dreaming, but copying. We meticulously dissect our competitor’s top-performing landing pages, down to the shade of their call-to-action button, the exact phrasing of their scarcity timers, the number of testimonials stacked above the fold. Originality? It’s not just undesirable; it’s a liability. Every unique design choice, every fresh copy angle, is another variable that hasn’t been proven by eight thousand micro-tests across the internet. It’s an unknown, and in a world where every click costs, the unknown is











































