When people ask what I studied in college and I say English, there's a pause. A very specific pause. It's the pause before someone decides whether to ask what I do with that or just nod and change the subject. If they're in marketing, they almost always ask. And then when I tell them I run an agency, there's a second pause, longer, where they're recalculating something in their head. As if the math doesn't work. As if the path from annotating Anne Sexton poems to running ad campaigns is a hallway that shouldn't exist.
It's the only hallway that makes sense to me. But it took years to understand why.
Here's what an English degree actually teaches you, underneath all the seminar discussions and thesis drafts and late nights arguing about whether Plath was confessional or performative (both, obviously, that's the whole point).
It teaches you to read between lines.
Not metaphorically. Literally. You sit with a text, a poem, a novel, an essay, and you learn to hear what isn't being said. The gap between the words on the page and the meaning underneath them. The tension between what a character says and what a character wants. The subtext that carries more weight than the text.
Close reading. That's what the academy calls it. Sitting with a passage and asking: why this word and not another? Why this sentence structure? What does the rhythm of this paragraph tell me about the emotional state of the narrator? Where is the writer hiding, and what are they hiding from?
I spent four years learning to do that. I didn't know I was learning buyer research.
There's a thing that happens when you interview buyers. Real buyers, not personas, not demographic profiles, actual humans who spent actual money on a product or service. You ask them why they bought, and they give you an answer. The answer is almost never the real reason. It's the reason that makes sense. The reason that's socially legible. The reason they'd tell a friend at dinner.
The real reason lives underneath. In the pause between sentences. In the word they almost said and then corrected. In the way they describe the moment of decision, which is almost always more emotional and less rational than the clean narrative they've built around it.
Reading those interviews is close reading. It's the same skill. You're looking at a text, a transcript, and asking: what is this person actually saying? Where is the tension? What word carries unexpected weight? What's the subtext underneath the surface-level answer?
Business school doesn't teach this. Business school teaches frameworks. SWOT analysis. Porter's Five Forces. The marketing funnel as a geometric shape with predictable stages. These are useful in the way that knowing the names of bones is useful to a surgeon. They give you vocabulary. They don't give you touch.
Those questions aren't in any marketing textbook I've ever read. They're in every literature seminar I ever sat through.
Poetry taught me compression. This is the thing I can never explain properly to people who think poetry is decorative language, which is most people, and I don't blame them because most of the poetry they've encountered was probably bad.
Good poetry is the opposite of decoration. Good poetry is compression. It's taking a complex emotional or intellectual reality and reducing it to the fewest possible words that still carry the full weight. Every syllable matters. Every line break is a decision. The white space on the page isn't absence. It's structure.
Ad copy is compression. A headline is a poem. Not in the flowery sense. In the structural sense. You have six to twelve words to create enough tension, enough resonance, enough recognition that a human scrolling at the speed of boredom stops and reads the next line. Every word matters. Every word that doesn't earn its place weakens the ones that do.
I learned that from Anne Sexton. From Sylvia Plath. From Frank Bidart and Sharon Olds and the semester I spent on the Metaphysical Poets and John Donne's ability to hold an entire theological argument inside a single image. "Batter my heart, three-personed God." Seven words. An entire theology of surrender. That's a headline. That's a hook that's been stopping people for four hundred years.
When I write buyer-facing copy now, I hear Donne. Not his content. His compression. The insistence that every word pull weight. The refusal to let language sit there being pretty without doing work.
Harold Bloom, the crankiest literary critic who ever lived, had this concept he called "strong misreading." The idea that every great writer misreads their predecessors, not through incompetence but through creative strength. They take what came before and distort it, wrestle with it, refuse to let it sit comfortably. The distortion is the art.
Buyers misread ads the same way. They bring their own history, their own wounds, their own desires. They read your headline and it means something you didn't intend, something shaped by the last product that disappointed them, the last promise that was broken, the last time they trusted a brand and felt stupid for it. You can't control the misreading. You can only write something strong enough to survive it.
My English degree taught me that the reader is never passive. The reader is always co-creating the meaning. The text doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in the space between the writer's intention and the reader's experience, and that space is where everything interesting happens.
Marketing that ignores this space is marketing that talks at people. Marketing that lives in this space is marketing that resonates. The difference isn't technique. It's a fundamental understanding of how language works between humans, which is messily, unpredictably, beautifully.
I think the Hidden Layer methodology, the thing I've built my career on, is an English degree applied to commerce.
I didn't design it that way. I didn't sit down and say "I'm going to take literary analysis and apply it to buyer research." It happened the way most real things happen, through accumulation and accident and the slow recognition that a skill you developed in one context is exactly the skill you need in another.
The 215 buyer quotes before a word of copy. That's close reading. Gathering primary texts and sitting with them until the patterns emerge, until the subtext becomes legible, until you can hear what the buyers are actually saying underneath what they're saying. It's the same thing I did with Melville, with Faulkner, with the semester on Southern Gothic where I learned that the real story is never the one being told out loud.
The offer architecture. That's literary structure. Understanding that the way you sequence information changes its meaning. That the same facts presented in a different order create a different emotional experience. That pacing is persuasion. I learned that from novels. I use it in landing pages.
The voice work. Finding a brand's actual voice, not the one they put in their brand guidelines but the one that lives in how their founder talks when they're not performing. That's the same skill as identifying a writer's voice underneath their conscious style. The rhythms, the habits, the unconscious patterns that reveal what the writer actually thinks about the world.
Every piece of it traces back to a classroom where someone was teaching me to read better. Not faster. Better. To see more. To hear the frequencies underneath the audible ones.
I'm not saying everyone should get an English degree. The economics are bad and the job market is worse and I'm not the person to tell a nineteen-year-old what to study. I dropped into this career sideways, through a series of accidents that included a recession and a willingness to write for anyone who would pay me and the slow discovery that the thing I learned to do with poems was the thing nobody else in the room knew how to do with customers.
But I am saying that the business-school pipeline, the one that produces marketers who think in frameworks and speak in acronyms and approach buyers as data points to be segmented, is missing something fundamental. It's missing the ability to sit with a text and not know what it means yet. To hold ambiguity. To listen for the thing that isn't being said. To understand that language is not a delivery mechanism for information but a living exchange between two humans who are both, always, half-hidden from each other.
Poetry taught me that. The market confirms it every day.
It's late. There's a book of Sharon Olds on the desk next to my laptop, and next to that, a spreadsheet of buyer interview transcripts. They're the same skill. They've always been the same skill. I just didn't have the words for it until now, which is funny, because words are supposed to be the thing I'm good at.