About
cicopy.com investigates the gap between what a company says its marketing strategy is and what its own record shows.
I'm Jan Suski. I built this site because every marketing case study I read described strategy the way a company's own press office would: a founding myth, a memorable slogan, a campaign that "changed the game." Most of that is true as far as it goes. It's also the only part almost anyone ever checks. cicopy.com is the part that's missing: the court filings, the earnings calls, the regulatory rulings, and the named executive statements that show what actually happened around the campaign.
The Name
CI folds a few meanings into one abbreviation here. It's Criminal Investigation, the case-file conceit every post runs on: a pitch, a record, a verdict, filed and stamped like a closed case. It's Competitive Intelligence, the actual research discipline the site borrows its method from, the same kind of digging a company runs on its rivals, pointed back at the company itself. The OPEN or CLOSED stamp on every post points at a third reading, Continuing Investigation, since a closed case still gets reopened the day a company's record changes. And the archive at /case-files is, plainly, a Case Index: every investigation filed in one place, sorted by date. Copy is the marketing copy under review: the slogans, the taglines, the ad lines making the pitch. cicopy is competitive intelligence run on marketing copy, filed the way a criminal investigation gets filed.
Method
Every case file here follows the same structure. The pitch: what the company and the case-study circuit say the strategy is, with the actual campaign, date, and agency or executive named. The record: what the company's own court filings, earnings calls, regulatory decisions, and executive statements show about whether that pitch held up. The verdict: where the two line up, and where they don't, stated plainly rather than softened into "room for improvement."
Values
Three rules govern everything published here. No number appears without a named, real source: a court filing, an earnings call, a press release, a named journalist or outlet, a named executive quote. Nothing is invented: no composite scenarios, no imagined dialogue, no attributing a position to someone who didn't say it. And no company gets a pass for being popular or well-liked; the record is checked the same way regardless of how the brand is generally perceived.
If a fact can't be traced to a real source, it doesn't get published, even if it's widely repeated elsewhere. Several of the numbers that circulate across other marketing blogs don't hold up under that standard, and where that's happened, the case file says so directly instead of repeating the number anyway.
Found something that doesn't hold up? Email jan@jansuski.com. A real correction gets checked against a source and logged at the bottom of the post it applies to.
What's Next
The case files will keep publishing on the same schedule: one company, checked against its own record, at a time. Two things are planned alongside that:
- A social media presence built around single facts pulled from each case file, the kind of detail that doesn't fit in a headline but changes how the campaign reads.
- A YouTube channel that walks through the same investigations on video, sourced the same way: named documents, named speakers, no composite scenarios.
Neither is live yet. The footer below will carry both links the day they launch.