Why the headline has footnotes

The first thing you see on our front page is a small blue number after the headline. It is not a design flourish. It is the whole business, stated in one character.

Go to our front page and look at the headline. After the last word there is a small blue numeral, raised, the kind you last saw in a textbook. Click it and the page scrolls to the margin, where a line in typewriter type tells you what the word "lore" means, and where a pair of initials in ballpoint says a person checked it.

We are, as far as we can tell, the only agency site whose headline has footnotes. We would like to explain why, because it looks like a joke and it is not one.

The claim and the receipt

Publicity runs on claims. A founder says her company grew forty per cent; a publicist writes "fastest-growing"; a journalist, if she is any good, asks "compared with what". Most of the time nobody asks, and the number goes out, and it sits on the internet, and a year later an AI engine repeats it as fact to an investor who is doing diligence.

Journalists have had enough of this. A third of them say they bin a pitch for missing or unverifiable sources.1 Half of them say fewer than a quarter of what reaches them is relevant.2 And since last year the pile has grown fivefold, because the same tools that write the pitches now write them faster.3 One publication has stopped taking pitches by email at all and asks you to phone.4

Our answer is a rule, and the rule is mechanical. Every claim on every artefact we produce carries a numbered marker, and the marker points at a receipt: the document, the page, the date, and the initials of the human who read it. A claim without a receipt does not go out. In the product it is a grey button that will not press. On the website it is a headline we are not allowed to write.

So the headline has a footnote because the headline is a claim, and we do not get to exempt ourselves.

What a footnote costs

It costs a lot, which is the point.

It costs the phrase "industry-leading", because there is no receipt for it. It costs "countless", "10x" and "up to", because a number with "up to" in front of it is not a number. It costs every testimonial on our site until there is a real one with written permission, which is why the site has none. It costs the client logo row that every agency page has at the fold, because ours would have to be real clients who said yes in writing, and we have not asked anyone yet.

It also costs the reader something. A page with footnotes reads slower. The margin is wide and mostly white, and the numbers pull your eye sideways. We tested a version without them. It looked like every other agency in the category: a serif headline, a warm background, a confident sentence. It looked like a page that could say anything, because it could.

Who signs

The second thing to notice is the initials. Every receipt ends with two letters in blue, and every slug line at the top of every card carries the same two letters after the word "approved". They are the initials of the editor of record, a named woman whose job is to read everything that leaves this company, for a client or for itself, and to put her name on it.

That is not a flourish either. Under the law that now governs AI-assisted text in Europe, a public statement written with a model is exempt from labelling only when a human has genuinely reviewed it and a named person holds editorial responsibility for it.5 The initials are the evidence. The blue is so you can find them.

Twelve agents draft our pitches, our chapters, our replies and, yes, this page. They are good at it. They do not sign. A person signs, and if you hover over her initials you get her name and her role, because a byline you cannot read is a byline that does not count.

What "lore" means

The footnote on the headline defines a word, and the word is the company's name.

Your lore is the story people tell about you, and now the story machines tell about you: what ChatGPT says when an investor types your name, what Perplexity cites, which page Gemini learned your founding date from and whether that page is right. Most of it was never approved by you. Some of it was written by a publicist three years ago who used the phrase "industry-leading", and it has been quietly repeated since.

We keep it accurate, current and told right. The way we do that is the way this page does it: a claim, a receipt, a name. That is the whole method. The rest of the site is the same footnote, applied to everything, including the prices.