AI For Copywriting Megacourse Pt.1

"That's what the MONEY IS FOR!"

I know I’ve been a bit absent, but it’s for good reason. I’ve been preparing another gem for you.

For those of you who have been subscribers since the beginning, you know I did a multi-part series on how to get clients even as a newbie with zero portfolio.

Next to “How do I get clients?!” the other most pervasive question I get is “Is AI going to take over?”

Or any iteration of that —

• How am I using AI

• Should I use AI

• Do companies care if I use AI

• …etc…etc…etc

So let’s go down the rabbit hole together in this series where I will show you what AI’s role is in the copy world at this point, where it’s going, and then we’re going to get in depth in how to use AI as a copywriter (because you SHOULD be using it).

First — let’s get grounded here by understanding that AI isn’t actually “changing” anything at all in the copy world.

You see every time some new technology comes by everybody thinks it’s going to kill copywriting or direct response in general.

It’s always the same shit. When TV came along the same argument for “shrinking attention spans” was just as prevalent.

And so everyone figured 15 to 30 second TV commercials were best.

Early in the mornings on TV during fringe time (think 2AM to maybe 5AM) there used to be nothing even on TV except maybe a flag waving with music playing.

It was direct response copywriters who bought up all that cheap air time that nobody wanted (“Because nobody is watching TV at that time!”) and took consumer grade cameras and filmed 2 to 3 hour long commercials that “Nobody would ever watch!” and made millions upon millions of dollars.

And transformed fringe time TV into some of the most valuable time slots and created cultural phenomenon in the process (P90x, George Foreman Grill, Ginsu Knives, Chia Pets, Shamwow, Snuggies, Oxyclean, Nutribullet, Proactive — you name it).

When the Internet came along it was a similar argument. And yet — to this day — long, ugly sales letters and videos are the foundation upon which ALL online marketing revolves around.

But the issue regarding AI is one of “Who will even NEED me anymore?”

If AI can keep scraping the entire world’s knowledge (and gain deeper and deeper access to it over time) and you can just write a prompt that spits out PPC copy and test hundreds if not thousands of iterations of it in seconds, then who needs copywriters anymore?

Let’s slow down a moment and look at what HAS NOT changed.

I am reminded lately of a particular scene out of Mad Men.

You see Don Draper is the “Creative Director” and under him are a bunch of junior copywriters and creatives.

Throughout the series you’ll often see Don barking orders at his juniors “Give me 20 taglines by tomorrow morning” or “Give me slogans by Monday morning.”

Then his juniors will trot off somewhere and brain storm, come up with a bunch of ideas, hand them over to Don just for him to pick one or two, tell them to change X, Y, Z and get back to him again.

In the meantime — Don’s off womanizing and getting day drunk.

Got it?

Now in this following clip, one of his juniors Peggy Olsen is pissed at Don because he took one of her ideas, changed it a little bit, and the ad he created won some big industry award.

When complaining about the lack of recognition Don says, “I give you money and you give me ideas, that’s how it works”

Then she says “But you never say thank you” and Don barks “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!”

Alright so what? What does that have to do with anything?

Well think about it — what is AI doing for you?

When you use it correctly you are crafting a task for AI to perform.

You are telling it about a product you are advertising, you are telling it about the audience it’s advertising that product to.

You’re giving it all the details you can about who the audience is, what they want, what their desires are, their fears, their wants, their income, their political leanings and so forth.

Then you’re providing it with examples of other ads that have worked and have not worked, competitors and more.

Then you’re saying effectively “Give me 20 taglines” but instead of tomorrow morning — it does it in a few seconds.

In other words, you get to skip being a “junior” and go straight to being your own Don Draper level Creative Director.

Now you can have your own team of juniors providing you with endless ideas and also your own team of researchers providing you endless context reports — and YOUR job is to take the ‘kernel’ and transform it into a winner.

You might think that’s “cheating” but eventually every senior copywriter, Copy Chief, Creative Director / Strategist ends up in this role.

Why?

Because they no longer have to perform the grunt work. They know what’s good and what’s not.

They know how to analyze research, identify trends, and then see a potential in an ad or angle and tweak it to transform it into something amazing.

With AI at your fingertips — you must begin thinking like a “Creative Director” and skip the whole junior copywriter phase.

So really — what has changed in that respect?

The only thing that has changed is that now you don’t have to spend years and years in the trenches earning your stripes so that you can eventually be allocated the resources of a bunch of newbie juniors who can go out and do the legwork for you.

And that’s great — because I can tell you right now it’s not fun to deal with juniors.

Here are a few reasons why…

1. They have personalities that you have to deal with (ugh… people).

2. You have to train them up from scratch and keep “programming” them the way you want and this can take months until the work finally gets up to your standards and they require less hand-holding

3. A lot of them quit and so you have to bring on somebody new and do it all over again

4. They take a long time to do the work (or at least it’s not instant).

AI allows me to create work flows and projects and spend time training the tool in the exact way I want to start getting outputs that meet my criteria and standards and once those processes are created, I don’t ever have to worry about the AI “quitting” and me having to do it all over again.

So in effect NOTHING HAS CHANGED — the only difference is instead of getting a team of juniors to do the grunt work for me to bring me ideas and research, I’ve got AI to do it for me.

The use case is the same, it’s just now more efficient.

Now let’s look at some more things that have NOT changed.

I hear a lot about ‘originality’ dying because of AI. Or “You’re just scraping and regurgitating content.”

Lol — originality? Nobody in this industry is original at all. And all of us steal content and always have. What the hell do you think a swipe file is?

David Ogilvy famously said, “They worship at the alter of originality, whatever that means. Originality is the most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising.”

If you go to Swiped.co and look at a lot of the most famous copy examples, what you’re going to find is that they’re all swiped.

Look at the famous Wall Steet Journal letter “Tale of Two Young Men” by Martin Conroy which made over $2 billion in subscription sales.

Practically the entire thing was swiped and re-engineered content.

For example “The story of two men who fought in the Civil War” from 1918…

And “The Joy of Succeeding while you are still young” from 1919…

Or this ad from 1922 “This book came between two men and separated them forever.”

Or this ad from 1919 — “Earns $30,000 a Year Because He Never Forgets — The Story of Two Clerks in New York City Who Started Together, Side by Side, at Twelve Dollars a Week.”

Now here’s a Facebook ad for Provitalize that has been performing extremely well over the last six months. Here’s the hook / lead and creative image:

Notice anything?

Virtually the same concept and idea ripped from an ad that was ripped from an ad that was ripped from an ad.

For over 100 years now (honestly much longer, but let’s just go with a timeline most people can grasp) the general practice of any great copywriter has been to observe advertising, create massive well-organized swipe files, and then re-engineer those hundreds if not thousands of swipes into different ads for different products.

So what has changed? Absolutely NOTHING.

All AI allows me to do is swipe MORE content faster and go through it more effectively and ideate with that content in a more streamlined manor.

I mean what copywriter in the 1980s wouldn’t have loved to walk into their office with floor-to-ceiling file cabinets organized with swipe files and just said out loud “Find me 20 headlines from these swipes that fit my new Ginsu knife client” rather than start to rummage around for the next 3 days straight, organizing clips on the ground until they find the perfect combo?

Or hell, even just five years ago, with my Google Drive folder filled with 2,000+ swipes — wouldn’t it have been great to just type “find this and create 20 headline ideas” instead of scrolling for the next 3 days straight from morning until evening fishing for an “ah-hah” moment.

I can give AI access to my swipe file for example (and I’m always collecting ads, headlines, and more for my SWIPE file and I have swipes going days to centuries)…

And then I can tell it about the product / service I am marketing and demographic and automatically begin ideating based on that enormous swipe file to re-engineer content and create new ad ideas, mechanisms, and promotions.

The only thing that has changed is the speed and depth at which I can perform an action that copywriters have always been performing.

That letter by Martin Conroy that sold $2 billion subscriptions was NOT original.

It was swiped content and the entire thing was simply a re-engineered ad that already existed.

Another quote from Mad Men in regard to the entire creatives department is “Everybody here traces.”

I remember my world view getting shattered in high school AP art class back in about 2001.

Although it was a public school art class, my art teacher was actually college level and we had some of the best outputs as a class that rivaled even the junior year students at Savannah College of Art and Design.

My teacher at that time who had worked in commercial art blew my mind when he told me how most commercial artists just take various images / photographs, print them out and use an overhead projector to project the image onto a canvas and then just trace it.

Yep.

That’s even before photoshop (of course digital art / photoshop was around in 2001, but my teacher was harkening back to the 70s - the 90s for commercial art).

So when creatives also these days lambast AI as stealing artists’ IP and reengineering it — okay so WHAT HAS CHANGED?!

Commercial artists were always doing that.

AI let’s me take a picture and immediately turn it into an illustration through prompts.

But maybe 40 years ago I would have taken a picture, printed it out, projected onto a giant canvas with an overhead projector and just traced it. Then headed over to the silk screen shop and had it colorized.

Or hell — clipped a bunch of photos out of a series of magazines, organized them together, and projected them.

What do you think Andy Warhol did (who started out as a commercial illustrator).

Listen — this “new world” of AI isn’t new at all.

But it IS forcing you to think differently.

You need to begin thinking like a Creative Director or a Copy Chief from the very beginning.

Meaning your ability to recognize trends in audiences, recognize good ideas / advertising, and then tweak and organize those ideas to create new campaigns that strike the right chord is paramount.

You can no longer expect to be a “junior” copywriter to break into the industry anymore — AI is the new junior copywriter.

Nor can you expect to “just” be a copywriter - meaning that you need to already understand how to analyze data, construct frontend campaigns that lead into backends, understand split testing and iteration, and so on down the line.

THAT’S what really has changed.

Because a lot of the baseline grunt work is being handled by more sophisticated tools — grunts are no longer needed. And juniors were always grunts.

An amazing copywriter now is a Creative Director / Copy Chief from the outset who knows how to spend potentially HOURS prompt engineering / context engineering and collecting data — just to have AI spit out the right copy.

Then YOUR job after it spits out that copy is to decide if it’s good enough. Or to pick an iteration that you know is the best. And to make those tweaks that will make it perfect.

AI on the scene means there is no room for Peggy Olsen working her way up. Your baseline is now Don Draper.

In Part Two I will get into the AI tools that me and other copywriters are using and what they’re best for and then how to get into prompting / deep research.

This series is going to get progressively more high level — so put your thinking caps on and make sure to ask me any questions you’d like me to address in the next issue.

See you then!

• William