Copywriting in the Age of AI with Nick Usborne Ep. 610

howdy welcome back to the another fun-filled episode of the unknown secrets of internet marketing i have a great guest for you today and a topic that i think everybody would be interested in um this podcast is going to be called the copywriting in the age of ai copywriting in the age ai with nick osborne he's been copywriting for you know he said 15 plus years before the internet for direct response um you know uh definitely uh uh i'm a student of dan kennedy uh and and uh you know click funnels and everything that's going on there and uh ai has certainly changed the game i would say even with the announcement uh was it yesterday the day before yesterday of um apple integrating in at the core os level chat gbt okay and so um siri is going to be very smart and he's going to be listening to everything we say and um you know it's going to be a very interesting world when i watch even the um you know interviews and podcasts and stuff that i listen to from like ex-google employees and people that are involved in ai they can't even project out what's happening in two years and and certainly uh large language models and and and uh writing content has been at the forefront and it's something that uh nick we were talking about welcome nick so welcome to the show thanks for having me thanks for having me pleasure to be here yeah no i um i'm i'm really excited um you know your your even your course uh future-proof copywriting i think is like really right at the forefront of of what's happening because we were talking about uh pre-show how uh the ai checkers right and and we have a number of enterprise clients that are saying hey wait no ai content don't submit ai content right and you said you had uh talking with some freelancers that are submitting content that are writing the content or working with a writing shop and you know it's

definitely writers um and maybe ai is used to write the outline but it's being written by humans and the ai checkers are saying no this is ai even stuff that i've written and published and i just check it and i know i wrote it um you know portions of it are saying hey this looks like ai so you know google's having a really hard challenge with i think they threw up their hands um a while back and said hey if it's good quality content like we're okay with it right um right and so i would love to hear kind of what you're seeing on the bleeding edge uh with with how copyright is being impacted because i would even tell you you could say hey write uh write whatever write this ad in the style of dan kennedy and it'll do it you know what i mean and so there's there's some some challenges with it so really interesting to kind of hear your viewpoint on a lot of this stuff so yeah i'm i'm like a long-time copywriter and i and i teach and train a lot of writers freelancers and in-house teams and and i'm kind of seeing both extremes some people are saying no i'm not going to touch it i don't trust it it's useless it's just a word guesser you know these tools they can't write so that's one end the the other end people are like all in and and sometimes being over-reliant on ai um because ai like like people is is imperfect and so you'll see bias there or you'll see the hallucinations or just getting stuff wrong um i think that the smartest group i see are the people in between who recognize that there's enormous not just productivity benefits but the the way i use these models i'm really attempting to become a better writer by using them um and i and i don't use it i don't look at these models something like gpt4o as simply a software tool um i actually have a

more of a mindset of collaborating with these models yes so i i kind of i kind of treat it with a weird respect as a co-intelligence it's not intelligent the way a human is but there there is you know i don't just say hey write me tweets or write me an article on xyz i will get into conversation with these models and i'll say okay what do you think are interesting topics for this audience in this kind of topic area give me some titles then i'll say hey number three that looks interesting give me an outline all right this is looking great let's write like give me a first draft and then i'll do something like and this i think is what a lot of people don't do is i'll pause and i'll say hey do you think there's anything we're missing here or anything i'm missing here and it's at that point that you're actually collaborating rather than instructing it's no longer it's a software tool it's a co-worker i say what do you think i'm missing and like i'm getting to the habit of doing that more and more because i get some really great feedback of like wow i would not have thought of that well you know i wouldn't have thought of it that way so like i'll i'll half the time say please um when i'm talking to it but but i think it's really healthy to to get into conversation with it but i also like like even like a learning tool if you if you don't know like i think it's super helpful if you have a good foundation of what you're trying to do right like if you're trying to move into a vertical that you don't understand at all you should treat it as like a learning tool to learn more about that segment right like so if you don't understand target audience um customer personas um you know the customer journey like you know what channel you're you're you're advertising you need some background information

to to work with the prompts to to get the right answer you can't just say give me the right answer and what you're saying is you're you're building the data set and you're building it contextually to to understand what you're asking for to get the prompt right based on the past information to to get the right answer and and so yeah i mean for sure like when people claim that they get disappointing output i i kind of probe and ask them about their their prompting habits or prompting process and and usually the problem is not with a modelist but the person's prompt so to your point i mean i i create a lot of detail like if i want to say write a blog post if i wanted to write me a first and second draft of a blog post i will give it a lot of information i will give it the the reader persona or avatar i'll say this is who we're writing to this is who you are please this is your role you are an expert in abc and then i'll say look here's specifically what i want you to do and here are some examples like say if i wanted to write a sequence of three emails i'll say look here here's 20 emails we've done before that proved to be really successful so i learned from that so i might be pasting in um you know a thousand words of instruction or i might do it a step at a time um but yeah i'm giving it a lot of information to work with so so i think that whole thing and the other thing that that i do a lot and that i teach a lot is to deliberately add add in where ai tends to be a little weak which is on the emotion side the emotional intelligence so a lot of what i'm teaching and in my course that you referenced like i'm teaching artificial intelligence plus emotional intelligence because emotional intelligence is like hey these

models are amazing they demonstrate remarkable you know what they do i think is absolutely remarkable uh but they they've never fallen in love they've never eaten ice cream they've never walked on the beach and felt the sand between their toes so that experiential emotional side of being human is something that they've read about but they've never felt firsthand so that's something what i try to do is to to weave in kind of emotional intelligence and also prompt them to be more emotional which sometimes they get and sometimes they don't yeah i know you can say write this more conversationally like there's there's definitely different things that that you can say and also i would tell the audience um that i have tested out very very very detailed uh prompt sets uh versus uh more maybe shallow prompt sets and the amount of difference i'm getting is is not very high so i think that there's some some background research that people can do to understand kind of what the prompting categories are and how it's going to write because you know i think that well i don't know is mark twain or something that said hey i would write you a letter um what or if i had more time i would write you a shorter letter or something along those lines so it's very precise like i i like how it gets to the point and it's like hey say this better say this more professional say say this in a way and like you know i'm seeing a lot of people that don't know um maybe the english language great um to to to use that as as help like how do i how do i say this more appropriately um you know but i i think your point on the the human emotion the human experience is that's what i think you have to do because ai is giving like the data set of the baseline of whatever it knows right and you need to share that that real world experience so

google says eat expertise authority trust and they added um the experience component and that experience component is your personal experience with whatever that you can insert in into whatever you're collaborating right with with with ai and um uh really offer something uh above and beyond or expert level uh or or experiential knowledge in in a specific area um and and i think that that's what's really important i think that like you said like the productivity tool this just makes people better at what they already know how to do yeah and certainly if you don't know something you can shortcut um uh learning by using as a learning tool by asking the right prompts and and i i think there's going to be a lot of training applications um for ai right for sure um and there is i mean to you to a point you you're touching on a little while ago it's i i will i kind of do this kind of iterative prompting process so i might say i was a while back i was writing a sales page and it was about networking and conferences and things like that and i had gbd4o do a first draft and i said hey let's just start with like a like a story an anecdote which you'll often see in a sales page and it did and it made up this story and when i read the story i was like huh because it actually reminded me of an experience i had at a conference of where i saw someone walking towards me and i couldn't remember their name and it was like really embarrassing so what what was happening there is it prompted me to remember something and then i rewrote the opening with my real personal experience and when you do that there is a there's a kind of authenticity of when you share your own experience there's an authenticity that it's very very hard for ai to replicate so i'm going back and forward and in fact it was the model that

prompted me to think of my own experience which i then added into the copy which made it better so it really is this back and forth and and i think also that's really important in that it helps differentiate your output so i see services online now where it says hey come to us and we'll create your your content at scale you know here's your prompt library here's your template library and i'm saying guys if you use the same models with the same prompt library and the same template for your emails or blog posts if everyone is using the so nick i want to take it back to talking about your background on on how you got into this so i i think it's really exciting what's going on with with with all the ai but i think um really understanding um the history of copywriting and kind of where it is and then like looking forward is important so can you just for the audience's benefit uh benefit and my benefit i i uh i know a little bit about you um but i would love to kind of hear the story of like how you got into copywriting and like what you've seen it do because i i mean i think it just it moves the needle and like dan kennedy um just i mean he he he was just brilliant um and i've read so many of his books um and he started actually doing the target like a book for every target persona right like so a lot of the the same stuff um and i i would say he's where i really cut my so share share with me a little bit about um your background how you got into it and some of the clients you've worked with and all you know stuff like that oh sure okay so uh i i got into it in 1979 so please don't do the math um and i've been a copywriter ever since that's however in my living and i worked as

a trainee copywriter in an ad agency in central london uk and it was the kind of tail end of mad men i guess it was it was a time when the creative department was king or queen and the creative department in that agency i kind of felt i was at home you know as as a copywriter and i spent many years doing print advertising at that agency then i left there and was a co-founder of a direct response agency with three other people and i was doing that for a number of years then i moved to canada i was creative director of an ad agency in toronto i've worked with apple i've worked with the new york times with yahoo with microsoft i've worked with a lot of large companies and medium-sized companies as a writer and then in 1995 i created my first website which was fairly early uh because i just loved it this this thing like this internet thing and and back then the internet it wasn't really a commercial space much back in 1995 it was more this kind of democratization of media it was like this this amazing place where anybody could be a publisher no gatekeepers it was gorgeous and there was this kind of dream and like i was straight into it and by the by 1997 i'd given up any kind of direct response physical like direct mail i was 100 online by 1997 and again conferences and just just loving it because it was such a dramatic time and then you know in the early 2000s i remember you know well we got got into some social media stuff and then of course we things changed it's you know we got these very large companies taking control much more control um and all of a sudden it was you know google and amazon and microsoft and facebook and just these massive companies kind of becoming the new gatekeepers uh so that that early dream kind of disappeared a bit and i guess for artificial intelligence i'm

always interested in what's new uh i started getting into that about five years ago i had a small agency where we would do it working with chatbots for companies and some of that was just like conversational design if this then that but we were also using some rudimentary ai we were using watson um and and that was like it made my brain hurt it was like it wasn't a conversational interface like we have now it was really complicated doing ai back then and then along comes in in november of what was it 2022 uh gpt 3.5 and that just blew me away it's like i tried it like within a week and and it's like it's like 20 years had passed in in in the course of a weekend it was just this unbelievable thing and i guess we take it for granted now but that first week that first few tries with with you know chat ai just blew my mind so so i've been really really interested in that but as a copywriter and you you talk about dan kennedy and the kind of other copywriting greats that they'll all tell you that the most important thing in persuasive writing is emotion you've got to connect with people emotionally emotion is the trigger that that drives engagement and drives conversion and as i was getting into ai as as a productivity and as a writing tool i thought this is insanely useful and interesting and fascinating but it's kind of weak on human emotion which is such an important part in communication so that's where i really got into my message of look ai yes go in go all in you have to go all in as a writer as a freelancer uh but don't forget emotional intelligence don't forget that that emotional side because that's where you as a human are still way superior uh to these ai models so basically you asked for the story and it's kind of a long story uh but that's how i got here no i

think that that was like a hugely key piece right is a or ai well i i think after they get a big enough data set right like they they will figure out the emotion i mean the stories that they tell are incredible right um but i mean currently where it is right now um you have to trigger that emotion um that that real world experience as we've been talking about is is is so critical to the human experience and the finding those pain points right like it's like right pain and greed or like what are the those are like kind of two of the two of the main factors that drive people to to make decisions and so knowing that when you're writing copywriting and and leveraging ai that that's a really critical piece um walking into it um i can uh tell you it's it's kind of funny uh when it when chat gbt came out you know everybody was like hearing about it you know i was on panels and people were like talking about it but like what it was but no one was used really using it but me and uh i was uh early on uh which i you know i'm already outed for this so um you know so i think it's okay but i was uh i was posting like on my on my wife's um my wife's facebook uh like you know uh you know we're celebrating this or we're celebrating that and i would use ai to say you know what would be the most you know what would be the the best message to say about this right and then it's like it's taking all the experiences it has and giving the you know bell curve best answer right so like it you're hitting the target right in the center and then i added you know some some personal personalization to it so so it it is mine and i can tell you like she was over the moon um and then and then about

six months later you know she was just like oh my gosh like you know this just you know she's sending me like hearts and like super you know and then she figures it out because i had sent her some article we were because it was like what industries are going to be you know displaced by this so i think that's a a real concern and uh i think you know right people that use ai um i i had a head of copywriting uh at our company and she was adamantly opposed to using anything ai she was like you know like hey it threatened her job like i this is not something i'm interested in doing um anybody on my team we're not going to do this so like in some leadership meetings there was a little bit of kind of like okay so you're like this is a no-go path right and i i i kind of after a few conversations were like um this is the like way forward they're like like you're trying to you know water's coming down a river very very fast and you're trying to go up the river i said you know this is just like we have to do this or we're going to get left behind sort of thing um and and and and so you know she she had a different direction and and you know like everybody walks a path for a certain amount of time and then you know they they may go their separate ways they may reconnect and so so so so so we um we certainly changed changed the model over the last two years of of what we were doing um and you know when we talk about seo um you know contents the engine that that drives seo um and then there's a lot of kind of signals that you're sending so that the ai on the other side so you got an ai now talking to ai and there's like degradation of models and that's why you got

to add kind of that human experience that's why elon musk i think when he bought twitter he's like let's get rid of all these bots because he can't train a data set on you know ai talking to ai because you're getting to a homogeny of of of knowledge you need to keep feeding it um rich data and and and so um you know i i don't know it's been it you're right it is evolved very very rapidly and like we were talking about before we can't even project out the future what what is what are your what are your uh predictions i guess on on where you see it heading and going because you've you've been walking both of these paths pretty early on um where do you see it really um i would well like like like like you say you know the answer is i don't know um but but i i i got a few guesses so so one of the things that happened in the last few months is that wpp which is the world's largest ad agency group they own like the top 100 ad agencies in the world including like iconic agencies like ogilvy and they they are just inking a deal with google to work with gemini and they are basically going to use gemini across these 100 top agencies um to basically handle ideation campaign ideas copy um images art direction so so ai is going into the agency world in a big way and they're not the only agency group doing this and and i kind of get it because the math of this is irresistible to a company or to an agency or organization um so sometimes i see copywriters like getting confrontational with a company saying look you're if i write copy for you it's going to be better than what you can do with these models and the company's saying we agree but when we use gpt for our equivalent we're getting content written 100 times faster on one cent in the dollar

compared to you so yes you're better but the math says we shouldn't work with you anymore so so there is i see that pathway evolving where companies do automate more and more and more of their you know the age on the agency side and on the the company side but but i think there will be a pullback a pushback and and this is something that we began to touch on earlier which is what i call the sameness trap if you use the same models with the same prompts and the same templates you will get output that looks strikingly similar because of course you will using the same tools to generate the output and that for a company is the last thing you want you've probably spent billions of dollars like generating a particular brand character for your company you the last thing you want is to sound the same so there'll be this tension i think companies will be drawn to the math of it they want to maximize their use of ai so they're getting maximum output for minimum expense but at the same time they've got to protect their brand they've got to protect their points of difference and that's where the human then leans in and says i can help you with that because when you're talking about my origins back in the early days when i was in london and that was like the mad men days creativity was key it was all about creativity and like when i i'm a huge fan i work a lot with these models but i've yet to see any of them write a headline where i think oh my goodness that is incredible like they're all workable headlines but nothing really fantastically creative so so i think human emotion and creativity at the differentiating points and i think that's where we lean in and keep ourselves relevant as human creatives writers you know i agree with you on the headlines and and certainly when i've taken copywriting courses and and the headlines are more

important than the rest of the copy because you gotta you gotta get them in the door right you gotta get them interested and i do agree with you that the headlines aren't aren't showstoppers yet um i i think what will probably end up happening is um a lot of uh you know you've worked with some big banks like there's a lot of limiting of using the public data right and so i think that they're gonna silo a lot of their data and i i hadn't heard this deal about the ad agencies i actually know someone that sold into that um kind of conglomerate uh where they're they're independent but you know they're they have a parent um right and uh i think what probably people are going to do is feed their take the model you know silo it like wall it off feed their own data all the stuff they've done and you could do that for a particular brand here's everything we've done for that brand and then generatively predict you know where could this go right and and i've seen that even individuals like so you take all the stuff you've ever copyrighted nick and and you put it in there and you can make a bot that could answer as you could answer right and and so what do you think about that because that's where i i see it i think it's happening so so the the third largest agency group and i forget the name it's based in in paris france and they also own about 100 agencies and they're investing hundreds of millions in their own model and they're doing exactly what you're talking about they're saying to all their group the agencies in the group they say we want all the data all the creative all the results everything you have in your silos for the last 20 years and we're going to feed it into our model so our model is is not a public facing model like chat gpt it is just looking at the

creative and they're copying the results and the data from our agency world for 20 years to now so yeah to your point that that is that is being built right now um so the one the one thing i'm starting to think about now is you you did a lot with chatbots right and and i think that so so you're you're you're also well well versed in in that track um what are you seeing i mean i i see chatbots replacing like customer service replacing sales um yeah i mean like where the agency it makes sense right it it totally makes sense uh at scale to to do that um how is that going to change the landscape do you think i mean do you think it's going to there's going to be a lot of shedding of creatives um i mean i think that there has to be but like what does it look like like so say these get implemented you know you you fast forward a couple years now what is the landscape look like because um now remember data is the digital like your data is the value right so then people are maybe buying agencies to get access to to all their years and years of um copy and client base to build the data sets i've seen also i wrote an article a while back like someone else coined it it was like the intimacy economy okay so the personalization of ai can understand somebody and communicate and be much more um you know thoughtful than even a human could be in a lot of cases and so like using it from a therapy standpoint but also people want personalization like i mean we were on a call yesterday doing a deck presentation and we were like here like we were talking about case studies as like part of our our process here's about the company here's the case whatever they like cut us off and they're like what how is that going to be applied like specifically to us

like they were like a disc profile like a d they were like we want to know how that affects us directly they don't even want to see it at it it was it was a little bit like hey like this this this is a rhyming it's not exactly but it rhymes of what you're trying to do um and they're like no how is that going to be applied to our model and what what what are the results going to be and and um and i so i thought that was super interesting and so i think this personalization this this intimacy of connection um because there's so much information out there it's almost like information overload i even have to like take a break so i can think and get my thoughts together because i'm getting hit with you know technology 24 7 um like going fishing or something like that i like to get away from the technology you do i get i get cycling each day or kayaking just to get away from it but but to the personalization point that that is coming fast and furious you you mentioned the the deal the the apple thing with with siri being upgraded and having access to gbd4 and things like that so you imagine now that within that ecosystem on on your iphone imagine that they want to sell you something they know you intimately everything that's on your phone or everything you do every like they so every single message so it's so if apple is selling something then they they can they can change that message person by person every single owner can get a slightly different version of that sales pitch based on their who they are and what they do and how they interact with the world through siri and and through their iphone so so they could well become a time where every time we look at an ad unless it's print but every time we look at a digital ad or digital messaging or email there is an

element there that is personalized specifically for me or you as an individual so this is like if when i go back to my direct mail physical direct mail junk mail days it was the dream of like one-to-one marketing but you could never do it back then it was very rudimentary uh and we've been getting closer and closer to that idea of one-to-one marketing and now we are we're just inches away from that and where every marketing message can be changed according to the recipient and their experiences and their fears and desires and their lifestyle and everything so there was actually a google data dump about a month ago that revealed a lot of stuff um and and i and i'm on i've been i've been really busy and need to do a podcast about that that'll probably be happening very fairly soon um but one of the things also that i am seeing that that google's doing and they've come out and said it is all search okay so so a lot of what we do you know rankings for different search terms there's long tail key phrases like qualifying for topical authority there's there's a lot that kind of goes into the strategy of it um but also tracking keywords is really important for clients okay right and google came out and said every search is going to be personalized based on the previous searches of that person just like what apple's doing where they're going to know us better than we know ourselves and they're going to write the copy um and and they're doing this with uh uh uh like it it's called performance max so it's basically hey give us a bunch of different taglines give us a bit different images and then the ai will figure out what's working best but then you layer on that personalization component to it as well so you're testing it in mass but then you're testing it for that individual and i'm starting to see like even in search results hey oh that kind

of caught my attention right like okay you know that that's something i might be interested in do you think that do you think that's working well yet i think that from what i'm seeing is they are spending an absorbent amount of money to add um the ai horsepower to the searches and it's actually more expensive for them to do organic searches but they're trying to protect market share as as a as a search platform because of all the inroads that that microsoft ads um and bing are making and then bing even has like a dedicated team that's like hey let's press this advantage and so you know we're really getting to this battle here and i mean even elon musk is coming out and saying like we're gonna put things in a spare day cage because there's security issues here because it's learned it's just learning right like it's just learning on from everybody and everything and then it's like it's going to be the war of the ai's like whoever has the biggest data center who has the smartest ai is gonna and who knows what they're going to use it for but it it's going to be an interesting it's going to be interesting that's all i know and i think and i think i hey i agree and and i think as we go forward we'll see more and more of this technology but but i also see something else which is there will be a place for say agencies boutique agencies to say the greatest we have we have found out in the desert of technology we have found the best creatives that the human creative directors the copywriters the designers the art directors who still know how to create outstanding advertising and i think there'll be a market for that and there'll be almost like a hunger for that is is that yes i think we'll be overwhelmed by the by artificial intelligence in marketing and communication and sales but that it'll almost become a kind of must-have for some

brands to actually go back to the human creative and say you know no ai just be an amazing creative person and come up with some campaign ideas i think there will always i think be a place for that maybe maybe i'm maybe i'm being romantic but actually i think it can give you uh an advantage to also tap into that human creativity well i mean people do business with people they know like and trust and and they want to know that the other person on the other side of the table cares um and i think putting everything in autopilot with with ai i i think it's just going to be a lot smaller i think that you know that's why they're talking about universal basic income because well there's going to be the people that understand how to use the technology and that have like a firm basis and and understanding in in in whatever the art is that that you know that they're they're they're bringing value to the world in and then you apply it with that and it increases that productivity um and then you know there's gonna i mean maybe it's gonna make time for a lot more art right like where a lot of people have have time like i mean that was what i was told right when like email was coming around and like technology was gonna help us work less and so that we could um experience uh life more and make our world better but what just happened is like you know work harder work faster you know the cycles you know um no i agree with you so we're kind of getting to the point of of wrapping up i would love to hear any kind of final thoughts um you know what what you're offering i think it's super important that people understand uh how to use ai if they've heard about it but haven't stepped into it certainly uh like like like my past um you know uh director of of content um

you know like it's coming and and i think you should i think you should embrace it um and yeah i mean you know my my message to every every freelancer and everyone writing within within company uh marketing groups is is lean into this to the max um i think you're gonna you know you either ride the wave or you get crushed by it right um and i don't think there's really much of an in-between um so yeah i think you have to lean in and learn it because it's here it's a transformational technology to to to try to ignore it it's a bit like the candle maker ignoring edison's light bulb you know ignoring all you like that it's not going to make any difference because that technology transformed the world or the model t ford coming out you know if you made horse buggies you may have hated the the motor car but it doesn't matter what you think of it it's coming and it's the same way it's the same with ai you may not like it but it's coming so my recommendation is lean into it but also i think for that point of differentiation either for differentiating yourself and also for differentiating differentiating on behalf of your clients lean into the emotional intelligence side as well because emotion has always been the most powerful factor in in marketing communications and engaging and in driving conversions i love it oh nick how do people get in touch with you if they want to hear more get some training and uh you you use and leverage your knowledge and help so okay so so my my my website is nickosborne.com so n-i-c-k-u-s-b-o-r-n-e.com and if you get a nickosborne.com forward slash seo i have put together like a landing page there's a there's a free download you can sign up for my newsletter you can get a discount on my my course um and just poke around the website i have i have i have a blog there and i have tons of hundreds

of blog posts on this topic on the site so yeah nickosborne.com forward slash seo awesome well nick it was a pleasure to have you on uh we'll have to maybe check in down the road and see see how things are changing i i i really like the kind of uh visionary forethought kind of look of where things are going because no one knows like it's an interesting time we live in so thank you so much nick for coming on uh really appreciate it oh thanks for inviting me as you can tell i love talking about this stuff interesting times interesting times all right everyone bye-bye for now