Everywhere I turn on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, I’m seeing breathless posts about how I, too, can succeed in business by using ChatGPT to automate everything, especially the time-consuming drudgery of creating my own marketing messages.
Consider me a skeptic.
A few weeks ago, I decided to encapsulate the unease I was feeling about all of this. Don’t get me wrong — the technology is unbelievably impressive, far more than I can comprehend, but also overhyped beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
Here’s the thing: my business and all of my clients’ businesses are built on developing authentic human relationships built on trust. It feels inherently anti-authentic to try to short-circuit the process with a predictive analytics-driven algorithm. And I’m not convinced it even works.
Being an ad guy, I wanted to communicate a complicated thought with a single, compelling headline, not four paragraphs of text.
The easy way, of course, would be to slam a prompt into ChatGPT, tweak whatever it gave me, and then ask it to create a matching visual.
Instead, I decided to recreate an exercise from literally my first week as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather.
My Creative Director handed me a brief for a decidedly unglamorous folding postcard for a seafood restaurant that American Express was promoting and told me to return when I had written 100 headlines.
It took a long, hard grind to come up with one hundred different ways of saying essentially the same thing. The first ones were clichés, the next ones were awful, and finally, I got to a few that I actually liked. The Creative Director and the account team agreed, the client picked their favorite, and it went into production.
Within a few weeks, the results started coming in, and the test was expanded to all 50 restaurants in the chain. It was so successful that they dusted it off a year later and re-ran it. A few years later, long after I’d moved on, I met a woman at a party who was the new Production Manager at Ogilvy. I asked her what she was working on, and she told me that they were sending out a folding postcard that they re-ran every year…
In writing 100 headlines about AI and authenticity, I found myself doing two things: coming up with new themes and then creating variations on those themes.
Every time, my thinking became sharper and clearer, the wording became cleaner and more interesting, and the message hit harder. I figured out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it: in my own, imperfect handwriting.
But it wasn’t just the headline.
The thinking that went into this article — again, no AI, even though I do use em-dashes! — became easier, and a myriad of ideas flowed.
The process changed me.
People began responding to the headline, which I’m using as my profile header, because the pro-authenticity message and delivery resonated with them.
Why? I think it’s because subconsciously we recognize human-made objects and appreciate the effort of their creation. More importantly, because trust is the basis of lasting relationships, outsourcing messaging to AI would erode that trust before it could even begin.
No one can compete with AI when it comes to cranking out slop. But since AI can’t progress in its thinking by systematically creating version after version until it’s just right, it’s our job to do the hard work, to do the homework.
According to David Ogilvy, “If you can’t write, you can’t think.” If you’re thinking about connecting authentically with your highest and most valuable prospects, then we should talk. Hit me up.