Ep #152: Claude is Writing Mid Copy

Transcript

Speaker: [00:00:00] In this episode, I’m gonna talk about your taste and why it matters, and if maybe you having taste in marketing is like the last grasp of humanity that you have as these robots try to take over

Speaker: All right, welcome back. I’m Casey. I think you know that. So let’s talk about this Facebook post that I saw. So I’m recording this on July 2nd. This is, the year of our Lord model Fable 5, day two. And before Fable came back out that’s the new Anthropic model someone wrote a post on Facebook, I saw it, and it said, ” Is anyone else noticing that Claude is writing really mid copy?”

And I thought that was so interesting. So here’s what it triggered off in me. Is anyone else noticing that Claude is writing poor quality marketing persuasion copy? And when you ask a group of marketers, you’re gonna get an answer of “Yeah, I’m noticing that.” The problem is if you ask a group of business owners, they don’t notice it.

They don’t know the difference. They don’t know what good [00:02:00] copy looks like. And I’ve said this before, but it’s like bad copy can have all the trappings of good copy. It can have a headline and a sub-headline, and maybe it even starts like a sales letter, like a classic direct response piece, but it’s lacking in substance.

I think of it like a… Have you ever seen that prank where people take a a balloon and they blow it up and they put it on a plate and they ice it like a cake, and it looks like a cake, but when you poke it with a knife, it pops? It’s what this AI copy feels like to me. And it’s it’s our taste that tells us that it’s bad.

When you’ve tasted something great, you know what great tastes like. Business owners, they don’t know. We’ve got a CMO inside the accelerator, and she’s s- super sharp, and she was talking to a business owner, and the guy effectively said, “I’ll– I can just do it all myself. I’m the kind of person who can do it all myself.”

And he went out and did it all himself, and she checked in and looked at his ads a week later and then a couple weeks later, and the guy’s ads had his own business name wrong. The guy’s [00:03:00] business name on his own ads was incorrect. It wasn’t a typo, it was just a different name. To that guy, his ads had all the trappings of good ads.

They had all the trappings of what an ad should look like, but in reality, they were nowhere near a good or persuasive ad. We’ve got a marketer inside of the accelerator, and he is a classic marketer, like a direct response marketer, the kind of guy who grew up in the Dan Kennedy space. And we were just riffing the other day, and he was talking to me about ugly ads and how much he loves ugly ads, and these are like Sharpies on bandit signs on the street corner, like stuff that’s just a little ugly, and he knows how effective they are.

To a business owner who doesn’t have that taste, they say, “That looks bad.” To him, he says, “I don’t care if it looks bad. I’ll even call it an ugly ad,” but it performs better than anything else he can do. So this idea that we have taste is so critical and important, and I think as AI gets better, and, as you listen to this you might have a day or [00:04:00] two left of Fable 5 before it moves into its token model, at least that’s the current plan with it.

You might notice that we’re in this next generation frontier LLM model, and that’s really exciting to be there and it can do things for you that you want it to do. But if you don’t have the taste and discernment of it having done the thing right How do you know it’s actually producing something good for you?

So I think that we have two options that we can live in. For some of you, you’re marketers with distinct taste, like you know what it looks like when it’s done right. And for you, my recommendation is to be the person with taste and to make sure the things g- that get created are created in your sense of what’s right.

But some of you don’t have that taste because you’re a different style marketer. You’re more of a fast CMO who’s more into deal-making and leans more in the sales stuff too, and isn’t really that strong in copy or in direct response or whatever. And for you, my recommendation is gonna be just to execute quickly, get something that looks good enough, and then let the [00:05:00] market tell you.

And there really is no right way here. It’s really based on you and your pedigree and your experience. So if you’re deeply experienced, do what you know is right build off of that and iterate off of that. And if you don’t know, just speed of iteration is more important. You need to be building a marketing department that acts as a laboratory to test these ideas and these offers, the different guarantees.

I was speaking about that classic kind of direct response marketer in the accelerator, and he’s working with a client, and he showed me guarantees that he’s working on. How fun is that? I can’t think of many CMOs that I’ve talked to that are, like, really working on the guarantee for their client. What does the client say?

“You’re happy or it’s free.” Like a guarantee like that. Not in providing services as a CMO, but like the company that provides services, what is their guarantee? And he’s laying that out. That’s a level of discipline in direct response and messaging and copywriting and customer journey that I think is really important.

But some CMOs just don’t have that. They don’t see it that way, and they see things a little bit differently. [00:06:00] So the question for you is, where are you at? Where do you have taste and discernment, and where do you need to focus on getting it right because you know what tastes like? And then when do you not have the taste and discernment and know what good enough, looks like, and that’s when you just need to do rapid iteration and testing.

So there’s two different tracks, and that might be two different tracks for you as a CMO, but it also might be two different tracks for you based on the discipline. When it comes to copy, you have taste. When it comes to design, you lack taste. When it comes to technology, you have taste. When it comes to financials, you lack taste.

Like you don’t– You have some of it, you don’t have some of it, so you need to be in a space of trusting your gut and working from there, or rapid iteration and testing. And it reminds me of something I’ve, I brought up before, which is the creation and the proliferation of the slop loop. So the slop loop, as I see it, is I can make anything with AI and If I lack the taste to know if it’s done right, and it looks right enough ’cause I one-shotted it, [00:07:00] right?

I prompted the model and it built something. I’m like, “Cool, that looks good. That– I don’t know if it’s good, but it looks good.” So let’s say I one-shot it, and then what happens next? Then I just do the next thing on top of it, and the next thing on top of it, and I just layer slop on top of slop on top of slop, and I never get the feedback of it actually being effective.

The slop loop is real. The slop loop is what is going to happen to your clients if they don’t hire you because they lack taste, discernment, and experience. So your job is to call that out in a way that’s really clear. I heard someone say, all that marketing stuff is easy.” It’s is it easy?

I guess it is. Writing copy is easy. Okay. And you can ask AI to write copy, yeah. But h- Is all of it in symphony easy? Is all of it in symphony and then dealing with the salespeople and the CEO and the CFO and the COO, is that easy? Is it iterating new products, is that easy?

No, those things like all together become complex. But it’s like hiking Mount Everest. Is that easy? It’s as easy as walking [00:08:00] forward until you get to the top, but it doesn’t mean that every step is easy or the whole journey is easy. So I think that is something you have to keep in mind and be able to articulate clearly to your client that marketing individual steps, easy.

The whole thing and someone to hold that context in their brain and then to leverage the humans and the AIs to get the thing done, critically important. I think we’re also seeing a move here of reliance on humans and AI. Where I get most excited about AI these days is just in computer use, so the AI actually on my computer doing stuff.

I find that to be the most interesting place for me. Maybe it’s using Claude Design for an ad image. Maybe it’s helping me with some copy if I’m feeling a little brain dead. But really the thing that the AI tools have been helping me the most with is moving the mouse and keyboard on a Chrome, Chromium window just doing stuff for me.

So if that’s unknown to you, I encourage you to lean into that and figure it out. And moreover, I think that the thing that I wanna encourage you to do the most is [00:09:00] just choose a pet project that you can just bite off and work on. For the last five months, six months, I guess since February, I’ve been I guess that’s five months.

I’ve been working on an app and I’ve been having a ton of fun. I’ve got, I think we’re at 12,000 downloads of the desktop app. I’ve got a number of contributors. I built a iOS app and I built a Android app. And it’s not about the money. I find it interesting, I find it fun, it’s for a hobby.

But the thing that I got from it, that I get from it, is this constant project to work on to leverage AI tools to learn more about how they work and to get better at them. And then when problems in the business come up with my clients or whatever I can solve those problems quickly. I live in an intersection that I think should be, should have a traffic study and in the city, I think I can get the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Safety, I think that’s what it is, to do a traffic study.

And I use the AI [00:10:00] tools to research who the people are and crawl the websites and draft the letters and everything. And a project that I thought about for, I don’t know, two months, just in one evening I was able to get everything done and do all the outreach and do all the follow-up. Now that takes something that would require me to have a lot of, focus.

And I was able to offload that to LLMs. And then I sent it to people, and now I can have real conversations, and I’m speaking in front of the regional community organization in a couple weeks. And, I can move all that stuff forward. Before, that would’ve taken a lot of time, and now it feels a lot more straightforward.

And I think my ability to do that quickly is rooted in me continuing to play and develop stuff that has nothing to do with business or money, but really just to stay engaged in the play and the fun. So I want you to think about these things. Where can you be engaged? Where can you start developing taste?

I’m developing taste in the AI tools. There’s other people that are using it more than me, but I’m using it quite a bit. I’m using it maybe, [00:11:00] I still think probably two hours a day, maybe five days a week now instead of seven. And that’s giving me a sense of taste that I’m developing so I can be better at making decisions in the future.

And if you’re shying away from these tools, I think the time is now. Just choose a project, whatever you want your project to be, just choose it and figure out what’s possible. If you hear this while Fable is out, the encouragement is to ask Fable to do a highly complex task that you never thought was possible before, and have it– just give it a shot and see what you can do to fine-tune it and build something maybe of usefulness.

It will unlock in you an ability to think bigger and to solve a bigger problem and also just to have the confidence in how this stuff works and how to think about it. So I think that’s a big takeaway. You have the taste that you have right now, but also I think you need to be developing the experience so you can develop the taste in these AI tools, so you know when things shift.

You know when you’re getting substandard quality. You know when the model says Opus 4.8 but it doesn’t [00:12:00] feel like 4.8. And if you know what I’m talking about like that hits home. If you don’t know what I’m talking about it might be a worthy thing to consider just finding a project that you can work on, that you can dig in with and get deeper.

All right if you’re interested in joining the accelerator, we’re pretty choosy about who we let in. But the folks that are in are folks that are hungry to grow. I was just in with Boardroom earlier today, and we’ve got a couple gals that are chasing each other to hit a million dollars Canadian in collections.

Pretty exciting to hear. We’ve got other folks that are working a lot less hours and not making as much money, but having an incredible quality of life, and kind of everything in between. If you’d like to see if you’ve got what it takes to be a fractional CMO, just book in a call with my team.

It’s no pressure, and we’ll see if we think you have the experience and if you’ve got your head on straight and we think that you’re the kind of person that we would wanna support in becoming a world-class fractional CMO. Just book a call at cmox.co/call. All right. I’ll see you later.