Direct Response Copywriter | Sharing screwups from a decade of direct response health marketing
Marbella, Spain
Joined November 2020
- Tweets9.7K
- Following1.3K
- Followers5.4K
- Likes25.8K
Spend all day using incredible A.I. tools....
Then have to take care of something random in ads manager and you realize...
This shit is designed to piss you off. It's deliberately bad, they want you to hate it. No other explanation
13
788
Yes its the best I've found. Like anything else it needs proper set up and input but once that's handled it's very strong.
Plus it's not constantly being nerfed like other models. In fact the opposite is true since the team is always shipping ways to make it stronger.
Plus the video gen harness it has, image creation is very good and I've been using the page builder to make some seriously good pages for us.
I had Grokbot run a test on Elevenlabs today and my notes are:
- EXTREMELY good for voice acting, tonality and lip sync
- Probably a good place to get Drama ads done
- Def not the most cost effective model, it was very expensive for a full VSL ad (2+ minutes)
- Quality we very high, esp sound quality.
Same exact think with Grokbot. Just a coincidence I guess
Opus 5.5 turned to absolute garbage today.
After using it for 3 weeks nailing everything i threw at it, it can no longer do the most basic tasks.
@ClaudeDevs fix this!
1
13
1,979
Unfortunately this is true the last 48 hours.
I had 0 issues with useage limits - Grokbot was so sharp I gladly paid more.
Sucks to see they're doing the same as Anthropic. Nerf current build right before the update hits so the update feels amazing
Grok Bot has been nerfed incredibly hard since the @elonmusk tweet about the costs being unsustainable.
I'd assume they're routing requests to Grok's models now instead of Opus 5.5 or anything near equivalent.
Massive loss in quality this week
Current brand is in its 11th month. And this is precisely what we've done.
We also run a higher AOV bundle & save offer rather than our normal subscribe and save offer so we can pull revenue forward during this time of the year and max profit so we're better prepared for Q1 when subscriptions are the better play.
For most brands Black Friday is seriously overhyped and so much unnecessary time is spent on preparation
All you really need is:
- Banner on website (optional countdown timer)
- Add BFCM offer to hero image on PDP
- Launch a bunch of offer statics
- Take best evergreen video ads and put BFCM banner on them
- Plan a few more emails over that period
All in all takes like 2 or 3 days max and even the above stuff is optional
Only exceptions here were a serious amount of time and planning needs to go into it are brands that rely heavily on gifting
Most brand would be better off just focusing on their evergreen efforts and launching new products etc
2
24
2,711
Agree with large chunk of this for sure, but I've returned to manual research over the last 3 months.
I may have Claude pull high engagement posts and stuff for me, but I absolutely will not have Claude go through it because Claude intentionally leaves out the juiciest stuff because its so woke (a big reason I switched to Grokbot btw)
Imo you MUST go through those threads and comment sections yourself and you will see what I mean - the best, most graphic, most emotional stuff is not getting grabbed by Claude.
It's also just healthy for many of you to be learning how to manually research.
Sometimes I take for granted that a copy project for me used to be 3-6 weeks of pure research on a topic, manually reading studies, comments, and sifting through customer call transcripts for nuggets of gold
If you're letting Claude serve you your research then you're not getting anything different than the next guy because Claude is likely serving them the same damn thing
You want to be in there, scrolling around, reading through the conversations, responses, and even arguments that people have in the comment sections.
Don't just let Claude serve you what it "thinks" is good, go get it yourself.
If you're selling supplements to 50+ women (you're smart), you need to stop doing research on reddit/amazon/or wherever the fuck you do it currently.
The majority of women over 50 are not on reddit.
They don't comment on youtube videos.
They don't leave reviews on Amazon.
But they do post in facebook groups/communities.
I swear the fucking goldmine I've just uncovered in a facebook group is insane.
The angles that I'm about to rip will go crazy.
I wouldn't have been able to find these angles if it wasn't for this facebook group.
On top of that, a lot of people post images and guess what... you can run them as natives nigga.
And you don't have to manually do the research. Add claude to your browser and it will read through hundreds of posts for you and find the best most unexplored angles.
Game over.
Copyrizzler.
This is the way.
I'm at 21% usage this week.
are you running out of grok bot usage now?
you're probably the reason.
i run 8 bots. this week, every scheduled routine across all of them is only 22% of my usage.
the other 78%? me chatting with them, and them handing work to each other.
so here are the 4 questions i ask:
1. is the bot actually needed, or can another bot take the job?
2. can the job be a script? then the bot just runs the script instead of wasting tokens each time.
3. does the bot automate a digital chore? weekly carts, receipts, reminders, etc. if not, what's the point?
4. can one bot own the routine and delegate to the others? ie. don't have 5 bots each running their own check every morning.
the absolute biggest cost is ME... 53% is just me asking "quick" questions.
1
16
2,165
Mf'ers will really be like "Grok Bot changed my business, I'm running almost everything agentically, I have a team of bots that can do more than most employees and I slashed by opex but now I'm paying $250 in extra credits every months what a rug pull!"
3
25
2,639
Steve Erl retweeted
if you are not building with AI at the center of your organization, training your team on AI-first workflows, you're going to get your ass kicked.
the force multiplier that AI is for our team is shocking, and compounding more and more each day.
You know that Louis CK bit about a guy furious the plane wifi went down, when 15 minutes earlier he didn't know it existed.
That's everyone complaining about Grok Bot rate increases right now.
1
12
1,519
This week with Grokbot + Stefanbrain
- 11 Long Form Primaries
- 15 VSL Concepts
- 20 static ad concepts
- All BFCM video ads ready
- All BFCM static ads ready
- 0 video editors used
But yeah agentic video editing isn't here yet.
Next week we begin stress testing. Can this output be doubled? We'll see.
"What doesn’t work anymore is changing the hook text, cutting the first 3 seconds or swapping the music and calling it a new ad."
This is mostly true - those things "can" still work but no where near the way they used to and certainly not that often.
What he's describing below is the correct way to view "iterations" now. Change the perspective, change the story, put the avatar in a new scenario.
Basically, find new ways to grab the customers attention with something fresh on the same angle.
I think of it in 3 buckets.
Bucket 1 are the fastest, quickest and most efficient changes the team can make with the least effort to just get something new up to surround the winner - changing the speed the ad is played at, changing the ethnicity/sex/gender of the person in the ad, changing the song in the song ad. They may not bring you new huge wins but they can work often enough that I consider them good hygiene. Plus Editors (or agentic editing) can make these changes almost instantly now.
Bucket 2 are format changes that probably require some minimal rewrites and changes - Song ad was a winner? Can you remake this as a podcast ad, a talking head ad, can you kick it out to a creator for a yapper, can it be done as a LFP etc etc.
Bucket 3 is the hardest and most time consuming - complete rewrites to change the perspective or scenario behind an ad while hitting the same person in a different way that maybe pulls them in better.
Junior strats confuse this too often and they simply rearrange the words in the script and call it new - instead of thinking through another way to present the problem and the solution.
It's sort of like when Clayton Makepeace would talk about why he'd have such an endless list of bullets/fascinations in his copy. And how each one was unique - because you never know which one of them is gonna be the thing that pushes the customer over the edge into the sale.
9 of 14 bullets may not matter at all to the prospect, but 1 of them does so you want to make sure you hit that.
You’re assuming the angle died because one ad stopped working. Could just be people are tired of watching that exact video.
You can still keep the message and change everything around it.
Say you sell a sleep supplement and your winner is a woman in bed saying “i used to wake up at 3am every night”
Take that same story but have a 50yo guy tell it in his kitchen at dawn, a nurse coming back from a shift, or just make a static of a phone lock screen showing 3am
The message is already proven, you’re giving it a completely different execution.
What doesn’t work anymore is changing the hook text, cutting the first 3 seconds or swapping the music and calling it a new ad. It’s still basically the same video for Meta. Thats what i meant by iterations being overrated.
New angles are a different thing: a different problem, a different reason to buy.
Someone waking up at 3am vs a founder who can’t fall asleep because his brain won’t switch off vs someone who want to cut outmelatonin. Same product but what makes them buy is different.
We do both >> new executions of proven messages + new angles to reach other buyers. Happy scaling 🫰🏽
best in the game
HIT SOME NICE NUMBERS IN OCTOBER
$3m in spend for a client on our ads
$1.1m spend for another client
And $600k for another client
Here’s what worked for us:
- yappers
- authority ads
- ai animation
- comedy ads
- 3 reasons why
- founder ads
- mash ups
- AI vo and b-roll
- problem/solution statics
Spam some of these, get some spend and thank me later
I've been doing this but with video lessons. Costs me almost no extra time too, just film myself doing things I'd be doing anyways, or film myself giving it feedback on a job - same way I'd send a loom to a member of the team for things we wanted fixed or improved
I run my business with 25 Grok Bots.
The tip that fixed most of their bad output wasn't a better model.
It was this one: brain dump by voice, then make the bot "restate this in your own words."
Half the time, it had misunderstood me.
One line before it starts saves hours of fixing after.
28
2,252
Steve Erl retweeted
people who qualify themselves by how much of other people’s money they spent on ads is the dumbest shit literally ever
“i’ve spent 500m on met-“
