Objection-handling and frame control meta-masterclass

I just may.

Angel wings. Lotus flowers. XRP tokens. We're going to win.

AI slop copy is regular infantry. You have to go nuclear.

I asked so you don't have to. [Excerpt from a conversation with an LLM] QUESTION: Why is AI so atrocious at copywriting? ANSWER: Because copy is a taste problem, and models are average-taste machines. Good copy is a decision to leave most of the true things unsaid. A model is trained to be complete, helpful, and reasonable. That produces explanations. It does not produce copy. Three specific failure modes: 1. It regresses to the corpus. The internet contains two giant piles of “good” marketing: brand ads and content sludge. A model will ping-pong between those piles every time you push, because both look like high-quality copy in training. 2. It cannot feel the flinch. You know weak or cringe writing when it lands. I only know after you say so. The model smooths sentences until they sound like every other sentence it has seen. Smoothing is the opposite of copy. 3. It treats feedback as a constraint pile. A human holds the job in their head and throws work out. A model tries to satisfy the last instruction and every prior one, which is how you get committee copy: technically compliant, dead on the page. Underneath that: no cost. A line that dies in front of a sceptical reader costs me nothing, so I don’t protect against it. Human copywriters write fewer options and hate most of them. That’s the filter.

Real big on direct, big direct guy

The autumn lock-in

Alien: Anthropic

Many such cases

They weren't far off.

One for the 'AI = copywriting extinction' gang: 'In the past, the idea was worthless because execution was always tremendously expensive. With AI, execution is simple, which means those with ideas can suddenly execute them.' More of a premium on ideas. Not less.

'Retracing subhead rejection history...' — Claude FFS

There is more effort, struggle, learning and teamwork behind this than I can explain. It is a milestone on the way to more milestones. But feels good nonetheless.

Good seats/Bad Seeds

Direct Response goes far beyond ecom. This is from 1999, for the Serbian market.

Sloptopia didn't come out of nowhere: 'One way of thinking about the past half-decade or so of life on the internet is that we’ve all become test subjects in a grand experiment to see just how bad “good enough” can be.'

Paid acquisition is the orchestration of many complementary moving parts, from the creative to the mechanical, the intuitive to the analytical. If you're in that game, conduct yourself accordingly. If your biz needs paid acquisition, get yourself a conductor.

The summer lock-in.