The Role of AI in Modern Copywriting  🔗 **Source:** [The Role of AI in Modern Copywriting](https://share.snipd.com/episode/048dcf96-1c4c-45c4-a79f-aee50db65e71) ## Highlights - **How The VSL Transformed Jon Benson's Business** - Jon Benson created the video sales letter (VSL) in 2006 and it immediately transformed his business results. - A month after using a VSL for a fitness offer his sales scaled to a million dollars a month in traffic-driven revenue. Transcript: Jon Benson I suppose? Yeah, believe it or not, it's 20 years old this year. 20 years, okay. 2006. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. It's, I mean, it was, it, yeah, everything changed. The day that happened, 30 days later, everything changed for my offer that I did it for, you know, we went from like struggling on my second book that I wrote in fitness, and then went to A million dollars a and a month rather in traffic costs, you know, people buying that kind of money and going up to even higher than that. So it was crazy. And then all of a sudden people started calling me and asking me to write VSLs for them. And I'm not, I wasn't a copywriter. I, that's not, never been my claim to fame until after this happened. And then I had to get good at writing copy. So that's what happened. That's funny. John Jantsch So you have, so you, you said you had, you've written a book about gym ownership. Is that what you said? Jon Benson No, I've written six books in fitness. So weight loss, fitness, bodybuilding. Yeah. So that whole thing. Okay. John Jantsch So, so are you one of those people that that was your passion and you just had to, you had to learn how to do marketing. And so, you know, this whole idea of studying persuasion and conversion and innovation, is that something that was really just picked up because you're like, I better get good at that. Jon Benson It was picked up specifically for copywriting. Yes. But I studied persuasion in college. Actually, I was studying MLP in college. I was fascinated by how you can basically get people to listen to you and hear what you're actually trying to communicate and motivate them to make changes based on things that are, that You believe at least are good for them. So you're not trying to manipulate them, you're just trying to motivate them. And I was always into like, how can I motivate and connect with people deeper? So I studied NLP back then, way back then, and you know, mail order course from Bandler. And that got me into Tony Robbins and that led me into even deeper persuasion issues. I just was always really fascinated by it. And that led to me being into the advertising world. And that led eventually to writing a book. ([Time 0:01:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7b380317-0290-4c07-a2d4-bf343dc4160f)) - **Specialty AI Produces Humanized Longform Copy** - Benson's early AI training produced a 7,000-word VSL that sounded like an A-list copywriter rather than generic ChatGPT output. - He emphasizes specialty training and agentic architectures over generic LLM outputs to preserve authentic persuasive voice. Transcript: Jon Benson And I was working with Jasper at the time. They were called Jarvis, but I was the first guy in the copywriter to train anything on an LLM. And they ended up with a 60 second VSL out of all the training. And I thought, yeah, I think we can do this in a different way. And we ended up being, you know, having a 7,000 word VSL come out of our AI and it sounded like a real VSL. It didn't sound like Chatt GBT, it didn't sound like Claude, it sounded like a real VSL. And so that was our claim to fame. And since then, we've just, of course, gotten, we were very early into the agentic phase. So we've just gotten better and better at that. ([Time 0:05:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b09a8bb7-3c70-4997-88de-4788ecce80bf)) - **Words Still Drive Conversion More Than Video** - Words remain the core of persuasion; video can help but cannot rescue weak writing. - Benson notes split tests where video beats words-only and vice versa, but consistently: great words drive conversion. Transcript: Jon Benson Know, it depends on what you're trying to sell. We have seen split tests with video beating words only, and we've seen words only beat video. It really depends on what it is. And what works today, a year from now, will be something you want to reverse. So for a while there, there was like my friend Craig who writes for Golden Hippo, and he's done amazingly well building a billion dollar company from he's an amazing writer but he was One of the first guys working with Gundry to do a lot of video on the front end of the VSL but you know talking to him behind the scenes so to say we know that it's still like a Google Doc and The words are everything so he slades over the words man getting, getting the words just right. So all the video in the world is not going to save you if your words suck. It just isn't going to happen. So the words are still the most important thing. ([Time 0:07:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a901a6b5-f36a-4a36-83c7-e7e9636e43f8)) - **Train AI With Your Buyer Alignment Profile** - Train AI on your values and voice before asking it to write copy; otherwise it will default to internet-trained clichés. - Use an assessment (buyer alignment) to capture values, target audience, and forbidden phrases so outputs feel human and on-brand. Transcript: Jon Benson And this is where it gets a little bit hairy for people because there has to be an element of your personality that's okay to be known. Just as the same thing would be true if you went and hired me as a copywriter. Like I would ask you if you had an offer and you wanted to do whatever your offer would be. I would start asking you lots of questions that you probably don't think is related to your offer. Now, I'm not talking about like when I'm asking all these really intensive personal questions, but I want to know what your values are. I want to know where you stand. Who do you want to attract as customers what are you against what do you not just what the product does because the product or the offer whatever it does i that's not that difficult what's Difficult is to make that story resonate with people that will automatically hear and go oh that sounds like something that i can automatically relate to and that's what a really good Copywriter does we don't try to sell people that are not interested or just completely need to go from a level one to a level five awareness. That's really not what we want to do. We want to target people that are already there because you have plenty of people like that. But if you write, if you go into a chat or Claude or whatever, and you say, write me an email or write me an ad or write me a BSL, and they don't know who you are. They don't have a good feel of your words, feel of your personality. It's going to write stuff that's schlocky because it's trained on the internet. So if you just think about this for a moment and everyone listening to me will get this. It's like, can you imagine training anyone to do anything by telling them, go read the internet and get back to me tomorrow? That's what we've done with LLMs, right? It's like, well, that's going to give you a lot of knowledge, but most of it sucks. I mean, so most of what's out there in copy is terrible. So it's learning models have been terrible. So that's why specialty AI is like ours and in our industry, you have to have it to where the people that know what they're doing actually trained individual, in our cases, agents, that Use not one LLM, but a dozen, you know, can use as many as we need one model or other, but you know, a dozen, whatever models we know are going to be the best ones for the right tasks. So that takes that. And then what we do is a little different. We ask people to go through an assessment to figure out what are their values? Where do they stand? Who are the people they want to attract and how do they want their words to appear? So we take care of the persuasion element, but also we see that with the words and phrases that are closer to who they are as a person. ([Time 0:08:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/510fbd68-793e-46e6-9c95-a00d0fa91373)) - **Use AI To Amplify Editing Not Replace Creativity** - Treat AI as a power tool, not a replacement; offload grunt work and use the saved time to finesse and add signature human touches. - Use AI outputs as a draft to edit, personalize, and inject unique ideas that become campaigns. Transcript: Jon Benson It's a mnemonic hammer or whatever they call those automatic hammers. So you've got an automatic hammer and there's a skill to hitting a nail with a hammer, right? The question is, as a carpenter, is that really what you want to be known for? Is I strike a nail head perfectly with a hammer every single time? Or if you could have that done for you instantaneously with something that just tapped it in, what would you do with the time that you have left now? You would probably spend that doing the creative portion of things and like, oh, I can do this. I can build this. And this is what the same thing is true of AI and copywriters. It's like, we're not trying to put people out of business. We're giving them the ultimate power tool. So a lot of the grunt work, a lot of the research, a lot of the structure you don't have to worry about. Then you can go in and finesse it. And everything sounds so much better when you do that. We want people to do that. So there's still a knowledge factor that I think that copywriters need to have. And sure, some people do use tools like Benson. They just don't think about it. They click a few buttons and they go because it works. But the copywriters, they want to put their signature on it. And that this just gives you the ultimate way of doing that. ([Time 0:12:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7cdeb0e9-6bbf-4485-aa5b-954e3d3d3372)) - **AI Unlocks High Velocity Split Testing** - AI makes massive creative split-testing practical, enabling hundreds of ad or headline variants to run quickly. - Top teams run hundreds of ads simultaneously and rely on scale testing to find the one angle that explodes growth. Transcript: Jon Benson People knew what the guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars at this stuff do, if you knew the amount of testing that went into it, most people would just give up. They would stop. I'll give you an example. I have a good friend of mine that is the top of their industry on meta and they flew out to meet the actual real meta heads of ads because there's the ones that they give people and there were Ones that give these people, you know, they gave them a hundred thousand dollars to spend just to play with, just because we want to see what your new creative team can do. They will run 800 ads at a time in any given month. They're running 800 versions of an ad. So there's just no way to do that effectively without AI. And that's when they were the early adopters to this. Now they can run those kinds of things and it's like they can figure out what works. And guess what? One or two might scale or three. It doesn't matter how good the writers are. It's like some hook, some angle may work and that angle, if it works, can just skyrocket a business. So I think it's one of the best things about AI is the ability to split test leads of a sales letter or BSL, split test, obviously campaigns and ad campaigns and things like that. ([Time 0:14:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a4f7813-43fd-4357-a3d2-75e61bca61ee)) - **Set Linguistic Guardrails Based On Core Values** - Build guardrails by mapping values to allowed and forbidden phrases to prevent overly manipulative messaging. - Benson's buyer alignment report produces words to use and avoid, and the 'never say' list is the strongest guardrail. Transcript: Jon Benson Well the guardrails i've used actually that's a technical term and we use specific guardrails in our agents that are, that when somebody sets up Benson correctly, we use, it's called A buyer alignment profile that we have people go through. In fact, I'm going to give it to your listeners for free. They can go through that and get their buyer alignment, which is a 15 page report of the words and phrases you should use and not use. And that exactly fits that bill of that sets up guardrails. It's like, use this because I value X, Y, and Z. What do the words of I value X, Y, and Z translate to in copywriting lingo? Because it doesn't mean like if I value freedom, you don't want to use like, hey, since you love freedom as much as I do, then you're going to love so-and shoes. That doesn't make any sense, right? And so it's just too ham-fisted and heavy-handed and all that stuff. So what phrases do people that love freedom as a core value, what usage would they use and what would they never say? And it's what they would never say that the guardrails. ([Time 0:16:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/838d60eb-3577-4fb2-907d-25c65841f616)) - **Train Your AI Or Use Platforms Built For Training** - Stop expecting AI to be the full answer; actively train it with your materials and memory to get reliable outputs. - If you can't engineer deep memory into tools like ChatGPT, use specialty platforms built to be trained on your content. Transcript: Jon Benson To stop thinking of AI as the answer and start thinking of it as a tool is a huge step in the right direction. Also to train whatever AI you're using. Ours is built to be trained. So it's copy paste kind of thing. But if you're going to use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you need to be able to train it with who you are, what your values are, what words or phrases to use, what not to use. And you'll find that the memory on this is pretty short. So unless you know what you're doing, and then we can get into things like instances of open claw and clawed code and all that stuff, that's very technical. And most people don't want to go down that rabbit hole. I mean, our guys go down that rabbit hole because we're kind of geeky when it comes to that. But most people want just the best answers that they can without having to become a software engineer. So to do that, yeah, it's a lot of knowledge. It's a lot of time to say, here's who I am and here's what I want you to do. Now you can do that to a limited degree in chat and cloud and tools like that. You can do it to a huge degree in our tool because we built it to do that. ([Time 0:17:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ad7d4ec-5ccc-41cb-b02a-0ffd01305892)) - **Paid Research Revealed Clients Didn't Sound Like Themselves** - Benson recounts charging high fees for bespoke copy and discovering clients' own writing often hindered results. - He spent thousands on research to map words and phrases for clients before automating that process via AI. Transcript: Jon Benson So when people used to hire me, because I don't write copy anymore, I'm solely focused on Benson, but when people used to hire me, I was very expensive. I was like probably the most expensive guy in the world for like five or 10 years. And they're certainly one of the most expensive guys in the world. And they would hire me and I would give them a first draft of something, like usually a BSL or a sales letter. And they would say, oh, this doesn't sound like me. I go, yeah, I know. It's because you suck. It's like, yeah, you don't want to sound like yourself, man. You really don't. And I mean that in kind of a funny way. It's like the copy they were writing was just terrible. And so they were trying to make their terrible copy kind of polish, you know, put lipstick on a pig, so to say. So you can't do that. You have to like be able to understand some basic persuasion and then work in, and this is what I didn't do when I was a proof, when I was writing in early days of copywriting, work in their Values. I figured this out later in my career. It's like, oh, I can work in their value statements and figure out what the words are. But that was just tons of research. We charged like 15, 20 grand just to do the research, to figure out like what are the words we should use and shouldn't use and phrases and all that stuff. And unless somebody came along that was like an identical client, we have to do that all the time. ([Time 0:19:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/98239b4b-cb2e-45e7-92e6-9cb6f4b2f261)) - **Use A Buyer Alignment Assessment To Define Voice** - Take a buyer alignment assessment to get a 15-page report of words to use and avoid and align copy with your audience. - Benson offers freebuyerprofile.com to generate the buyer alignment profile in 10–15 minutes. Transcript: Jon Benson Sure. If you go to freebuyerprofile.com, that's freebuyerprofile.com, you can take our buyer alignment profile, which will test your users. Figure out your core values, help you figure them out. We use a lot of different standardized testing models in these questions. And in about 10 to 15 minutes, we'll get you a report that you can use in your marketing and that will tell you words and phrases that you should think about using and words and phrases you Should definitely avoid. It will give you all the NLP, all the magic sauce while still sounding like you, and will also help elucidate what you already hold valuable and the people that you want to attract. ([Time 0:20:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e44be5a0-4407-4f25-9175-549be5cc9421))