Why AI Content Isn’t Converting: John Benson on Persuasion, Values & What Actually Converts

0:00A father's absence can have a serious effect on a child. Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school and 11 times more likely to exhibit violent behavior. I'm attorney Jeffrey Leving, and I've been protecting the rights of fathers for more than 30 years. Dads, don't lose your important relationship with your children. Call 312-356-DADS. That's 312-356-DADS for help and a free father's rights information kit. For more information, visit dadsrights.com. When do the images we see online become too much for us to handle? Job at Writers Theatre is an intense psychological thriller that skewers the insidiousness of the internet, the meaning of work, and the ramifications of a secret revealed.

0:47The off-Broadway sensation and edge-of-your-seat thriller about big tech and even bigger secrets is on stage at Writers Theatre April 9th through June 14th. We're the only AI that's even talking about it, but it's also just conceptual for people. And that's why I love helping people do this for free to find their values, to see what words and phrases work for them and what words and phrases probably won't work for the people they want to attract. That's a big thing to make AI more humanized. Also, just more in tune with who you are as a person. That's super important. Otherwise, it's just going to become this robotic slop that no one wants.

1:22We've been pushing against that from day one. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. AI is making it easier than ever to create content, but not necessarily better. So the real question becomes what actually makes something resonate? John Benson, the founder of Benson.ai. B-N-S-N dot A-I and is credited with inventing the video sales letter, one of the most effective formulas in online marketing in history.

2:08Now he's focused on how human creativity and A-I work together. John, welcome. Hey, appreciate it, Ryan. Thanks for having me, man. We don't get like creators of inventors of necessarily certain marketing formats every day. The VSL. I hear it was an accident. Yeah, it was as much of an accident as you can happen. It was one of those things out of necessity. I was doing YouTube videos, but before YouTube videos were a thing to do, really. And I was trying to sell my second book. My first book did really, really well because I didn't write the copy. I wasn't a copywriter. I was selling half a percent conversion.

2:39So doing videos and it was in the fitness space. I'll do it. I don't want to do another video. I was burnt out on it. So I decided I would just talk. This is back in 2005. There wasn't any VSLs at all. There wasn't a big demand for graphically oriented videos. That was a big thing. YouTube was only going so fast back then. That was bandwidth was an issue. I decided, well, I'll just talk and then put the words on the screen. And what's the worst that could happen? And that ended up being the first VSL. And it crushed my conversion the first time I sent it out. So I was, what if we do one longer?

3:05And then it just kept getting longer and longer. And so they ended up being the long-form ugly VSL that everybody knows about today. I'm old enough to remember what that was. I was about to be moving to New York for an eight-year stint, doing newspaper ads for multiple wireless carriers and other things. That was a glamorous advertising job, let me tell you that. Everybody thinks the ad agency world is glamorous. I'm thinking back to 2005. Print ads in 467 newspapers. We toiled over the littlest details. Now things are moving so fast. And I'm hearing this, John. I see you create the VSL. You were ahead of that.

3:37You were ahead of this AI curve, which we're going to talk a lot about. But do you consider yourself a pioneer? Like I sense a humbleness in you that's kind of like, well, you know, kind of accidentally created it. I mean, there's got to be something there that's driven you towards platforms that ultimately become what they've become now. The VSL was sheer luck. Sheer luck combined with the fact I studied NLP of all weird things in college. I was fascinated by the psychology of persuasion and not in a manipulative sense, but how you can win friends and influence people, so to say. And I started studying NLP.

4:08Richard Bandler just came out with his mail order course. This was like before Tony Robbins and all that stuff was really big. I mean, Tony was out. I'm not that old, but I didn't know much about his stuff and then got into Tony and his stuff. I took that NLP and also, ironically, I owned an advertising agency in Dallas. As you know, red and black, they were the colors that everyone used for everything. If you wanted something to convert for 15, 20, 30 years, that's why the red and black and the title case came from the idea of originally every slide was a title case. I'll take credit for this.

4:40Everyone reads the headline. So what if everything looked like a headline? And I know that sounds ridiculous to say this out loud, but that's literally what my train of thought was. So I made every slide a headline. Every slide had to be only about 15 to 18 words. And that ended up being that very hypnotic pattern. To this very day, I still see VSLs that are all title case. I stopped doing that like a long time ago, thinking maybe that wasn't a thing, but it worked really well. Originally, the AI was very intentional. Back in 2010, trying to figure out how can we break language down into something a computer can understand.

5:07And people don't have to learn this ridiculous skill and art of copywriting because it's very hard. We started as almost a Mad Libs project of filling in the blanks and then walking people through how to fill in blanks and how to think through language patterns and the software would do the rest. And that was early nascent, wasn't AI, it was just very nascent for the training of what eventually was going to be used in a lot of the LARC language models. And then started working with the early LLMs and I couldn't do anything back then. I couldn't complete a sentence. We've been in this for a while and figured out, I think, what works and what doesn't work, but especially how to make it sound human.

5:40We had the very first long form VSL out of an AI and definitely the ones that convert. It's pretty bad if you go to Claude or Chad and say, write me a VSL. Even if you say write it in the style of me or Gary or whomever you want to pick as your favorite copywriter, it's going to do it. It's going to miss a lot of things because it's pulling from its knowledge source, which is knowledge sources, the Internet. And when you train something on the Internet, as far as how well to write copy, it's going to suck because most copies suck. So it has to be really specific training. And we figured that out really early on.

6:09We built the first RAG system for copywriting software with AI. And it went on from there. Founder of BNSN.ai, I paid for your software when it first came out. BNSN, the first iteration. I don't know how long that's been. I feel like it's been four or five years ago. Has it been longer than that? Three and a half, yeah. Three and a half. I got hit on the Facebook. We were doing something at the time, and I paid for it for like six months. It was very much worth it. I had a client at the time with the agency that I was like, I need something to help automate some of the work with social captions, other things.

6:41And it helped. I was only like a six-month project with clients. The only reason I didn't keep using it. But it was good. Someone from your PR team, I saw your name pop up. I said, no, we're getting John on here. I've paid for his content. I know how good he is. Literally, the best thing was your Facebook ad used probably your own sauce. They say eating your own dog food, like using your own secret sauce. And it was great. It got me in. But then the product was great. I did use it. It helped. A father's absence can have a serious effect on a child. Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school and 11 times more likely to exhibit violent behavior.

7:13I'm attorney Jeffrey Leving, and I've been protecting the rights of fathers for more than 30 years. Dads, don't lose your important relationship with your children. Call 312-356-DADS. That's 312-356-DADS for help and a free father's rights information kit. For more information, visit dadsrights.com.

7:39I was ahead of my time, too. Like, you were way ahead. I was ahead using AI to write some copy. Like, I was like, hey, hey, get ahead. If you went back three and a half years ago, you totally were. It was right at the birth of ChatGPT and wasn't even in the consciousness of everyone. And it was a year later before anyone even knew really what ChatGPT was. And to this very day, a lot of people think AI, they think chat. We're still very, very early on this curve. It seems like we're not with all the agentic stuff going on. And if you go back and listen to my podcast in the coaching that we've done for three and a half years, we were talking agentic AI almost two years ago.

8:11And we've been on this for a long time, knowing where it's going and pretty good track record of pointing out what's coming up next and what people need to be focusing on. This is when we really made a shift recently, about six or seven months ago. And it was this aha moment. My wife and I went to Spain and we were coming back from this festival we went to where everybody's like in this peace and love vibe and everybody's happy. It's like where you get out of your own way for a little while and we're on the plane ride back to Rome. And it just kind of dawned on me. I said, you know what? We live and die by our core values.

8:38And we have the greatest group of people. Why would we want to attract anyone else? And I always taught in copywriting, you should just write according to your values because when somebody reads it, it's going to seep out. But I would teach all these strategies for using phrases and words that align with certain values. And now there's a whole science behind it. You look at spiral dynamics or you look at Gerard's work on this. So I said, well, what if we just made the AI do this? What if we just started talking about, because we were doing it from the position of the value should come from what we call a blueprint.

9:06But what if we actually use somebody's actual real values, either their personal values or their business values, whatever they want or both? And what if we weaved that into the copy so that when somebody reads it, they're going like, whatever this guy is selling, I want. Or I'm going to go out and have a beer with this dude or this girl or whatever. Or this doesn't resonate with me at all. And so you immediately just shut down people that you don't want as customers, but you massively attract the ones that you do. And we started doing this and just everything started clicking. And we realized how poorly general AI, even really good writing AI, like Claude is probably one of the best writers.

9:41It has to understand your values and how to subtly weave it in there. It took us six months of training, which is a long time to be training agents. So that's really what we're proud of right now. We're the only AI that's even talking about it. But it's also just conceptual for people. And that's why I love helping people do this for free, to find their values, to see what words and phrases work for them and what words and phrases probably won't work for the people they want to attract. That's a big thing, to make AI more humanized. Also, just more in tune with who you are as a person. That's super important.

10:07Otherwise, it's just going to become this robotic slop that no one wants. We've been pushing against that from day one. John, the word persuasion comes to mind when we're talking sales copy. The art of persuasion, always in sales. Can AI actually understand persuasion or is it just mimicking it? Understanding is a loaded term for sure because you're dancing on AGI, general intelligence. And I would say that it understands it better than a minus list copywriter understands it. In the same way that copywriters understand things, we can mimic things. A lot of times you'll find copywriters that will just go out and find a Gary Halbert letter and change all the words to a different offer.

10:43They don't understand what's making that work. They're just making it work and it might work and it might not work. To understand it, that takes a lot more. And now over the past six months in particular, with the rise of the agentic stuff, AI starting to what I would consider understand. Benson has understood it for two years, but we had to build agents before agents were around. They were called chains. We had our own name for them. we came up with nomenclature that is now used in the industry, but we had to figure out if this really needs to be like, it needs to start with a, with a baseline and it needs to edit it.

11:13It needs to be smart enough to figure out if this is right or wrong. And that's what agents do. And they're calling tools and skills or whatever they're called. We were doing that before that. In that sense, it would understand it, but in the sense that it understands it the way that we use in human terms, probably not, but it does it so well that the line is really narrow and it's getting more and more narrow toward the point that you can't tell the difference. If you put your value what we call your buyer profile as a value alignment profile. If you put that into your AI copy, it sounds immediately different.

11:44And you don't know why. Unless you're a massive student of psychology or in NLP and all this, if you don't know why it sounds different, it just does. Because it's not obvious. If let's say that you value freedom, it's not going to start off like, hey, listen, if you dig freedom, you're going to love this new product. It's nothing like that, right? It's nothing so ham-fisted. It's not a sledgehammer at all. But when it's really subtle. Like what do people that love freedom say? How do they say this versus somebody else would say this, the sentence being whatever. And that takes a lot of data. That takes a lot of thinking, understanding to that point.

12:19Yeah. I think that you could qualify that as understanding. And I've been saying this from day one. I still think people need to know copywriting, meaning understand the basics of it because it doesn't matter how good the AI is. You need to understand if it's good or not. It may sound like you, but is it good copy? There are certain things that you simply don't know. You have to test it, but there are certain things that are just categorically not the best copy that you could look at. And I think that's why I'm big on education. We do live coaching once a week because we're just so big on teaching people everything we can.

12:48It's a massive thing for us and it's been a massive thing for us and will always be. I don't think it should ever be a machine. It should be a human working with a machine as a power tool. And this is the power tool to end all power tools. This is industrial revolution scale change of the world kind of thing. Yeah. You're on the forefront of it. You live in the rabbit hole. You're definitely probably going down it daily. Thinking of persuasion, what are the core elements that have never changed in sort of that art in the skill of persuasion? Persuasion is rather than trying to coerce somebody into making a decision, you compel them into making the decision that aligns with their values is how do you compel someone to take action based on what they already believe is true.

13:27And the already believe is true part, it should be underlined and highlighted and circled and tattooed on somebody's forehead, because they need to already believe that the base of what you're saying, the conclusion to your argument is true. I've studied, I was a philosophy major, so I've studied rhetoric and building a syllogism in copy is incredibly important. Premise one, premise two, conclusion. People do this all the time. And I just had the podcast with Todd Brown. He said, the argument is the most important part of it. And I don't think it is. I think the argument is essential for the most important part of persuasion.

13:59Most important part of persuasion is compelling someone based on emotion, based on what they believe to be true, but that has to be centered around an emotional state. It's the same thing litigators do during a trial case. They will say the evidence points here, the DNA is here, you've got the fingerprints here. But when they go to the jury, they go, now you know all this, but what would it be like if you let this man go? Can you picture the next family that this man may encounter? Would you want that guilt on your conscience? Well, that's all emotion. They're using emotion to solidify the argument that they made.

14:32They're using emotion not based on something that they don't believe. It's something they already believe. They didn't believe before the trial started that the fingerprints were on the weapon. They didn't know. They just simply didn't have a belief. They were agnostic. But now that they believe this, that's great. What do they believe that's never changed? They believe in family. They believe in justice. They believe in et cetera, et cetera. That's why if you look at how litigators pick juries, if they know the case is a little flimsy, they're not going to lean on somebody that has a high value of mercy.

15:00They're going to lean on somebody that has a high value of justice. And then they will talk to them based on what they already believe. So that is, to me, the essence of persuasion is you make the argument, but then you justify it emotionally based on what people already believe. I've always said that people think with their head and they buy with their heart. I had a dream once that I made that statement up. I don't think I did. I I think I heard it from someone really smart like 10 years ago, probably someone like yourself. When you were talking, I was thinking about mentalists. They're really strong in persuasion and making you believe you see something, even if you really didn't.

15:29That's where the ethical part comes in, where we're not trying to fool anyone into believing something that they don't ultimately believe. We're trying to dig into and elevate beliefs, core values, and other things that align to persuade them to buy something. Matching aces here versus we're not trying to make a diamond a spade. Am I getting it? You are very, very succinctly, too. The one thing that I want to say is this philosophy of selling things based on ethical persuasion is harder to pull off in, say, the e-com space where you've got you're selling T-shirts. OK, why should they buy this T-shirt over this T-shirt when they're just basically identical?

16:07OK, let's say that they are identical T-shirts. Well, that's much harder to pull this off with. You can still use the same principles by simply saying a T-shirt in general will give you X, Y, and Z. And you already believe that this emotional state of A, B, and C is already true. But it's much more difficult because people buy on impulse and they just want the best deal and those kind of things. Where this comes in handy and where it's essential is when these products, they can be competitive, but there's something that really does or has the potential to alter somebody's life on a fundamental level.

16:38A T-shirt probably won't do that unless you don't have any clothes. then you would just give somebody the t-shirt. But talk about somebody who wants to take a fish oil capsule, something I wrote a lot in the fitness space when I originally started. And so there was a lot of weight loss kind of offers. Somebody needs to lose weight. Somebody wants to improve their heart health, et cetera. We focus as copywriters on not just the weight loss or in the fish oils case, not just this is going to help you lower triglycerides. You're not getting enough of these essential fatty acids, which are important for metabolic health and all that.

17:08We just ask one question, and this is a great formula for persuasion. All of what I just said, you can lower your triglycerides. And I just always teach people the simple sentence, so that you can fill in the gap. So now you can, or so you can, or so that you can, or whatever you want to say. You can lower your triglycerides. So now you can, what? That's the thing that matters. The lower triglycerides is the syllogism, is the logic. You can rest easier next time you go to your cardiologist, your heart doctor, He's going to look at you and go, wow, I haven't seen your labs look this good in 10 years.

17:40With a heart like this, you might live to 100. That means just think about how many more years, decades you can have with your grandkids and maybe even their children. Nothing I'm saying is not true. It's just all completely rational, logical, but it's emotional. And it's something they already believe. It's because they already believe they have a value of family. I know that. I know the avatar inside and out for this offer. Not every offer is going to have a value of family. If you're writing for the pickup audience and you're writing to single guys, the value of kids is going to be way down on the scale.

18:09It might be there kind of hidden underneath the surface. It probably is there. They're trying to get to it in a roundabout kind of way. But a lot of people just don't share it. So you need to figure out what their values are. Confidence, freedom, power. These are if you wanted to write to that audience. That's basically what we do with AI now. What we used to have to do through lots and lots and lots of research, lots of practice, which is kind of cool. When I think of so that you can, I feel like we're tapping into the why. And a lot of times you hear people say, you know, what's your why? People that have no why they do things and what matters to them, which is these avatars, that's what we're tapping into the why.

18:45Why they take it is because of why they do anything. Because these core values, core tenants matter to them. Isn't so that you can, isn't that a why? It is the why, but it's a series of whys. So many people think, for example, I could take the fish oil example. For those that are not going to bore you with fish oil data. I used to take it and then I was like, is this even doing anything for me? Yeah, it's incredibly important, especially if you have any sort of Nordic genes in you like I do. It's like I have ridiculously low levels of omega-3s in my diet. It's for one thing that the way I eat for fitness training and stuff, it's not high.

19:17It's not very conducive to that. But also if you have naturally higher triglycerides and there's a lot of reasons why people take omega-3 fatty acids. But so many people as a copywriter, you would write, you would talk to that because a lot of people are educated now. Not when fish oil first came out, but now they're educated enough to know that, okay, I know I want to take this because I want my lipids to improve. I want my heart health to improve. They know the general basics of it. What kind of a story can you tell around what an improved heart looks like? Because people know that it's like, well, yeah, of course you want to avoid a heart attack.

19:46Of course you want to not end up a heart crippled. These are kind of obvious. But if you state it like that in the copy, it's like when I first looked into this, I was looking into it because I'm like you. I want to avoid an early heart attack. Who doesn't? And I don't want to end up a heart. No one wants to end up with a hard curve. I want to have a long, healthy, wonderful life. What's the one thing you didn't think about was the X. I didn't think about how awesome this was going to be for allowing me to eat more of my favorite foods without spiking my insulin levels. Because believe it or not, here's how this works.

20:12Now I can eat my occasional Oreos and my insulin stays. I'm just giving you an example of what I'd be talking about. I have this other benefit. And I, as a copywriter, you would have these series of benefits. And another thing I didn't know about this, which is crazy, is it really helps target some of the stubborn belly fat because this fat is made of this brown adipose tissue, blah, blah. You can see where research is super, super important right now. I'm just riffing stuff off the top of my head, by the way. What AI does very well, you ask how well does it understand? AI is like what Benson, in particular, is very good at digging into this research.

20:42And it's about to be even better because we're about to unload a research assistant people can tap on to if they want the extra research stuff to go out and dig up all this data. And you can know like here are nine extra things this thing will do that you didn't know about. And then you could say just now write it in benefit form. Oh, this now lets me do this. Well, now it feels like this, but now it's still filtering through people's core values. And so now it's going to sound like it's going to sound like me versus sound like somebody else. So, yeah. So that's where the art of copywriting meets science.