The Role of AI in Modern Copywriting

0:00John Jantsch:So what if the real opportunity with AI is not replacing human creativity, but expanding it by turning entrepreneurs into better editors, directors, and decision makers?

0:19John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is John Benson. He's a copywriter, entrepreneur, and AI pioneer, best known for creating the video sales letter, one of those terms that people just use like it's been around forever. The format that shapes modern digital marketing, he is long centered on ethical persuasion and authentic connection. And more recently, he developed BNSN, an AI platform trained on high converting campaigns for small businesses. So, John, welcome to the show. Hey, John. Thanks for having me. So let's, I assume you have to do this a little bit of your time when you go on shows like this, but the term VSL, you know, has kind of entered the marketing vernacular.

1:07John Jantsch:Talk to me a little bit about, I've been doing this for 30 years. That was probably 12, 15 years ago, really, when that kind of burst on the scene as an innovation. You want to talk a little bit about what that's done to your trajectory, 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 week and a month rather in traffic costs, you know, people buying that kind of money and going up to even higher than that.

1:50So 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. That's not, never been my claim to fame until after this happened. And then I had to get good at writing copies. So that's what happened.

2:05John Jantsch:That's funny. So you have, so you said you had, you've written a book about gym ownership. Is that what you said? No, I've written six books in fitness. So weight loss, fitness, bodybuilding. Yeah, so that whole thing. Okay, 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? It was picked up specifically for copywriting. Yes. But I studied persuasion in college.

2:38Actually, 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 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.

3:11And that led to me being into the advertising world. And that led eventually to writing a book. But yeah, I actually would have, the book thing came about because I'd always been passionate about bodybuilding and fitness and things like that growing up and athlete. I was an athlete most of my life. And then ended up sedentary and ended up obese in my late 20s and early 30s. I had a 50-inch waist and had a heart attack at 38. So it was like a train wreck of health. And that got me back into it. So the Fit Over 40 book was written based on that, on turning that around. And then I interviewed a bunch of other people because I didn't think I was enough for a book.

3:48So I did 52 people that did the same.

3:51John Jantsch:So I'm curious, and this is a question, unfortunately, I feel like I'm asking almost every guest these days. But how has AI changed that element of copywriting for good or bad? So my goal with AI and copywriting, I've been doing copywriting software since 2010. So this is going to date me a lot. But in AI, early nascent AI in 2017 and working with early LLMs in 2019. So very early into this thing and trying to convince everybody this was the thing that we wanted to do. And the reason why is because I had these courses that I would teach people how to write, VSLs, and I knew how hard it was for me to learn all the copywriting in and outs and develop my own style, which I did.

4:34And I said, well, what if I could have software that would do it for them? And the average business owner doesn't have time to do that. They just want the copy that converts. So I've seen it from 15 years away going, I know this is going to happen eventually. And so we decided the software is pronounced Benson as my last name. It's just my last name without the vowels. Not BNSF like I butchered. Yeah, but it's cool. You can spell it out. That's all right. And so we did Benson. Originally, it was going to be called VSL Pro. It was going to because it was the first AI to actually write a long form VSL.

5:03And 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, I think we could 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 Chaff 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 just, of course, got, we were very early into the agentic phase. So we've just gotten better and better at that.

5:36And so my goal was to replace myself. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to say, if I can replace, if I can use this to write a VSL, which I have, I have sales pages for my own stuff, which I have, then I know that it's going to be good enough for prime time. And that was the goal to do. So, yeah.

5:53John Jantsch:So, talk to me a little bit. We obviously got more to explore in AI, but talk to me a little bit about the VSL itself. I mean, it has become very mainstream. I mean, you hear people talk about it, whether they know what it is or not. They talk about it as part of their funnel, you know, today. So, is it overdone? I mean, is it over? Yeah, every year I hear that. I've heard that for 20 years. So literally 20 years. So the first year I came out with it, I said, oh, it's already. And then Ryan Dias, who's a good friend of mine, made the mistake of saying when he came out and promoted his own little mini VSL course.

6:24And he later gave me credit for, which is really nice of him and everything. But he said, oh, sales letters are dead. You'll never do another sales letter. I'm like, dude, I've never said that. You know, I think everything works if you let it. And VSLs just happen to keep on working. And they, yeah, just ask Agora if they work. I mean, yeah, they work. They work really well. And now people are using VSLs in feed. So you've got the meta ads that are basically short VSLs that use the same psychology just compressed in two to five minutes. So we've been doing that for 15 years as well. So, yeah, and then they go to a longer VSL.

6:56So they still work just as sales pages work, just as webinars can work. Everything can work. It just depends on what you're wanting to sell and how you approach it. But the words are the consistent thing. So if the words aren't there, if the words don't reflect an actual human underneath it, people sense it a mile away, which was our goal with Benson was to create humanized AI. How do we do this? How do we create AI that doesn't sound robotic? It doesn't sound like, you know, chat GPT writing an email is asking a rhetorical question in the very first sentence and, you know, this kind of really bad AI copy that we see all the time.

7:28How do we do this and actually sound like a real A-list copywriter? And that's been our focus for three and a half years now.

7:35John Jantsch:Initially, the large innovation was it was not a talking head on video. It was the words. Is that a key component of it? You 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 was like my friend Craig who writes for Golden Hippo, and he's done amazingly well building a billion-dollar company. 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.

8:14But, 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 the words just right. So all the video in the world is not going to say any of your words suck. It just isn't going to happen. So the words are still the most important thing.

8:31John Jantsch:So one of the knocks on AI, of course, is it's made it very easy for people to create really crappy content. And, you know, you see it all the time now, right? It's like volumes of really bad content. So why are, you know, why can't people create better content? What's the mistake they're making? Is it simply just a matter of being lazy? No, it's the matter of the LLMs or in our case, it's the agents not knowing you. 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.

9:10Like I would ask you if you had an offer and you wanted to, 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 are you, not just what the product does, because the product or the offer, whatever it does, 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.

9:43And 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 just 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.

10:10So 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 AIs 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.

10:45You 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. So it starts feeling more human.

11:15John Jantsch:Yeah, it's interesting. I know is we've worked with clients, you know, a lot of them have a fairly large body of work of them talking about things, explaining their products, being who they are. And that element, you know, allows you to build that voice or that brand. But then there is a technical framework element to it as well, isn't it? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, if you go too far outside that framework, you're going to lose a lot of the things that we already know work so well, persuasion-wise. So, So the goal is not to try to convince somebody of something. It's to compel them to take action on what they already hold valuable.

11:49So all you're doing is aligning your offer with what they already hold to be valuable. And that's the skill of copywriting. And that's something that AI is, you know, I think, obviously I'm biased. So I'm going to say we're kind of the exception. But AI in general has gotten a little better at this. I'd like to think we've led some of the way in that. It's getting to where there's more of that human element involved. So talk a little bit about that, because there's certainly a lot of people, creatives in particular, that have felt like they have this special sauce, this special talent to create that content, to create beauty, to create things.

12:26John Jantsch:And maybe AI has kind of taken that. I mean, it's eventually going to get good at doing video and graphics and things. So where is the human element remain? Right. So think of it as like, I look at it as the difference between using a hammer and using a jackhammer or something that's a powered hammer, right? 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?

13:02or 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.

13:32We didn't 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 this just gives you the ultimate way of doing that. It's like hiring the best ghostwriter we can think of. So if I hired a copywriter to write something for me and they sent it back and I read it and went, wow, that's just freaking fantastic. fantastic, then I could find these little bitty things in there that I only know or that I primarily know.

14:02Now we go, oh, you know, I'm going to change this over here. And then I might find a creative thing that he said or she said that I wouldn't have thought of. And that now becomes a campaign. My mind goes, oh, wow, I didn't think about that. I can turn this into a campaign. Well, that's not AI. That's me. Right. So if the AI wrote it or a human wrote it, it wouldn't matter. And so that's what we do that's a little different because we coach people live once a week so that we can help inspire them to use this, use the words that are coming out and how can we use it to help market their business model effectively.

14:30John Jantsch:So I think one of the areas that obviously is a breakthrough is in testing. Obviously, anybody, any copywriter worth their salt is like, I think this is good, but let's test it. Right. And, you know, now we can test 200 versions for not much more time than it took us to create that one beautiful one. And what do you think that is going to ultimately do in terms of people's effectiveness? If 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.

15:07I 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$100 ,000 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 kind of things. And it's like they can figure out what works.

15:39And 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 VSL, split test, you know, obviously campaigns and ad campaigns and things like that. It's very helpful.

16:00John Jantsch:You've spent a lot of time building a reputation about ethical persuasion, but it's not a very far leap to go to things that are maybe not that ethical, right? To go from just what you talked about as getting people to do something that they want to do or that's good for them and they just need to hear it to manipulation. So, and I feel like AI doesn't really care in some cases. So how do you, what are the guardrails that, you know, really use to, to kind of stay within what, you know, we talked about beliefs, your beliefs. Yeah. Well, the guardrails I've used, actually, that's a technical term.

16:43And 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're going to 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-so shoes.

17:18That 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. So in other words, that prevents the AI from going over the balcony, so to say, when it comes down to overly persuasive language.

17:40John Jantsch:So for some of the folks that you've worked with, you've probably started to catalog kind of some of the biggest mistakes people are doing, making right now using AI. You know, where do you see, you know, people really need to make a shift to make AI more effective for them? 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 and phrases to use, what not to use.

18:18And 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 OpenClaw and Claude code and all that. So 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 Claude and tools like that.

18:53You can do it to a huge degree in our tool because we built it to do that. And that's super important to get the language patterns down. But also, and this is the last thing I'll say, but this is true of copywriting in general. So when people used to hire me, because I don't write copy anymore, I'm solely focused on Vincent, but when people used to hire me, it was very expensive. I was like the 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.

19:25And 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 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 professor, when I was writing in early days, I got writing, work in their values. I figured this out later in my career.

20:00It'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 charge 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. Now it's automatic, which is fantastic.