Chat GPT reminds me of vintage ads.
Specifically, it reminds me of a first-year marketing course, where we laughed at the fools of the past who were convinced to buy cigarettes and soap from print ads laden with doctors' recommendations, sexist puns, and full blocks of illegible text. Clearly, we would never be convinced by anything so obvious.
What we forgot was that marketing evolves.
Those vintage ads were successful. They paired style, memorable lines, and social proof on magazine pages seen by thousands. People bought the soap and cigarettes. Then audiences shifted online, print died (sorry) and those same ads are now condemned for a lack of nuance and variation. The rules for copywriting changed and 'traditional marketing practices' are a thing of the past.
Copywriting is a strange beast of a term. It includes website CRO and “copy that converts!”, SEO-optimised keyword-padded blogs and articles, social media captions and scripts, B2C and B2B product descriptions, LinkedIn bios and client proposals. Much of it follows certain rules; templates that can be studied and mimicked.
And now, all of it can be done by AI.
At least in theory.
I’ve seen several LinkedIn polls asking users to tell the difference between copy written by AI vs Humans. Often, the polls show a lack of clear distinction. The robots are winning!
But, my bet is this. Over the next few years, it’s going to become very obvious which companies are relying heavily on AI software, and which are backing human writers to develop the next generation of copywriting rules. The reason why AI won't 'take over' marketing, just yet, is it still needs human oversight to determine what suits each company, the subtleties in brand tone, and to create the truly innovative and new.
AI can follow the rules, but it takes humans to create them.
