David L. Deutsch talks copywriting fundamentals, from signature legibility to systematic idea generation. He offers free reports at speakingofwriting.com, a $97/month mastermind, and a paid course called Idea Power. The conversation touches on how AI homogenizes ideas and why human judgment still matters.
Questions this video answers
speakingofwriting.com (also DavidLDeutsch.com).
"Copywriting from A to Z" — 26 ways to improve response.
$97 per month.
Chapters
Right. You're eating a cookie and you're, you know, it's really dry and sticky and you want to have milk. Right? Milk goes with certain things and the absence of milk is, can be really bad. So they played, they played with that. So I also played with it in terms of, you know, got copy. And it was a way to just, it was just a way to get into a discussion about the importance of copy through that classic campaign of, you.
Know, and I see that you, you, you have it in the form of a letter. You have your name, you actually have a signature, which from all I've read in copywriting books, the signature matters. People do ab testing of a blue signature ink versus black. How much thought do you put into that? Even things like the color of the ink when you're doing like a traditional direct mail paper direct mail campaign.
You know, the main thing with something like that is readability. And interestingly, the main thing with the signature is legibility. Right. If you see like a scroll, you trust the person a little less when it's a, when it's a scroll, right. When you can read it, you trust them a little more. It's just a really small thing. But really small things add up.
Yeah. Tell us about. And you've got pop ups on your website, which I do too. Tell us about these reports. If people are interested again you, they can get these at no cost by going to speakingofwriting.com. you also have DavidL deutsch.com but presumably easier for people to remember how to spell. Speakingofwriting.com yes. Tell us about these two special reports.
So relieved when I got speaking of writing.com and didn't have to continuously spell Deutsche. Which reminds me of the time I went to Germany and someone there asked for my last name for some customs thing or whatever. And I said it's Deutsche D E U D. And they went, I know.
How to spell a little more common name there.
I was so happy. It was a country where everyone could spell my name. It was the most amazing.
Tell us about these two special.
I will, I will. These are, these are two reports. One of them is copywriting from A to Z. It's 26 ways to improve response. And it's just a way of going through different copywriting techniques right from A to Z that will improve your writing, improve the response that you get from your writing. Again, it was a fun way to do it and it was something that made it not boring for me. And you know, the challenge of having to come up with something for Every letter of the Alphabet. And hopefully it makes it interesting for, for, you know, for people. Hopefully people are going, I wonder what he came up with for Z. That's going to be, you know, a hard one to come up with a copywriting principle for. Then the other one is idea. I mean, I love ideas. I love creativity. I love the impact that an idea can have, whether it's an idea for a product, whether it's an idea for how to market something, whether it's an idea for copy and for a headline. Especially today, right, when AI is just sort of homogenizing everything and making everything, making copy, making the ideas that people come up with be so similar. You know, a real human breakthrough idea is something that stands out. And this is, you know, some of the techniques that I've come up with for coming up with ideas in a more kind of a systematic way.
I want to go into more depth than that in just a moment. But while we're on your products page, you've got the A list, copywriting secrets, right? You have your inner circle. This is a mastermind group.
Yeah, it's a mastermind group. It's kind of a group coaching kind of a thing. You know, if people wanted to coach with me, wanted me to coach them 101, one on one, it's, you know, like thousands of dollars an hour, but for 97amonth, you can be part of this group and, you know, have the chance to have me work with you one on one and have your.
And you also have idea power. Is this an online video course or what is this?
Yeah, it's basically an online video, although there is an offline workbook which is a big part of it. And it's basically a systematic way of coming up with ideas. Because I think the problem people have with ideas is they kind of go, oh, I need an idea. What in the universe would be a good idea that I can think of? And this is kind of a way of just kind of using a series of questions. Kind of like the same way AI uses prompts, right, to prompt you for coming up with ideas. Right. Like that. Are you.
I mean, that's really where I wanted to go is how much do you find yourself using AI as a source of ideas? Because I do find that if you retain your editor's hat, it's fantastic for just generating ideas at a very high volume. And yeah, I have my own GPT as well, where I've uploaded, gone to OpenAI, set up an account, created my own GPT with all my books and Online training and stuff. So now my clients can go to my GPT or my digital clone on my own site and say, yeah, I got an interview tomorrow, I think this is my message. Or, you know, here's a paragraph, help me really narrow down my top three messages. But now I want 10 great sound bites for each message using the TJ sound bite method, which has got to have an analogy or a cliche, or I've got a whole matrix and boom, It'll spit out 30 sound bites in 30 seconds. And if I'm being fair and honest, I will say, okay, maybe not everyone is perfect, but it would take, it would have taken me 90 minutes to do that. It did it in 30 seconds.
Right.
And I really only need three or four for each one. So if half of them are bad, it doesn't matter. I still have at least five for each one that are frankly as good or better than the ones I would have come up with.
But you see that that's where an important skill comes in, which is discrimination, which is the ability to tell which ones are good and which ones are bad.
Yes.
And that's why skill is such an important factor. That's why people will never be able to just use AI to just come up with stuff. They've got to have that skill where they know what's a good, you know, whether it's a headline, whether it's a sound bite, whatever it is, they've got to know. They've got to be able to tell.
And what do you see the marketplace giving evaluations to copywriting skills these days? Because I see headlines all the time about AI decimating, you know, a number of jobs such as copywriting. I know as recently as is quick, as close to me as a block away was a building with a big ad agency gone. I think some of them are working from home now. Are we actually seeing the raw numbers of, of copywriters going down the way we are with journalists, for example? I mean, the number of full time journalists at newspapers has been decimated in the last 30 years, not just because of AI, but.
Right.
Other trends. Are we seeing the actual numbers of full time professional copywriters going down necessarily? I don't know, because sometimes the media messes things up. Or, or are we seeing this as a skill set just being incorporated more into any serious business person, any entrepreneur, they're just building this on as a skill set and doing it themselves or both. Are both of those things true?
Yeah, I think both of those things are true. I think it is being incorporated as a skill set. I think there's more need for copy these days.
