TJ Walker and a co-host discuss how AI helps copywriters build audience avatars and decide between long and short copy. Walker argues "the more you tell, the more you sell," but only if the copy stays interesting and relevant to readers.
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Right. Like, what are the reasons? Okay, one reason is that it's amazing and it could make your jaw drop. Right. Another reason might be you should be familiar with this technology because you may want to use it sometimes. So if you see me doing it. Another reason might be maybe it is a language that you speak or that you'd like to speak and it would be interesting or even useful to hear me speaking. Maybe you know, people, maybe they want to send it to people. Maybe you want them to send it to people that speak a language than other language. Oh, my friend speaks Hungarian. I'm going to send, you know, TJ speaking in Hungarian to them. That'll be so cool because they, they're also in communication or whatever. So AI is really good when it has like a lot of information. Right. Like, and, and the, the loop is kind of also. AI can also help you figure out what are the reasons. See, that's kind of the missing step. Right. Step one is kind of AI help me find the avatar for this. Who is this going to exactly? Paint a picture of it? Right. So now you kind of know in your head what the picture is. Right. But now AI has the picture, which you can then, of course, copy and paste and use every time you want to write something to this market.
Yeah, I mean, clearly I left some things out. I should have briefed the AI more on the background of the user, more reasons of why they want to do it. That does bring up, I find a perennial question when it comes to copywriting, more versus less, long versus short. And I sometimes feel like I've wasted half my life debating this with people. I come in general, I come from the school of thought that says the more you tell, the more you sell. And you and I are both old enough to at least have read in the textbooks how at one point for 35 years, the most successful direct mail marketing campaign ever was for the George McGovern campaign. It was, I believe, a 17 page fundraising letter.
Right.
And it raised more money than anything else. And people are bombarded with so much information these days. Oh, the average person has the attention of a goldfish. And you've got to communicate everything in 30 seconds, or you've got seven seconds or you've got two seconds. And I have this debate with a lot of other communications people on marketing. You know, it's got to be shorter, shorter, shorter. And I always generally push back and say, why does it have to be shorter? If they're really not interested in this, they're not even going to read one sentence. How do you make your own judgment calls about length when it comes to copywriting?
Well, I think the thing that's being left out of the discussion kind of is long is great if it's interesting.
Yeah.
If it's boring, it's not so great. We'll read, you know, eight Harry Potter Potter novels, right? We'll listen to.
And you might. I. I won't, but I get your point.
Yeah. You know, we'll read, you know, long books. We'll read long articles. We'll read anything if it's about ourselves, Right. You know, somebody used to say, I can. I can get you to read a 500. You know, I can get you to read 100 page report, right? All I have to do is say, it's all about tj. It's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna read it. It's all about me, right? Same thing if it's about me. So if copy.
Fascinating report, by the way.
To us. Right? But that's the thing. To us, to our. Or to this audience of one or to this audience of people, it's, you know, we want to do things that are fascinating. We want to do things where they go, wow, this is about me. This is about the challenges that I'm facing as a communicator, right? This is about the challenges that I'm facing. What do I do? How do I use AI? What do I. Long versus short. All these challenges. So the quest, you know, like most things that rhyming, the more you tell, the more you sell. Like most rhyming little ditties like that, penny saved is a penny earned. The opposite is also true, right? Pennywise, pound foolish, right? You. You can focus on the wrong things. And sometimes short is good, and sometimes long is good. But long has to be interesting. It has to be compelling. It has to keep your attention. You can't bore someone into buying, you know, something.
Now, that brings up an issue that I'm just dying to ask you about. With respect to boredom. I'll. I'll be candid. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on marketing, copywriting, ad creation. Intellectually, I feel like I know a lot.
