Why your email marketing may need a round of chemotherapy…

Rant incoming. So some context:

About a month ago, a guy brutally stabbed his girlfriend 30 times – killing her – in the early morning hours…

(Worst part is I personally knew the guy – we went to kindergarten together. Thankfully, our paths diverged in high school…)

Now obviously the guy is in prison and being dragged to courts and all – he’s probably staying in there for a long time…

But that’s not what made me pissed today…

It was the victim’s sister.

I just saw her „Open Letter to the Public“ Facebook post…

…and it took me no more than TWO lines of copy to recognize…

It’s ChatGPT slop.

This infuriated me.

You copy-pasted the AI-generated text directly from ChatGipity – I’m talking not even a little modifying or anything…

(Not that this would make things any better, but still…)

Your sister was the victim of possibly the worst murder of the entire year – at least in the city I’m from – your life is literally forever changed for the worst…

Yet…

You couldn’t be arsed to spend some time to write a heartfelt letter to your sister?

It’s funny:

Around early 2023, I was listening to a guy who was knee-deep into AI waaaay before this whole AI train kicked off…

Specifically:

He was talking about his predictions for AI in the coming years.

Now this was all very early on in the whole AI game – when virtually everyone was still dazzled by the pure sex appeal of it…

But even then he said:

(I paraphrase, since I don’t remember the exact words.)

‘I don’t think AI will make people better at their jobs… I think it will just make them more lazy and actually worse overall because of it.‘

It turns out he was spot on.

I frequently see marketing emails with blatant ChatGipity copy in them.

Case in point – an excerpt of one I got today from a pretty big Sports Nutrition brand:

===

This isn’t about chasing motivation. It’s about having the tools ready when discipline takes over.

===

(That’s about the only piece of copy in the email – the rest of it was, as it usually is, just full of fancy graphics of protein powders, creatines, pre-workouts etc.)

But seriously:

Who thinks this is any good?

It’s all meaningless weasel-words. It’s all overused „it’s not X, it’s Y“ parallelisms. Or the annoying word „quietly“ in every other sentence.

AI-generated copy is tumour-inducingly bad.

It lacks the human context… the syntactico-rhetorical idiosyncrasies… the ruthless „kick“ you need to have to go after someone’s desires, notions, feelings, hopes and dreams…

To ultimately push them to act.

(i.e. to buy your damn stuff.)

I actually think most marketers are aware of this…

But they’re just too lazy to care.

This was all but confirmed to me, today, with that sister who was so unbothered to write a letter – from the heart – for her late sister.

And if she’s this lazy…

…then how can most marketers not be?

Anyway:

This is all a reason why…

There’s a MASSIVE gap in the market.

A gap for content (whether that’s ads, blogs or emails) that’s real, authentic, interesting, and which – most importantly…

Inspires action.

And the only thing you need to do?

Is just NOT use AI.

(Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing then not using AI won’t help. But I reckon you’d ironically still do better than if you did – at least it will be authentic.)

One of my predictions for AI is that as the slop it generates takes over more and more of the interweb…

… humanity – in marketing – will start becoming more and more in demand.

(I’ve already started seeing a few marketing agencies – those who are somewhat smart – BRAG how they use zero AI in their workflow. If that tells you something…)

And if you couldn’t tell from this email…

Yours truly also uses zilch of AI in his workflow – and emails.