I’ve been writing copy for over 40 years. I started creating sales letters and direct
mail package using a damn typewriter. (Does anybody know what that is today?)
Then came emails, HTML templates, landing pages, and video sales letters, each requiring careful crafting to engage audiences. Four decades of evolving from paper to digital persuasion.
In the early days, I studied swipe files—collections of ads from the greats like Bernbach, Ogilvy, and Schwartz, mimicking their style and structure. But copying only takes you so far.
The real work was facing a blank page, waiting for ideas to form. You’d grind,
sometimes for hours or days, to find the core idea—the reason someone should buy. That’s where the craft lived: in the struggle, the rewrites, the refining of a single line until it worked.
Technology changed things. First, it was software like WordStar that made writing faster. Spell checkers caught typos. Then grammar checkers flagged awkward
phrasing. Cut and paste? Absolute game-changers.
When ChatGPT and Grok arrived, I started using them to refine and sentences--not to mention clean up the typos.(So I no longer hired proof readers.)
Soon, I could say, “Write me a sales letter,” and get a full draft in seconds. No late nights, no piles of scrapped drafts—just usable copy, instantly.
It’s easy to love tools like ChatGPT and Grok (which helped organize and edit this post). They’re fast, efficient, and turn days of work into
moments.
This post itself? Planned by me, polished by Grok, done quickly. Ka-CHING.
But here’s the catch:
AI can’t teach you to think.
Great copywriters like Halbert, Kennedy, and Carlton built persuasion through mental wrestling, crafting arguments from nothing. That slow, deliberate process is where insight lives.
AI can produce copy, but it can’t replicate the reasoning behind it or the instinct for what resonates. That’s your job. Rewriting, refining, obsessing over a word—that’s what makes copy exceptional.
So,
yes, I’m fond of ChatGPT and Grok. They’re my tools, my assistants, my time-savers.
But my real commitment is to my own thinking, the human judgment no algorithm can match. AI can write a draft, but only you can make it yours.
The grind taught me that, and I’ll keep grinding no matter how fast technology moves.
As a seasoned direct response copywriter, Doug has created hundreds of profitable
direct mail packages, emails, and video sales letters for the world's largest specialized information
publishers—generating over $100 million in direct sales.
