AI's strength in copywriting is not generating final text, which often lacks a human touch. Instead, use it as a research assistant to find unique concepts, analogies, or data (like the 'Michelangelo effect') that can serve as the core, attention-grabbing idea for your campaign.

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The true power of AI in marketing is not generating more content, but improving its quality and effectiveness. Marketers should focus on using AI—trained on their own historical performance data—to create content that better persuades consumers and builds the brand, rather than simply adding to the noise.

As more teams use AI, campaign strategies become homogenized because AI suggests traditional plays based on existing data. The key differentiator becomes human oversight, where marketers add unique, creative insights to AI-generated foundations, ensuring campaigns stand out.

Develop superior AI-generated copy by first using an AI agent to research and deconstruct the frameworks of top marketers. Then, feed the AI examples of your own writing to distill a unique brand voice. Combining these into a custom 'skill' produces consistent, high-converting copy that feels authentic.

Marketers should use AI-driven insights at the beginning of the creative process to inform campaign strategy, rather than solely at the end for performance analysis. This approach combines human creativity with data to create more resonant campaigns and avoid generic AI-generated content.

Most people use AI to perform tasks like writing copy. A more powerful application is using it as a strategic brainstorming partner. Ask it high-level questions about cultural trends and consumer behavior (e.g., 'Why did this artist pop?') to generate novel insights for your strategy.

Instead of asking an AI tool for creative ideas, instruct it to predict how 100,000 people would respond to your copy. This shifts the AI from a creative to a statistical mode, leveraging deeper analysis and resulting in marketing assets (like subject lines and CTAs) that perform significantly better in A/B tests.

Marketers often approach AI with inflated expectations, wanting a perfectly finished product. The correct mindset is to view AI as a tool to overcome the "zero to one" hurdle. It's a powerful assistant for creating a solid first draft or getting 50% of the way there, which a human then refines.

Don't use AI to generate generic thought leadership, which often just regurgitates existing content. The real power is using AI as a 'steroid' for your own ideas. Architect the core content yourself, then use AI to turbocharge research and data integration to make it 10x better.

The desire for perfection and control is a bottleneck in the AI era. Marketers who insist on reviewing every word of AI-generated copy will fall behind. The new critical skill is not writing perfect copy, but engineering and continuously improving the prompts that generate it at scale. It's a mindset shift from creator to system designer.

AI should not be the starting point for creation, as that leads to generic, spam-like output. Instead, begin with a distinct human point of view and strategy. Then, leverage AI to scale that unique perspective, personalize it with data, and amplify its distribution.

Use AI to Discover a 'Big Idea,' Not to Write Final Marketing Copy | RiffOn