Can ChatGPT become the next Tom McElligott?

Years ago, as a young copywriter, I created a list of favorite headlines. Lines that set the bar for what I thought a great headline should be.

The list included:

A Nike Charles Barkley ad: The meek shall inherit the earth, but they won’t get the ball.

A Cessna ad: It took you six months to learn to walk. In six weeks you could learn to fly.

A Dewars ad with a photo of a gruff-looking, 70 year old bartender: Do you really want to ask this guy for a screaming orgasm?

A cheeky, greed-is-good-era Porsche ad: Fire the chauffeur.

And the classic Tom McElligott ad for Murray’s Restaurant: When a restaurant offers something called a butter knife steak, they must have very tender steak. Or very tough butter.

There’s a reason why ChatGPT doesn’t come up with headlines like that. (Yet.)

As a “generative pre-trained transformer,” ChatGPT is trained to find existing patterns in the way words precede and follow each other. It sees each word as a “token,” and based on the word’s context + your prompt, it deduces (from its existing data sets) what word/token should come next.?

So, given the 17 billion different parameters it’s programmed to search, surely ChatGPT can write a more memorable Porsche headline than “Fire the chauffeur:”

1. Unleash the full potential of your driving experience with Porsche
2. Porsche: the ultimate combination of style and performance
3. Elevate your daily drive with a Porsche sports car
4. Discover the thrill of the open road with Porsche
5. Experience the ultimate in luxury and performance with Porsche
6. Power. Precision. Porsche.
7. Unparalleled style and performance in every Porsche model
8. Porsche: the perfect balance of power and control
9. Push the limits of what’s possible with Porsche’s cutting-edge sports cars

10. Elevate your driving experience with Porsche’s unparalleled performance and style

Okay, maybe “memorable” isn’t one of the 17 billion parameters.?(Yet.)

Without a doubt, AI platforms like ChatGPT will play a fundamental role in marketing/advertising/brand-building’s future. Learning to work hand-in-hand (okay, side-by-side) with these platforms will be essential to any marketing person’s career. It’s incredibly exciting stuff (especially if it knocks Google Search off its pedestal).

But since ChatGPT generates text through a purely deductive/regenerative process, it begs two questions:

1.) Can it generate a truly original sentence, where the word combination has never been generated before??Word combinations like “butter knife steak.”

2.) Can it generate a sentence that makes no obvious, deductive, logical sense because the words seemingly share no context??A sentence like “The meek shall inherit the earth, but they won’t get the ball.”

i.e., a sentence you hear once, and never forget.

i.e., the kind of word-play that’s essential to writing great headlines, hooks, and copy.

The assertion that ChatGPT will replace copywriters (full stop) can only be true if we (as an industry) decide copywriting is nothing more than rehashed, deductive reasoning — just a series of expected, pre-existing sentences where each word is the most likely word to follow the previous one.?

Great copywriting isn’t essay writing. It’s not?a.) deductive, b.) linear, or even c.) about the 150 word blocks of “copy” I keep seeing as examples of ChatGPT’s?prowess. (Because no one reads the body copy, right?)

Great copywriting starts with an insight, not a fact. A provocation. A well-reasoned rejection of existing formulas, and heard-it-all-before precedents … whether one is writing print, TV, social, or a brand tagline.

It’s about finding the unexpected, unforgettable connection between seemingly unrelated words and concepts … words that trigger an emotional, often-times irrational conclusion.

Will a pre-trained AI generator ever see a connection between a pair of Nike shoes and Gary Gilmore’s “let’s do it” statement to the firing squad?” The synapses that fired inside Dan Wieden’s mind that night, and led to the most famous tagline in marketing history, seem like an impossible set of “parameters” to “pre-train.”

Is it ever going to follow the word “curious” with “strong” to come up with “The curiously strong mint?”

How can it know that joining the Army is a path through which you can “be all you can be?”?

Or, that mosquitos refuse to bite the most interesting man in the world “out of respect?” That he “bowls overhand.” And “when sailing around the world, found a shortcut?”

Our job as copywriters (human or otherwise) isn’t to generate or regurgitate marketing pablum.?It’s to create original language that transcends marketing-ese and cheap superlatives. To create ads, posts, content, marketing materials that don’t look/sound/feel like ads, posts, content, marketing materials.?

When I worked at Goodby, Rich Silverstein’s most dismissive critique of an idea was to shout, “That’s just a f-ing ad!” The goal then, as it should be today, is to create something a pre-trained ad generator would never create when asked to create an ad.?

JEFF: Write a headline for https://murraysrestaurant.com that doesn't sound like an ad.

ChatGPT:?Experience the Best of Fine Dining at Murray’s Restaurant

JEFF: Write a headline for https://murraysrestaurant.com that makes me laugh.

ChatGPT: Get Your Eat On at Murray’s Restaurant: Where the Food is Always Better Than Your Ex

JEFF: Write a headline for https://murraysrestaurant.com that makes me believe the steaks are tender.

ChatGPT: Treat Your Taste Buds to the Tender Steaks at Murray’s Restaurant

JEFF: Write a headline for https://murraysrestaurant.com in the style of Tom McElligott (after pasting 10 of his most famous headlines into the prompt).

ChatGPT: Elevate Your Dining Experience with Murray’s Restaurant’s Unforgettable Menu

JEFF: Write a headline for https://murraysrestaurant.com that mentions its butter knife steaks

ChatGPT:?Savor the Juicy, Tender Butter Knife Steaks at Murray’s Restaurant

JEFF:?Sigh.

Sir Kenneth Robinson once said, “The problem with advertising is not that it set the bar too high and failed, but that it set the bar too low and succeeded.”?

It is clear the first wave of “content” created by ChatGPT will be another lowering of the bar. Case in point: all the hype and hoopla celebrating Ryan Reynold's “mildly terrifying, yet compelling” AI ad for Mint Mobile requires a very low-bar definition of the word “compelling.” And an even lower-bar definition of copywriting.?

The most important question is, “what does the second wave look like?”?

Can we find a way to work with AI where it makes the work better, not just cheaper/faster? Where it alters the economics of creating and producing world-class content, so it’s possible to shoot-for-the-moon again? Where it empowers and unleashes a new generation of Tom McElligott’s and Janet Champ’s and Steve Simpson’s … instead of putting them out of business??

If not, AI will just become a faster, cheaper way to create tuned-out, transactional noise like, you know, “Treat Your Taste Buds to the Tender Steaks at Murray’s Restaurant.”

The bar for what gets approved today is different for every client, every creative director, and every writer. But the bar for great copywriting is the same as it’s always been:?

It’s about sharing insights that reveal the core humanity, the essential human/emotional truth at the heart of a brand … insights that makes people think “the person who made this ad/product knows exactly who I am, how I feel, what I want.”

Someday, with the right prompts and parameters, ChatGPT might clear that bar.?

Until that day, stay thirsty my friends.