Timeless B2B Marketing lessons
How to write copy that gets your buyer to act
Early in my career, it seemed like everyone was becoming “the growth marketer” and I thought that’s where the job security was. I needed to become the growth guy. The CEO at the time told me the opposite: you have a superpower in creativity and storytelling. Double down on that.
That conversation shaped my entire career. I think about it a lot because the internet is drowning in AI writing – and it seems to me that the marketers focusing on plain good writing have the advantage. When everyone has access to the same tools producing the same AI slop, one way to stand out in marketing is to just be good at the craft of writing. Eddie Shleyner is one of the best at this.
He’s the founder of VeryGoodCopy, a newsletter on copywriting and persuasion with close to 100,000 subscribers. He came on the podcast recently to talk about why this timeless craft matters more now, not less. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation.
1. Great copy shows. It doesn’t tell.
We all know by now that AI copy has tells. Unnatural words and overt enthusiasm. The em dash. Robotic structure. That AI tone. (What am I missing?) Eddie shared another one he’s identified, and he brought receipts to demonstrate.
He walked me through an experiment he ran and shared on social media where he asked AI to describe the birth of his first child. Then, he wrote his own version using the exact same word count: 88 words each.
The AI version:
Meeting my firstborn child was a truly magical experience. It was a moment of joy and excitement that I will never forget. When I held my newborn for the first time, I felt a wave of love and warmth that I had not experienced before. I was filled with so much joy and pride that I was now a parent. My little one looked so peaceful and content in my arms. Seeing my baby for the very first time was an unforgettable moment that I will cherish forever.
Creepy.
Now, his version:
“He’s so quiet,” I said, looking up at the nurse. She smiled behind her mask. We all wore masks. Gowns, too. Gloves and hairnets, too. “Is that okay?” I said. “Is it okay he’s not crying?” (I thought healthy newborns cried.) “It’s okay,” said the nurse. “He’s quiet but alert,” she said. “Just look at him looking at you.” I looked. “He’s looking right at you.” He was. He was looking in my eyes. “He’s saying hello,” she smiled. “Hello,” I said. I felt like crying. “Hello, son.”
(This punched me right in the gut and made me think about how much love I have for my son! Dammit I am getting misty again even as I edit this email.)
He posted both side by side. Hundreds of thousands of impressions. Hundreds of comments. The consensus wasn’t close.
The AI version explicitly names every feeling: magical, joy, love, warmth, pride. Eddie’s version names none of them, but you feel everything anyway. That gap is the whole game, and it applies to marketing copy too.
2. The technique: Leave something to the imagination. “Holes” for the reader to fill.
Eddie broke down three specific things that separate inspired writing from empty, AI writing.
The first is anti-description. He explained how he never explicitly tells you he’s in a hospital. He mentions masks, gowns, gloves, hair nets. Your brain builds the scene from your own memory of that place, which makes it more vivid than any description he could have written. Most copy over-explains. Anti-description trusts the reader.
The second is dialogue. What people say and don’t say reveals character without the writer having to state it. “Why isn’t he crying yet” tells you everything about Eddie’s anxiety in that room without the word anxiety appearing once. Writing dialogue that feels real is genuinely hard, and it’s one of the places AI consistently falls flat.
The third is subtext. Context carries the meaning so you don’t have to declare it outright. The last line of Eddie’s piece – “Hello, son” – is technically just a greeting. But because of everything that came before it, it lands as a transformation. He’s not the same person he was at the start of the story. You feel it without being told.
He ties all three to something called the Kuleshov Effect. A film editing concept based on an experiment where an actor’s neutral expression was cut against different images: a bowl of soup, an untimely death, a woman on a couch. Audiences were amazed by the actor’s emotional range. He, in fact, wasn’t expressing anything. They were doing all the work with their imaginations. Good copy operates the same way. Give readers just enough to bring themselves into it.
3. Great writing is actually great research – AI’s strength.
Eddie said he never called what he did copywriting. He called it copy researching, because that’s where the bulk of his time went. Analyzing information from relevant forums, reviews, interviews, anywhere people talked honestly about what they wanted and feared. Understanding the market really well was what made great copy land. The writing was almost the easy part, he said.
Now AI handles the research. What used to take days takes a fraction of the time, which means he has more room for the actual creative work. A flip has happened: research used to crowd out writing time. Now it’s the other way around.
That’s the right use of AI in a writing workflow. Not to write copy. To do the research that makes good copy possible, so you can spend your time on the part that requires human intuition. The internet is full of competent copy right now. What’s scarce is copy that feels like a real person wrote it for a specific reader. Inspired writing, he called it.
How are you using AI for writing at work? Do you have any strong POV on using AI in marketing copy? Reply back and let us know. It’s always great to hear from you about what you’re working on.
– Dave
P.S. What’s a piece of B2B marketing copy that actually stopped you recently? A homepage, an email, an ad, a cold outreach that somehow worked. Hit reply and send it my way. I want to see what’s landing out there right now.
