False advertising has been around almost as long as advertising itself. I was watching YouTube when a commercial came up with this promise: “This short book will make you six figures on Amazon this year.”
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
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Well, this might not be false advertising, but that sentence packs a lot of certainty.
“Short” makes the work sound easy, while “six figures” makes the payoff hard to ignore. But the real weight is carried by one word: “will.” There is no could be or maybe in the word will.
I hear claims like this all the time on YouTube. Some are easy to dismiss. Others are occasionally put together well enough to keep me watching. Forget about the pitches for a moment.
Grabbing my attention is a feat unto itself because I approach YouTube ads with immense skepticism.
There Is Craft In This
Strip a YouTube ad down to its foundation, and you find the copy that makes the pitch. Someone has to decide what gets said, when it gets said, and what the viewer should know before the pitch arrives. That is the territory of copywriting.
Keeping someone watching requires more than an outrageous promise. The advertisement has to work on something the viewer already cares about.
Fear of loss is one of the oldest tools in copywriting. The fear doesn’t have to be invented. Losing money, getting older, or watching an opportunity slip away can do plenty of work on its own. The copywriter’s job is to connect that fear to what is being sold.
There is nothing inherently dishonest about this. A weak proposition can still be wrapped in very good copy.
None Of This Is New
Long before YouTube, copywriters were learning how a handful of words could stop someone long enough to hear the pitch. The best became artists at it. Kudos to these guys.
In 1919, Maxwell Sackheim wrote “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” to sell a correspondence course. The word “these” made the question personal. Which mistakes? Am I making them?
He was writing at the end of a long American tradition in which literacy and command of language carried considerable cultural weight.
Sackheim was also writing after decades of mass immigration to the United States. For a recent immigrant, mistakes in English could follow you into a job interview or expose you the moment you opened your mouth.
Seven years later, John Caples wrote “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano, But When I Started to Play!” for the U.S. School of Music. It reads more like the beginning of a story than an advertisement. The humiliation is already underway before the reader discovers that something is about to change.
Caples spent the rest of his career studying why advertising worked. In 1983, he published How to Make Your Advertising Make Money.
Years ago, I picked up a copy because I wanted to learn how to write headlines.
It was incredibly boring.
I slogged through it anyway.
That was the point. I wasn’t reading Caples for entertainment. I wanted to understand how someone who had spent a lifetime in advertising thought about how a few words could direct a person’s interest.
David Ogilvy brought his own kind of artistry to advertising a generation later. In 1958, his Rolls-Royce campaign opened with: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”
Ogilvy reportedly worked through more than a hundred possible headlines before settling on it. The specificity gives the claim credibility.
The Art of the Headline
Sackheim, Caples and Ogilvy each brought their own artistry to the craft. They understood the medium, understood the audience, and developed their own ways of getting a prospect to keep looking.
Nearly a century separates some of their work from the commercials running on YouTube today. The screen has changed. The craft of getting someone to stay for the next sentence has a much longer history.
AI arrived very late to that story.
So What Actually Changed?
The machinery changed.
Caples could write dozens of headlines before finding the one he wanted. Ogilvy reportedly worked through more than a hundred for the Rolls-Royce campaign. That took time. Each attempt required someone to sit there and do the work.
With AI, a copywriter can try an idea, discard it, and try another almost immediately. What once took considerable time can now happen in minutes.
An AI-generated headline may sound new, but the craft behind it was practiced a century ago. It should. AI arrived after generations of copywriters had already figured out plenty about getting our attention. Their work became part of the enormous body of writing these systems learned from.
The psychology behind the pitch didn’t suddenly change because AI showed up. Neither did the person sitting on the other side of the advertisement.
What changed was how quickly the pitch could be made.
The old salesman didn’t discover a new way to sell snake oil. He got a much faster printing press.
The Buyer Acquired One Too
Something else changed along the way. The person watching the ad got better tools, too.
Google had already made it possible to check a claim without much trouble. AI shortened the distance again. I can hear something in a commercial that doesn’t sound right and start digging while the pitch is still fresh in my mind.
There is a caveat here. Asking AI doesn’t settle anything. It can be wrong. Taking the first answer it gives me as fact would simply replace one act of faith with another.
What AI gives me is a place to start, and it gets me there fast.
The Search Trail
Part of the reason I wanted to write about this was the sheer amount of drivel showing up in YouTube advertisements. What puzzles me is that somebody responds to this stuff. The ads keep running, over and over.
Before committing to the post, I did what I normally do and checked whether anyone was actually searching for the subject. Surprise! That led somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
“False advertising” gets about 4,400 U.S. searches a month. Then I tried “is it a scam?” and “does it really work?” Both showed active search traffic, with the latter two trending upward.
Those numbers don’t tell me that people watched a YouTube ad and immediately went looking for answers.
But the searches themselves caught my attention. People can question what they are being told. And many do. Hooray, AI can help us sort through the muck.
Beyond Advertising
Advertising gave me a good place to start because the artisanship is evident. But what is happening to copywriting isn’t confined to advertising.
The same question reaches into the rest of creative work. How much of the process are we willing to hand over to AI?
That brings me to the line in the sand.
Craft in the Age of AI
Writers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, photographers, and video creators can delegate parts of their work that previously required the practitioner.
Technology has always altered craft. Recording technology, synthesizers, digital editing, and photography software changed what practitioners had to do physically.
AI extends that history, but it can now perform parts of the creative process we once did ourselves.
That brings us to the line in the sand.
The Line in the Sand
Everyone using AI draws a line in the sand. The difference is where the line is drawn.
For some, ChatGPT is a research tool. Others are comfortable letting Grammarly edit their writing. The line can move much farther. Suno can generate a finished song, while Sora can generate video from a prompt. An entire piece of work can now be produced with little human involvement beyond giving instructions and deciding what survives.
Pick your poison.
Even then, the line hasn’t disappeared. Choosing what to keep may be where that person draws the line.
This is why saying someone “uses AI” doesn’t tell us very much. Two people can make that statement while giving the technology completely different roles in their work.
Choosing is itself a creative act. Anyone who has produced a record knows how much of the finished work comes down to deciding what stays.
Maybe the Snake Oil Isn’t New
There is an old line in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
The history of advertising makes a pretty good case for Solomon’s observation.
A century ago, Sackheim and Caples were already figuring out what made people stop and read. The tools we have now would be unrecognizable to them. The potential customer would not.
AI has given us extraordinary control to decide how much of the work we want to do ourselves. Those decisions have become part of the creative process.
Maybe that is where the question mark in “The New Snake Oil?” belongs.
Those of us using AI have already drawn our line in the sand.
I know where mine is.
Where is yours?
Can We Help You?
What part of your craft has to remain yours? How much are you willing to hand over to technology?
As always, thank you for reading. Your time here matters.
Apparently, we kept your attention. Might as well finish the sales pitch.
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The Fire of Inspiration: A Journey into Artistic Genius explores the philosophy of Mack-n-Cheeze Music in greater depth.
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