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- [00:00]
A
So what if the real opportunity with AI is not replacing human creativity, but expanding it by turning entrepreneurs into better editors, directors and decision makers? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is John Benson. He's a copywriter, entrepreneur and AI pioneer best known for creating the video sales letter, one of those terms that people just use like it's been around forever format that shapes modern digital marketing. He is long centered on ethical persuasion and authentic connection. And more recently he developed bnsn, an AI platform trained on high converting campaigns for small businesses. So John, welcome to the show.
- [00:54]
B
Hey John, thanks for having me.
- [00:57]
A
So let's. I assume you have to do this a little bit of your time when you go on shows like this, but the term vsl, you know, is kind of entered the, the marketing vernacular. Talk to me a little bit about. I've been doing this for 30 years. That was probably 12, 15 years ago really, when that kind of burst on the scene as an innovation. You want to talk a little bit about what that's done to your trajectory? I suppose.
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B
Yeah. Believe it or not, it's 20 years old this year.
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A
Twenty years, okay.
- [01:25]
B
2006.
- [01:26]
A
Yeah.
- [01:26]
B
Yeah. Crazy. It's, I mean it was it. Yeah. Everything changed the day that happened. Thirty days later, everything changed for my offer that I did it for. You know, we went from like struggling onto my second book that I wrote in fitness and then went to a million dollars a week and a month rather in traffic cost, you know, people buying that kind of money and going up to even than that. So it, it was crazy. And then all of a sudden people started calling me and asking me to write VSLs for them. And I'm not, I wasn't a copywriter. I, that's not never been my claim to fame until after this happened. And then I had to get good at writing copy. So that's what happened.
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A
That's funny. So you have, so you, you said you had, you've written a book about gym ownership, is that what you said?
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B
No, I've written six books in fitness. So weight loss, fitness, bodybuilding. Yeah. So that whole thing.
- [02:17]
A
Okay, so. So are you one of those people that that was your passion and you just had to, you had to learn how to do marketing and so, you know, this whole idea of studying persuasion and conversion and innovation, is that something that was really just picked up because you're like, I better get good at that.
- [02:34]
B
It was picked up specifically for copywriting. Yes. But I studied persuasion in college actually. I Was studied NLP in college. I was fascinated by how you can basically get people to listen to you and hear what you're actually trying to communicate and motivate them to make changes based on things that are. That you believe at least are good for them. So you're not trying to manipulate them, you're just trying to motivate them. And I was always into like, how can I motivate and connect with people deeper? So studied the NLP back then, way back then and you know, mail order course from Bandler and that got me into Tony Robbins and that led me into even deeper persuasion issues. Just was always really fascinated by it. And that led to me being into the advertising world and that would. That led eventually to writing a book. But yeah, I actually would have. The book thing came about because I'd always been passionate about bodybuilding and fitness and things like that growing up and athlete I was an athlete most of my life and then ended up sedentary and, and got. Ended up obese. In my late 20s and early 30s I had a 50 inch waist and had a heart attack at 38. So I was like, it was like a train wreck of health and that got me back into it. So that's The Fit Over 40 book was written based on that, on turning that around. And then I interviewed a bunch of other people because I didn't think I was enough of books. So I did 52 people that did the same.
- [03:51]
A
So I'm curious and I this is a question, unfortunately I feel like I'm asking almost every guest these days, but how has AI, you know, changed that element of copywriting for good or bad?
- [04:04]
B
So my goal with AI and copywriting, I've been doing copywriting software since 2010. So this is going to date me a lot. But in AI in early nascent AI in 2017 and working with early LLMs in 2019. So very early into this thing and trying to convince everybody this was the thing that we wanted to do. And the reason why is because I was. I had these courses that I would teach people how to write VSLs. And I knew how hard it was for me to learn all the copywriting in and outs and develop my own style, which I did. And I said, well, what if I could have software that would do it for them? And the average business owner doesn't have time to do that. They just want the copy that converts. So I've seen it from 15 years away going, I know this is going to happen eventually. And so we decided the software is pronounced Benson as my last name. It's just my listening without the vowels
- [04:52]
A
and BNSF like I butchered.
- [04:54]
B
Yeah, but it's cool that you can spell it out. That's all right. And so we did Benson. Originally it was going to be called VSL Pro. It was going to. Because it was the first AI to actually write a long form vsl. And I was working with Jasper at the time. They were called Jarvis, but I was the first guy in to the copywriter to train anything on an LLM and they ended up with a 60 second VSL out of all the training. And I thought, yeah, I think we can do this in a different way. And we ended up being, you know, having a 7,000 word VSL come out of our AI. And it sounded like a real VSL, it didn't sound like ChatGPT, it didn't sound like Claude, it sounded like a real vsl. And so that was our claim to fame. And since then we just of course got. We were very early into the agentic phase so we've just gotten better and better at that. And so my goal was to replace myself. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to say if I can replace, if I can use this to write a bso, which I have sales pages for my own stuff, which I have, then I know that it's going to be good enough to. For prime time. And that was the goal to do so.
- [05:53]
A
Yeah, so, so talk to. We obviously got more to explore in AI, but talk to me a little bit about the VSL itself. I mean it has become very mainstream. I mean you hear people talk about it whether they know what it is or not. They talk about it as part of their funnel, you know, today. So is it overdone? I mean, is, is it over?
- [06:11]
B
Yeah, every year I hear that. I've heard that for 20 years. So literally 20 years. So the first year I came out with it, it said, oh, it's already. And then Ryan D, who's a good friend of mine, made the mistake of saying when he came out and promoted his own little mini VSL course and he later gave me credit for, which is really nice of him and everything. But he said, oh, sales letters are dead. You'll never do another sales. And I'm like going, dude, I've never said that. You know, I think everything works if you let it. And VSLs just happen to keep on working and they, yeah, just ask Agora if they work. I mean, yeah, they work. They work really well. And, and now people are using BSLs in feed. So you've got the meta ads that are basically short VSLs that use the same psychology just compressed into five, two to five minutes. So we've been doing that for 15 years as well. So yeah, and then they go to a longer bsl. So they still work just as sales pages work, just as webinars can work. Everything can work. It just depends on what you're wanting to sell and how you're, and how you approach it. But the words are the consistent thing. So if the words aren't there, if the words don't reflect an actual human underneath it, people sense it a mile away. Which was our goal with Benson was to create humanized AI. How do we do this? How do we create AI that doesn't sound robotic, it doesn't sound like, you know, chatgpt. Writing an email is asking a rhetorical question and the very first sentence and you know, this kind of really bad AI copy that we see all the time and how do we do this and actually sound like a real, A list copywriter and that. So that's been our focus for three and a half years now.
- [07:36]
A
Initially the large innovation was it was not a talking head on video, it was the words. Is that a key component of it?
- [07:44]
B
You know, it depends on what you're trying to sell. We have seen split test with video beating words only and we've seen words only beat video. It really depends on what it is and what works. Today, a year from now will be something you want to reverse. So for a while there, there was like my friend Craig who writes for Golden Hippo and he's done amazingly well building a billion dollar company from. He's an amazing writer, but he was one of the first guys working with Gundry to do a lot of video on the front end of a bsl. But you know, talking to him behind the scenes, so to say, we know that it's still like a Google Doc and the words are everything. So he slaves over the words, man, getting the words just right. So all the video in the world is not going to save me if your words suck. It just isn't going to happen. So the words are still the most important thing.
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A
So one of the knocks on AI, of course is it's made it very easy for people to create really crappy content. And you know, you see it all the time now, right? It's, it's like volumes of really bad content. So yeah, well, why are, you know, why can't people create better content? What are, what's the mistake they're making. Is it simply just a matter of being lazy?
- [08:52]
B
No, it's the matter of the, of the LLMs or the, or in our case, it's the agents not knowing you. And this is where it gets a little bit hairy for people because there has to be an element of your personality that's okay to be known. Just as the same thing would be true if you went and hired me as a copywriter. Like, I would ask you, if you had an offer and you wanted to, whatever your offer would be, I would start asking you lots of questions that you probably don't think is related to your offer. Now, I'm not talking about, like asking you all these really intensely personal questions, but I want to know what your values are. I want to know where you stand. Who do you want to attract as customers? What are you against? What do you. Not just what the product does, because the product or the offer, whatever it does, I. That's not that difficult. What's difficult is to make that story resonate with people that will automatically hear and go, oh, that sounds like something that I can automatically relate to. And that's what a really good copywriter does. We don't try to sell people that are not interested or just completely need to, you know, go from a level one to a level five awareness. That's really not what we want to do. We want to target people that are already there because you have plenty of people like that. But if you write, if you go into a chat or Claude or whatever and just say, write me an email or write me an ad or write me a visa, and they don't know who you are. They don't have a good feel of your words, feel of your personality. It's going to write stuff that's schlocky because it's trained on the Internet. So if you just, just think about this for a moment and everyone listening to me will get this. It's like, can you imagine training anyone to do anything by telling them, go read the Internet and get back to me tomorrow? That's what we've done with LLMs, right? It's like, well, that's going to give you a lot of knowledge. But most of it sucks. I mean, so most of what's out there in copy is terrible. So it's learning models have been terrible. So that's why specialty AIs like ours and cotton iron industry, you have to have it to where the people that know what they're doing actually trained individual, in our cases, agents that use not One LLM, but a dozen, you know, can you use as many as we need one model or other? But, you know, a dozen, whatever models we know are going to be the best ones for the right tasks. So that takes that. And then what we do is a little different. We ask people to go through an assessment to figure out what are their values, where do they stand, who are the people they want to attract, and how do they want their words to appear. So we take care of the persuasion element, but also we see that with the words and phrases that are closer to who they are as a person. So it starts feeling more human.
- [11:15]
A
Yeah, it's interesting. I know as we've worked with clients, you know, a lot of them have a fairly large body of work of them talking about things, explaining their products, being who they are. And that element, you know, allows you to build that voice or that brand. But then there is a technical framework element to it as well, isn't it?
- [11:33]
B
Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, if you go too far outside that framework, you're going to lose a lot of the things that we already know work so well, persuasion wise. So. So the goal is to. Is not to try to convince somebody of something. It's to compel them to take action on what they already hold valuable. So all you're doing is aligning your offer with what they already hold to be valuable. And that's the skill of copywriting. And that's something that AI is. You know, I think, obviously I'm biased, so we're gonna. I'm gonna say we're kind of the exception, but AI in general has gotten a little better at this. We. I'd like to think we've led some of the way in that, into getting to where it's. There's more of that human element involved.
- [12:13]
A
So talk a little bit about that because there's certainly a lot of people, creatives in particular, that, you know, have felt like they have this special sauce, this special talent, you know, to create that content, to create beauty things. And maybe AI is kind of taking that. I mean, it's eventually going to get good at doing video and graphics and things. So where is the human element, you know, remain.
- [12:38]
B
So think of it as, like, I look at it as the difference between using a hammer and using a jackhammer or something. That's a powered hammer, right? It's a pneumonic hammer or whatever they call those automatic hammers. So. So you've got an automatic hammer and there's a skill to hitting a nail with a hammer. Right. The question is, as a carpenter, is that really what you want to be known for is I strike a nail head perfectly with a hammer every single time? Or if you could have that done for you instantaneously with something that just tapped it in, what would you do with the time that you have left? Now, you would probably spend that doing the creative portion of things and like, oh, I can do this. I can build this, and this is what. The same thing is true of AI and copywriters. It's like, we're not trying to put people out of business. We're giving them the ultimate power tool. So a lot of the grunt work, a lot of the research, a lot of the structure you don't have to worry about. Then you can go in and finesse it, and everything sounds so much better when you do that. We want people to do that. So. So there's still a knowledge factor that I think that copywriters need to have. And sure, some people do use tools like Benson. They just don't think about it. They click a few buttons and they go, because it works. But the copywriters, they want to put their signature on it. And that this just gives you the ultimate way of doing that. It's like hiring the best ghostwriter you can think of. So. So if I hired a copywriter to write something for me, and they sent it back and I read it went, wow, that's just freaking fantastic. Then I could find these little bitty things in there that I only know or that I primarily know. Now we go, oh, you know, I'm gonna change this over here. And then I might find a creative thing that he said or she said that I wouldn't have thought of, and that now becomes a campaign. My mind goes, oh, wow, I didn't think about that. I can turn this into a campaign. Well, that's not AI, that's me. Right? That. So if the AI wrote it or a human wrote it, it wouldn't matter. And so that's what we do. That's a little different because we coach people, live once a week so that we can help inspire them to use this, use the words that are coming out. And how can we use it to help market their business more effectively?
- [14:30]
A
So it's one of the. One of the areas that obviously is a breakthrough is in testing. Obviously, anybody, any copywriter worth their salt is like, I think this is good, but let's test it, right? And, you know, now we can test 200 versions for not much more time than it took us to create that one beautiful one. What do you think that is going to ultimately do in terms of people's effectiveness?
- [14:56]
B
If people knew what the guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars at this stuff do, if you knew the amount of testing that went into it, most people would just give up. They would stop. I'll give you an example. I have a good friend of mine that the top of their industry on meta and they flew out to meet the actual real meta heads of ads because there's the ones that they give people and they're the ones that give these people, you know, they give them $100,000 to spend just to play with. Just because we want to see what your new creative team can do. They will run 800 ads at a time in any given month. They're running 800 versions of an ad. So there's just no way to do that effectively without AI. And that's when they were the early adopters to this. Now they can run those kind of things and it's like they can figure out what works and guess what one or two might scale or three, it doesn't matter how good the writers are, it's like some hook, some angle may work and that angle, if it works, can just skyrocket a business. So I think it's one of the best things about AI is the ability to split test leads of a sales letter or BSL split test, you know, obviously campaigns and ad campaigns and things like that. It's very helpful.
- [16:01]
A
You've spent a lot of time building a reputation about ethical persuasion, but it's not a very far leap to, to go to things that are maybe not that ethical. Right? To go from just what you talked about as getting people to do something that they want to do or that's good for them and they just, they need to hear it to manipulation. So. And I feel like AI doesn't really care in some cases. So how do you, what are the guardrails that you know, really use to. To kind of stay within what you know, we talked about beliefs. Your beliefs.
- [16:40]
B
Yeah, well, the guardrails I use, actually that's a technical term and we use specific guardrails in our agents that are that when somebody sets up Benson correctly, we use, it's called a buyer alignment profile that we have people go through. In fact, I'm going to give it to your listeners for free. They can go through that and get their buyer alignment, which is a 15 page report of the words and phrases you should use and not use. And that exactly fits that bill of that sets up guardrails. It's like use this because I value X, Y and Z. What do the words of I value X, Y and Z translate to in copywriting lingo? Because it doesn't mean like if I value freedom, you don't want to use like, hey, since you love freedom as much as I do, then you're going to love so and so shoes. That doesn't make any sense. Right. And so it's just too ham fisted and heavy handed and all that stuff. So what phrases do people that love freedom as a core value, what is, what usage would they use and what would they never say? And that's what they would never say that the guardrails. So in other words, that prevents the AI from going over the balcony. So to say when it comes down to overly persuasive language.
- [17:41]
A
So for some of the folks that you've worked with, you've probably started to catalog kind of some of the biggest mistakes people are doing making right now using AI. You know, where do you see, you know, people really need to make a shift to, to make AI more effective for them?
- [17:56]
B
Oh, it's to stop thinking of AI as the answer and start thinking about it as a tool is a huge step in the right direction. Also to train whatever AI you're using. Now ours is built to be trained, so it's copy paste kind of thing. But if you're going to use CLAUDE or chat, GPT or whatever, you need to be able to train it with who you are, what your values are, how, what words and phrases to use, what not to use. And you'll find that the memory on this is pretty short. So unless you know what you're doing and then we can get into things like instances of open claw and CLAUDE code and all that stuff that's very technical. And most people don't want to go down that rabbit hole. I mean our guys go down that rabbit hole because we're kind of geeky when it comes to that. But most people want just the best answers that they can without having to become a software engineer. So to do that, yeah, it's a lot of knowledge. It's a lot of like time to say here's who I am and here's what I want you to do. Now you can do that to a limited degree in chat and Claude and tools like that. You can do it to a huge degree in our tool because we built it to do that and that's super important to get the language patterns down. But also, and this is the Last thing I'll say. But this is true of copywriting in general. So when people used to hire me, because I don't write copy anymore, I'm solely focused on Benson. But when people used to hire me, it was. I was very expensive. I was like, the. Probably the most expensive guy in the world for, like, five or 10 years, and they're certainly one of the most expensive guys in the world. And they would hire me, and I would give them a first draft of something, like, usually a BSL or a sales letter, and they would say, oh, this doesn't sound like me. I go, yeah, I know. It's because you suck. It's like, yeah, you don't want to sound like yourself, man. You really don't. I was like, it's like. And. And it. Like, I. And I mean that in kind of a funny way. It's like, you're. The copy they were writing was just terrible, and so they were trying to make their terrible copy kind of polish, you know, put lipstick on the pigs. So you can't do that. You have to, like, be able to understand some basic persuasion and then work in. And this is what I didn't do when I was a proof, when I was writing in early days of copywriting. Work in their values. I figured this out later in my career. It's like, oh, I can work in their value statements and figure out what the words are. But that was just tons of research. We charge, like, 15, 20 grand just to do the research, to figure out, like, what are the words we should use and shouldn't use and phrases and all that stuff. And unless somebody came along that was like an identical client, we'd have to do that all the time. Now it's automatic, which is.
- [20:20]
A
Well, John, I appreciate you dropping by the Duct Tape marketing podcast. Is there someplace you mentioned that you had a gift, you wanted to invite people, and obviously I'd love to know where they can find out more about Vincent.
- [20:30]
B
Sure. If you go to free buyer profile.com that's freebuyer profile.com you can take our buyer alignment profile, which will test you, figure out your core values, help you figure them out. We use a lot of different standardized testing models and these questions, and in about 10 to 15 minutes, we'll get you a report that you can use in your marketing, and that will tell you words and phrases that you should think about using, and words and phrases you should definitely avoid. It will give you all the nlp, all the magic sauce while still sounding like you, and will also help elucidate what you already hold valuable and the people that you want to attract.
- [21:03]
A
Great tool for training. Any AI tool, I suspect.
- [21:06]
B
Yeah, definitely.
- [21:07]
A
That you're going to use. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you dropping by. It's free buyer profile.com and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. John.
- [21:16]
B
Thank you, John. I appreciate the time.