Are You Serving McDonald’s and Expecting Nobu Prices?

I’m going to say something that might get me kicked out of the copywriting subreddit: AI copy is very often just fine.

For some things, it’s all you need to get your point across. If you need a product description for a 50-cent plastic washer or a generic internal memo about the office fridge policy, let the robots have at it.

Copy produced by LLMs is the McDonald’s Cheeseburger of the marketing world. And as a woman who spent a lot of her high school years at my local Westfield McDonalds, enthusiastically partaking in their famous 90’s $0.50c cheeseburger deal, I know the value of a good Maccas value meal. 

It’s consistent, it’s fast, and it fills the hole. But nobody, and I mean nobody, walks into a McDonald’s, sits under the fluorescent lights, and expects a $400 omakase experience.

And yet, I see "premium" consultants and experts every single day serving up AI-generated filler on their websites and then wondering why their prospects are haggling over a $2k package.

When you use AI to handle your high-stakes messaging at the pointy end of your sales funnel, you are signaling exactly one thing to your audience: You could get this experience anywhere. 

LLMs are glorified predictive text bots. By their very design, they can only ever give you an aggregate of what already exists.

Definitionally, LLMs cannot differentiate you from the competition. They are built to scrape everyone’s data into a great big word soup in order to ladle out what it thinks you want to hear. 

If you want to charge premium prices, you have to provide a premium experience. That starts the second they read your first headline.

If you’re a commodity business that doesn’t care about presentation and you're happy to compete solely on price, by all means, use AI to write all your website copy. It’ll save you a fortune while you race your competitors to the bottom.

But if you want to build a brand that appeals to a premium customer, the kind who values what you do differently to everyone else, you’re going to need to treat them like a premium customer.

And that starts with investing in your messaging strategy and your most important comms.