Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, actor Joshua Jackson said something on the Kelly Clarkson Show about a lesson Emilio Estevez taught him that is perhaps in some ways amongst THE most valuable business advice you can ever get. Specifically, about when working on the Mighty Ducks sequel, when he “blew past” a line of autograph seekers to get to the locker room.
Jackson said:
“Emilio pulled me to the side and just said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Don’t ever, ever do that again. Why do you think you get to go out there and skate in front of all those people? This is who keeps you employed; do not ever forget who it is that you are here for.’”
Jackson then added:
“It was a really important reframing for my 15-year-old self. Remember who you are, and what’s actually important.”
Earl Nightingale’s “you have no boss but the customer” comes to mind. They pay you, not the clients. Without those customers, those clients can’t pay you. So it makes no sense to pander to the clients like copywriters do.
“My client says I have to use dumbed-down AI because they want to save money…”
Screw ‘em if that’s the case.
They are NOT your boss.
The customer is your real boss, if your client doesn’t like it, find a better client.
Gene Schwartz warned about this in the early 90’s in his speech to Phillips, “you have no client but the audience.” Nothing else matters at the end of the day – not some digital grove worshipper with an AI girlfriend, not some committee of chuckleheads who wouldn’t know a good ad if it fell out of the sky and bit them on the prostate gland, and certainly not some goo-roo approval, industry approval, or peer approval.
If anything you are likely better off doing the opposite of all them.
Either way, only the customer matters.
And if a client balks at that attitude?
If they are more interested in “saving money” than serving the customer?
Why waste your time and talents?
You can do whatever you want, of course. It’s your life. But I remind myself of this every day, and it has kept my business out of a lot of trouble, while making decision-making on what to write in ads, emails, books, etc a lot easier.
Even better:
Be your OWN client, with other clients optional.
Literally treat your own business, list, offers, as a client in your rotation of clients so if one or more go darkside chasing nonsense, you don’t care, it doesn’t really affect you, and you are eating steak either way – yes, even if they fap themselves blind and their palms hairy to so-called AI in the service of saving money instead of serving the market and giving it a great buying and user experience.
The future is bright for Client-less copywriters, imo.
We don’t care about things like AI or client moods, either way.
If anything, we find it amusing.
As far as the email-side of it all goes, see the paid Email Players newsletter here:
Ben Settle
