TCC Podcast #415: Copythinking with David Deutsch

Most writers focus on the writing part of copywriting, which only makes sense as we’re writers. But maybe we should be doing more copythinking before we start to write. Our guest for the 415th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is A-List Copywriter David Deutsch. And when it comes to thinking about copy, David has few peers. He talked about strategy, writing emotional copy, coming up with big ideas, and much more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

David’s website
The How to Write Emotional Copy Workshop
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: When we started The Copywriter Club Podcast, one of the things we were adamant about was that we would interview copywriters at all levels of experience and at all the various stages of their business journey. So we’ve spoken with copywriters who are just getting started along with those with years of experience. We’ve interviewed copywriters who call themselves content writers, strategists, consultants and various other titles. We’ve heard from marketers and authors and experts in all kinds of fields. In fact we used to start the podcast with the promise that you would listen and walk away with plenty of ideas you could “steal” for your own business.

With that background, it’s always a thrill to get the opportunity to interview an expert copywriter who has earned his place on the A-List. One of the go-to copywriters when it comes to being coached by one of the very best in the direct response world.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I’m speaking with A-list copywriter David Deutsch. David has generated more than a billion dollars in sales over the course of his career. Not bad. And probably someone we can learn from. You’ll hear this in the interview, but one of the things David likes to talk about is the difference between writing and persuasion and copywriting. The two ought to be the same, but often they’re not. I know I say this every episode, but I think you’re going to like this interview. So stick around.

Before we jump in with David…

It’s October. Which means the year is 3/4 done… we’ve all got one more quarter to reach the goals we set for our businesses at the beginning of the year. So let me ask you, how is it going? Are you ahead or behind your goals? What can you accomplish in the next 12 weeks that will move your business forward and set you up for a successful 2025… hard to believe the decade is half over… any way in my opinion the best place for copywriters to stretch and reach their goals is The Copywriter Underground, the paid membership with more than 100 hours of training, including an entire course on selling, a mini-course on proposals, more than 27 different templates, including a legal agreement, and so many other resources designed to help you grow. And each month, we invite a different guest expert to teach a new skill… this month’s members-only persentation is by Email Marketing Hero Kennedy on creating lead magnets that attract buyers, not freebie seekers to your list. It’s the kind of skill that will help you build your own list and make you so much more valuable to your clients. It’s happening next week in The Copywriter Underground which you can join at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, let’s go to our interview with David…

David, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I would love to start with your story. How did you become a direct response copywriter, a copy coach, and I think what some people would even say, you know, original member of the A-list of copywriters that are out there? Tell us how you got there.

David Deutsch: Oh, well, thanks. It’s great to be here, first of all. And, you know, I started on I don’t know how far back to go, but I started my advertising career at Ogilvy and Mather in New York, which was David Ogilvy’s agency back when he still occasionally roamed the halls. And I you know, worked in the ad world for a while after that. Um, and it was, it really taught me, first of all, of all the advertising people, David Ogilvie was the most accountable, the most direct response, enthusiastic. So I always had that training in, it’s not just creativity, but it’s selling right. And it’s not creative unless it sells. And, um, When I first encountered Jay Abraham, I was like, wow, there’s this whole world out there of direct response. There’s this whole world out there of more accountable advertising. I want to be a part of that. So I kind of left the ad world and started working for the boardrooms, the Agoras, Healthy Direction, some of the big publishers, as well as all sorts of entrepreneurs and startups and fun stuff like that. But it was always more or less direct response oriented. It was always about getting a response, getting an order, getting a name. 

And after doing that for a few decades, I started teaching, coaching other people how to do it, because I kind of found that it’s really pretty easy in a way to turn someone, turn their thinking, right? Most people think incorrectly about writing. They think, well, how can I write? How do I put the words? What are the right words to put on the page? Rather than, hey, you know, if you had to convince someone to go to a certain movie or to go to this restaurant versus that restaurant, you wouldn’t sit down and be all writerly and try to compose something. You would just, your natural persuader would come out. So, I find that just getting people in touch with that kind of goes beyond all the formulas and the templates and all, which are great to have. But the main thing is, how do you get in touch with that ability that you naturally have to help people, help to persuade people? So that’s what I do now. I still do some writing occasionally, although it’s more partnerships, kind of getting together with people and creating a product or working with them as part of their team. and have my own products as well, because nothing keeps you as sharp in terms of writing.

Rob Marsh: You’re having to sell your own things.

David Deutsch: It’s like, boy, you really pay attention to the numbers. And that’s what copywriting is in a way. It’s as much of a science as it is an art.

Rob Marsh: I love that. So before we jump into how you do that and the strategy, all that, you’re one of the last guys around that really remembers Ogilvy, David Ogilvy. His books, I think, almost set the stage for much of what became the direct response industry, even, you know, before the internet sort of, you know, took over a lot of that, but just tell us, you know, just a minute or two, your thoughts about that whole experience for you and how formative it was for you.

David Deutsch: Well, I think being at Ogilvy was kind of like being at a teaching hospital in a way, right? People taught each other and there was a body of learning that you learn from. It was partly a mythology in a certain way, which was interesting, right? The myth of David Ogilvy and what he did and how he was. And of course, he perpetuated that myth by occasionally wearing kilts and doing outrageous things in restaurants and doing outrageous things in presentations. But, you know he loved the English language. You can tell his writing is so masterful in its command, in its exactness, its use of language. And he loved getting results. He loved selling. He didn’t just write for sport for its own sake, for winning awards, right? He called direct mail my first love and secret weapon. because he used it once to sell a hotel back in the day. And so, you know, and I think also his putting his teachings in different forms, right, in his lectures, in his books and things has kind of inspired me to share what I know, to be part of that passing on.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love reading his books to this day. Some of the things that maybe he teaches are a little dated, but you know, I’d still say 80% of what he taught, what he talks about is applicable to the work that we do. Certainly what we’re doing online, you know, where response is so much of what we have to do. But I’m a little bit jealous that you had that experience of being at Ogilvy in those days.

David Deutsch: Yeah, I’m very I’m grateful. Because It’s like I fell into it in a certain way. You know, I got a job there. It wasn’t even in the writing. And then I got into the writing part of it. But I was just like, Oh, I’m at an agency. That’s interesting. You know? Yeah. And, but I kind of fell in love with it. You know, just got kind of swept up.

Rob Marsh: I think, yeah, I think that happens to a lot of us. I’m, you know, much the same way. I had an opportunity at the very beginning of my career to start writing and I’ve loved it ever since. Yeah, it’s, it got its hooks in me and I’ve not wanted to let go. You mentioned when you left the agency, you started working with a lot of these big name direct mailers and it was all offline, I believe at the time. As you list off some of those names, I can imagine a lot of direct response copywriters thinking, wow, that’s the A-list of clients. It feels charmed in a way. How did you connect with that first client that then led to the next, whether it’s a boardroom or Agora or… Yeah, how did that all come together?

David Deutsch: Well, that’s an interesting question, interesting story. In the Jay Abraham corpus of work, there was a mention of a guy named John Finn, who was a copywriter’s agent in Los Angeles. And I thought, I should copy, I should copy, I should write to this guy. And I wrote to him. He was very receptive. And he hooked me up with different clients. and hooked me up with a guy named Jim Rutz, who was a very well-known writer in the world of direct response and in those big, you know, with those big companies. And I started working with Jim Rutz, which was a great learning experience, amazing command of language, amazing command of selling. It’s like you can’t put his right, you read his writing and you can’t put it down. So I worked with him for a while and, you know, he was kind enough to introduce me to the players there and they knew that I worked with him. And eventually I began working with, with his blessing, working with them on my own. You really can’t be working with someone, you know, both for, I think the, the learning, because, you know, it’s you can learn all you can from books, right? But unless you have someone that’s really tearing your work apart, right, and that’s really, you know, giving you feedback on it, and then showing you exactly what to do. Sometimes, it’s hard to learn plus the contacts that you make, I’ve made working with Jim and working with other people and working with John Finn.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Tell me, are there two or three major lessons or takeaways that you had from your experience working with Jim Rutz?

David Deutsch: Sure. I think the main thing was don’t be boring. First of all, do not bore. And Jim was just amazing at using colorful language. He even wrote to the reader’s highest intelligence. Sometimes you come across words you didn’t even know what they meant. And either it didn’t matter, or you kind of knew what they meant from the context. So it didn’t matter in that sense. But he could take anything and make it into an interesting story, put an interesting twist on it. So I think there was really, you know, there’s really learning that. And I think also, I learned from him, just the power of a great idea of an outrageous idea. Half of the ideas he came up with were terrible, but the other half were genius. You never kind of knew which one was which. But that’s how it is, I think, with great ideas. Someone comes along and says, I got this great idea for a drink. We’re going to make it. It’s going to be really bad tasting. It’s going to be full of sugar and caffeine. And we’re going to put it in a little can, and it’s going to be really expensive. We’re going to call it Red Bull. I mean, that sounds like a terrible idea, but it turned out to be a great idea.

Rob Marsh: So what I mean, since you mentioned that, let’s let’s talk a bit about ideas. And I know this is something that you have been talking about and teaching about pretty in depth most recently, although throughout your entire career, ideas have been a critical part of your success. So, yeah, let’s talk about this. Where do ideas, well, actually first, what is an idea? Because I think a lot of times we talk about this, oh, you got to have the big idea in order to write a sales page or to have a campaign or whatever. And there’s a huge disagreement as to what even qualifies as a big idea.

David Deutsch: Yeah, yeah. And disagreement is silly because an idea is whatever you want it to be. Who cares, right? There’s no definition. Oh, this is the definition.

Rob Marsh: That doesn’t make it to idea status. That’s a concept.

David Deutsch: Yeah. You know, an idea is a new way of doing something. It’s a new way of saying something. It’s a new way of presenting something. You can have an idea for where to go to lunch. You can have an idea for how to change the world, you know, with a new iPhone. There’s all sorts of ideas, right? Idea for a heck of an idea for a headline. You can have an idea for a product. So I think what we’re talking about in a way though, is, is ideas for copy. Yeah. Right. And to me, a big, like what they call a big idea is an idea that you can really build a promotion around. right, that sustains a whole promotion. Like you see that with Agora, the stuff that they do. You see that with some big health promotions. You see that in the ad world, of course, right? What’s the idea behind this commercial that kind of sustains it, that gives us a premise to build on, right? Like “End of America”. Well, yeah, the idea, it’s not an earth shaking idea. But the idea was that the end of America, which is just kind of a little bit of hyperbole, that, you know, America, as we kind of know, it is coming to an end, and you need to be prepared. And not in a gloom and doomy way that there’ll be blood in the streets, but just that, hey, it’s gonna be some big changes. And you could either profit from them, Or you can kind of watch your portfolio go down from. 

A lot of my favorite big ideas are just opposite ideas. That’s one of the things I teach in my Idea Power training. Just do something opposite. If everyone else is zigging, you zag. If everyone else is saying, do these things to be healthy, you can say, hey, all that stuff’s a lot of crock. You’re not going to be healthy because you don’t do this and do this. You be healthy by doing this stuff that I said, looking at it in this new way. Right? Like, yeah, you shouldn’t need a ton of sugar. And yeah, you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. But you know, drinking eight cups of water a day isn’t going to help you and not drinking coffee is going to help you because coffee is good for you in a lot of ways. And that was an actual promotion. It was very much like that. It was like, you know, had enough with all these people telling you all those things not to do right. It got your attention.

Rob Marsh: So what are some other, I’m going to use the word framework here. It’s not really a framework, but you know, if we have these tools, like, you know, opposite ideas, what are some others of these tools or frameworks that we can apply as we start thinking through, okay, I’ve got a promotion or I’m coming up with a hook for something. Maybe it’s not even as big as a campaign. It’s just, you know, I want an article on LinkedIn or on my own blog or whatever, but I need that hook. What are some of those other tools that we can apply to the thoughts as they come?

David Deutsch: Well, I think people get stuck, right? They just, they don’t think of it as in a fluid sort of way as how can I take what I have, right? And kind of what can I add to it? What can I subtract from it? Like maybe an idea comes from zooming in. on something like Ogilvy zoomed in on the clock in that at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock, right? He zoomed in, right? You can zoom out, you can focus on one particular feature, right? A lot of times an idea or your ideas or promotion sounds really bland, right? Talking about Oh, this revolutionary thing is going to change your thinking in the world and how you do it. But if you really zoom in on one little thing, how it neutralizes a certain molecule in order to switch off your, I don’t know, hunger hormone or whatever it is, right? And then same with adding something, right? What can I add to this? How can I throw in Donald Trump? How can I throw in a celebrity? How can I make it relevant to what people are seeing going on in the world now? And of course, you see that in financial stuff, right? It’s like the agora, the Trump checks, or the Trump secret, or how the election’s gonna change something. And you see it in health by the celebrity connection, right? Celebrity secret. And I’m not saying don’t just automatically add the word celebrity into it, but look for the connection that it might have to some celebrity, right? Maybe some celebrity does something that’s along these lines that you can kind of use that as a tie in. Maybe people in Hollywood are doing it. People at Hollywood are doing everything. Chances are, you’re doing whatever it is your product does.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s truth there. So I want to ask you, when you get a new assignment, what is your process? Because do you jump into the product first? Do you start researching the customers? What does that even look like when an assignment lands on your desk?

David Deutsch: First of all, first thing I do, and it’s something I got from Clayton Makepeace, is I just start coming up with ideas. because I don’t want to fill my head with a lot of cans, cans, you know, it’s this, it’s not that. The first things that come to mind are usually the things that would get me to want this thing that I want this thing to have, right? Like, you know, and as you kind of what used to be called open the box, right? Of materials and background research, open the files nowadays. You know, you may find, oh, I can’t really say that it enables you to live forever, but I can say it enables you to live longer. And I can say, you know, certain other things about it, right? But a lot of the thinking about it, a lot of the analogies about it, a lot of the directions that you get when you first don’t have anything, you know, uh, hemming you in can be very productive. So that’s, that’s kind of my starting point is do that for awhile and then say, okay, I’d like to, in the research now explore certain things. Like I want to explore this thing about longevity here. I want to explore how it helps you live longer. Um, and rifling through some of the other stuff. Maybe I’ll see some unexpected things. I’m, I’m looking for that, you know, It was discovered by a headhunter, by someone got it from headhunters in the Amazon jungle, right? How close can I come to the one-legged golfer, the famous John Carlton ad, where the guy got it by the technique from watching a one-legged golfer. I want to find those things. And I want to know enough about the market, who we’re writing to, right, to know not just, oh, they’re male, they’re this, they’re educated, they want to make more money. I want to know why they want to make more money. I want to know what drives them. I want to know what keeps them up at night. I want to know what they, as Jane Kennedy would say, I want to know what they talk to their spouse about at night, driving to see their kids, you know, or not at night. I don’t know why I threw in at night, but, you know, like, what do they just say to each other in private, right? How can I kind of tap into that? And then I want to know, how the product works, you know, like really well, I hate getting copy from people. Um, where it’s like, obviously, it’s written by a copywriter that read a couple of pages of stuff about blood pressure, but doesn’t really understand, like, if I was talking to a doctor, it’d be a totally different conversation. Not like he’d use big words, but it would be obvious he understands how blood pressure works. Right? It’s obvious from this copywriter, he doesn’t understand how blood pressure works. He just kind of knows how to talk about it. And when you read it from someone that’s really maybe gone out and read a book or two about blood pressure, really understands the different ways of getting blood pressure down, really understands what happens when blood pressure goes up, right? How that puts pressure on every organ of your body. It’s not just, oh, it’s a number, and it’s a bad number when it’s a high number, right? We’re talking about every organ of your body is being overtaxed by this high pressure, fluid pressure up against it, right? And getting rid of it just frees up your circulation. You know, I had a client and he did a lot of he was in the facial skin care. And I said, you know, I read your stuff. I don’t really feel like you really know, I mean, I feel like, you know, skincare better than most people, but I don’t feel, you know, what’s really going on under there in the epidermis. I feel like, you know, enough just to write what you need to write for it really, you know, kind of well. And he was right. You’re right. You know, I’m going to go read up on some books, right? I’m going to go read some books. And he came back. He was like, God, it makes such a difference now when I write about it, right? Even if I’m not directly referencing what I wrote, what I write and the way I say it is different. Because I know, you know, what’s I know the 90% under the iceberg now. So anyway, I got off on a little rip. But so that’s what I do then. And then I just try to write, you know, maybe I’ll come up with some headlines. Maybe I’ll have an idea for an opening. I don’t really care where I start. I just want to start I want to start getting stuff on paper. I think that’s real important. And then try to get something down, complete as quickly as possible. and see if it works or if it doesn’t work. I like to work on Scrivener for longer stuff, because it’s really easy to organize stuff in Scrivener. It’s really easy to move it around. It’s kind of a word processing program, like for writers. And it’s like everything you always wanted a word processing. I wish Word divided things into Windows easier. And I wish that column where you can make it so they have the table of contents. I wish that was a little better and more active. I wish all these things. It just does that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, Scrivener’s made for, I think, originally for novelists, right? So you can move characters around or chapters around or whatever. Because of that, though, I think it becomes a really powerful tool if you’re writing long form, because oftentimes you’ll tell a story that later, as you’re writing, it’s like, wait, that doesn’t really fit up above, but it does fit down below. The copy and paste scroll in Word is so much less effective than what you’re talking about with Scrivener.

David Deutsch: All you have to do is move the title in that over here, I guess, in that left-hand column, just move it down to where you want it. You don’t have to like take the whole thing and cut and paste it. Exactly. The other thing that I love is that you can keep all your research right there on that same column. So it’s like, oh, I want to look at that PDF. Oh, I want to listen to the recording that we had the call with the client, right? It’s right there. I want to see that chart again. The chart is right there in that column.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes footnoting research so much easier. It’s a great tool, Scrivener, for all of this. It’s so cheap.

David Deutsch: It’s like, what, 49 bucks or something like that?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s cheaper than Word, for sure. So as you’re writing this, and I know I kind of asked this before we started recording, and you’ve been doing this long enough that you obviously know, okay, at some point, I need to be building authority or I need to be introducing proof at this point. But do you have a framework or an outline in the back of your head that you’re writing to as you sit down, or do you just let it come out of your fingers as it comes?

David Deutsch: To some extent, it comes. I mean, there’s a basic There’s certain basic outlines that are kind of in my head, you know, there’s the, you know, the problem. you know, I want to, you know, I want to let people know that there’s a problem. And if it’s a problem that, you know, oh, there’s a knife stuck in their neck, okay, well, I don’t have to sit there and go, you know, it’s really hard to have a knife stuck in your neck. And people look at you funny, but you know, it’s embarrassing, you know, you’re less productive at work. Like, I don’t have to do that. I just have to go, I got a thing here that can get that knife out of your neck. If they’ve got arthritis, Okay, little less so, right? I don’t have to harp on how painful arthritis is. They know it’s painful. Maybe I have to remind them a little bit. Maybe I have to play a little bit on, you know, you can’t pick up your grandson. That kind of hurts, makes you feel a little less, you know, useful. Just, you know, just step on the corns a little bit. If it’s high blood pressure or if it’s like, you know, high blood sugar, well, that’s a little different because there’s not those constant reminders like you have with arthritis. So I got to do a little more pressing on the problem. I got to do a little more reminding them that, hey, it’s not just, you know, a number that your doctor says you really should get down. This is a ticking time bomb in your body that’s liable to go off as a stroke or a heart attack at any minute. Um, And then, of course, there are some things where they don’t even know it’s a problem, like, oh, I never knew I needed this, right? You’ve got to tell, like Scrivener, right? Nobody knows they need Scrivener until you tell them, hey, there’s this better way to do this thing, right?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Life insurance strikes me as one of those kinds of products where you absolutely need it if you die, but it’s one of those things that you don’t even want to think about needing. And so, yeah, hardly even like hits your radar, right?

David Deutsch: Yeah. Like I think Dan Kennedy says, you got to show them the coffin. There’s no life insurance. I came close to that. I sold a book on estate planning.

Rob Marsh: Okay, basically the same problem.

David Deutsch: Same thing, I had all those same problems, which is of course planning for death and who you’re gonna leave money to. How do I make this interesting, right? And it was one of the first things I did for Boardroom and it was a great training ground, right? Because it really like, okay, in trying to make that interesting, it was like, well, now I, it was like lifting 50 pound weights and now 10 pound weights don’t seem that heavy anymore.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, for sure.

David Deutsch: I remember, if I could just share one thing, this long thing about how you have to be really careful to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s because if you don’t do certain things, then the money that you think is earmarked for a certain beneficiary might not get to that beneficiary because you’ve misstated something or haven’t specified this in this certain place. And I turned that into how to avoid accidentally disinheriting your heirs.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. There’s a connection there, right? Yeah.

David Deutsch: To me, that really sums up how do you take something boring, make it into not boring? How do you take something that’s just informational and make it relate to something that they care about, which is, you know, their heirs, you know, getting what’s coming to them.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So as you’re writing, I’m curious about the effort and the amount of work that you put in. And maybe this is something that you coach people on. For a beginner, intermediate copywriter, how many headlines, how many hooks should they be coming up with? Or is their writing, whatever this thing is that they’re writing, a sales page, a blog post, a case study, whatever, how many rewrites does it take to get to something that’s actually good? And I know that’s a really nebulous question, so I apologize for that.

David Deutsch: And of course the answer is it depends, right? Yeah, of course. Like 50. You know, three is often a good number, right? You get to two, you revise it once.

Rob Marsh: You’re talking about the actual article itself, not necessarily headlines. Headlines would be more than three. Yeah.

David Deutsch: Yeah. The actual overall thing, right? You do it once, you go, you know, I missed this. I missed this. I don’t know about this approach. I want to try this. That’s kind of a second draft. And then you see other things become clearer because you fix some things. Other things are now a little out of whack or now it becomes clear that the conclusion is not as good as it could be. So the third time kind of does it right. Headlines, it’s good to generate, I don’t know, 20. You know, it’s good to generate 30. You know, the main thing is a to make them all as different as possible. Don’t just like, you know, Oh, should I instead of like, like how to make more money and live a better life? Make more money and live a better life. I’ll take out the how to like, no, that’s just to say.

Rob Marsh: right?

David Deutsch: Right. Like you really want something like, you really want to base it on a different hypothesis. Maybe they don’t want to make more money. Maybe you’re wrong about that. That’s the most important thing that that’s the thing that’s going to work. Maybe they just want to look good to their to their family. Maybe they want to be a good provider. Maybe they want to maybe it’s keeping score to them. Right? You know, so the headline then becomes how to prove your sixth grade teacher who said how to prove wrong your sixth grade teacher who said you’d never amount to any Like maybe, so that’s another headline, right? And what’s another headline, right? What if we took it and extended it, the benefit, right? It’s not the money, it’s the thing you can buy, right? Why not spend next year vacationing in Europe, flying first class and staying in a first class hotel instead of going to the nearest beach or something, right? It’s not quite the same thing now. It’s different emotionally. It’s different conceptually. So, you know, again, people get hemmed in. They’re like, Oh, I got to say these things in the headline. And I got it. Got it. They try to make the headline into a sales pitch. And as you know, it’s not a sales pitch. It’s a read the next read what’s under the headline pitch.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s it’s a catch your attention. So that you can get them into the next sentence, right?

David Deutsch: Nobody ever read a headline and went, I’m gonna buy this thing. I’m

Rob Marsh: So, you know, to bring us back around then to, you know, back to ideas, how do you know when you’ve got a good idea? Because, and this is obviously the reason we want to come up with a lot of them, because the first few ideas are generally not great or they’re so common, you know, that they’ve been used and seen before. How do you know when you’ve got that one or, you know, two or three maybe that you’re just like, wow, we definitely need to test this or we need to use this?

David Deutsch: Yeah. Well, um, first of all, I don’t mean to be pitchy here, but they can go to, um, speaking of writing.com forward slash IP. And there’s a test that they can take to see whether something is a big idea or not.

Rob Marsh: Okay.

David Deutsch: And couple of things on that. One is, you know, You’ve got to train yourself to recognize good ideas. I mean, that’s what you’re trying to do here, but to feel good ideas, right? You read something like End of America. Can you feel like it does something to you emotionally that gets your attention? You can feel that when everybody reads at 60 miles an hour, loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce electric clock, you feel like it does something to you. They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play dot, dot, dot, Right? You feel that. Yeah. And, um, you’ve got to learn to kind of feel that, like practice it with other headlines. Like, does this do that to me? Right. Does this, is this a big idea? And then learn to recognize it in your own, looking at them as if you didn’t write them. Right. Like, look at it. Like, okay, if I will, I’m just encountering this headline. I didn’t write it. Oh, you know, Does it? Yeah, that’s not very interesting. It looks like a million other headlines. I mean, right, like, because it stops being your precious baby. And you’re seeing it as other people see it. Okay.

Rob Marsh: I mean, in the real world, the way to do this probably is to look for those things that do stop you, that do catch your attention, that you’re just like, wait a second, why do I love that ad? Or what is the thing about that that made me stop as I was going to go get a drink during the commercial break or whatever and have to finish watching that? Or I’m turning the page and I have to read this and trying to, I guess, figure out what is the thing about this that made me stop?

David Deutsch: Yeah. I mean, that’s something I learned from Steven Kotler. I was very articulate about that best selling author. And he says, Look at how something made you feel. How does this make me feel? And then why does it make me feel this way? How does it make me feel this way? And I think there’s a couple things when it comes to big ideas, right? The first is, you know, I think, Oh, he said, Does it make me go? Wow, when I saw it, someone else’s idea? Do I go? Do I wish I’d thought that?

Rob Marsh: Yeah.

David Deutsch: And you can kind of do that with your own ideas. The other is, is there an emotional component to it? End of America. There’s emotion there. They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play, da, da, da, there’s a lot of emotion in that. Vindication, resurrection, proving others wrong, not being laughed at anymore. So much emotion there. So does it have that emotion? And is it a big enough idea to carry a whole promotion, right? I mean, Ogilvy’s thing was for, you know, 12 mistakes, let’s say, that people make when they read English. You know, to this day, people look at that and they go, I wonder what those 12 mistakes are. Maybe I make those 12 mistakes. And it carries the whole promotion, because as it talks about those 12 mistakes, it talks about why you should buy this course.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. Okay. I want to change gears just a little bit and talk about this idea that, again, before we started recording, I mentioned Brian Kurtz mentioned this to me. I’ve heard him say it a few times, this idea of copy thinking as opposed to copy writing. You’re the guy that coined that phrase, I believe. What is copy thinking and how is it different from copywriting?

David Deutsch: You know, I think Of course, you’ve got to think to write, but I think a lot of people just kind of go on automatic pilot when they start writing. right? And the automatic pilot is programmed by their, by their eighth grade English teacher and maybe college, you know, courses and things they had to write for that. It’s programmed by, okay, I’ve read a lot of this stuff and I know what it sounds like and I’m going to make it sound like this sort of thing. It’s not your fault, right? You’re, you know, not to blame for being overweight or not rich or whatever it is.

And now, okay, now I’m in the story part. So I am going to tell this story, right? So come hell or high water, no matter how boring it gets, they’re gonna tell that story from beginning to end, right? Because they’re not thinking about, well, maybe the best way to tell this story is to start at the end of the story and work my way back, right? In medias res, as they say. Maybe the best way to, you know, whatever it is, maybe there’s a better way to do this than just kind of regurgitate the stuff that occurred. Because AI can do that, right? AI does that very well. So what we need to do is to get off of the automatic pilot and take control of the throttle or whatever the thing is called in an airplane. And fall back on our own experience and our own expertise and our own insights that we have and our own, even wit and humor and personality and what we are and what’s inside us.

And that means thinking. That means like just sitting quietly before you start to write and go, well, what do I want to say here? What do I know about this? What do I feel about this? What do I want the person I’m writing to, to feel? Right? What story do I want to tell and how do I want to tell that story in a, you know, in an interesting way? And what strategy should I use, right? Is everyone else, you know, zigging, so I need to zag? Have people heard, you know, the Schwartzian, have people heard this to death? And I can’t just come in with a better way to lose weight or a better way to make money. I’ve got to come in with, you know, why French women don’t get fat, right? Or I’ve got to bring in, you know, you know, this radical new way of making money or address the market directly, right? Tried every way of making money and can’t seem to do it. Here’s what you’re missing. So that’s what I think is lacking so much. And I think it’s more and more lacking as people kind of rely more and more on AI output, whether they cut and paste it, which horrifies me. Or whether they use it you know, incorporated themselves, they need to add that strategic element to it. They need to add that strategic element in terms of even how they prompt AI, right? Like, hey, here’s what I’m thinking. How do I go against what people are doing? What’s the strategy? What’s the way? Like, have a conversation with AI. AI isn’t just write me a sales letter or write me an email, right? It’s like, hey, let’s talk like you’ve got this intern. that is working for you, right? You don’t just say, go write me a, well, you might, but go write me a sales letter. It’s like, hey, let me tell you what I’m trying to do here. What are your ideas? What do you think? What do you think about this? What do you think about this, right? How would you take this? How would you dimensionalize this? What other ways could you do this? Give me five other ways to tell this story.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah. It feels to me, and I agree, that what copywriters, maybe we’ve got an entire generation of copywriters who are used to taking an assignment from a client and assuming that the strategic thinking has been done. You know, they’re asking me to write a sales page. So I’m, you know, I, I’m assuming that they know how to drive traffic to the sales page or they’re asking me for an ad. So I assume that it’s about this thing that they’ve asked about rather than taking that step back to, to really do the strategic work. And I think that’s hard for a lot of copywriters because oftentimes we don’t have that background.

David Deutsch: Yes, we don’t have the background and thinking is hard work. And people are under deadline pressures. But that’s what people need to do. And when you do do it, it makes the writing so much easier.

Rob Marsh: Totally.

David Deutsch: Because you’ve got that insight. You’ve got that direction. You’ve got that strategic underpinning. You know what you’re trying to say, what needs to be said, how it needs to be said. You know, sometimes I feel like that’s my whole purpose as a coach is just to get people to stop and think, you know, to just say to people, Hey, how would you say this? So forget about writing, right? Just sell it to me. How would you sell it to me? Right. And then at first I’ll kind of copyright selling it to me. No, no, no, no, no, no. Just I’m your friend sitting in a bar. Just tell me about this thing. Don’t tell me your strategic, you know, whatever your, you know, what you think the copy should say.

Rob Marsh: Yeah.

David Deutsch: You know, tell me as a friend, because that’s what copy is. I forget who said this, but it’s kind of, um, it’s like just putting your, you know, putting your arm around someone and saying, Hey, let’s go look for, you know, close together. You look, you look good in this. You don’t look good in this. Right.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So you mentioned using AI, obviously not to do the writing, but as an idea buddy. How have you used it to improve strategy, or how are you coaching other writers to use it? I know you can sort of have that back and forth, but do you actually ask a tool like Cloud or ChatGPT for strategic ideas to start with?

David Deutsch: Yeah, sometimes. I think Ask for strategic ideas, bounce strategic ideas off of it. Ask it, why would this not work, right? You can ask it unlimited questions, right? Why not ask it why something wouldn’t work so that you could avoid finding that out later? Or at least consider, oh yeah, it might not work because people might be offended by this, or might not work because that’s not the benefit people really want, or whatever it is. But yeah, sure, have that. conversation with it. And I wouldn’t say don’t use it to write, but that’s a very far part of the AI process, right? Yeah. When it’s ready to actually write something, you know, like first you’ve got to go, what’s the avatar? What’s the strategic? What are we trying to do here? And, you know, AI, as you probably know, is very step by step. It doesn’t do well with find an avatar, think of a strategy, and, you know, do an outline and write it, right? It likes to do those things in stages, like, let’s do the avatar first together. Let’s do this together. Let’s do that together and go back and forth.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a writing buddy or as a thought buddy, AI can actually be a really great tool to force us to do the things as copywriters that we often skip over because we think we know the audience, or we think we know what the right feature is. And if we have that go, that back and forth, you know, tell me why this won’t work. Give me three additional things that I’d be thinking about here, kinds of prompts could, I mean, it just, Like, it’s part of that copy thinking process.

David Deutsch: Sure. It’s a great copy thinker. You know, what are five things that people with diabetes wish regular people without diabetes knew? Right? That could be some pretty good stuff to have in your promotion. What are five things that, you know, people with diabetes, you know, what are their biggest obstacles? What do they hate most? Right? You know, questions like that can give you real insights. into a target market. I mean, probably can’t beat going out and talking to people with diabetes. But you know, it’s a good it’s a good thought starter, right?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah. So we met in person a few years ago at one of our events, Copywriter Club in Real Life. I think we were in Williamsburg there. And one of the things I noticed that you were doing as all these presentations on stage, I looked over at one point and you were busily scribbling notes into a notebook, which impressed me a little bit because I don’t think there was anybody on stage with less experience or with more experience than you. So there’s a lot of people who have been maybe doing this for only a couple of years or whatever, and you’re still scribbling away tons of ideas, thoughts that you’re having. And like I said, it impressed me because I was just thinking, if somebody with three, four decades of experience is here learning. There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. So that’s a really long introduction to my question, which is, how do you stay sharp today? What are you doing to learn? Where do you focus your reading, your journaling, your thinking, basically, to make sure that you’re growing your skills?

David Deutsch: Ooh, that’s quite a question. You know, there’s a lot of things, right? Keeping current with what’s going on, whether that’s social media. I love TikTok, which is, of course, a great way to know what’s going on because it’s all on there. Although it does kind of gravitate me away from, you know, young person things kind of into, you know, things more appropriate for my age.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, the algorithm still works.

David Deutsch: Yeah, the algorithm works really too well. Because whenever I say to my daughter, hey, did you see that thing on, you know, whatever, she’ll be like, yeah, Dad, you know, that’s on the old person feed, right? But it’s a great way to keep up with stuff. Being around young people, coaching young people is a really big help. You know, reading a wide variety of things Um, not just stuff that, you know, you’re interested in, but stuff that you might not want to be, you know, exposed to. Right. Um, whether that means watching, you know, Fox news or watching, you know, I love to watch Fox news and I love to watch, um, you know, CNN. Right. I love to see all ends of the spectrum. This goes back to the thing about taking notes. And I think there’s a couple of things there. One is they may have different insights than I do. They may have learned different things. They may know some things that I don’t. But even the things that they know that I know, they may know a different aspect of it. I may learn something from how they applied it or how they used it. That’s something I got from Jay Abraham, right? You go to the same seminar as someone, find out what their takeaways were, right? Because they won’t be the same as your takeaways. Different people see different aspects of things. And so, you know, I think that’s really important too. And just, you know, using the tech. The best advice I ever got about AI is just use it. you know, plan your vacation with it, use it. Don’t worry about getting this new plugin or, you know, this hot new, you know, just become familiar with it.

Rob Marsh: So here’s a slightly contrarian question, but what drives you nuts about copywriting today?

David Deutsch: Well, a lot of it is AI copy. When you can look at it and you go, oh my God, AI so wrote that. You can see that in editorial stuff, right? You can see that in copywriting. So that drives me a little bit nuts. I think it drives me a little bit nuts when people just are kind of writing on automatic pilot. because it just seems like a waste of a person, you know, when this person is an individual and has got things to bring to it and is only bringing to it, you know, this homogenized, you know, vomiting forth of everything that’s ever been written before in a different, you know, the classic being, you know, it’s not your fault.

Rob Marsh: Might as well have AI write it if that’s all you’re going to bring to the table.

David Deutsch: Yeah, because that’s exactly what, and that’s why AI is so good, because it’s good at doing it’s good at taking everything and making it sound like it, you know, it sounds like. And the danger is, as people become more and more immune to that, right? And what is, I don’t know, I forget what the word, inured against that, right? Like with stock photography, we can look at something, oh yeah, stock photography, you know, There’s the people posing around the boardroom table, right? Maybe we didn’t at first. We went, oh, nice photograph. Oh, look, they got all that set up and lighting. And now we just go, yeah, that’s the stock photography. Yeah. And it’s kind of becoming like that with AI, I think, too. It’s like it’s got that soulless kind of ring to it. And that’s why I think it’s really important for copywriters to read people like, to read writers with voice like Stephen Kotler, like Norman Mailer, like Tom Wolfe, you know, to really experience what real voice and copy can sound like and personality. Because that’s what people read, right? They read things like that that are interesting to them. And more and more, we’ve got to hold people’s attention. We’ve got to get people’s attention. It’s getting hard to do that, right, for everyone everywhere because people are so buried in all the noise and all the stuff that’s out there, they’re not responding like they used to.

Rob Marsh: I think that this is a really important point. You know, Gary Halbert was famous for handing all of his copy cubs a Travis McGee novel, you know, to basically, you know, get them thinking, you know, in a different way. And like you said, when we show up, we were hired to write copy. So we put on our copy goggles and we write copy. But that’s not the stuff that connects deeply. That’s not the stuff that’s emotional. And we’ve got to go beyond that automatic stuff. And it’s fiction. The writers you named are phenomenal for voice. dozens of others that we can name that also do that. But it’s a reminder that if you’re not reading fiction or poetry or outside of the realm of just copywriting books, you’re probably shorting your ability to write well.

David Deutsch: Yeah. I mean, a lot of what I train people in is fiction techniques for nonfiction. Right? How do you build characters? How do you build suspense? How do you, how do you plot, you know, the stories that you tell? And of course, we’re doing real stories, hopefully. But you know, they’re doing with fate was so what, right? A story, a story is a story. And an interesting story is an interesting story. Like Howard Gossage said, people read what they’re interested in. Sometimes it’s an ad. Yeah, right. And all those writers, Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Stephen Kotler, I forget the other one, but they all wrote, even David Wallace, they all wrote fiction and nonfiction, right? And the reason their nonfiction was so great was because they brought those novelistic techniques, those fiction techniques to their nonfiction.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s a great lesson there. So you started out a few decades ago doing this. If you were coaching somebody, maybe it’s a friend of your daughter’s or whatever, they’re just getting their start. I want to be a direct response copywriter. Where would you tell them to start? What would you tell them to do? What are those first couple of steps you would coach somebody on?

David Deutsch: Well, I’d start them out with, you know, the basic books, right, the Hopkins, the Ogilvy, the capels, give them a foundation in the basics of direct response, because those haven’t changed, right, the basic tenets of Hopkins, the testing, right, more important than ever, easier to test than ever. The basic human nature stuff in those things hasn’t changed, right. And then I think I would make sure that they not only knew copywriting, but they also knew you know, how to make a funnel, they also knew SEO, they also knew, you know, CRO, conversion rate optimization. Yeah, right. They knew those things that they didn’t just think of. And they just didn’t think of themselves as writers, right? Writers is one thing that they do. They’re people that get sales that get, you know, I’m someone that gets sales for people get response. And sometimes a lot of that revolves in writing because you have to, you know, write stuff for CRO and SEO and all those other acronyms to work. So I tell them like, just know more than other people. That’s a big thing in what I teach, right? Just know more than other people, right? Know more about copywriting, know more about the products, know more about the market. It’s hard to write better. Right? You know, people are, some people are good at writing, some people aren’t that great at writing. But it’s real easy to know more than other people. Like some writers are really good writers, I’m sorry, some copywriters are really good writers, like Bencivenga, you know, and other people like that. Other people are good enough, but they’re really good at knowing what to write, right? Really good at knowing what to put on paper to get people to react in a certain way, to do certain things. So just know the history of copywriting, know the history of the industries that you’re working for, right? Just put in that work, especially when you’re young and you need to differentiate yourself.

Rob Marsh: This is where every copywriter should be more curious than anybody else, right? That’s like one of the number one character traits, I suppose, that really set us apart, or at least should set us apart. If you’re curious, you learn.

David Deutsch: I mean, imagine that friend of a friend’s daughter or whatever it is, right? And, you know, she knows copywriting. So she goes, you want a copywriter? I can write copy. Nah, we got plenty of copywriters. We don’t have an opening right now. Right. But if she goes in there and she’s like, you know, Hey, I can help you improve your sales. You know, I do copywriting and I do other things like what’s the biggest problem you have right now? Well, we can’t really get our leads to convert. Well, I, you know, I know a little bit about that, right? I know a little bit about converting leads and here’s some of the things I found. Tell me more about it. So she may be a copywriter, but she’s getting her foot in the door with whatever their problem is because she can help them solve it. And she can use copywriting to help them solve it. But because she knows a little bit about the funnel and how to convert leads and how to get more leads or whatever it is, she’s got so much more exponentially a chance at getting that job, getting that, you know, project.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. This has been a great conversation for me, David. It’s been great to connect with you and hear your thoughts on all of this stuff. But it’s only been 50 minutes. I’m guessing there are a lot of people who would like more David in their life to be on your email list, possibly even jump into one of the courses or the trainings that you offer. You mentioned the website earlier. It’s speakingofwriting.com. Is that the best place to go?

David Deutsch: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so happy now I have a website. David L. Deutsch, D-E-U-T… I don’t have to do that anymore. Now it’s just speakingofwriting.com.

Rob Marsh: Well, and plus there’s the other, the other David Deutsch, who’s the famous physician or, or whatever, if you misspell your name, all his stuff comes up. So yeah. Speakingofwriting.com is the easiest way to find you.

David Deutsch: Yeah. That’s where they can go. They can, you know, sign up for my newsletter. They can, uh, find out about products there. There’s a bunch of articles and there’s two free reports, one on copywriting and one on, uh, creativity, how to come up with great ideas.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for your time and again, for sharing. I’d love to have you come back sometime. We can talk about some of this stuff even at greater depth, but I appreciate your willingness to share so much, David.

David Deutsch: Thanks. My pleasure. I’d love to come back. I think we’ve got a couple more hours in us.

Rob Marsh: Easily. Thanks. Thanks again to David Deutsch for going deep on copy thinking, finding ideas, strategy, and so much more. There’s just so much to learn from this interview, and I’m already going back and taking additional notes. 

David talked a little bit about writing emotional copy. He shared some really good ideas on how to do that, paying attention to the way that copy makes you feel as you encountered it. We have a how to write emotional copy workshop with a bunch of different bonuses. If you want to check that out, you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion. And of course, you can connect with David at his website, speakingofwriting.com. There’s a couple of bonuses there. And if you go to speakingofwriting.com/IP, you can get the checklist that David mentioned early on in the interview about how to know if you’ve got a good idea or not. And of course, join his list there so you can keep up with what David’s doing in the world of copywriting today.