Hey, it's Payton. 👋

It’s Friday, and these are the 4 dangerous things I found this week worth your attention.

Almond Breeze and Equinox both launched campaigns this week making fun of AI, with Almond Breeze putting the Jonas Brothers next to deliberately cheesy AI-slop ads and Adweek calling the whole trend "virtue signaling about AI." Aerie's in too.

The bet is that audiences are so tired of synthetic content that "made by humans" is now a selling point. I find this interesting compared to Mark Zuckerberg telling staff that AI agents haven't progressed as quickly as he'd hoped.

🟡 Adapt it. The instinct is right, but the execution is missing. Don't run an ad about being human. Just be detectably human in everything you make, which is cheaper and doesn't need the Jonas Brothers.

A creator's Dr Pepper jingle pulled 42 million views and 5 million likes, so Dr Pepper aired it during the College Football Playoff National Championship. It slaps.

🟢 Steal it. Your audience is already making things about what you do (reviews, replies, testimonies, that one dude who makes memes). Find the best one this month and give it a bigger stage.

DiamondBack, a truck bed cover company, raised conversions 18% without writing a single new word. They took the answer to the question every buyer was actually asking and moved it from page three to the top of the page.

Can you spot the difference?

🟢 Steal it. Most conversion problems aren't copy problems. You likely wrote the sentence that closes the deal; it's just buried deep in your page.

Marketing Brew's post-game data: AI-made spots drew just 6% of ad mentions and 4% of engagement, and reception ran "sharply negative." Expensive proof of hit #1: people can smell it.

🔴 Stay away from AI-generated final product in anything meant to build trust. Use the machine for labor, never for the goodies themselves.

I spent this week rebuilding this newsletter's entire backend with AI because the numbers demanded it: I lost 219 subscribers last quarter and sent exactly 2 times in June. The readers who stayed open at 59%, so the product was fine. The pipeline was the problem.

So was I.

The rebuild, in three pieces: a welcome sequence that tells new readers exactly what they signed up for (and invites the wrong ones to leave), an ai cron scout that scans my sources every morning and keeps 10 ideas on a bench where anything unwritten in 5 days falls off, and a drafting system trained on my own edits, so every editing pass I make trains future research/writing.

Total cost is about ~$100 a month, and the rebuild took roughly one working day.

🤿 Dive Deeper: The Trust Stack is my free guide to using AI without losing your voice, your ethics, or your audience's trust. 

The market just spent millions confirming what you already knew. People trust people.

—Payton ✌️