I rage-quit a webinar a few weeks ago.

It was a first for me, but I was too angry to stay on the call. I shouted, “FUCK THIS!”, closed Zoom, and stormed downstairs to rant at my partner, Jessie.

The webinar promised to teach us how to add jokes to our copy, and I’ll sum up the advice from the first twenty minutes:

Step 1: Find a joke you like from a comedian, movie, or TV show

Step 2: Change one or two words

Step 3: Pass the joke off as your own

There you go. Easy-peasy! Oh, except there’s one small problem—this is plagiarism.

This “expert” copywriter was teaching other marketers to just steal other people's work and claim it as their own.

Imagine being this guy's client? How can you trust anything he submits was actually written by him? He’s the copywriting equivalent of those blokes down the pub who used to sell pirated VHS tapes of the latest movies.

But unfortunately, he’s not the only one peddling plagiarism as an alternative to creativity.

PlagiarismGPT

If you’ve looked at social media for longer than five minutes recently, you’ll have seen plenty of buzz around ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Amid this buzz is a dishearteningly high number of posts that suggest this clever little trick:

Step 1: Find content you like from other creators

Step 2: Feed the content into ChatGPT, asking it to rewrite it

Step 3: Pass the new content off as your own

What a great hack!

Who cares that the creator you stole from put time and effort into researching and writing that content?

Fuck them, right?

Unfortunately, people seem to be lapping up this advice. Either getting AI tools to rewrite someone else's content or getting AI to ‘write’ it in the first place.

But do you want to know a secret?

AI isn’t writing anything. It’s just software that plagiarises millions of people at once.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressively efficient plagiarism. It would take a human marketing bro centuries to steal that much content manually.

But it’s still plagiarism, plain and simple. It’s generated based on someone else's ideas, someone else's research, someone else's creativity.

And the funny thing is, it probably isn’t even as effective as you hoped!

Yesterday's news

See, the flaw with stolen content is that it’s immediately unoriginal and out-of-date.

Whether you rewrite something yourself, or get a robot to do it for you, you’re already behind your competitors.

Let me explain…

When Arctic Monkeys released their debut album, I lived in their hometown of Sheffield. 

They became a household name overnight, and it had a huge impact on the local music scene.

All of a sudden every band in the city was getting a record deal, as record deals tried to cash in on the buzz by finding the ‘next’ Arctic Monkeys.

And you can probably guess what happened next.

They all recorded their debut albums, had big launch parties around Sheffield, then…nothing. Their albums flopped, their gigs stopped selling out, and they were quickly dropped by the labels.

But why did they fail? People loved the Arctic Monkeys, so why wouldn’t they love all these other bands that sounded similar?

Easy! Because people don’t want a shitter version of something they first heard 6/12/24 months ago.

This is what you’re doing when you copy someone else's content. You’re just posting a shitter (probably) version of something someone else has already said.

Is that really what you want your target audience to see? Do you really want to advertise yourself as a tribute act, or simply a shitter version of your competitors?

It pays to be creative

Luckily, with the popularity of this kind of copycat marketing comes an opportunity—if everyone else is copying each other's homework, it’s much easier to stand out…

DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

If everyone else is doing the tango, do the macarena. If everyone else is wearing a tuxedo, wear a dress. And if everyone else is swimming, sink!

No, wait…ignore that last one.

But my point still stands. You need to look at this ocean of monotony as a blank canvas for you to paint on.

Stop using templates to write your emails. Stop using the same copy frameworks everyone else uses. Stop getting AI to generate your blog posts. Stop stealing other people's jokes.

And do something different.

A great example of this was back in 1960 when car ads were all about status, size, and sex appeal. They promised the perfect life, as long as you bought the right car.

But instead of doing what everyone else was doing, VW put out a series of ads for the Beetle that were the antithesis of these ads.

They made light of the small size and focused on reliability and low running costs instead of making bombastic claims about lifestyle. 

They focused on things that most people would see as boring and unglamorous, such as economies and quality assurance.

And they worked!

Over 21 million Beetles were sold worldwide in the 20 years that followed, and those ads are still heralded today as some of the best of all time.

Do you reckon they’d have achieved that level of success by copying what everyone else was doing? Of course not. They took the risk of being creative, and it paid off.

Now it’s your turn!