Last night, in my writing workshop, two writers coincidentally used the phrase “murder of crows” in their pieces.
We noticed.
We noticed the first time because it was an unusual phrase and we liked how it jumped off the page. (In marketing, we call this pattern interrupt.)
We noticed the second time because we liked the phrase again, but also we’d heard it before, and so we talked about that.
What was the effect of having just heard this phrase? It dampened the impact a bit. The novelty was beginning to wear through. (This leads to what we call banner blindness in marketing.)
If this can happen to an inherently interesting phrase like “murder of crows,” imagine what happens when it’s an inherently lifeless or salesy one like “enhance productivity” or “integrity is our priority,” and so on.
Let me take you on a quick tangent before I get back to this phrase, which I still believe is powerful; it just happened to be picked up by two talented writers in the same week.
The miracle and tragedy of AI
An interesting thing is happening with the craft of writing in a business context. More people are using AI to clean up grammar, be a thought partner, and produce first, second and third drafts.
Writing is being outsourced.
It’s a miracle and it’s a tragedy all at once.
It’s a miracle that AI has gotten so good that it can produce things it would take us hours to do, and is improving by the second.
It’s a miracle we can train our LLMs to write more like us and make us more efficient and faster. (Note: I’m still very skeptical about this, but I’m open to believing I’m wrong and that the technology is improving so fast that this will be more true as the minutes tick by.)
It’s a miracle to have an assistant that doesn’t ask for anything but more and more input. Not even an occasional lunch or smoke break.
But it’s a tragedy that mostly what’s trained LLMs thus far is full of words like elevate, resonate, crucial, enhance, and intricate. It’s a tragedy that LLMs learned by swallowing terabytes of Reddit threads. (Real language, sure, but have you perused online comment strings? Eeks.)
It’s a tragedy that the more people outsource their ability to uniquely phrase things, to find metaphors that say it more obliquely and yet more powerfully, the more our collective ability to do this dulls.
And the more our human brains see the same words used over and over, the more our brains overlook them or just won’t stop to look or digest. The more we might even be suspicious at having seen similar phrasing so many times.
I know marketing writing isn’t the same thing as literature. Literature’s job is to move people to experience or see the world differently. If it’s good, it will change the reader in some way. Marketing’s job isn’t so different, though. In addition to basic communication, marketing needs to make people feel something, incite curiosity and/or at the very least, move people to action.
Does it really need to be watered down, though? Can we not make it more eye-catching?
A murder of crows is a killer term. (Yeah, there’s a pun in there, but really it is.) It’s a group of birds with a rich tapestry of folklore and superstition. I once witnessed a murder of crows holding a funeral for one of their own that lay dead on the sidewalk below them. It was a wild and I daresay spiritual experience to have on a random afternoon walking my dog.
Crows have the ability to elicit stories in our minds. Pictures and mood.
Words like enhancing productivity and leveraging resources do not.
So, as we march toward this world where we outsource more and more marketing writing to robots, remember that there’s a time and place for marketing to stir feelings and paint pictures through stories.
Your LLM may be able to do that for you. But you’ll need to at least be aware and be able to poke, prod and question your copy to make it stand apart. Look for your murder of crows. Just be sure someone else hasn’t already found it.
