Develop, Evaluate, and Improve Marketing Creative That Performs.
Special Fall Pricing: Regularly $1,000 is now 50% off—$500. Enroll here.
AI can generate headlines, ads, copy and campaign ideas in seconds. But generating more creative does not mean generating better creative.
Marketers still need to know which idea has the strongest proposition, which headline will attract the right customer, which claim is credible, which campaign is distinctive, and which polished-looking AI output should never see the light of day.
This masterclass gives you a practical framework for developing, evaluating and improving marketing creative – and for knowing what works, what does not, and why.
You will learn how strong creative work differs from weak work, why some apparently impressive ideas fail commercially, how to recognize a genuine proposition, and what separates distinctive marketing from polished mediocrity.
Drawing on proven principles from some of advertising’s most influential creative thinkers, the course connects classic creative thinking with the realities of modern marketing and AI. This is not a history lesson. It is an expert-led examination of what makes marketing work across propositions, headlines, landing pages, brand voices, campaign concepts and AI-generated alternatives.
The result: stronger campaign ideas, more effective creative, better feedback to agencies and teams, and less time and money wasted developing work that was never strong enough to perform.
Know what works. Know what does not. Know why.
What You’ll Learn:
- Develop stronger campaign ideas before moving into execution.
- Find the strongest customer proposition before polishing the copy.
- Distinguish an idea problem from an execution problem.
- Turn vague marketing claims into credible reasons to believe.
- Develop and evaluate headlines for attention, relevance, and commercial purpose.
- Improve AI-generated creative instead of simply accepting what AI produces.
- Spot polished mediocrity, especially in AI-assisted marketing.
- Identify and strengthen ideas that are not sufficiently distinctive.
- Edit creative without stripping out personality and brand voice.
- Evaluate competing creative ideas using evidence rather than personal preference.
- Give agencies, colleagues and AI systems clearer, more useful creative direction.
- Explain and defend creative recommendations with greater confidence. voice.
Apply These Techniques to Real Marketing Creative.
The frameworks and exercises are designed for the work marketers create, brief, review and approve every day, including:
- Advertising concepts and campaign ideas.
- Headlines, hooks and calls to action.
- Email subject lines and messaging.
- Landing pages and website copy.
- Product and service propositions.
- Offers and promotional messages.
- Brand voice and content.
- AI-generated campaign alternatives.
- Agency and internal creative briefs.
Flexibility to Fit Your Schedule:
Can’t make it to the live session? No problem. We’ll send the workshop video, workbooks, and supplementary materials shortly after recording so you can catch up, revisit, or reinforce your learning.
Module 1: From Marketing Idea to Strong Creative.
Find the Proposition, Message and Idea Worth Developing.
Strong creative work rarely starts with better wording. It starts with finding something worth saying: a product truth, a customer tension, a neglected benefit or a compelling reason to choose.
This module shows you how to separate the underlying idea from the execution and how to recognize the difference between creative that is merely polished and creative that is genuinely persuasive.
The Essential Creative Distinctions
- Variation versus invention.
- Novelty versus relevance.
- Polish versus persuasion.
- Distinctiveness versus weirdness.
- A headline versus a proposition.
- An idea versus an execution.
Through presenter-led examples and comparisons, you’ll see why generating more options is easy. Knowing which ones deserve to survive – and how to improve them – is harder.
The Giants’ Playbook
Claude Hopkins: Prove It. Claims are cheap. Proof sells. See how vague promises can be transformed into evidence customers are more likely to believe.
John Caples: Earn the Next Second. Attention means little if nobody keeps reading. Discover what makes a headline pull rather than merely shout.
Rosser Reeves: Find the Proposition. If everything matters, nothing sticks. See how strong campaigns identify the one thing the customer should remember.
Leo Burnett: Find the Inherent Drama. Every product contains something potentially interesting. The challenge is identifying the part customers actually care about.
Bill Bernbach: Break the Expected Answer. Category conventions can make brands disappear into one another. Explore when conventions help and when breaking them creates advantage.
Eugene Schwartz: Meet the Customer Where They Are. Different levels of customer awareness require different messages. See how the argument changes depending on what the customer already knows, believes or wants.
David Ogilvy: Replace Adjectives with Evidence. “Premium.” “Innovative.” “World-class.” Specifics persuade more effectively than empty adjectives. Examples show how evidence makes marketing more credible.
David Abbott: Sound Like Someone. A tone-of-voice guide can describe personality. Great copy actually has one. See what distinguishes recognizable brand language from generic corporate prose.
John Hegarty: Escape the Category. If a competitor could run your campaign simply by changing the logo, the idea probably is not distinctive enough. Discover how stronger creative thinking gives brands something harder to imitate.
The Thirty Ideas Problem
Ask AI for thirty campaign ideas and it will happily provide them. But are they really thirty ideas – or one idea rewritten thirty ways?
You will learn how to use AI for speed and range without confusing quantity with quality, and how to recognize when an alternative represents a genuinely new idea rather than a cosmetic variation.
Key Takeaways:
- The Giants’ Playbook: classic creative principles applied to modern marketing.
- The CRAFT Framework for diagnosing and improving creative work.
- The Thirty Ideas Test for evaluating AI-generated alternatives.
- A Distinctiveness Test for identifying generic campaign thinking.
- A clearer way to separate proposition, execution and polish.
- Better language for developing and discussing creative work.
- Greater confidence explaining why marketing succeeds or fails.
Module 2: Building a Human Brand Voice That Survives the AI Era.
Stop AI from making your brand sound like everyone else.
A distinctive human voice helps people recognize a brand quickly. It gives content texture, conviction, memory, and commercial presence. It helps the audience decide whether the brand is credible, relevant, and worth paying attention.
Module 2 shows how to define, protect, and scale that voice with AI without diluting it.
During the session, participants build a working Human Voice Guide and apply it to the formats marketers use every day: LinkedIn posts, blogs, email sequences, landing pages, thought-leadership copy, ads, social captions, PR copy, and video scripts.
Strong copy answers three questions fast: Is this for me? Should I trust it? Why should I care?
Key Takeaways:
- Understand why human voice is the core commercial advantage in an AI-saturated market.
- Treat brand voice as a practical marketing asset, not a decorative tone-of-voice document.
- Identify what human writing does that AI often misses: asymmetry, implication, specificity, observation, tension, timing, and earned conviction.
- Build a working Human Voice Guide for brand consistency.
- Use that guide inside prompts, briefs, reviews, approvals, and rewrites.
- Apply the Six Levers of Human Voice:
- Specificity Injection: replacing vague claims with details a real audience can believe.
- Rhythm Variation: breaking AI’s default sentence symmetry and predictable cadence.
- Emotional Calibration: removing fake enthusiasm and adding earned conviction.
- Friction Writing: allowing tension, sharpness, and a defensible point of view.
- Conversational Compression: making written copy sound more naturally spoken.
- Imperfect Humanity: using small, controlled imperfections to make copy feel more credible.
- Humanize LinkedIn posts, blogs, email sequences, social captions, landing pages, and video scripts.
- Stop a brand sounding like a motivational bot, a corporate ghostwriter, or a committee-approved hallucination.
- Scale voice with AI while protecting distinctiveness.
- Understand how voice, point of view, and trust shape performance in feeds, search results, AI answers, and inboxes.
How to convince your boss you should take this class.
The risk for marketing teams is no longer a lack of output; it is output lacking judgment: generic claims, diluted voice, weak proof, synthetic warmth, over-polished language, and copy that feels as if nobody with real authority has touched it.
Human-First AI Editing gives teams a practical way to improve AI-assisted content before it reaches the market. It raises quality, protects brand distinctiveness, reduces wasted review cycles, and makes AI more useful to the people responsible for performance.
This course is especially useful for teams under pressure to create more campaigns, social posts, emails, thought leadership, landing pages, and sales content without lowering standards.
Business value for teams
This workshop helps teams:
- Reduce review cycles caused by weak AI drafts.
- Improve brand consistency across channels.
- Catch vague, risky, or unsupported claims before publication.
- Turn AI from a content-volume tool into a quality-improvement tool.
- Give teams a shared standard for judging AI-assisted work.
- Protect audience trust while increasing production speed.
- Improve the quality of campaign, content, social, email, and sales copy.
- Make AI outputs more useful for managers, reviewers, and approvers.
Participants leave with:
- The Five Filters editing system, ready to apply to any AI draft.
- The Six Levers of Human Voice for AI-assisted content.
- A working Human Voice Guide for brand consistency.
- A curated prompt library for editing, tightening, humanizing and quality control.
- An anti-slop checklist and AI tells diagnostic.
- A content evaluation framework for team review.
- Practical examples across email, landing pages, LinkedIn, blogs, ads, PR copy, product descriptions, and video scripts.
- A measurable before-and-after improvement on a real piece of marketing content.
- A clearer way to explain the business value of human-led, AI-enhanced editing to a team or manager.
Download Material
- Workshop recording for on-demand review.
- PDF of the presentation.
Who should attend?
Whether in B2B, B2C, nonprofit, agency, or in-house marketing, this course gives marketers practical ways to improve the quality, distinctiveness, and trustworthiness of AI-assisted content.
The course is designed for marketers who already use AI and know there is a gap between producing content and producing work worth publishing.
Ideal for:
- Digital marketers who want better AI output, not more disposable content.
- Content marketers and copywriters who are tired of synthetic sameness.
- Marketing managers who are responsible for protecting the brand voice across AI-assisted production.
- Strategists who need AI-supported content to feel intelligent, specific, and commercially useful.
- Brand leads worried about the trust cost of average-sounding AI copy.
- Team leaders who are trying to raise editorial standards without slowing production.
- Business owners using AI for content but are unhappy with how it sounds.
- Marketers who can already sense audiences detecting AI tone in the work they read.
- Professionals who want to speak more confidently about human-led, AI-enhanced editing in meetings and planning sessions.
- Marketers who recognize that judgment, originality, and voice are becoming scarce commercial assets.
The Presenter:
Jonathan Gabay
Jonathan Gabay teaches AI in Copywriting, and Brand Storytelling, and Video Scriptwriting and Production Using AI Masterclasses for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.
Jonathan is an accomplished content writer, digital marketer, journalist, and lecturer renowned for collaborating with esteemed brands. He also serves as a trusted advisor to the media, offering insights into the latest developments in brand marketing and PR.
What sets Jonathan apart is crafting compelling brands and communication campaigns leveraging the power of AI.
With an impressive portfolio of 17 published books, his upcoming university-level textbook, “Digital Marketing and AI Psychology,” slated for release in 2024, promises to be a ground-breaking resource for aspiring digital marketing students and seasoned industry professionals.
Beyond writing and teaching, Jonathan advises many organizations on subjects spanning AI implementation, storytelling, video production, copywriting, crisis management, digital advertising, PR, marketing, and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of change. He is a senior lecturer at the University of West London, Oxford College of Marketing, and Chartered Institute of Marketing.
From government entities to corporate giants and non-profit organizations to grassroots movements, Jonathan’s counsel is sought by those seeking to harness the transformative potential of AI and innovative digital marketing strategies.
Social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangabay/
If you’re at all interested in AI and want to learn not to fear it but to embrace it, this workshop – and many of Jonathan’s other workshops – are for you. The ROI is so very obvious to me.
This course breaks down the key changes to marketing we need to know in this day and age. It gives you a guide on how to break into the public eye with your marketing.
