💡The offer is still king - but AI is changing what "proof" means

Confused? Let me explain exactly what I mean by this.

🔍 The proof problem

For decades, proof in direct response meant a few reliable things: testimonials, before-and-after photos, clinical studies, celebrity endorsements, and the famous "reason why." These elements built credibility and moved product.

But consumers in 2026 are operating in a different information environment. After years of AI-generated reviews, deepfake testimonials, and synthetic social proof flooding every corner of the internet, audiences have developed a kind of proof fatigue.

They've seen too many five-star reviews that feel hollow.
Too many transformation photos that look touched up. Too many "real customer" video testimonials that clearly weren't.

✂️ Specificity is the new credibility

When everyone else's proof sounds polished and vague, raw specificity cuts through like a razor.

The testimonial that says "I lost 22 pounds in 6 weeks" is table stakes. The one that says "I lost 22 pounds, dropped from a size 14 to a size 10, and for the first time in three years I didn't dread my sister's wedding photos" is the one that gets read, believed, and shared.

The same principle applies to your data.

Don't say "thousands of customers." Say "4,817 customers since March." Don't say "results may vary." Show the distribution - who got what, and under what conditions. Counterintuitively, admitting that 20% of your customers saw modest results makes the 80% who saw dramatic ones more believable.

🚀 What's actually working right now:

• Longitudinal proof - Instead of a single testimonial snapshot, marketers are seeing outsized returns from "update" campaigns - following up with customers at 30, 90, and 180 days and documenting what's still working. It signals confidence that the result wasn't a fluke.
  

• Documented skeptics - Finding customers who were openly doubtful before buying, and letting them tell that story in their own words, is outperforming traditional enthusiast testimonials in several niches right now. The structure is simple: I almost didn't buy because [specific objection]. Here's what changed my mind. Here's what happened.
  

• Process transparency - Showing the mechanism - actually pulling back the curtain on how your product does what it does - is becoming a powerful conversion lever. It used to be enough to say "clinically proven formula." Now you need to show the formula and explain why each piece is there. Audiences who understand why something works are far harder to poach by a competitor who's only competing on price.

🤖 The contrarian play

Here's what most people won't tell you: AI-generated creative is raising the floor and compressing the ceiling.

Average copy is getting better because anyone can generate competent, structured, grammatically clean direct response with a good prompt. That means the average ad in your niche is more polished than it was two years ago.

But polish isn't persuasion. The ceiling — breakthrough copy that makes people feel genuinely seen, that captures a specific emotional truth about their struggle — is still a human game. And because mediocre-but-polished is now everywhere, truly resonant copy stands out more than it did before, not less.

The marketers winning right now are the ones using AI to handle the scaffolding (structure, variants, research summaries, headline testing) while doubling down on the one thing AI still can't replicate: a real, earned understanding of what your customer's life actually feels like.

📋 One practical move to make this month

Pull your three best-performing testimonials and rewrite them using the following structure:

1. The before: describe the specific situation and the specific frustration, not just the general problem

2. The doubt: what made them hesitant to try

3. The turning point: the moment something clicked

4. The after: concrete, numbered, time-stamped specifics

5. The unexpected bonus: something good that happened that they didn't expect

Test these against your current controls. In most niches, this structure outperforms traditional testimonials within a few weeks of live traffic.

The fundamentals of direct response haven't changed. But the environment you're running them in has. The marketers who stay dangerous are the ones who keep asking: given how my customer's relationship with "proof" is evolving, what does it take to actually be believed today?

That's the question worth obsessing over right now!

💌 Like this newsletter? Let's continue the conversation

Get in touch with us by responding to this email or tagging us on LinkedIn or Instagram and sharing your thoughts. Your feedback helps us keep our newsletter relevant and interesting.