By Lee Ann Laban
Multi-channel Education Marketing Strategy & Demand Generation
By Lee Ann Laban
Back in the early ’80s, Memorex ran an ad campaign with the line: “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” The idea was that their cassette tapes sounded so authentic you couldn’t tell the difference from a live performance. Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves asking a similar question: “Is it human-written content or AI-generated?”
AI is now built into nearly every new tool, and that’s smart. It handles the repetitive tasks so humans can focus on strategy and creativity. In marketing, people love to debate the ‘tells’ of AI copy—the em dash, the emojis, the overused phrases. But the fact is that clients don’t really care who wrote it. They care if it works. Across industries, publishers are using their years of accumulated performance data to train in-house AI tools to optimize ad copy. It’s part of a larger shift in how marketing is being done today.
We recently tried one of these tools that was trained on years of top-performing ads. On average, we were told, the AI-generated copy delivers a 42% higher click-through rate than human-written ads. Pretty dang impressive, right? We thought so too.
In our experiment, we tested two of our original, human-written ads against AI-generated versions. Same content offer. Same audience. A head-to-head test. Which set of ads do you think performed better? The fact that we’re writing a blog post about it might give you a hint.
Yep. Our human-written ads outperformed.
But our surprise win doesn’t mean AI isn’t an effective tool. We see it more as a reminder that while AI excels at optimization, human intuition still adds a spark that algorithms can’t quite replicate (and as humans we will always root for team human). Does this mean we won’t use this AI tool again? Nope. We’re definitely going to try it again, because marketing today is all about experimentation, synergy, and finding the right mix of human and AI. We actually really liked the copy the AI tool came up with and were a little surprised that our versions outperformed theirs.
We’ve all seen bad copy that screams “AI;” it reads like jargon-speak. That’s why we’d be wary of anyone who says they’re “all in” on AI, just as we’d be wary of anyone ignoring it altogether. It’s all about collaboration with AI, rather than 100% AI or no AI. This time our ad copy outperformed. But we have been specializing in K–12 marketing for the past almost 30 years, so we should give those AI-optimized ads a good run for their money!
Have you heard about the EPOCH scale? It’s a framework developed by MIT Sloan’s Roberto Rigobon and Isabella Loaiza to assess how likely AI is to replace human jobs. The scale highlights five uniquely human qualities—like empathy, creativity, and ethical judgment—that machines struggle to replicate. (Please note that I wrote those em-dashes, not AI!)
Tasks that lean heavily on empathy, ethical judgment, and creativity are particularly resistant to automation, but they pair beautifully with AI when it comes to enhancing productivity. That’s the sweet spot: letting AI handle the rote and repetitive tasks, laying the groundwork for humans to bring the emotional intelligence, vision, and creativity to the job. It’s also exactly where we’ve built our expertise after nearly 30 years in K–12 education marketing.
Curious how we can put that mix of human expertise and AI innovation to work for your campaigns? Let’s talk.
P.S. We’ve been developing something pretty exciting involving AI. We can’t wait to share more in the new year!
About Lee AnnLee Ann has been with Spyre since 2021, creating eye-catching social posts and using her background as an edtech conference organizer to help clients stand out at events and beyond. When she’s not at work, she’s baking, traveling the globe, or competing with friends at trivia nights.
