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Attention Framework Masterclass Live Overview and QA
Published August 3, 2022 · 123 views on YouTube
What is the Attention Framework Masterclass?
The Attention Framework Masterclass is a live course led by copywriter John Benson, creator of the VSL (video sales letter) methodology, run over two weekends (August 16-18 and August 23-25). This session is a live pre-course Q&A where Benson and host Darby field audience questions and preview what the masterclass covers, centered on how to find and use a “hook” and “big idea” to drive marketing copy.
What is a “hook” and “big idea” in copywriting?
According to Benson, a hook or big idea is a short phrase or concept, often just two or three words, that captures a unique angle on a product or problem and gets repeated consistently across every piece of content a business creates. He calls this consistent repetition a “golden thread” that runs through blog posts, emails, articles, and ads so the concept sticks in a buyer’s mind.
What examples does John Benson give of a strong hook?
Benson points to Budweiser’s “beechwood aged,” which he says came from simply naming an existing brewing process and then repeating it consistently, and to P90X’s “muscle confusion.” He also describes a $100 million video sales letter built around the idea of “the end of America” for a financial publisher, and a health-focused VSL for Dr. Steven Gundry built around a phrase he calls “the cardiac killer.” In each case, he says the strength of the underlying idea mattered more than production quality, on-camera presentation, or the narrator’s voice.
What does the masterclass cover on day one?
Benson says the first day of the course focuses on learning to speak the ideal buyer’s language: identifying the specific words a buyer uses to describe their pain and their goals, and using those same words back in the copy. He connects this to research inside Jasper, noting that the AI tool can surface buyer language and data, but that the phrasing still needs to be shaped to match how a real buyer actually talks. He also argues that creativity is a skill anyone can develop, not a trait some people are born with, and that this session’s first couple of hours are meant to help attendees unlock that creativity before moving into applying it to VSLs later in the course.
Full video transcript
Welcome, welcome everyone, happy Wednesday to you all joining us here live. If you’re watching the replay, happy Wednesday to you as well. I’m joined here today with John Benson, creator of the VSL, “the billion dollar copywriter.” I’m going to be answering your questions about the upcoming Attention Framework Masterclass that’s going to be starting here in just a couple weeks: the 16th to the 18th of August for week one, and then the 23rd to the 25th. So I’m going to kind of man the room as people are coming in.
John, if you want to say a few words leading into this, we’ve got some people coming in. Good to see you, Marty, Mary, John. I think you’re on mute too as well, John. All right, cool, hello, hello everyone, howdy, as we say in Texas. So yeah, this is going to be exciting. It’s kind of the third time in my career I’ve done this, where I created a course and got it all ready to go and decided I wanted to do it live versus in a recording, just to get more energy involved in it. And it just happened that Darwin and the guys from Jasper, formerly known as Jarvis, reached out, and this just was very serendipitous timing, so it’s going to be really cool having you guys chime in and do the recipe side of things. The combination is cool.
Darby: I’m getting a message from my assistant saying she’s in the waiting room trying to get in. John and I can speak to that too. When Darby and I are working together, I’m just as excited to hop into and learn inside this course as well, because what we’re finding is: are we actually serving Jasper members, are we actually providing the service they’re truly looking for? And the one big idea training, really narrowing that down into finding the correct hooks to put inside a template. I mean, Darby and I go back and forth all the time, and I’m really starting to see the importance of that one big idea, that one hook.
I wonder if you could speak to the difference between knowing and not knowing that, and what can be achieved by adding the power of AI on top of that?
John: So those two- or three-word hooks, in that case it’s a hook and a big idea both. Back in the Mad Men era, Madison Avenue was writing taglines and headlines and making ungodly amounts of money doing it. They came up with some really great headlines and taglines, but those hooks and big ideas are so much more powerful in the digital medium than they ever could have been in print, because in print you’d see it once, it might stick in your head, and that’s it. In the digital medium you can take a hook or a big idea, two or three words or just a concept, and string that concept through every single thing you do: blog posts, emails, articles, ads, everything. It’s all a through line, and we call it a golden thread. The difference between VSLs that have a golden thread and those that don’t is huge, and in today’s world, where the competition for traffic is so intense, it’s almost impossible to get something to convert without a really strong hook.
The hooks I gave as examples on the live webinar we did were “muscle confusion” by P90X and “beechwood aged” by Budweiser. Those aren’t gimmicky, necessarily, depending how you define it. What Budweiser did is take a process that everyone was using, just about everybody, aging beer in vats with strips of beechwood in the bottom, and their marketing guys said, “let’s call it beechwood aged.” All they did was name the process. But because the process became so synonymous with Budweiser, it made them four billion dollars, and no one else could come back and say they’re beechwood aged too, because it would sound absurd. So once you coin something and brand it to yourself, not necessarily trademarking it, but just talking about it more frequently, people start relating to the problem and the solution by your own vernacular. Normally, people come to me or “Don Draper” types to write these things and get paid a lot of money for it, but what if there’s a way to teach anyone how to do that? That’s what I spent the last two years of my life figuring out, and we did: I’ve got part-time admins coming up with hooks just as good as the folks we usually pay for.
There’s a lie that says people are born creative or that you’re not creative, and that’s just not true. It’s been proven in practical terms and in neuroscience that everyone can tap into much deeper zones of creativity, and all I’m going to be doing in the first couple of hours of our session is helping you tap into that. Once you make your marketing changes, it just totally changes things, and we’re going to apply that to video sales letters specifically, long-form videos as well. If you have the course right now, you get free access to now DSL, which is my software for that. This is not AI, this is not Jasper, we’re not competitors, but it can spit out a 70-minute VSL. It’s the only software on the planet that can do that. But before you start doing that, it’s wiser to know your avatar, to learn the language patterns they use, and then, if you can speak your avatar’s language, the world is your oyster.
Darby: It almost seems like the Attention Framework Masterclass isn’t just for VSLs, but it can be used for the VSL template and all the AI stuff, but it’s the base of everything they create inside of AI moving forward, so blog posts, setting the golden thread into whatever they do inside Jasper, any content they create, this is really going to set them up for success.
John: Without a doubt. It could be just two or three words, an idea, like “the end of America” for Agora back in the day, that was a hundred-million-dollar VSL, right before the 2007 economic crash, and he was pretty much right. But it was the most boring, most ugly presentation, all the slides looked like they were done by somebody who had just picked up a copy of PowerPoint circa 1997, and the narrator, Porter Stansberry, had a voice I honestly found boring. My first comment to the guy who wrote it was that this would never work. But I was completely wrong: that VSL went on to do a hundred million dollars in sales for Agora, which ended up being a billion-dollar marketing company, and I got a testimonial from their owner saying he owes me at least a hundred million dollars, which I wish he’d pay. The idea was so much better than the voice, so much better than the slides. That idea came from Mike Palmer, the genius copywriter who wrote it, and you don’t have to be a genius, you just have to know how to tap into these ideas, which is where we’re going to start.
Another example: the company Gold and Hippo, run by a good friend of mine, a great copywriter, is on track to become another billion-dollar company. You’ve probably heard of Steven Gundry, a Harvard doctor who’s all over the internet in high-produced VSLs with a lot of camera work. But the scripts are all built on the same idea. The first VSL they did was one I was hired for. The script I came up with was terrible, honestly, I was going through a bad breakup at the time and just wasn’t into it, but the hook I came up with ended up being the hook they still use to this day, even after switching to a different product, and it became one of their top-selling VSLs. If I talk about “the cardiac killer” in your body, and you’ve seen the VSL once, you know it, because it’s drilled into your head over and over. The monetary value of that hook is in the millions, more than they ever paid me. So what’s the monetary value going to be for you if you get just an idea, doesn’t have to sound hooky, could just be a different way of looking at something, whether that’s dog training, chiropractic care, or brick-and-mortar retail? You talk about that different angle so frequently that people latch onto it, and it becomes the only answer to the problem. That’s what I want to help you do, and that’s just the first day.
Let’s have some fun, then we’ll start talking about applying it to VSLs.
Darby: I see some questions in the chat. Maybe just a rundown, John, if you want to touch on what is fully covered inside Attention.
John: Yeah, I get off on that a lot because it’s the cornerstone. The very first day we’re going to be talking about more than just hooks, we’re going to be talking about the most important thing you can learn from me or from anyone else, which is how to speak your buyer’s language. Your ideal buyer has unique language patterns, and I saw this viscerally when I started diving into Jasper and seeing what it can do research-wise. The data is there, it’s like having your fingertips on the internet, but the words and how that data gets phrased is often different from how your avatar actually speaks. Knowing who your ideal buyer is, what words they use to describe their pain and their dreams, and using those exact same words back to them is the foundation the rest of the course builds on.