The Label You Thought You Had to Add

You spent a weekend rewriting the homepage and it finally sounds like the company you think you're building. "AI-powered" in the headline. "Powered by AI" in the product tour. The sales emails got the same polish, because the team was proud of what you'd built and wanted the world to know there was something smart under the hood.

Then the quarter turned and the pipeline got heavier to push. Demos that used to book go unanswered. A couple of deals you'd have closed last year are parked in a maybe. Nothing about the business is broken. The product is better than it was six months ago, and you'd swear the pitch got sharper, because you sharpened it yourself.

That's the part that gets in your head. You can't point to the thing that changed, so you start running through the usual suspects: the market, the season, your reps, yourself. The homepage never makes that list, because the rewrite was the part you were surest you got right.

And the term you felt you had to add is the one making your buyer slow down. This is a positioning problem, and the copy is only where it surfaces. Underneath is a harder question: are you selling the machine you built, or the outcome your buyer came for?

That’s 6 sales in 7 months. 29 all time. And the performance?

16.5%, 17.6%, and 17.8%, net annualized returns on sold works held longer than one year (See all 29 at Masterworks.com)

It’s not from stocks, private equity, or real estate… it’s from contemporary and post war art. Crazy, right?

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Historically, the segment overall has had attractive appreciation and low correlation to stocks.*

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As one of the largest players in the art market, with $1.3 billion invested over 500 artworks, they pass critical advantages through to their 70,000+ members to add art to their portfolios strategically.

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^{*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.}

You're not imagining the slowdown. A survey from WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of Automattic, reported by TechCrunch in June, polled 2,000 people on the use of AI in marketing: 800 enterprise decision-makers and CMOs alongside 1,200 U.S. adults. Sixty percent of those consumers said a brand using "AI" in its messaging is a turnoff, a reason to trust it less. Close to three in four respondents said the internet feels less human than it did 10 years ago, and that's the climate your "AI-powered" headline is landing in.

A survey catches a mood. So set a second source next to it, one built to test cause rather than opinion. Researchers led by Mesut Cicek at Washington State University ran controlled experiments with more than 1,000 U.S. adults and published the results in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management. They showed two groups identical descriptions, a smart television in one test, with a single difference: one version included the words "artificial intelligence" and the other left them out. The half that saw the term was less likely to buy. The team ran it across eight different product and service categories, and the result held in every one.

Same product, same price, two words added, and fewer people reached for it.