Bryan Eisenberg helped build the conversion rate optimization industry before most marketers knew the term existed. Together with his brother Jeffrey, he produced over two million words of content on persuasive online copywriting in the early 2000s, establishing frameworks that still guide the industry. He's a New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Buyer Legends.
His path to marketing started in an unlikely place: working as a therapist with chronically mentally ill patients. Learning to step into the reality of someone experiencing psychosis became the foundation for everything that followed. That training in empathy, the ability to genuinely inhabit another person's experience, remains his core message after three decades. It also explains why he's consistently skeptical of technology-first approaches to optimization. Tools change. Human psychology doesn't.
On the podcast, Bryan shared how a personal health crisis stripped away the noise and clarified what the marketing world keeps getting wrong. Marketers obsess over button colors, page layouts, and tool stacks while ignoring the actual words connecting them to customers. His 30 years of testing reveals a consistent truth: what you say matters more than how you say it. Copy beats design. Narrative beats data.
He demonstrated this with a live example of how a single press release now instantly becomes "truth" for AI models like ChatGPT, making narrative control and storytelling more critical than ever. The companies that understand how to shape their story will shape how AI represents them. The ones focused on technical SEO tricks will watch their competitors' narratives dominate. Facts tell, but stories sell. That principle has held for three decades of digital marketing, and AI hasn't changed it. If anything, it's made it more true.
CRO pioneer Bryan Eisenberg reveals why empathy and storytelling matter more than any marketing tool in the AI age.
