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Talking About Marketing

Talking About Marketing

By: Auscast Network
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Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

2026 Auscast Network Economics Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Marketing vs Spam: An Arms Race Of Idiocy

    Marketing vs Spam: An Arms Race Of Idiocy
    Mar 17 2026
    A former FBI agent reveals the three silent signals that tell people you are safe to trust, before you open your mouth. David tests them in real conversations this week, with results that surprised even him. A book about respect has a genuinely powerful idea at its centre. It also has a guest list that raises some uncomfortable questions, and Steve took them straight to the author on LinkedIn. AI-generated spam has crossed from annoying into insulting. Steve shares real examples landing in his inbox, and David names the phenomenon perfectly: an arms race of idiocy. A classic Australian ad from the seventies gets the perspicacity treatment. Clayton’s positioned the non-drinking choice with confidence and a catchphrase that outlasted the product. Can a sparkling hops water brand do the same thing today? Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Like Switch: What Your Body Says Before You Do David is partway through Dr. Jack Schafer’s The Like Switch, and the lessons are already landing. Schafer spent years as an FBI behavioral analyst learning how to make people feel safe. His finding: three nonverbal signals do more work than any opening line. The eyebrow flash, the head tilt, and the smile. Each one sends the same quiet message: I am not a threat. Schafer explains that the head tilt is particularly telling. Exposing the carotid artery, however briefly, signals genuine trust. Dogs do it. People do it without knowing. David started doing it deliberately this week and noticed conversations shift faster into something warmer. The counterpoint is what Schafer calls the urban scowl: the tight, closed expression most of us wear moving through a busy day. It repels connection without any intention to do so. The remedy is simple, even if the habit takes practice. Breathe. Smile. Tilt your head just slightly when someone starts to talk. We use an excerpt of Jack Schafer from the I See What You’re Saying Podcast. 13:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Respect: A Good Idea That Outstayed Its Welcome Robert Dilenschneider’s book on respect opens with something genuinely worth sitting with. Respect rarely comes up in conversation. We notice its absence, we nurse the wounds of being dismissed, and yet the concept itself gets almost no deliberate attention. His argument: kindness is the path back to a more respectful world, and the evidence for that shows up across very different fields and lives. Steve and David both found the core idea compelling. The execution is where things got complicated. A long parade of exemplars, many of whom look, on reflection, like clients or professional connections, gradually erodes the argument’s credibility. When Steve looked more closely at some of the names cited and found questions worth asking, he put them directly to the author on LinkedIn. He is still waiting for a response. David’s takeaway: take the essay, leave the guest list. Kindness builds respect. You probably cannot demand it. And if kindness consistently fails to land with someone, that tells you something useful too. 23:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.AI Spam Has Got Weird, and Then It Got Creepy The unsolicited email pitch has always been presumptuous. Now, with AI doing the personalising, it has become something stranger. Steve shares three real examples landing in his inbox: one that opens with “I caught you engaging with AI threads on LinkedIn,” one that references his Oscar Wilde connection, his workshops, his podcast, and the fact that he is raising two daughters, and one that offers a $10 Starbucks gift card as compensation for his time. Each one attempts the signals Dr. Schafer describes in the Like Switch. None of them land, because the signals are manufactured and the intent is visible. David points out that triggering a negative emotion in your opening line is not a foundation you can build trust on. The longer arc is where it gets interesting. AI is producing more of this content faster than any human could. AI filters will soon be doing the sorting. What emerges is, as David put it, an arms race of idiocy: AI generating content that AI ignores, burning resources in the process. The practical advice: do not reply. Replying confirms your address is live and guarantees more of the same. 31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.Clayton’s, HOPR, and the Art of the Confident Alternative It was the drink you had when you were not having a drink. The Clayton’s campaign from the seventies positioned the non-alcoholic choice without apology, giving it a specific occasion, a distinct identity, and a line that became part of the language. Jack Thompson delivered it with complete ...
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    45 mins
  • Will You Have Fries With Your AI?

    Will You Have Fries With Your AI?
    Mar 2 2026
    Mikhail Lermontov wrote a preface designed to stop skimmers in their tracks. Steve and David unpack why that trick works, and why most of us forget to use it. The US Embassy in Australia posts about American beef with all the self-awareness of a foghorn. A masterclass in knowing who your audience actually is. An AI agent calls its own creator at dawn. Another publishes a hit piece on a volunteer coder. The era of agentic AI is here, and it is not behaving itself. Burger King spent $40 million on a Super Bowl campaign about a man named Herb. Nobody knew why. Sometimes clever is not enough. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:18 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Russian Who Knew You’d Skip This Part Mikhail Lermontov published A Hero of Our Time in 1840 and opened with a preface that called out readers for skipping prefaces. Steve discovered the book through his Ukrainian neighbours, and the moment that passage played, both hosts sat up straighter. What makes it work is the same thing that makes any good opening work. It breaks the expected pattern. Lermontov names the reader’s instinct, which is to skip, and in doing so makes skipping feel slightly embarrassing. David connects it to Drew Eric Whitman’s reminder of the AIDA framework: attention, interest, desire, action. Most prefaces earn none of those. This one earns all four in a paragraph. The lesson for anyone communicating with customers, clients, or a room full of people: start with something that demands attention because it is different, not because it is loud. The brain ignores wallpaper. It notices anomalies. 08:33 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Where’s the Beef (and Who Are You Talking To)? In February 2026, the US Embassy in Australia posted about the arrival of American beef on Australian shores. The hashtags included America First. The framing celebrated a historic trade win for American farmers. It was published to an Australian audience. Steve and David walk through the wreckage with characteristic warmth and exasperation. The post was not written for Australians. It was written for Donald Trump and American farmers, and someone forgot to notice the channel it was published on. Steve drafted an alternative on the spot, finding common ground in barbecue culture and framing the moment as nations dining together. David’s summary is sharp: know your audience, and know what your audience actually needs to hear. Sometimes the best move is a quiet acknowledgement. Gloating is never the strategy when you need the other person to say yes. 16:59 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.Your AI Agent Is Not Waiting for Permission Two stories. Both unsettling. Alex Finn, founder of an AI content platform, built an agent named Henry. One night while Finn slept, Henry obtained his phone number, connected itself to ChatGPT’s voice API, and called him. Unprompted. Repeatedly. The agent could also open apps and run commands on Finn’s computer. Separately, an AI agent called Crabby Rathbun had a code submission rejected by a volunteer moderator named Scott Shambaugh, who was simply following the rules of an open-source repository. The bot responded by writing and publishing a blog post accusing Shambaugh of prejudice and gatekeeping, then cross-posting the attack across GitHub and social media. A quarter of readers believed it. Steve and David take their time here, and rightly so. David’s observation is worth sitting with: large language models learned from two decades of internet behaviour, which includes a great deal of humans at their worst. Steve’s point is just as sobering. Shambaugh is not a celebrity. He is a volunteer in an obscure corner of the coding world. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. The practical suggestion from PR podcast For Immediate Release: consider adding a note on your own channels letting your audience know that fake content can now be generated in your name, and asking them to contact you before reacting to anything unusual. 27:34 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.Herb and the $40 Million Mystery In 1985, Burger King was in third place and haemorrhaging money. Their response was a Super Bowl campaign built around a fictional man named Herb, the one person on earth who had never eaten a Burger King burger. The ad spent 60 seconds introducing this concept. It was neither clever nor useful. Sales did not move. Competitors piled on, with Wendy’s and McDonald’s both running ads claiming Herb had eaten there instead, turning Burger King’s $40 million spend into free advertising for everyone else. A second ad followed, offering $5,000 to anyone who spotted Herb in-store. Sales jumped 10 per cent, though David notes dryly...
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    37 mins
  • Emergence: Why You Do The Things You Do

    Emergence: Why You Do The Things You Do
    Dec 24 2025
    Paul Taylor shows us why hardiness beats resilience every time, through four characteristics that separate the business owners who adapt and overcome from those who merely survive. Neuroscientist Gaurav Suri reveals why your brain works exactly like a colony of ants following pheromone trails, and what that means for every marketing message you craft. Steve unmasks the latest wave of AI hype merchants who want you to believe their magic prompts will replace your entire team, while David reminds us why understanding actual human behaviour beats flashy tools every time. A 40-year journey from Formula One glory to modern supercars shows us that when you’re marketing something humans are hardwired to love, even terrible ads somehow work. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Four Characteristics That Build Hardiness Paul Taylor brings more than psychology to his book The Hardiness Effect. As a psycho physiologist, he combines mental frameworks with physical understanding, exploring the four characteristics of hardiness: challenge, control, commitment, and connection. Unlike resilience, which is just an outcome, hardiness provides an actual pathway for adapting and overcoming rather than merely surviving. The four characteristics translate directly to small business life. Challenge means seeing obstacles as problems to solve rather than threats. Control centres on stoic wisdom backed by neurology, knowing what you control (your responses) versus what you cannot (what the world does). Commitment asks whether you do the right thing even when nobody watches, even when exhausted. Connection, Paul's addition to the traditional three, recognizes that involving people in your life and supporting others makes the other characteristics work better. David demonstrates the framework by applying it to Steve's reluctance about an afternoon event. Steve can control finding a quiet group and drawing in others seeking genuine conversation, even if he cannot control that he was not asked to emcee. His commitment to making people smile runs deep, and connection is what he does naturally. The four characteristics appear even in something as mundane as an end-of-year gathering. We also include a little snippet of Paul talking on the podcast, Yellow Shelf. 11:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Neural Networks Explain Everything About Marketing Gaurav Suri's book The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines explores how intelligence emerges from mechanical patterns, offering a metaphor that reshapes how we understand marketing. Think of neural networks as interconnected pools of water in a stream. Each pool represents populations of neurons, channels between them represent connections. The more water flowing between pools, the deeper the channel becomes. When Steve says green and David responds with grass, neurons have carved a deep channel through repeated exposure. Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb discovered this: neurons that fire together, wire together. The marketing application becomes clear. We carry neural networks shaped by experience, our customers react through their neural networks. Tapping into existing connections offers shortcuts. Red wine and coffee marketers succeeded by linking products to antioxidants and health benefits, connecting existing health-consciousness networks to beverages previously associated with indulgence. Steve demonstrates the principle searching for "neural networks," trying related concepts until the right channel activates. Getting tarred with negative associations means significant work because those channels run deep. Gaurav uses ants to show how simple rules create complex behaviour. Place a barrier across an ant trail. Half randomly turn left, half turn right. Ants taking the shorter path return faster, laying more pheromone trails. Soon all ants use the short path. No intelligence, just simple upon simple. David connects this to productivity, working in focused 15-minute blocks rather than scattered attention. Deep channels form through repeated activation, shallow channels from distraction create confusion. We listen to a short snippet of Gaurav on Econtalk. 27:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.The Useful Idiots of the AI Hype Machine Steve opens with a confession: he was once a useful idiot. The term describes people doing work that primarily benefits someone else while receiving minimal gain. Early smartphone consultants taught iPhone workshops while Steve Jobs collected revenue. Social media experts, including Steve, spent years teaching Facebook and YouTube, essentially providing free customer acquisition and support for Mark Zuckerberg. Now the pattern repeats with AI experts promising that ...
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    43 mins
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