Google used to hand you a list. Now it hands you an answer, and Steve and David unpack what that quiet swap is doing to our brains, our buying decisions, and our businesses.
Pete Blackshaw’s forthcoming book, The Answer Economy, has Steve and David asking an uncomfortable question: when AI tools do our searching for us, are we still thinking, or just nodding along.
Steve and David dig into why Google’s AI overview might be quietly shrinking our critical faculties, and why that matters more than it sounds.
They also test which AI tools can be trusted to give it to us straight, and which ones might be leaning on who is paying the bills.
Small business owners get a practical wake up call: AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely, so vague slogans will not survive this shift.
Then it is on to pesky callers, a well behaved moat dragon, and a 2004 Ford ad that might just be the best car commercial ever made.
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.
Are We Still Thinking, Or Just Accepting the Answer
Steve introduces Pete Blackshaw’s upcoming book, The Answer Economy, and its central worry: as AI tools take over our searching, what happens to the human doing the asking. David frames it as the next stage of the attention economy. For 25 years we built research skills by comparing sources ourselves. Now an AI summary sits at the top of the page, ready to do that work for us, and the question becomes whether solving a problem quickly is the same as solving it well.
Borrowing from James Clear on habit formation, David notes that our old habit of searching then evaluating has quietly become searching then accepting. That shift, he argues, is a problem for our critical thinking, and it raises a bigger question about who is funding the answer we are being handed. Steve and David then run an informal trust test across AI tools, noting that Claude scored Amazon a modest five out of ten on its customer centric claims, even though Amazon helps fund Anthropic. It is a small data point, but one that earns some confidence in at least one of the tools doing the answering.
The segment closes on Pete Blackshaw’s idea that consumers are shifting from searchers to interrogators. Steve shares a real test he ran, asking an AI overview to compare local mechanics, then following up with a more specific question about trustworthiness for his eighteen year old daughter. The follow up question changed the entire recommendation. David frames it as a reminder to stay specific and curious rather than settling for the first, more general answer.ng that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident.
This player has the full Blackshaw interview with Shel and Neville from the For Immediate Release podcast (one of Steve’s favourites).
15:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Why Vague Marketing Claims Are About to Stop Working
Steve breaks down what The Answer Economy actually means for a small business. People search by asking questions, so the businesses that win are the ones structuring their content to directly answer those questions, rather than leaning on slogans. David connects this to inbound marketing, arguing that a person who arrives with a genuine question already has intent, and answering that question well increases the odds they become a customer.
Here is the blog post Steve refers to: AI Ready: The Small Business Guide to Being the Answer
Groundless claims like being the best in the state no longer carry weight, because, as David puts it plainly, AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely. Steve calls this a genuine wake up call for small business owners still leaning on assertions instead of substance. The fix, they argue, is not more clever copy. It is specific, honest, question and answer style content that reflects real expertise, which is exactly the thinking behind TAM’s own GEO Ready work.
A clip from Pete Blackshaw adds that different AI tools have different personalities and source preferences, with Claude in particular acting as what Blackshaw calls the extreme librarian, favouring credentialed sources over marketing spin. David frames this as an opportunity: small business expertise, long underused online, now has a format built for it, with businesses that articulate what they actually know positioned to benefit.ear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short.
27:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
A Well Behaved Moat Dragon for Your Phone
Steve tackles a problem every business owner will recognise, the relentless spam call. His solution is a simple phone setting that screens unknown callers, asking them to identify themselves before the phone even rings. David describes the feature as a well behaved moat dragon.
Steve walks through the setup for iPhone (Settings, Screen Unknown Callers, then choosing “ask reason for calling”) and covers the equivalent options for Android, Pixel, and Samsung users. It took him thirty seconds to switch on and has noticeably reduced the daily static competing for his attention, freeing up mental space for the work that actually matters.
31:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
Would the Ford Territory Ad Still Work Today?
David nominates a 2004 Ford Territory ad built around a mum juggling household chaos with eyes in the back of her head, courtesy of the car’s then novel reverse camera. Both hosts note it leads with the human before the features, unlike most car ads.
The test they set themselves is whether the same approach could work now that every car has every feature as standard. David’s answer is that the ad succeeds because it starts with a person and their genuine needs, then lets the product follow, a structure that would still work today regardless of which feature gets the spotlight. It is a neat, practical echo of the answer economy conversation that opened the episode: understand the human’s intent first, then speak to it.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
S09E01
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Thinking about Marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders, produced by Steve Davis and David Oldney of Talked About Marketing. More than 8,000 conversations have taught them something. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Everyone needs external perspective. Through their four Ps, person, principles, problems, and perspicacity, yes, you heard that correctly, they explore marketing with curiosity, generosity, and the occasional gentle eye roll.
They hope this becomes a trusted companion on your journey in business[00:01:00]
Steve Davis: Uh, David Olney, yes
David Olney: Steve Davis, no
Steve Davis: Yes
David Olney: Yes, and?
Steve Davis: Yes What? Ah, finally we get a question. I thought that’d be a nice way to start a topic on the answer economy. I led with an answer, David.
David Olney: I just thought we were playing word games.
Steve Davis: And there lies the challenge
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number one, person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wilde put it this way, “The aim of life is self-development, to realize one’s nature perfectly. That’s what each of us is here for.”
Steve Davis: In the person segment, we are going to take our first look at [00:02:00] a forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw.
It’s called The Answer Economy. I heard a fantastic interview with Pete on, uh, For Immediate Release, one of my small clutch of favorite other podcasts. And the book doesn’t come out till September, but the ideas he put forth in it are a really fascinating bunch of ideas. So in the principle segment, we’re gonna look at how they apply to us in business in this day and age, which boils down to, in this world where AI tools are going to be doing most of our internet searching for us, we’re not going to Google anymore.
We’re sending ChatGPT there, or we’ve got some little, uh, answer agent that we’re sending off. When we do that, it changes what is found in the world. It’s changing what we’re shown in the world. What does that mean for our marketing and our business? We’re getting to that in the next segment. But for this [00:03:00] one, this new world also has an impact on us as humans, where we go to Google, just even Google, not going to ChatGPT or anything else, but Google to do a good old-fashioned search, and Google is pushing right under our nose its big AI overview, wanting to take us down that pathway.
What does that mean, David? What does that mean for us as persons, uh, who happen to be running or managing businesses, but either way, in the real world, this has an impact on the way we interact with the world.
David Olney: It does, most definitely. It’s the next stage of the attention economy. We’ve all known for years, since the late ’90s with Google, that you want to learn about something, you come up with a query, you get your first page of results.
Maybe you find something there that’s interesting. I seem to always end up on the second or [00:04:00] third page before I found things that were interesting. And then you start evaluating those sources and comparing and contrasting and building your own picture. And in doing so, you verify your research skills and start to develop knowledge about the thing you’re researching.
But now with this AI summary at the top of the Google page, in the attention economy, you can do all that work that we’ve spent over 25 years getting good at, or you can read the summary, follow the recommendation, maybe solve your problem very quickly But will you solve your problem as well as if you did the research and built a body of knowledge?
And would you buy the same product or service if you had done the research yourself? So the attention economy is drawing us to someone else doing the evaluating, and that could come at a very big price for us.
Steve Davis: And I think the, [00:05:00] the devil’s in the detail because we’re still going… Let’s say we’re just- let’s just say we’re going to Google and we’re using its AI part of the search result, but it’s giving us the AI overview.
For all intents and purposes, we probably feel like we are still doing the old thing. It just happens to resolve faster.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: And maybe what we don’t realize is we’re using our critical faculties less and less, and anything not used- Yep … starts to diminish.
David Olney: So as James Clear says in Atomic Habits, if you wanna build a new habit, link it to an old habit.
So our old habit was to go to Google and then do work Our new habit is to go to Google, and it does the work, and we go, “Ah.” So it’s an incredibly sophisticated psychological tool to get us to do the same thing we did, but in the end, accept the answer we’re given, which is very bad for our critical abilities, but also raises [00:06:00] the immense question of, well, who’s funding Google?
Steve Davis: That’s right, which is advertisers.
David Olney: So is that AI, you know, paragraph representative of the data, or is it representative of the spend to Google?
Steve Davis: I, uh, you know what? I, I’ve listened to the… I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid from Google over the years, how they’re the good guys. Uh, learned that it wasn’t necessarily the case ’cause money does speak.
And yes, you’ve got ads floating around, and they’re going to have some sway. Even ChatGPT, when you do a search using that, they’re, they’re offering paid-
David Olney: Yep …
Steve Davis: advertising slots. Now, they’re kept separate, but you have to wonder if behind the scene, those ads help get a slight advantage inside the AI’s view of the world.
David Olney: Again, we can, we can see if… Well, like we do work with all the AIs every day, you know, that [00:07:00] each of them has slightly different personalities based on the founders and central group of people in each company. So why wouldn’t they also represent the main cash flows? It would be strange if they didn’t.
Steve Davis: Yeah. The one that seems to be a little bit impervious to that at the moment is Claude because-
David Olney: Of Anthropic’s choices about how to be in the world.
Steve Davis: Yes. Anthropic funds it through our subscriptions, and so it’s not beholden to advertising, and it’s also bringing more pay-as-you-go-
David Olney: Hmm …
Steve Davis: tokens and systems when you use their heavier models- Hmm
like Fable, which makes you think they’re, they’re keeping the business sustainable.
David Olney: It’s cleaner- Mm … but we have no proof of how clean-
Steve Davis: I
David Olney: think- … other than their claims.
Steve Davis: Well, what’s interesting, and Pete Blackshaw talks about this in his book and in the interviews in the lead-up to it. I’m assuming it’s gonna be in the book.
Uh, Anthropic, uh, is, uh, has as one of its major funders, [00:08:00] um, Amazon.
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: So Amazon has kicked in quite a bit of money to make Claude even possible. But in Pete’s work, when he does brand audits, he gets them, uh, these large language models to have a look at different companies and assess, are, is the real world output matching what they promise?
Hmm. And when it comes to Amazon’s claim that we’re the most customer-centric, um, company out there- Results in something like ChatGPT say, oh, you know, about seven out of 10 or thereabouts. Other ones, Groq, I think gave it eight or something like that. Claude gave it five.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Now, that is biting the hand that feeds you on one hand, but it does earn a lot of trust with the rest of us that even though Amazon pays a lot of money, it doesn’t impact its cold, hard look [00:09:00] at does the output match the hype.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: And that gives me some sense of confidence, uh, for one of those tools.
David Olney: Mm. I think the significant thing you described there, though, is our interactions with Amazon. We’ve all interacted with Amazon now for decades. We know that profit drives them at a level that is, you know, far greater than their interest in the customer.
The customer is a means to cash. Now, that’s true of all businesses, but you can do it in a crude, brutal way, as Amazon does, or you can do it in a nicer, more human way. But we know that because we can compare against a body of knowledge in our own heads. Whereas you apply that logic to anything new you haven’t done before, who knows how Claude’s making a decision?
Who knows how ChatGPT is?
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: So some things, we’ve got the benefit of the period where we did the evaluation, still provides the foundation- Yeah … for our critical analysis. And the more time we spend in this new world of read that paragraph of AI summary, we’re gonna have less and less [00:10:00] of a body of knowledge to be able to meaningfully evaluate against, you know, temporal knowledge.
Steve Davis: So what I can say at the moment is, at the moment, Claude, it seems to be trustworthy.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Will it stay like that? We
David Olney: don’t know. Because of our body of knowledge over time before Claude existed, yeah.
Steve Davis: The other point before we end the person segment is there’s a theme in his book that we, as consumers, move from searchers to interrogators.
Pete Blackshaw: It’s not just the marketing slogans. It’s like how the product’s made. It is literally is it truly superior and can you verify that? You know, yeah, how do you stack up versus, uh, competition? Who are the people behind the brand? What’s the supply chain behind the brand? They’re kind of looking for all those different, um, ingredients even, even for the purpose of like, uh, Amazon.
I mean, this stuff is so real. I just put [00:11:00] out a note to my clients this morning. I put a little blurb on LinkedIn as well, but Amazon Prime Day was really insightful. I didn’t go- I couldn’t– I didn’t go to Con last year, but I did stay glued for four days straight on Prime Day, and it was probably the biggest conversational boost we’ve seen in the history of commerce.
Almost every single… You know, now it’s like every product you look at is surrounded by questions. I mean, what the hell’s going on? And then a lot of the a- you know, obviously a lot of advertising trying to work into that. But on that platform, you can go in there and say, “Is this product sustainable,” or, “Should I buy sustainable products?”
Or should I… I mean, and, and it’ll really give you very, very deep perspective before they start shoving products your way, and that is an absolute game changer. And so– and I do think, like, the smart retailers will wanna make sure that, that the consumer kinda gets what they need. So, so I may be… You know, long way of saying I’m optimistic.
Where, where, where it [00:12:00] could get scary, you know, is if where everything got out of whack before was that Google was a monopoly and they had like 90% market shares, so they can do whatever they want. I do think because you’ve got genuine competition, there is this real effort to like provide maximum value to the consumer, and that’s why I say we’re in a moment.
You know, the answer economy is a moment. Either we’re gonna screw it up like we did before or we’re gonna kind of turn it into a true win-win for consumers and business alike. But it’ll take some work to do that right.
Steve Davis: One of the things that all these tools do, including Google and its AI overview, is you’ll notice at the bottom of that little box, it says, “Do you wanna ask a follow-up question?”
And that is that shift where if we take one step further from your original, um, observation, David, of us trusting what comes back-
Ford Ad: Mm …
Steve Davis: there is scope for us, if we’re willing to [00:13:00] exercise our curiosity muscle-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: to push further, drill down. And I used– I was actually having a wonderful time with a group of people at the Stretton Center last week at the time of recording, where we were talking about making ourselves AI ready.
And as one of my tests, I did a search for who are the most… I asked, I can’t remember exactly, I think it was, “Who’s the most trustworthy or reliable, uh, mechanic in the area for cars in the Munno Para area?” ‘Cause that’s roughly where, um, the Stretton Center is. And it gave me a list of results. But then I used the question from the AI overview, which had given me three to consider, and I said, “My daughter’s just turned eighteen.
If she goes in with her car, which of these is going to be more trustworthy that I know she’s not gonna be taken for a ride- Mm … and sold stuff she, you know, doesn’t?” ‘Cause young women in particular can fall victim to [00:14:00] overselling in those environments because mechanics will think you don’t know what you’re on about, so let’s fleece you.
It then came back with a different set of criteria. Similar group, there was a couple of changes, but it, but it explained, this is why. This is the photographic evidence of what they do. Mm. The fixed price, and this is going to guard against the well-known situation. That was very compelling and very smart, David.
David Olney: Yeah, and this is the key thing. We’ve gotta remember to be researchers, to be interrogators. Like, being more specific comes natural to me from being an academic. It’s what we did. We constantly made everything smaller and more detailed to be sure of what we were finding. And these skills become even more important now, where the first answer is so easy.
But the first answer is fairly general. Take that advantage to ask a few more questions. This is still going to be faster than having to read fifteen web pages, which we used to [00:15:00] all do.
Steve Davis: Mm. And all those would’ve been almost the same as each other. Whereas now, we’re getting the chance to run a scythe- Mm
through the masses of content to get to the bits that might be the needle we’re looking for- Yep … in the haystack.
David Olney: So much faster than… You know, remember when it used to take weeks to know enough about something to wanna spend money or to feel safe spending money. That could be now down to hours at most.
Steve Davis: All right. Go forth and interrogate, don’t search.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two, principles. These are ideas worth building on. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, you can never be overdressed or over-educated
Steve Davis: In the principle segment, I think it’s probably fitting that we explain what the heck The Answer [00:16:00] Economy means. And you can have a shot in a moment, David, but my reflection, it’s based on the fact that our economy works typically by people being able to find vendors and suppliers on the internet, and so they go searching.
And when people search, they normally use the form of a question. Sometimes they’ll list a specific item they’re looking for, but typically they’ll ask, “Is this the best thing for X?” Now, that’s a question. And so this book is looking at the answer economy, which means those businesses who are going to set themselves up best To present themselves to the world in the format of answers that match our questions.
That’s what it boils down to. Not running off with our lovely fancy slogans, but doing deep thought about what questions are my [00:17:00] ideal customers likely to be asking? And I don’t know about you, Dave, in fact, I think I do know about you, but this is the old world being made new again.
David Olney: Absolutely. It’s the next step or iteration of inbound marketing, recognizing that the person with intent is the best potential customer because they’ve made a decision to look for answers to their questions ’cause they wanna solve a problem, they want to achieve an end state, and that if you answer their questions, the likelihood is their intent will go up and up and up for each question you can answer.
So the real, you know, the key thing that Pete Blackshaw has tapped into here is the evaluation phase is what’s changed. We used to ask more and more questions to get more and more answers to be more and more confident, but now we’re gonna be given answers very quickly. So how much work we do has changed.
How much work [00:18:00] we need to do is, you know, up for debate, and how we present information for people who want answers, that’s the bit of this iteration that’s very much changed.
Steve Davis: Absolutely. And that was, I did labor that point-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: um, with my workshop group, who were all wonderful and, and totally engaged by the way.
I think the small business people who will thrive are the ones who lean forward at this point and try and wrap their hand around it, their head around it, because I don’t think I was over-egging the omelet when I said, this is a profound wake-up call. And it’s a wake-up call because it’s still very common that most people smear words on their websites- Mm
or their marketing material that kinda, kinda sound like, look like the kind of words that tick a box, “Hey, we’re the best ones in South Australia who do XYZ.” Groundless, unverifiable, but it sounds good and it looks right, and it’s what everyone else [00:19:00] is doing. This is the moment of truth because AI search tools ignore those claims.
David Olney: They totally ignore assertions. They’re not interested
Steve Davis: And so the job is on us to meditate deeply on our ideal customers that we’re trying to be found by, that we’re helpful for, that we’re best placed to help, and put on our website as specifically and obviously as possible our content almost in a question and answer format.
There’s little bits of flourish we can add there, and it’s the sort of thing we’re doing a, um, increasing amount of, David, by the way, with the GEO-ready package that we have. GEO, which is generative-
David Olney: Generative engine optimization.
Steve Davis: That’s right. Which is just like search engine optimization, but bearing in mind that AI tools are using their generative approach to understanding the world, [00:20:00] uh, so that our content, uh, is ready for them to, uh, to read
Pete Blackshaw: I do this every day for clients. I– we literally kind of give them– we filter them through all the major LLMs, you know, from ChatGPT to DeepSeek to Perplexity and Grok. They all have different personalities. It’s no different than going after influencers, right? In- influencers- Yeah … kind of, you know, they beat to different drummers.
And so– And, and again, I would say Claude is the extreme librarian. You know, they just don’t like marketing BS. They kinda just focus on the facts, the credentialing, the science. Um, you know, Grok, um, is almost, like, hard to predict, and they do lean on a lot of the former tweets that kind of fall into it. Um, but they are a little bit– They’re definitely– They almost, like, personify, um, not the politics of Elon Musk, but [00:21:00] definitely, like, the almost, like, the unpredictable side of him- Hmm
in what you see. It’s, like, a different personality. Um, Gemini is still, you know, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, the, the– It depends on if you’re looking at Gemini AI overviews. I mean, they all have different thinking processes in terms of the way they synthesize data. But absolutely, and I would say the new just in the same way that, like, a PR term might, might say- Mm-hmm
we gotta, we’ve gotta figure out how to break through The New York Times and Financial Times and so and so, you gotta think the same way. It’s like they, they, they think differently. They source differently. And so this is– I spent the whole weekend doing this fascinating source analysis where I looked at, you know, tens of thousands of, uh, prompts, and then I analyzed the sources, and they have different favorites.
And just recently, The New York Times is finally starting to, to creep into OpenAI, which does start to impact the character of their output. Um, you [00:22:00] know, Claude tends to look a little bit more seriously at consumer reports than Joe’s review site. And so you have to know this. I mean, this is like the new PR.
This is like the new influencer management. If you do not know how these LLMs think, if you don’t know what their brand archetype is, if you don’t know what they eat for breakfast from a content perspective, you’re not on top of what your client needs, in my view.
David Olney: I think the really significant thing here is the small business person’s expertise has always been valuable. But finally, the online environment is giving them a chance to be the expert that they are in person, and I love this because we can get small business people now to talk about what they love, how they help people, how they know what the best product is to help someone, how they know what the best solution is, how they know what will serve someone for an extended period of [00:23:00] time, and we can help them shape their expertise into stuff the G-E-O will like.
Steve Davis: And so this expertise that we have, the, the thing that drives us in our small businesses, had been buried under clever words that we think are gonna hoodwink or stuff the word Adelaide 7,000 times- Mm … in a paragraph to try and beat that, which would make a human disappear.
Ford Ad: Mm.
Steve Davis: So this is the moment of truth.
We- our expertise has a moment where we’ve got an audience that’s powerful, these AI search tools, and we just have to chop the food up and serve it in a way- Mm … that is palatable to them. That’s what we’re on about. And Pete Blackshaw does say in his book that the answer engines are, generally speaking, Claude the best, they’re BS detectors.
If they sniff that you’re just making this up, you will be punished-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: or at, at least ignored. Yeah,
David Olney: ignored at, at, you know, the [00:24:00] least worst, but punished by, “Please don’t go here, my human, because these people are lying about this, this, and this, and all this stuff is unverifiable.”
Steve Davis: So what does this mean for someone who’s in a small business now?
I think it means having a good, long, cold look at your website and other marketing materials, and trying to look at it with that veil of ignorance. When we p- you know, we, we try and pretend that we’re like a potential customer who doesn’t know the inside stuff. Can they make sense of what we’re doing?
Can we answer simple questions that they might have about our product or service? Things that we might think are too obvious- Mm … but are actually really important entry points for people.
David Olney: I think the other thing to add to that, too, is assume the person reading this content has intent.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: Because the idea that you can sell anything to anybody, that you can just push your message into someone’s face, [00:25:00] the answer engine is going to ignore that.
It’s gonna go, “Well, that’s irrelevant to what my human asked. Why would I look at pushy stuff that has no evidence? Blah.” But when someone says they want to know about what you do in your area and you’ve answered questions really effectively, they already had intent. The answer engine is looking for credibility.
You put intent of the prospective client together and the credibility you bring with your expertise, and this means that effective small businesses who do this well are going to get more good clients. It’s what this whole thing will lead to. Yeah. It’s just a question of how much pain people experience along the way of getting there.
Steve Davis: Yes, because the old-fashioned days of search engine results are, are basically over.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Um, they’re unlikely to be seen by many people because it’s going to be the answer that’s being fed, and that answer is being fed by AI search tools that have been able to find those sets of questions and [00:26:00] answers on our website.
I’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post that I shared with the group last week about making yourself, um, answer ready, uh, ’cause it has a number of very practical tips that you can put into practice. Uh, the book’s not out yet, but I think the ideas are already in our grasp.
David Olney: Well, importantly, use whichever AI you’re comfortable with to summarize all Pete Blackshaw’s articles and blog posts and podcast appearances into a summary.
You’ll get all sorts of useful stuff you can act on immediately, and you will up your ability to verify, validate, and evaluate information, and you’ll start seeing how effectively the AIs are working to help us when we have intent.
Steve Davis: My final thought is please, I know on this podcast we’ll often talk about different things, and just like going to a big workshop or a seminar, we get excited and then l- busyness in life takes over.[00:27:00]
Please don’t let this go cold. Act quickly because your business’s visibility and credibility are at stake.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number three, problems. These are the marketing challenges keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, we ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening
Steve Davis: David, would you like me to change your world?
David Olney: That would always be fun if it’s a positive change.
Steve Davis: Ah, no, it is. This is the problem segment, and here’s a problem I think all of us can relate to. Pesky callers from those call center places, [00:28:00] or my wife made the mistake of inquiring about some real estate. We’ve been pestered nonstop by a different real estate company. I don’t know how they get word of this.
Nonstop. Even when you tell them to stop calling, they keep calling, David. We now are using technology as our gatekeeper. Would you like to know how?
David Olney: Please.
Steve Davis: I’ll start by telling you how I’ve done this with my iPhone, but there are Android options as well. In essence, when you call my phone and you’re not in my contact list, the iPhone will ask you who’s calling, who you are, and what you’re calling about.
I can see silently my phone is taking a call, and then within a few seconds, up pops a little text bubble that says, “It’s John Smith from such and such real estate.” And I know I can let that go through the keeper and not [00:29:00] be answered. Or it might be someone from RDA, Regional Development Australia. I will click that button and say, “Hi, how are you?”
And we’ll start talking. I have a gatekeeper, David, free of charge, who takes no prisoners, and the only thing I need to do now, which I’ve started doing, and I have no problem with that, is when that person, say, from the RDA calls for the first time and comes through, I add them to my contact list, so they will never be asked that question again.
Does this sound like something you’d find helpful?
David Olney: It sounds like a well-behaved moat dragon, and we all want a well-behaved moat dragon.
Steve Davis: Yes. So if you’d like to turn this on and you’re an iPhone user, you just go to your phone settings and scroll down, down, down, all the way down, and you’ll see something that says Screen Unknown Callers.
And you’ve got some options. Never, so they just ring as normal. Uh, [00:30:00] silence, calls from unsaved numbers will be silenced, sent to voicemail, and then displayed later. Or the one I chose, ask reason for calling. Calls from unsaved numbers will be asked for more information before the iPhone rings. So I’ve got that turned on.
Now, if you’re an Android user, uh, Google Phone app, this is the Pixel and some other Androids Their call screen can automatically answer calls from unknown numbers, ask who’s calling and why, and show you a live transcript before you decide whether to pick up. Samsung phones, they’ve got Smart Call, which is caller ID and spam protection, plus Bixby Text Call.
Lets the phone or assistant answer on your behalf and transcribe what the caller says so you can decide whether to take the call. And generic Android phones, they have a block/filter unknown callers. So that’s even without, uh, the Google or Samsung extras. Most Android phone apps let you block unknown or, [00:31:00] uh, unidentified callers or filter suspected ones to voicemail.
So not quite the same, but around the mark. It’s a simple method. It took me 30 seconds to turn on. David, it’s, it’s brought me psychological and mental happiness through the week because less distractions, taking some of, uh, my small finite ability to concentrate is no longer under threat.
David Olney: I am so looking forward to turning this on.
Steve Davis: You will answer my calls when I ring.
David Olney: Absolutely, ’cause you’re in my contacts, so you’re perfectly safe.
Steve Davis: Good.
David Olney: Unless you get another Tinder profile with a different name
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four, perspicacity. Let’s examine a campaign from the past and ask, would it work today? As Oscar Wilde believed, our one duty to [00:32:00] history is to rewrite it. So let’s see what we can learn.
Steve Davis: In the perspicacity segment, we look at, you know, ads in particular, ads and campaigns. In this case, it’ll be an ad from years gone by, and we ask ourselves, would this work today?
And, uh, David, I’m gonna give you full responsibility for this one. You said, “Steve, the Ford Territory ads from, you know, the early part of the century were amazing.” What enamored you of their ads?
David Olney: Well, the, the first thing that enamored me is it was partially to do with this answer economy idea. What I was really thinking about, it was Ford’s first attempt to build a car that people actually wanted.
They listened, and they built something that was bigger, more storage, four-wheel drive if you wanted it, still a big engine ’cause Australians wanted that at the time. Um, and the car itself did well because it was actually aimed at the audience. People had [00:33:00] intent, and the product was built to match the intent.
But of course, when we sat and listened to the ad, watched the ad in your case, turns out it’s a really clever ad.
Steve Davis: Shall we listen to it now? There, there’s the Ford Territory general ad, which is mainly music, and then the Ford Territory Gia, which is their luxury SUV ad. These are a sort of circa 2004, thereabouts.
Um, this takes place inside a household with a mum doing different chores while, uh, as, as you’ll hear firstly, a kid tries to steal a cookie. The mum says, “Don’t you dare,” and she’s not even looking at the kid. Then the husband tries to sneak out the back door, and she, without turning her head around, says, “Don’t you even think about it unless you mow the lawns.”
And then when they’re in the car backing out, she says, “D- I told you not to leave your, your bike on the driveway.” Let’s have a listen to the ad[00:34:00]
Ford Ad: Don’t even think about it
I thought you were going to mow the lawn.
Johnny, I thought I told you not to leave your trike in the driveway.
The Ford Territory gear comes with a reverse camera that gives you eyes in the back of your head. Ford Territory. The possibilities are amazing
Steve Davis: That’s an interesting ad, David, because unlike other car ads, which is all about vroom, vroom, testosterone, destroy the planet, and do it with air conditioning, this was honing in on a couple of features, or in this case, particularly eyes in the back of your head, the rear view camera, as well as spaciousness, but as well as being a family-friendly car.
David Olney: Yeah, it worked at the human level. It worked at the thing of selling the product. [00:35:00] It, it’s just a really good ad. I, I’m amazed a car ad was so good.
Steve Davis: And you are saying to me that Ford did seem to get it right because they’re still sought after, these Ford Territories.
David Olney: Yeah, I know people who are, are driving, you know, 22, 23-year-old Territories who go to mechanics who have like a boneyard of old Territories out the back to keep them going.
So they’ve got a real following of people who go, “This car can still be worked on. It’s still mechanical rather than a rolling computer.” It, it’s quite remarkable that the zeitgeist seems to have lasted for this vehicle.
Steve Davis: So here’s the challenge for our test of whether it would work today And the challenge is this, David.
They had cup holders, which seemed to be new-ish at the time, extra room, the rear view camera. Every car and its dog these days has every extra thing. Push a button, up goes the hatch, all that sort of [00:36:00] stuff. Is there anything left to make such a human-centered ad?
David Olney: I think the fact it starts with the human-centric perspective and then moves to the car is why it could work again for any car if you tapped in to this thing about this person who’s central to the ad and this person who chose the car.
So I think it’s the, the human first angle of this that makes it work as a, a good ad to sell a car.
Steve Davis: So this got on the side of the mums having eyes in the back of their head, and they are big decision makers with who buys what for a family car. There was one a few years ago where the focus seemed to be on how easy it was to park.
It might’ve been in one of the early cars where you could push a button and it would park for you. I guess that probably had some cut through as well. Is it, but if we run out of features, this is my dilemma. Is this just using a feature to hook in an audience? Is that where the intent is coming from?
David Olney: I suppose it was, but [00:37:00] it was still doing so much better a job, and I think it leaves the door open for continuing to go, who is this human with intent to buy a car?
And how are you talking to their intent rather than to your feature list? So I still think it’s, you know, car ads aren’t great, but it’s a lot better than the majority of them.
Steve Davis: Hmm. I better get you home now. We’ll hop in the car
David Olney: and- And drive it backwards the whole way using the rear vision camera?
Steve Davis: You betcha.
David Olney: Oh, this is gonna be so exciting. I’m hanging my head out the window and barking.
Caitlin Davis: Thanks for listening to Talking About Marketing. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit, and if you’re so inclined, leave a rating in your podcast app. Both help more than you think. Steve and David welcome your thoughts, which you can send to [00:38:00] podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com.
That’s podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with Steve at talkedaboutmarketing.com. No cost, no obligation. And we’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde, “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.”