From Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing Nixon obituary to an intelligence officer’s clarity framework, we explore how separating facts from opinions might save us from both political contortions and peanut butter cowboys.
Steve opens with a morbid but revealing question about eulogies, leading to Hunter S. Thompson’s brutal assessment of Richard Nixon and what our own legacies might reveal about how we’ve chosen to live.
David shares an intelligence officer’s deceptively simple framework for clearer thinking: separate what you know from what you don’t know from what you think, a discipline that could transform everything from hiring decisions to strategic planning.
Meanwhile, AI tools continue their siren song of effortless automation, prompting Steve to cancel his subscription to yet another overpromising platform that couldn’t deliver on its grandiose claims.
A 1991 Kraft peanut butter commercial featuring a claymation Texan oil baron reminds us that lazy creative thinking has been around far longer than artificial intelligence, though both share a fondness for impressive technology over meaningful communication.
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.
What Would Hunter S. Thompson Say About You?
Steve confronts listeners with an uncomfortable thought experiment: what would people actually say at your funeral? Drawing inspiration from a school principal who asks children not what they want to be but what they want to be like, the discussion moves beyond career ambitions to character formation.
Hunter S. Thompson’s savage obituary of Richard Nixon serves as a cautionary tale of how legacy emerges from daily choices. Thompson’s assessment that Nixon “was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning” offers a stark reminder that reputation accumulates through countless small interactions rather than grand gestures.
The hosts explore how this mortality-focused reflection might reset our compass for everyday interactions, whether with colleagues, customers, or family members. David notes the particular sadness of anyone living a life where such harsh words seem justified, emphasising that we get to choose how we want to be remembered through our daily conduct.
08:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
The Intelligence Officer’s Guide to Clearer Thinking
David recounts a pivotal moment at a 2006 counter-terrorism conference where an Australian intelligence officer challenged academics to separate three distinct categories: what you know, what you don’t know, and what you think. This framework, born from the necessity of making decisions with incomplete information, offers profound applications for business leaders facing similar uncertainty.
The methodology serves multiple purposes: it slows down emotional decision-making, acknowledges knowledge gaps before they become costly surprises, and prevents opinions from masquerading as facts. David illustrates this with a restaurant scenario where hiring a new chef requires careful consideration of known factors (current menu popularity), unknown variables (new chef’s ability to replicate existing dishes), and strategic opinions (whether to introduce changes immediately or gradually).
Steve and David examine how this framework might defuse the emotional ownership that often accompanies business discussions. By explicitly labelling thoughts as opinions rather than presenting them as established truth, teams can engage in more productive dialogue whilst managing risk more effectively. The approach doesn’t eliminate emotion from decision-making but prevents it from overwhelming rational analysis.
19:15 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Escaping AI’s Siren Song
Steve channels Homer’s Odyssey to describe his relationship with AI marketing promises, positioning himself as Ulysses tied to the mast whilst listening to increasingly seductive claims about effortless automation. His recent experience with Opus Clip exemplifies the gap between marketing promises and actual delivery.
The tool promised to automatically identify compelling moments from podcast videos and create engaging short clips. Instead, Steve found himself constantly editing the AI’s selections, extending beginnings, trimming endings, and ultimately questioning whether the tool saved any time at all. After requesting a refund, he reflected on how many business owners might be similarly caught between impressive demonstrations and disappointing daily reality.
David emphasises the importance of maintaining course regardless of technological novelty, suggesting that AI should be evaluated against specific tasks rather than adopted for its own sake. This echoes the intelligence framework from the Principles segment: know what problem you’re trying to solve, acknowledge what you don’t know about the tool’s capabilities, and form opinions based on actual testing rather than marketing materials.
23:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
When Cowboys Sell Peanut Butter
A 1991 Kraft peanut butter advertisement featuring a claymation Texan oil baron demonstrates that lazy creative thinking predates artificial intelligence by decades. The commercial attempts to connect oily peanut butter with Texas oil through a cowboy character who tempts children away from Kraft’s “never dry or oily” alternative.
Steve and David dissect the advertisement’s heavy-handed execution, noting how technology (claymation) overshadowed message clarity. The ad represents colour-by-numbers creative thinking: oil equals Texas, Texas equals cowboys, therefore oily peanut butter needs a cowboy character. This mechanical approach to creativity mirrors contemporary AI-generated content that prioritises technical impressiveness over meaningful communication.
The discussion extends to modern parallels, including news readers’ scripted spontaneity and social media’s algorithmic approach to engagement. A news story about a Roomba being run over after leaving its house prompts equally lazy commentary about robot overlords, demonstrating how surface-level connections continue to pass for insight.
David suggests the advertisement might still work today, with audiences impressed by CGI rather than claymation, highlighting how technological novelty often distracts from substantive communication. The hosts conclude that both vintage and contemporary examples share a fundamental flaw: prioritising medium over message, technique over truth.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S07E04
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Talking about marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders. Produced by my dad, Steve Davis and his colleague talked about marketing David Olney, in which they explore marketing through the lens of their own four Ps person, principles, problems, and per ity. Yes, you heard that correctly. Apart from their love of words, they really love helping people, so they hope this podcast will become a trusted companion on your journey in business.
Steve Davis: David, have you given in his thought, or could you now to what you’d like me to say about you at your funeral?
David Olney: Ah, that’s actually far more complicated than people probably think it is to work out what you want other people to say.
Steve Davis: Let me rephrase it. What do you think? I would say?
David Olney: Oh, I, I think you [00:01:00] would say that I was a supportive and.
And caring person who, you know, tried to make sure that other people achieve what they wanted to achieve and that I’ve got a short temper and gets stroppy with idiots. Would I be allowed to say that at the funeral? Ah, man, it’d be fine. It’s true. Most people know it.
Alright, how’s next Thursday? Looking for you by the sound of a pretty grim,
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps. Number one person, the aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly. That is what each of us is here for. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: in the person segment today. Uh, I just wanted to do something a little bit different because I was quite taken by an obituary. Written about US President Richard Nixon by a [00:02:00] journalist, uh, hunter s Thompson. Now, as we know, I think it’s fair to say, I mean, David, this is your wheelhouse. You lectured on geopolitics for a big part of your career.
When I say Richard Nixon, to you, especially in the, the context of things we learn about ourselves as people, what springs to mind
David Olney: an absolute fixation with. I deserve this much power and because I deserve it. It doesn’t matter if I use it inappropriately, like the, the arrogance and the self-serving this of Nixon is kind of breathtaking.
Steve Davis: Wow. Now, coupled with that, I’m reminded of, I think it was episode 150 of the Adelaide Show. I was having a major birthday milestone and I got five friends to record eulogies for me, and we did a whole episode about how to write eulogies and then I got to listen to them in company for the first time with others.
And it was quite amazing [00:03:00] and it made me think that we, it’s a waste for a eulogy to happen and be read out. Once you’re dead, because it’s quite touching and profound to hear what people actually think about you. And we don’t talk enough about that while we’re alive. And I think that’s a real issue.
That’s a topic for a different day. But it does, it it back then and it even now, it makes me wonder, and I think Stephen Covey in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has an exercise in pondering, what do you think, what would you like, uh, spoken about you at your funeral? Because it’s a way of, um, giving focus to your, your, your base motivations and how you are coming across in life.
You agree?
David Olney: Yeah. You know, to go back to a couple of episodes ago, you know, you want the values that shaped you, that you put out in the world to have resonated with people and that they should be able to say, oh yeah, David was all about these things. You know, [00:04:00] if you’ve got a set of values that matter to you and you live them, you hope that that’s what people notice.
Steve Davis: There was a school principal, uh, a deputy principal from Lutheran school up in, uh, Darwin in Palmerston that I interviewed on another podcast I do called around the school table and he, he works in the middle school and he said he doesn’t ask kids What do you want to be? He asked them, what do you want to be like?
And I think that’s a similar sort of thing. It’s trying to think about the outworking. Of
David Olney: your inner values. Exactly. Like I, I would probably rephrase it as how do you want to be? ’cause I think kids might find that an easier sentence to grasp, you know, how do you wanna be remembered? How do you wanna behave?
But yeah, that whole thing of no, no outcomes, you can’t necessarily affect them, but you can certainly affect how you behave and how you put yourself in the world and how you do things. And that’s gonna have a big impact.
Steve Davis: And if you’re thinking, okay, that’s fun [00:05:00] wondering, fascinating, but you might even think this afternoon or this morning, whenever you’re listening to this, this evening, what would people say about me?
Think of a specific person. What might they be saying about me in my eulogy if I were not here today? Uh. I guess if you want motivation to think about how you’re living your life because you want those words to actually be quite constructive and beautiful words you could do no worse than listening to what Hunter s Thompson wrote about Richard Nixon and aim for something just a little more north than this.
The Rest Is History: There are bad reviews and then there is the obituary. That the Gonzo journalist, hunter s Thompson gave President Richard Nixon. If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, Thompson wrote his casket would’ve been [00:06:00] launched into one of those open sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.
He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked. That he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was legal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Steve Davis: That is something I really don’t want read out. My body should have been burned in a trash bin, uh, unless the family doesn’t wanna spend money on the cremation.
David Olney: Look, let’s aim for a recyclable cardboard box. At least that that’s a good thing to burn if we’re gonna have a funeral pie. Do you
Steve Davis: think that, do you think that’s a good thing just to meditate on to go right.
I think it’s time for me to reset my compass.
David Olney: I think the really sad thing is that it’s said about [00:07:00] Nixon after he died. Uh, and yet people were saying terrible about things in saying terrible things about him while he was alive. I think the terrible thing is that anyone who lives a life where that seems like a fair summation.
That’s just really sad.
Steve Davis: It is, isn’t it? So there we go for the person segment. Sorry if I brought you down, but just let’s all just ponder our mortality and, and if we want. The legacy of our memory, uh, to be a positive one that might give some inspiration to others or nourish them, then I guess we have a little bit of chance and time to take stock of how we’re interacting in everyday life, whether it’s with the people around us in our workplace, our customers or family, friends, et cetera.
Um, yeah, I think we all get caught up in busyness. It. I don’t think it hurts just to reflect at that deeper, more [00:08:00] mortal level.
David Olney: You get to choose how you want to be.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: in the principle segment. Uh, this episode we are actually talking about some very specific principles, and these were principles. That came up in a previous conversation that David and I were having. Uh, and you’re gonna talk about them more eloquently, but it’s the principle of, in fact, you can give us the story to give it context, but you have this thing that you draw upon.
It wasn’t your original idea, but you, you’ll, you’ll give us some details on that, that when you’re talking to people about ideas, especially contentious issues and, and getting caught up in the emotions high, you break things down and say, look. Tell me what you know about a topic. Tell me what you [00:09:00] don’t know about the topic, and tell me what you think and do not get them muddled up.
There’s my generic introduction for you, David, to pick up the reins and draw some sense into this in a way that we can find some principles that might help us with our work in our small to medium enterprise, our associations, our organizations.
David Olney: Yeah, it’s a really good approach to calming down, slowing down.
Separating emotion from knowledge, acknowledging what we don’t know. I think the first time I ever heard it was at a counter-terrorism conference in 2006, and I was sitting with a reasonably senior Australian intelligence officer and he said, well, thing I don’t like about conferences is your academics don’t understand the rules of effective communication.
Tell me what you know, tell me what you don’t know, and then tell me what you think. And keep the three things separate. He said, your academics have a tendency [00:10:00] to tell me what you think and tell me what you know and hide what you don’t know. But I can’t tell which is what you think and which is what, you know.
I thought, oh, that’s very interesting.
Steve Davis: That is very profound for someone to come out with. Obviously it wasn’t his original idea. No, it
David Olney: was very much the idea of the intelligence officers on one side of the room versus the academics on the other. And I kind of, I take great pride in that conference that when it came time for the conference dinner.
I walked in. At that point, Karen and I were only friends. We weren’t a couple yet, and I thought we would go and sit on the academic table and we walked in for the conference dinner only to hear that intelligence. I was going, oh, David, come and sit over here with us. I’m like, oh, okay, thanks. Is there room for Karen too?
And in typical senior officer format, he just went, everyone move down one seat. But it’s like, oh, I’m now the only academic [00:11:00] sitting at the grownups table. This is interesting. So why and how does this work and is important, why and how in their world it’s so important is they’re always working with incomplete information.
And I think that’s very much the case too, with small and medium enterprise. You know, like the intelligence world, you only have some information and you have to make decisions with less information than you would ideally like to have. But if you can define what you know and what you don’t know. You can manage risk better.
Because if you know you don’t know it, that means you’ve at least thought about it. You’re aware it would be nice to have, but you can make a judgment on the basis of what you’ve got and what you haven’t got. And the fact that intelligence people always try and keep what they know and what they don’t know separate from now, what do I think about all that information?
So they always draw a distinction between here is a piece of [00:12:00] information and here is what I think it means. Because information can always be interpreted differently by people who have different information, who have different training, who have a different perspective, who have a different goal in mind, and that it’s really important, particularly in any discussion about taking risk, to draw a distinction between, well, what bits of information do we actually have?
Do we have enough information to make a decision or are we actually so scant on information that if we do what we think we should do, we are really just going with blind luck.
Steve Davis: Personally, I don’t use terms like blind luck, David.
David Olney: Yeah, but that’s ’cause you hang out with me and you are very careful about saying blind and I tell you not to worry because it’s such a useful word.
Steve Davis: This is not the sort of thing you would bring in a conversation. If you’re in a cafe and you have to make a coffee or a thick shake, you don’t have to start questioning those things. That’s just a routine
David Olney: thing. But if you’re about to hire a new chef for your cafe, knowing that you’ve got a distinctive [00:13:00] menu and people really like the dishes, the way they’re cooked, and you know.
That your chef wants to do whatever they’re gonna do and you’ve gotta get a new person. Do you keep the menu you’ve got that they might not be able to copy? Do you introduce new dishes straight away? Do you try and get a new chef fast enough to overlap with the new chef so they can work together for a couple of weeks and the new person can learn?
Is your current chef willing to help the new person learn to cook those dishes the same way? These are all things that you either know or don’t know and have opinions on, but the more you keep all those things separate, the better you will manage the risk of when are you hiring someone? Are you gonna try and get them to learn the existing menu?
Can they work with your current chef for a while? Do you need a new menu? Like the more you can break up what you know, what you don’t know, and what you think. The better you’ll manage the risk of the change that is obviously coming down the pipeline towards your little restaurant,
Steve Davis: and that’s a very [00:14:00] pragmatically focused example.
But even in a more general strategic discussion, my intuition is. That arm’s length discipline of being able to say, look, we don’t have enough much information, but this is what I think, naming it that way as opposed to pitching your te your flag into it. Yeah. And saying this is truth itself is a step forward.
Yeah. In enabling a conversation to happen. ’cause the goal here is to diffuse the emotion that comes with ownership of positions, isn’t it to? Yep. Just it be more cool headed in our discussion and be upfront. And if we’ve only got opinions, well so be it. But at least we can name, yep.
David Olney: Name it. So we’re, we’re essentially stepping away from emotion, being at the center of the decision making and hopefully also stepping away from assumptions that aren’t grounded on what we know.
Steve Davis: But here’s the rub. Despite everything we say about, [00:15:00] oh no, we make logical decisions. We know humans make emotional, so talk this, this to me, that we have a conundrum because this is a framework that’s trying to keep it cool and not be dominated and flooded by emotion. But is that, are we kidding ourselves?
Is it still going to be driven emotionally or is there some trick that’s going on with this methodology that gives us the best of both worlds?
David Olney: My observation using it with people is it slows them down when they’re categorizing. And by slowing them down and having to logically sort things, any strong emotion that was creeping into the discussion tends to dissipate.
And their ability to take a little bit more time and reflect on where things fit. And what other information they would really like to see if they can get before they make a decision, or do they wanna reflect more on what they think the information means? It tends to [00:16:00] just slow the pace and increase the reflection.
And really just doing that is a win. So many people get sort caught in the emotional cycle of, I have to make a decision. And then they just go through an emotional whirlwind. Finally make a decision more because of exhaustion than effective process. And this is effective process rather than emotional swirl.
It’s not a bad alternative.
Steve Davis: And of the three, I mean, tell me what you know about a topic. Tell me what you think. Eat them separate so we are clear that this is. My my thinking, this is what we know are Yep. And what we Facts, but the don’t know one is fascinating. Yeah. Because I think first of all, in some situations it takes courage to admit you don’t know something, but it’s better in the long run.
If we discover there’s a deficit in our knowledge, then we can pause and get that filled without having to back ourselves up. [00:17:00] I was listening to Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast just recently. And he just referenced, uh, when Donald Trump, uh, said to Zelinsky that you, well, Ukraine, you started the war.
And in Sam Harris’s reading the situation, he thinks that was just an accidental thing that Donald Trump said. It wasn’t a thought that he’d had before, but once he’d said it. He then had to, which again, Robert Cini and uh, you have to have that continuity of your position. And so him and all his aides had to contort themselves to try and make this mistake reality.
Whereas had we said, look, I actually don’t know. It clears the board. Is that fair?
David Olney: I would like to. Agree with Sam Harris in that situation. But I actually believe that Trump is so emotionally dependent on Putin [00:18:00] for approval that he is being guided by emotion rather than by any logical system.
Steve Davis: So he’s not gonna make too much use of these print this principle.
Never. Uh, so let’s put him to one side at the moment for us in our business and our organizations in life, um, it’s a nice little. Rubric. Yeah, heuristic. A heuristic. Tell me what you, no, let’s talk about what we know. Let’s talk about what we don’t know, and let’s talk about what we think about something.
And with that sort of conversation with things categorized as. We might get to positions more slowly but better.
David Olney: Exactly. And just keep them separate so that you can agree that the facts we have and the facts we don’t have are at least we’ve got some common ground because people always do better in conversation when they can agree on the common ground.
Steve Davis: Was that a good discussion? I mean, I don’t know.
David Olney: Seemed okay. Well, that’s what you think.
Steve Davis: Well, can’t even know it.[00:19:00]
Caitlin Davis: Uh, four Ps. Number three problems. I asked the question for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity. Oscar Wilde.
Steve Davis: At the beginning of season seven, we had a special episode in which David and I went deep reflecting on ai, warts and all. And one of the things that I touched on. Was the hype in the realm of the AI world so much over promising and not delivering, and I just wanted to, in the problem segment, embolden you, dear listener, to do what I’ve done and basically.
A bit like in Homer’s Odyssey. Uh, Ulysses. Ulysses. Ulysses, Ulysses. I’ve heard so many different pronunciations of his name. Uh, he wanted to hear the sirens, and anyone who heard the sirens on the, on the shore, their boat would go over. They get [00:20:00] smashed on the rocks and eaten up and all that sort of stuff.
So he had the, the, his crew fill his ears with wax and tie him to the mast of his boat. Sorry. No, no. He left his ears open. He got the, the, his crew, the crew to put wax in their ears wack so they couldn’t hear the sirens. They were immune. And he was tied to the mask. Yes. But could hear, yes, he could hear the exquisite beauty, but not get drawn into it.
That is what’s happening with ai. Ah, do the, I’ve seen so many ads since I came back from the variety bash of, Hey, do nothing. Just write a couple of words and a whole video series we made. Do nothing. A couple of words. We’ll write all your email things with ai and it’s gonna be magic. It is over promising.
’cause I tell you, the majority, if not all of these tools come out with plastic rubbish. It requires a lot more elbow grease to get them right than you think, and it’s a quite a, a horrible, icky part [00:21:00] of this industry. One tool that I was using for a while was Opus Clip. Its promise is that you upload a video you’ve made.
So I’d upload the video version of this podcast, uh, which by the way, it’s not live video. We just have the still image and we have the sound just so it’s on YouTube for people to listen to, and we feed it into opus clip and it’s meant to use AI to find the juicy little bits and make short clips. That’s its job.
It kind of worked okay. And then increasingly I found. It was just missing the mark. If I was going to do something with them, I’d had to extend the first bit, move the back bit, cut out a little bit, and ultimately I got to the point in the wake of our episode, David, of going, you know what, I’m over this.
I’m paying a couple hundred US dollars a year. Admittedly not, not, you know, sheep stations. But it’s just not delivering. I, I went through one, uh, one of our episodes and I went, no, [00:22:00] no, no, no. It was missing. It was. And so I asked for a refund and thankfully they gave it to me, but I, I just said, they said, why are you leaving?
And I said, well, you’ve got what you promise up here. But what’s being delivered is nothing like that. Oh, oh, okay. On you go. I think more of us need to, um, be like, uh, Ulysses and. Be able to listen to this and not give in to the siren call of the overpromising. What’s your take, David?
David Olney: It’s definitely a case of decide where you want the ship to go and make sure the ship is gonna stay on course.
Even if you want to, you know, like Ulysses, listen to the sirens. You don’t want them to take you off course. So AI should always be thought about in terms of, am I looking at this? ’cause it’s novel. And I’m not gonna waste much time and resources, or do I have a task in mind that I want it to do well and [00:23:00] test it against that task, but stay on course with or without it?
Because, you know, it’s just the current version of, of going down a digital rabbit hole. Uh, I think
Steve Davis: we’ll leave that story right down in that rabbit hole where it belongs. As long as we don’t thumb ourselves into frustration, we can crawl out somewhere else. Avoid the mixer mitosis. And the ferrets. Ooh,
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps number four per per cassity. The one duty Weta history is to rewrite it. Oscar Wilde.
Steve Davis: David, I’ve got a personal question to ask you if you don’t mind. Here we go again, listener. Have you ever opened the lid of a jar of peanut butter and stuck your finger in and just had a finger full of peanut paste?
David Olney: No. I had a Hungarian [00:24:00] grandmother who always seemed to be wherever she wasn’t meant to be.
And if I had ever done that, I think I would’ve got whacked in the back of the head with a wooden spoon. But what I learned really quickly is if I went and got a teaspoon, I could gobble just about anything in the kitchen I wanted and never get in trouble.
Steve Davis: Yes. Well, I have, I do admit that I have in my past.
Had a phase where I used to gobble a couple of teaspoons of peanut butter, especially the, the, there’s a particular brand, I can’t remember what it’s now, where there’s just no oil, no sugar. It really is a hundred percent peanuts just crushed into a beautiful paste, and it’s just a joyful little mouthful.
Mm. The reason it’s top of mind, David is ahead of the essay variety Bash, where we’re going out camping. I was doing research on camping sites about what are some high calorie foods you can have as an emergency backstop. ’cause I had no idea how much they fed us. They feed us a lot on those things and.
Peanut butter was one thing that was referenced. I didn’t do it in the end ’cause I [00:25:00] thought, no, then you need a jar, you need a, I didn’t do it. However, it did mean that when this ad popped up a craft peanut butter ad from 1991 with a Texan, um, model. Uh, what’s that stop motion? It’s a stop motion. Yeah.
Texan model made of peanut butter from a really oily jar pops up when the young child reaches into the pantry to get the craft peanut butter. Here’s what happens.
Ad: Oh, your horses honey. How about some of this oily stuff? I’ve got gals of black gold, Texas tea.
No thanks. I like crash peanut butter. It’s so easy to spread and it’s never dry or oily,
but all this could be yours. Stop again. The don’t be rasht, no won’t wait. Roll
craft peanut butter, smooth or [00:26:00] crunchy, but never dry or oily.
Steve Davis: David, have you ever heard of the word nuance? Yes. It does not exist in that ad. No, no, that that ad takes
David Olney: a
a half decent idea and, uh. Breaks it
Steve Davis: because you can think, oh, okay. Some peanut paste is really oily. Oil. Oil, Texas. Oh, Texan. Like a Texan cowboy. But yeah. Yeah, we could have an oily and it’s just, it’s just very weird.
It. And I mean, the young girl in that ad, she’s cute. That’s gorgeous. But it’s just, it’s artless. Yeah. There’s no, dare I say it, there’s no craft in in this ad, other than a very blatant color by numbers approach to an idea.
David Olney: Yeah. The wonders of Claymation, I guess they’re desperately hoping you’re impressed by that.
Mm-hmm. Whereas it [00:27:00] seems to me that just the little girl. Going into the pantry, going smooth, crunchy, smooth, crunchy, both that I would’ve been great.
Steve Davis: Yeah. And uh, I just find it’s a lazy application of the idea with technology rather than engage the human. Yeah. But even the script is just banging over your head over and over again.
So in this post picas release segment, we look at old ads and we think, would they work and still hold up today? I mean, I, I sadly think. It actually, it, I don’t think it’ll be overly successful. ’cause I think we’ve grown up a little bit beyond that. We have higher expectations, but there’d be a segment of the market where it would, it’d be done with AI instead of real claymation.
Yep. Um, but just the, the analog to this is channel seven, I think it was Channel seven news had a story in the week of [00:28:00] recording. About a Roomba, you know, those little robotic vacuum cleaner vacuum cleaners in Queensland that had somehow got out of the, the person’s house and their household security camera, saw it, leave the driveway and go across the road where it got run over and.
But the, the news reader in news readers are the most cringey, awkward humans. They don’t know how to relate to humans. They have scripted anecdotes that try to sound like they’re spontaneous. It’s the most. Awkward, awkward thing to do to watch them. ’cause they go, oh, this is gonna be a funny story. Switch into funny story mode.
And they had this intro for this, which again is lazy thinking. That’s where it’s connected here. It said, if you are worried that robots might one day be our overlords, think again. This Roomba, uh, left a house and went onto the road where it got run over. [00:29:00] Now it’s not even funny. It’s the lamest setup because there is actually some degree of reality to thinking about robots taking over or, or ai, artificial intelligence, getting the upper hand in in some way, but it’s not gonna be in the guise of a robot.
It’s like this. It’s as lazy as those people who go, oh, it’s 15 degrees. It’s chilly today. And they say global warming. Completely conflating the wrong ideas together and that. David is very similar to, I think, the lack of depth and thought in the way that this craft peanut butter ad was made. I mean, for crying out loud, they could have just said, you know, if you think your day sucks today, think about being this Roomba.
Yeah. You know, that End of story. Boom. Um, so anyway, craft peanut butter, that ad, David, what’s your verdict? Is, does it have [00:30:00] legs for.
David Olney: 2020s. I think sadly it would work today because someone would be impressed by the CGI the same way we were meant to be impressed by the claymation. I think it’s one of these things where a proportion of the room’s gonna go, oh, that’s technically clever.
Oh, it’s sort of entertaining. Oh, it’s peanut butter. The peanut butter’s the third thing in line. But I think this, nevermind the message. What was the medium? Does get in the way very often.
Steve Davis: One last footnote. This was 91. We knew Oil Texas. Is that connection still strong for most people?
David Olney: I don’t know if anything, people who are worried about fracking are going to sort of not see it as funny.
They’re gonna see it as destructive. So yeah, it was strange then. It’s strange. Now,
Steve Davis: do you know what they should do if they’re gonna do it today is at the end they say craft peanut butter. Fracking. Good. [00:31:00] Peanut butter.
David Olney: Peanut butter. Frack on mate. Yeah. Okay. I think we better put this away. What? The peanut butter With too much oil.
Back, back, down that rabbit hole.
Caitlin Davis: Thank you for listening to talking about marketing. If you enjoyed it, please leave a rating or a review in your favorite podcast app and if you found it helpful, please share it with others. Steve and David always welcome your comments and questions, so send them to [email protected].
And finally, the last word to Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.