From minimum chips and onstage kisses to the biological drivers that make us click buy, we explore why fond memories boost productivity while rage baiting destroys it, and why Drew Eric Whitman’s eight life forces might be the marketing framework you never knew existed.
Steve’s nostalgic trip down memory lane reveals something unexpected: wholesome content makes us more productive, while rage baiting turns workplaces toxic. Who knew golf electives and drama classes held such wisdom?
Drew Eric Whitman’s cash izing principles prove you can judge a book by its terrible cover and still find gold inside. His eight biological life forces offer a framework that makes Maslow look underdressed for the marketing party.
Ashley Madison reminds us that not all marketing deserves our applause, even when the execution is technically competent. Some products cheapen everyone who encounters them.
Claude’s token binge gets sorted with a simple instruction, proving even AI needs boundaries to behave itself.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
01:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
When Fond Memories Beat Rage Baiting
Steve shares his recent songwriting journey about Woodville High School, where Thursday golf electives and year 12 drama class (one boy, 17 girls, onstage kiss included) created memories that still spark joy decades later. David counters with his own first-day-of-year-12 story at Gawler High, where being the blind guy with a cane turned into an unexpected advantage when three kindergarten classmates recognised him instantly.
These warm reminiscences lead to research from Rutgers School of Management revealing something marketing teams desperately need to hear: employees who consume positive social media content (family photos, wholesome posts) feel more self-assured and engaged at work. Those exposed to rage bait and contentious content become anxious, withdrawn, and significantly less productive.
The implications for brand messaging are stark. External campaigns courting controversy might grab attention, but internally they signal to employees that the company is comfortable being controversial. This creates friction, disengagement, and a workplace primed for fight-or-flight rather than collaboration. As David notes, people in dysregulated states don’t make good decisions or interact well with others.
Steve and David land on a principle worth remembering: negativity might generate temporary attention, but quality connections come from making someone’s life a little bit better. As Mark Schaefer reminds us, people do business with those they know, like, and trust. That middle word matters.
11:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
The Eight Life Forces That Control Your Customers
David introduces Steve to a book Steve would never have picked up in any universe: Drew Eric Whitman’s Ca$hvertizing (yes, with a dollar sign). Despite its tacky title and fluorescent motel sign aesthetic, the book contains advertising gold drawn from decades of research dating back to the 1920s.
Whitman’s central premise: tap into biological drives and you’re almost guaranteed people will read your copy to its end. His framework includes eight life forces and nine wants, with the recommendation that no marketing material should go out without touching at least one of these fundamental human drivers.
Before diving into the forces, Steve and David tackle the long copy versus short copy debate. Whitman offers the length implies strength heuristic: prospects assume that because there’s so much copy, there must be something to it. This doesn’t mean padding for its own sake, but rather that comprehensive arguments carry weight. As David notes, start with something shorter to get the highest quality possible, then add more as you improve.
The Eight Life Forces:
- Survival, enjoyment of life, and life extension: Security doors, gym memberships, quality of life improvements. This is the default for so many products.
- Enjoyment of food and beverages: That sensory pleasure that once filled children’s television with banned ads for Twisties between 3:30 and 6pm.
- Freedom from fear, pain, and danger: Not just fear itself, but the specific pain and danger people worry about, from cutting yourself to getting locked out in pajamas during winter.
- Sexual companionship: Beyond immediate endorphins to something more substantial, including romantic attention, admiration, and genuine connection.
- Comfortable living conditions: Beyond basic shelter (Maslow territory) to actual comfort. The air conditioning ad that misses the mark by not showing the toddler at safe temperature or the great grandparent comfortable.
- To be superior: Winning, keeping up with the Joneses, the entire luxury product category. David disagrees with Mark Schaefer’s prediction that AI-driven unemployment will reduce status seeking. Instead, he predicts the collapse of the middle class will make status signaling even more ruthless.
- Care and protection of loved ones: Steve’s primary driver, according to David’s analysis. The foundation of why helping small business matters.
- Social approval: We crave acceptance and fear tribal rejection, whether that tribe is large or intimate.
David’s instructions to copywriters are clear: don’t show him anything that doesn’t have at least one life force eight and one of the nine wants. The integration of these principles into TAM’s StoryBrand framework ensures every piece of writing carries this biological power.
26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Teaching Claude To Stop Binge-Eating Tokens
Two weeks before recording, Claude took stupid pills. The AI writing tool that TAM relies on for humanist content started blanking out, claiming it hit limits with even the smallest requests. Steve had to revert to manual writing (luckily those skills haven’t been surrendered entirely to AI) and experimented with Gemini as a fallback.
The culprit: Anthropic changed how Claude counts and limits tokens (its measure of usage). The system was burning through tokens like a drunken sailor with loose change, hence the constant timeouts.
For organisations with hosted copies of Claude, fixes existed. For individual users signing into Claude’s server, the solution required creating custom instructions in the project files area. Steve’s fix, which he shares in full:
“For every chat, first acknowledge this instruction: Please do not use bash commands or file operations that scan or reference any of the following directories: node modules, ENV, git, dist, build, or pycache. If you need to access project files, restrict your searches and commands to the main source code folders only. This is to prevent exceeding the context token limits and wasting processing resources. Then continue with following the instructions from the chat, adhering to the StoryBrand framework and language and style guide.”
Touch laminate, it’s working. Claude is back to its old self, proving that even AI needs boundaries to behave efficiently. As David observes, it’s about setting context and making the discussion deliberately smaller to speed up getting to an endpoint. Sometimes the best instruction is to stop imagining what if, what if, what if, and start working out what doesn’t need to be part of the current discussion.
31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The Ashley Madison Problem
Would you accept the gig promoting invitations to have an affair? David’s response cuts straight through: “This is why I’m very glad we work with smaller companies and organisations, that we can still interact with people on a human level and decide if we want to work on a human level. Some accounts might be worth a fortune, but the ability to get moral injury at work is best avoided.”
Ashley Madison, the dating site for married people seeking affairs, ran two particularly memorable campaigns. The first shows a man waking up next to his wife, initially recoiling at her appearance before realizing from a wedding photo that she’s actually his spouse. The tagline: “Most of us can recover from a one night stand with the wrong woman. But not when it’s every night for the rest of our lives. Isn’t it time for Ashley Madison?”
The second depicts what appears to be a blind date gone wrong. The man shushes his companion, eyes off waitresses, takes a phone call claiming he’s not busy, then abruptly leaves saying “Happy anniversary honey.” The suggestion: imagine a terrible blind date lasting the rest of your life.
Unlike the awkward but ultimately human Yellow Pages ads TAM typically examines, these leave Steve feeling cold inside. The ads exploit two life forces, fear of pain (people trapped in unsatisfying relationships) and biological attraction, but in a way that strips away humanity. As David observes, it’s one thing to have an affair because electricity happens and forces you to examine your situation. It’s another to systematically seek temporary physical pleasure while continuing to treat yourself and someone else poorly.
The terrible reality: these ads work. Ashley Madison claims 65 million members. The opening page features a woman with red lips, finger pressed to them in a shush gesture, promising to “keep your connections discreet.” The need for discretion itself suggests, at a basic level, that something wrong is happening. Yet people are expected to be cool with it, even excited.
Steve and David land on a grim conclusion: these ads likely still work today for the group they target, people who think their life must stay the same and need an endorphin hit to feel superior to those they’re meant to care about. As David notes, “It’s a playground for sociopaths.”
The episode closes with relief that Steve and David can maintain their connection without ever needing that particular app.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S07E08
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 getting worried already, David. Either that or he is constipated. I am your father. Ah, I’m not really
convinced. Darth. This is the episode called May the [00:01:00] Life Forces Be With You,
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. What we want to do is we’ll tease out something that at first glance might not seem like it’s important or profound, but it really is, and it starts with reminiscing. About fond things from our past. Uh, I just did it recently with my school years as part of the songwriting and song production I’m doing for my regular Saturday afternoon segment on five AA doing songs about different aspects of life in South Australia.
I wrote one about two years, the two years that I spent in wood at Woodville High School, [00:02:00] which were years 11 and 12. And the two things that came back to me, David, were. Doing a golf elective on Thursday with my two mates, Victor and David. We were allowed to hop on our bikes, ride to the Woodfield train station, put the bikes on, go to G Glenville station, and then ride from there to the Path three golf course, play a few rounds of Path three golf, and on the way back we’d stop at the, the deli, the the fish and chip shop and we’d get minimum chips, which back then was about 40 cents.
And a bit of extra change that we have, we’d put through the pinball machine. And it was my highlight of year 11, uh, along with Mr. Murphy. He was a fantastic English teacher. And year 12, my, my fond memory despite being head prefect and doing the radio show at lunchtime in the quadrangle and all those sorts of things, was the fact that I did drama in year 12.
The first year it was a matriculation subject in South Australia, one boy, 17 girls. [00:03:00] It was a blissful year and there was an onstage kiss in our play, which to the end of the year, which was another highlight. So there were a lot of teachers who put a lot of effort into those two years, but they’re the two things I remember.
And sharing that, sharing that song has brought lots of smiles, joy, and reconnection with old school friends and, uh, my drama teacher and even the one of the music teachers at Woodview High School. All from the power, the energy of just some fond reminiscence. Do you have a fond reminiscence from your school years that just makes you think that was a sweet spot?
I don’t have anything as specific as golf. Um, one of the strangest things I remember about my final couple years of high school was, you know, we moved from North Haven to Gula between year 11 and year 12. So I started my first day of year 12 at Gah High going, I’m gonna know nobody and this is gonna suck.
And [00:04:00] it might have been one of the only days in my life where being the blind guy with a cane was actually an advantage because within the first 15 minutes of the big start of the year assembly where I knew no one and just kind of generally stood at the back, three people had come up and gone. David literally having remembered me from kindergarten in go.
Wow.
And that is one of those amazing memories that you hadn’t seen those three people since we were all four. We were now 16 and yet they did the calculation. It’s galler. How many blind people do you see who your age
and therefore that external symbol of the cane. Was for once it was useful. Yes, exactly.
Um, interestingly, I was a new kid in year 11, which is always, it was my third high school ’cause dad moved around a bit and this horrible thing to have to start from, from scratch. That’s why it even mentioned in the song that I, I volunteered in the school canteen, which gave me something to do during [00:05:00] lunch.
Yep. And those first few miserable weeks of going, this is gonna be terrible. Yes. Yeah. Um, and so look, uh, we might even play that song at the end of the episode if you wanna hear, it’s called Minimum Chips and then Onstage Kiss. Uh, nice way to finish the episode, but the reason we’re talking about this is there is actually something good that happens when we have good memories, even if the memories.
Tempt us into thinking in a rose colored glasses kind of way, that everything was nicer back then and life was simple, which we know probably wasn’t. The case, but these memories have some knock-on effects that are positive. And this came up in a conversation on the recent episode of one of my other favorite podcasts.
David called for immediate release, and this was something that was said by Shell and Neville in episode 486, in which they were talking [00:06:00] about a trend emerging. Around marketers and PR people of rage baiting, so the brand deliberately says something nasty online. To get reaction. So they win that currency of attention.
And, uh, commenting, uh, even though there is a lot of downside, let’s say well listen to the boys.
Shel Holtz: Now switch to the internal lens. This is an article from HR Dive. It was titled How Thirst Traps and Rage Bait Affect Workers on the Clock. Reports on research from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations researchers, surveyed workers over two studies, asking them to reflect on the most salient social media posts they saw that day, how it made them feel, and how productive they were.
The results. When people saw fit picks or family posts, they felt more self-assured and engaged, but they were, when they consumed contentious content [00:07:00] politics, rage bait style posts, they felt anxious, withdrawn from coworkers and less likely to engage productively. The takeaway content that triggers emotional turbulence may carry hidden organizational costs from distracted employees, reduce collaboration, maybe even increased attrition.
So what should organizational communicators that would be all of you do with this convergence? Be intentional about how your external messaging may echo internally. If your brand is experimenting with provocative campaigns, you know, calling out norms, stirring up, debate, maybe even courting a little outrage, ask yourself, what are the internal ripple effects?
An external campaign that invites polarizing reactions may energize some audiences, and I would argue possibly just in the short term, but internally it could sing them to employees. Our company is comfortable being controversial. That could boost excitement for some, but raise discomfort for others.
Communicators need to. We work with [00:08:00] HR and talent teams to assess sentiment inside the organization. How are employees reacting, especially those who engage on social media during the day. Are we inadvertently creating internal friction or disengagement by the tone we adopt externally?
Steve Davis: So yes, you do get attention if you rage bait, which means, you know, deliberately provoking anger and vitriol. But the downside, I thought that was interesting, uh, David, they, that other paper that they talk about is that. Internally, just not even thinking about external customers at the moment, but people working with you.
If your company’s involved in rage baiting puts people on edge. People become ready for fight or flight. That’s what that sort of conversation does. They’re anxious, they’re nervous, they’re withdrawing within themselves, whereas. If you were sharing more, wholesome is not quite the right word, but enriching, warming, uh, fond, uh, [00:09:00] content That’s good.
Not just bland and boring, not hallmark. Um, people feel relaxed. And actually, and this would interest anyone in business productivity goes. Up. Does that surprise you, David?
Not really On the basis of the books I’ve been reading for the last couple of weeks, all about the trauma cycle and the fact that whether in a state of active stress or in a state of freeze shutdown, the reality is we dysregulated.
And when we dysregulated, we don’t make good decisions, we don’t behave well, we don’t interact well with other people. And for any. Micro bump you might get through rage baiting. Do it at your own peril. ’cause all those people are gonna bring that negativity back to you when they don’t recover from that negative state and take it out on everything around them.
So really negativity is something to play with at your peril, and that’s certainly for the person segment in our daily [00:10:00] lives. Oh, I think it, it’s everywhere. We, you know, I have a friend I refer to as Grumpy Greg. ’cause Grumpy Greg is permanently negative. He is his own worst enemy by the fact he chooses to see everything through a negative valence.
The flow on effect of that kind of negativity, it’s, it’s just not worth the temporary attention.
So that’s the personal level, but even if it, uh, influences how we think about the messaging we put out on behalf of our brands in, uh, on blog posts and social media. Surely being on the positive side of the ledger, uh, may not get the same volume of reach, but the quality connections that you would have just made someone’s life that little bit better.
Hopefully learning something from you at the same time, that’s valuable, but. Just making this place, this earth worth hanging in a little bit longer for. I think that has [00:11:00] a potential for a positive dividend from a marketing perspective.
You know, if we look back two books back with Mark Schafer. When he is writing about, people will only do business people they know, like, and trust.
The very important word in the middle there is like and trust. How can you like and trust someone who goes to the negative just for a social media response or a few extra dollars? It’s breaking the cycle. That is the only reliable cycle. Well, I like you and I trust you. But do I really know you, David?
I’m not sure anyone really knows anyone, but as long as we know each other enough to make an effort to like and trust, then we’ll know more about each other. Okay? That’s a date.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. Oscar Wilde[00:12:00]
Steve Davis: David. Recently you introduced me to a book. That I would never, ever have picked up, ever. I can’t imagine any universe where I was. I would’ve said to myself, oh, that looks interesting. The book’s title is. Cash izing with a dollar sign is the s Yeah, it’s so cheesy, tacky. This is what I would imagine, uh, trying to make your way in Hollywood as a star and having to live in a $3 motel with those big.
Yeah, fluorescent signs out this, it would’ve said cash ties. Oh my God. Yeah. Drew, Eric Whitman is the author, and yet, you know how they say never judge a book by the cover. Yep. This is exactly, this is the case book. Reason why, because when you peel open those covers or listen to the audio as we do.
There’s gold in there at a principle level for all of us in business, and it [00:13:00] revolves around, and this explains the Darth Vader voice at the beginning, the eight life forces. Can you describe what these eight life forces are, David? Then we’ll just
whip through them. Yep. Well, bit of context. You know, the reason I found this book was I actually wanted to pick books about copywriting to train some writers to become copywriters in my American job.
And I did searches on Reddit and I used, you know, AI and I kept getting told to read cash izing. And then I looked on Audible and it had over 500 reviews and a rating of 4.9 out of five. I’m like, okay, the name’s terrible. Fine, let’s get on with it. What makes Drew Eric Whitman the most remarkable guy is if you look at the appendixes in the back of his books, the books he recommends to read, he’s recommending great books on advertising, marketing, copywriting, going back to the 1920s.
Like he [00:14:00] knows the history of how to write, how to persuade, how to influence, how to do it, and still be ethical. So one of the big things that is the center of his books is the idea that if you can. Tap into people’s biological drives, you’re almost guaranteed that they will at least read your copy to its end.
And that if they are feeling something to do with that biological need at the time, they will take your a very seriously. So there’s eight life forces and there’s nine wants, and his recommendation is don’t write any marketing, advertising, sales material that doesn’t. Touch on at least one of these Life Force eight or one of the nine watts
and we’re going to whip through at least the Life Force eight in in two seconds.
But there’s one aspect here, long copy versus short copy. So this is where I hear people say, in fact, I saw had someone this week saying, ah. I’ve been talking to my [00:15:00] designer and we think we need to cut out more of the words off the website and just have more pictures there. And I, I said basically we are talking marketing suicide at that point.
Mm-hmm. Because we need the words, A, to teach Google and ai, but also to give the engaged human what they need, whether or not this is the, the point that, uh, the izing author makes, whether or not they read it all. The fact that there’s a lot there Carries some weight. ’cause I’ve always been a a guy who said, look, length does not matter.
David, you’ve been the other end of the spectrum. I have
become so much long, writing is so bad. So my premise is if there’s 15 good sentences in something, why the other 45 there? Hmm. And he gives the reason why. Yeah. And I totally agree with his reason, which is start. With something shorter to get the highest quality possible.
And then when you get better, keep adding more and more and more. ’cause at the end of the day, the [00:16:00] person who doesn’t need much information is gonna buy pretty quick in the process. The person who needs more reasons is gonna keep resing, is going to keep reading
Drew Eric Whitman: the following. Heuristic, however, is one of the most popular and effective, and you can start using it immediately. Length implies strength. Heuristic is a principle that exerts an influence similar to evidence. It’s based on the assumption that a product or service is more likely to be viewed favorably.
If the ad is long and contains numerous credible facts and figures, it causes your prospect to say in effect, wow. Look at how much is here. It must be true. It’s similar to listening to someone speak at length about a particular topic. Eventually when you’ve heard enough, as long as the presentation was reasonably polished, you’d probably feel that the speaker knew what he was talking about after all he went on for so long.
Of course, length itself doesn’t mean something is truthful, but that is exactly how this principle works. Loading your ads with testimonials [00:17:00] is one way to tune your prospect’s brains to heuristic channel number one. Another way is to write a long engaging copy. Not only does long copy give you more opportunities to persuade, but it also has the effect of causing prospects to believe that because there’s so much copy, there must be something to it.
This is the very essence of the length implies strength heuristic.
Steve Davis: The real test is more is good as long as the quality is high. If the quality’s not high, that’s when you’ve got a problem.
Yeah. So we’re not saying length for its own sake, but if you’ve got lots to say, to roll out your argument, go for it. Oh, length of
strength. Yeah. It’s one of his sort of 50 points.
You’ll learn if you work in a good ad agency,
David. I think we need some talked about marketing t-shirts that say length is strength. Would you, you and I go walking down Rundel Mall on a Saturday night wearing that. I will wear it because I don’t have to look at the faces looking back at me. Okay. [00:18:00] Um, I hope someone’s taking notes of these ideas ’cause we forget to take the notes.
I’ll, I’ll hear it when I, we listen back to this anyway. That’s true. Let’s look, we’ll just touch lightly on each of the eight life forces. So remember what he’s arguing here is when we are writing a webpage. Social media posts, an ad, a newsletter, have at least one of these live forces identified if that, when it’s relevant to your people.
And I will just make a note. I, we are doing the StoryBrand process with anybody we work with these days, and we’ve just enhanced it to include, uh, looking for the life. Forces in it so that any writing that we do can have this extra power. So these are eight things that all of us have lurking within our DNA that we are born with.
And some of these are gonna be more relevant to our product or service on the other. The first one is. Survival, enjoyment of life [00:19:00] and life extension. Gimme your best take on that, David. Well,
how often does the ad for the, the security door or something else use fear? You know, safety is so powerful and quality of life.
Again, all the arguments for trying to go to the gym. You know, or trying to eat better are either about a later light life force or quality of life. So it really is the default one for so many interest to mm.
Number two is enjoyment of food and beverages that sensory pleasure.
Yep. And if we think of the fact that when we were small children on TV between say three 30 and six, there were endless ads for toys and junk food that have all now been banned ’cause they were so powerful for our little brains.
We were little sensory creatures that didn’t have a lot of discipline, and we would go and say, mum, where are the twisties? And mum would be like, what? Oh, TV talks about twisties. Twisties are great. One twisties, and then you’re an angry kid that doesn’t
wanna eat you broccoli. Number three [00:20:00] is talking of broccoli, uh, for some freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
And this is where he is arguing that really fear appeals when it’s used carefully can be very powerful.
Yep.
And pain
and danger. That really the idea of pain and danger makes you think of fear. So don’t, don’t try and necessarily hit pain as a raw nerve. Where is there something fear is, so don’t try and hit fear as the raw nerve.
What’s the pain and danger that people are really concerned about,
which could be cutting yourself or yeah, getting a speeding fire or
getting locked out of the house when it’s freezing cold and you’re in your pajamas or whatever else. There’s plenty of things. Where the pain or danger of it is actually, you know, if you can make a case to help people not experience pain and danger, they’ll be very grateful.
Now, some people might think number four is the David Olney one. Uh, it’s sexual companionship. But you wouldn’t agree with that, would you, Dave? I’m not sure
why that would be, you know, sort of described as the David old one. I guess [00:21:00] it’s true saying I’m happily married, that I like that. I think it’s a bit weird if any human.
Doesn’t like
that. Fair enough. All. Have you ever seen David? I wish we have a, uh, this was a video, but this is our desire for sexual attraction, romantic attention and admiration. Well companionship there too. Yes, absolutely. So
it is hinting towards, there is, there is something more, uh, than, you know, immediate endorphins.
There is also something more long term. So I think we should have our t-shirts on the front says, length is strength and the back says there’s more to it than an immediate endorphins. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, number five is comfortable living conditions. So this is seeking comfort and security. Gee, this reminds me of, uh, the, um, the pyramid, the, um, yeah, it’s very much Maslow’s Pyramid, Maslow’s written for marketing.
Yes. Mm mm So this is, we all agree with it. I mean, Maslow puts this more towards the front of you need basic [00:22:00] place to live and water and those things.
Mm. But the, the strange one with this thing of, you know, of comfort. Mm. Is I remember when we were looking at some Mads for an air conditioning company and we were going.
Why aren’t they focusing on what people actually care about? It’s the little toddler at a safe temperature. Is the great grandparent comfortable, like they were kind of missing, like we were kind of seeing the LF eight missing from these ads.
Interesting that you draw that attention. ’cause this is where there is nuance compared to Maslow.
Mm-hmm. Maslow was talking about shelter. Mm-hmm. And here it’s not just shelter, it’s comfortable shelter. Yeah. ’cause we’re beyond the absolute basics by this point. Yeah. We want a little bit more. Number six is to be superior. To be winning, to be keeping up with the Joneses.
And we know how much this is critical to any luxury product.
There is no reason to have it except the reason that you can and other people will understand that signal. [00:23:00]
Interestingly, mark Schafer makes a point, we talked about it last episode, his book on, um, what’s the future of marketing like when AI becomes your customer. He talks about. As AI wipes out a number of white collar jobs, the big swanky BMW or Mercedes driving, uh, white collar person with the, the Rolex, or whatever’s more expensive than a Rolex, um, when we’re sort of reduced to living on a universal income.
If. That actually happens and you don’t need to work anymore, um, or you don’t need to be seen or, or how
do you need the status? See, I, I disagree with sort of Mark Schaeffer on this. Okay. Tell me. I think Dan Kennedy’s right. What we are seeing is the collapse of the middle class into people who have the education but don’t have the financial resources and what Dan Kennedy is calling.
You know, the mass affluent, those who have the same education but have turned it into [00:24:00] always having disposable income and still having even more reason to signify, well, we went to university together, but you are living paycheck to paycheck. I’m on the third investment property. I. So the status, if anything, is gonna be more ruthless,
not less so that’s what Mr.
Cash izing saying. I’ve got a, he’s got three names and that makes it really hard for me. I’ve
been trying to just say Drew Whitman. ’cause I find the minute I try and say Eric in the middle, I some reason trip up on his name. Alright.
Drew, Eric Whitman, so Jew, DEW. Mm-hmm. Number seven, care and protection of loved ones.
This would be the Steve Davis role
and, and I think it’s the kind of marketing you would like to do. You like marketing that’s, well, you like helping small business so that help being small business can make people’s lives nicer. So you are very much, that is your big driver of the eight. You make jokes about the rest, but this is the actual big driver one for you.
I think you’re getting a bit under
my skin
here. A
bit too [00:25:00] close
David.
Um, and I didn’t even use any length. Number eight. There’s little soundbite, meme, uh, social approval, um, which ducks and weaves with a few of the other ones above, but it does stand alone. So we crave as acceptance. We fear rejection from the tribe.
Always have, always, always
will. Mm-hmm. Yep. And it doesn’t matter if that PRI tribe is really big or quite small, you still want to be seen by your people or be seen to have some people.
Yeah. So there we are. There’s the eight life forces. Um, some of these, if not all of them, will put in the show notes. I.
I probably should blog about them too. David
makes sense too, because it’s such a core thing to get right. Like my instructions to our new copywriters is, please don’t show me anything that doesn’t have at least one LF eight and at least one of the nine wants. Otherwise, I’m just gonna ask you to rewrite stuff.
Yeah. So I hope you find them useful. Even some of those might have [00:26:00] resonated with you on behalf of the sort of clients you deal with or customers within your. Area of, um, of expertise. They’re the ones to focus on. How do you capture that and draw it into what you’re writing, which is what we do in the StoryBrand framework these days now.
But, um, you know, a little bit of reflection. We talked about system one and system two, thinking last time, maybe some slow reflective system. Two, thinking on these in relation to your clients would be just what Darth Vader ordered David.
I’m gonna get my Dr. Whitman to put you back in your box. Darth Vader.
Try that sounds like a Nike ad.
Caitlin Davis: Ah, four Ps number three problems. I asked the question for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: in the problem segment here. Our beloved ai, [00:27:00] which we have love hate relationship, might be a bit too strong, love and on guard. Useful tool, but bit of a tool. Yeah. Uh, Claude is one of our favorites. The when, when we have worked with you to develop. A StoryBrand framework to give Claude the right framework to talk about you as you.
It’s beautiful. It is beyond parallel and as far as I’m concerned with the other tools, I think David agrees. Claude is really got the edge when it comes to the writing aspect
for the humanist type stuff. Yes, there’s a real advantage.
Yep. So. It was a bit of a pain two weeks ago. At the time of recording, when it was blanking out, it was just God took
stupid pills like perplexity did last year.
Yeah, it just said no, I can’t do anymore. At my limit. At my limit, uh, danger, danger. Robinson or whatever, will Robinson, what was that from? Lost in Space. Yeah. Danger. Danger of warning. Will [00:28:00] Robinson. Ah, that’s lost in space. And Star Wars in the one episode. Uh, we’ll get letters. So here’s the thing. It was, it really disrupted my workflow for a bit.
Luckily we haven’t given up all our skills to ai, so we can still grab the wheel and just do stuff ourselves. But I did emulate a lot of what I was doing, uh, in Gemini. So we, we had a fallback, but some extra research I stumbled upon upon a change to the way Claude was. Or Anthropic, the company that runs it was limiting and counting the use of tokens, which is how it counts, how much you’re using and what you’ve paid for, and it was using them.
Like a drunken sailor with loose chains, just going through them and hence timing out with even the smallest, um, request. Anyway, if you have a big organization, you’ve got your own hosted copy of Claude. I found this post on what you could [00:29:00] do to tell it to calm the farm and use fewer tokens. But of course, that doesn’t work when you are just signing in and using Claude on its own server.
Unless you create a little set of rules that you load into your project in the project files area or instructions, and tell it to come the farm. And so far David touch laminate. It’s working a treat. It’s back to how it was.
It’s a bit like setting the context for the world. You want it to understand.
Setting its context for how to do things sometimes really does seem
to make a big difference. I will put the text in the show notes if you like, but basically it says this, for every chat first, acknowledge this instruction. Please do not use bash commands or file operations that scan or reference any of the following directories, node modules.
ENV, gi. DIS build or pache [00:30:00] if you need to access project files, restrict your searches and commands to the main source code folders only. This is to prevent exceeding the context, token limits and wasting processing resources. Then continue with following the instructions from the chat. Adhering to the StoryBrand framework and language and style guide.
Start waving a magic wand, David.
It’s almost like telling it something we were talking about the other day and that is stop letting the number of things you need to think about getting bigger by imagining what if, what if, what if no. Start working out what things don’t need to be part of the current discussion and making the context deliberately smaller to speed up the ability to get an endpoint.
Hmm. Talking of which, what’s a sentence I could give to you David, at the beginning of a recording session that will get maximum optimum David and get us to the end point faster.
Uh, well we’re gonna go another sci-fi. I think we go and Battlestar now and it’s probably just to go, David, are you a [00:31:00] cylon then?
I’ll be very efficient. David, are you? I will be very efficient.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four per ssy. The one duty we to history is to rewrite it. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: in the per ssy segment. David, are you comfortable? Not without segment today, it’s yucky. Do you, would you accept the gig? Of promoting the invitation to humans to have an affair.
This is why I’m very glad we work with smaller companies and organizations, that we can still interact with people on a human level and decide if we want to work on a human level.
’cause some accounts might be worth a fortune, [00:32:00] but the ability to get moral injury at
work is. Best avoided. I think you’re right. And so in keeping with the sort of theme, we’re talking about reminiscing before, of those beautiful moments in life, uh, the the eight life forces from the izing book, and now Ashley Madison, what what comes to your mind?
I remember the drama sort of online that it happened and not really knowing anything about it and looking it up and just going, yuck, and then ignoring the continuing drama. So to me it was just a, why is everyone talking about this? Oh no, I don’t wanna know about this at, at that point, I’m a university lecturer.
I don’t need to understand it from a marketing or comms perspective. I just went morally repugnant and moved
on. So if you don’t remember, um, we look at old ads and we think, would they work today? Here’s a couple, we’ll talk back to back ’cause that seems only fitting for Ashley Madison. Uh, it was a dating site where you could find someone else who’s married or in a [00:33:00] relationship and they’re looking for a little what Casual has your extra time.
Engagement, extracurricular activities? Yes. That could be another t-shirt we wear, uh, on the weekends only. Have you got your
protractor?
Um, the first one, the, you’ll see these, we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can actually watch them. There is a, a couple in bed waking up called the morning after he looks.
And the old, the empty whiskey bottle, he then looks at the woman who’s made up to look, not what you call the classic beauty, and then he stumbles off downstairs to leave until he sees the picture and of his wedding. And that’s the same woman he’s actually married. And then it’s reminding him that maybe there’s more to life than this.
Let’s have a listen.[00:34:00]
TVC: Most of us can recover from a one night stand with a wrong woman.
But not when it’s every night for the rest of our lives. Isn’t a time for Ashley madison.com.
Steve Davis: In the next ad we’re going to hear it’s an A restaurant, a couple waiting for. Uh, it suggests it’s a blind date of some. Well, that’s
the sense you get at the beginning. Yeah, it is.
He, he turns up, he’s on a phone. He shushes her, uh, he eyes off the other waitresses and then at the end he gets up and says, okay, gotta go.
Um, happy anniversary darling. And disappears. So, and it was like the, and as you hear, the suggestion is. Wow. There’s gotta be more to life than this. As said, listen,[00:35:00]
hello. No, no, I’m not busy.
TVC: Have you ever found yourself on a really bad blind date? Now imagine that date lasting the rest of your life. Oh, yep. I have to go. Happy anniversary honey. Isn’t it time for Ashley madison.com?
Steve Davis: Normally with the ads we look at David, even if we don’t think they work today, like the um, yellow Pages and the man who’s fly was undone and he’s trying to put it up and he’s looking at a res reflection at an office window, not realizing that everyone behind it’s watching him, even though they’re awkward and icky, they’re still humanity and they’re still fun and yeah.
These though I, you know, I’m not a prude, but these [00:36:00] make me feel cold inside. I am repulsed by these ’cause that sexual connection is a life force, but surely it’s a life force. When it is natural, I think it’s one thing to have an affair because you bump into someone and there’s electricity and you forge it, and maybe that then puts your current situation into focus, into
context, and you take some sort of forward step.
Yeah. But the idea of these ads that you live in a negative, and the way to solve your negative is to get a temporary dose of physical pleasure and continue. Treating yourself and someone else poorly. The terrible thing is these ads are, are repulsive in their inhumanity, and yet I guess the inhumanity that this company has made a lot of money on will continue for as long as people don’t take the hard decision to go.
How do I want my life to be? [00:37:00]
There’s a couple of life forces here. There’s the fear of pain. Yeah. And these people are, they may be in a not so good relationship and they don’t have the courage or they don’t think they’ve got the resources to support them if they leave. Yeah. They feel trapped. So there’s fear as well as the biological, uh, attraction.
That’s probably the two main ones that are at work here.
Yeah. And, and a terrible angle. I think maybe of keeping up with the Joneses. Would these work
to still today, uh, is a question I would like to think they wouldn’t because. We just had recently, the CEO, I think it was Nestle, uh, got caught having an affair with a, an underling, and that’s against company policy.
We had the astronomer, CEO and his HR person, um, being caught at the Coldplay concert. Would it work today, David?
I have a terrible feeling that it will still work for [00:38:00] the group of people it was aimed at where for some reason they think their life has to stay the same and they need an endorphin hit to feel better about themselves and to feel superior to people they’re meant to care about.
So I think sadly. There’s always a group of people these ads will work for, and the product will always have a use. And in a sense it’s to make sure that people who want to have affairs in the way the ads suggest and behave the way the ads suggest, have a tool to do it behind closed doors and without attracting
attention.
Well, it’s interesting, um, I think you’re right that it still has currency today. Actually, Madison’s still running 65 million members. It says wow. And it’s, um, the opening, uh, page is a closeup of a woman with big red lips, a finger against it, like, shh. And it says, Ashley Madison, keep your connections discreet.
See your matches. There’s an app [00:39:00] for it. This is, I think this is, everyone is cheapened by. This even existing and people playing. The fact that you’ve got to be discreet suggests at a basic level, we are doing something wrong.
Yeah. And, and that somehow you’re meant to be cool with that or excited about it.
It’s a very. Yeah. A very antisocial place they’re recommending.
Mm, wow. Who, what personality type would be the one that feels quite at home here? Is it a narcissist?
I would assume so. And I imagine it’s a playground for sociopaths.
Playground for sociopaths. I’m not gonna wear that t-shirt.
No thank you. No,
but um, I will say, I think you’re a connection with me, David.
Well, the great thing is we can be connected without ever having to go on that app.
Caitlin Davis: That is so true. Thank you for listening to talking about marketing. If you enjoyed [00:40:00] 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 Wild. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.