From Ukrainian lecture theatres under air raid sirens to a lawyer’s breakdown in a Sydney office, this episode asks whether you can keep learning, keep building, and keep going when the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.
Nicholas Christakis lectures behind blast doors in Kyiv, and his students are beaming. CS Lewis reminds us from 1939 that life has never actually been normal. Viktor Frankl offers three anchors that helped people survive the worst conditions imaginable. The message for small business owners carrying a little extra anxiety right now: you are not alone, and this is survivable.
Georgie Dent’s book Breaking Badly hits close to home for anyone who has pushed through when they probably should have stopped. David unpacks the book’s hard-won lessons about stress, meaning, and why small business owners are particularly at risk of running on empty without anyone to pick up the slack.
A brazen piece of spam software called Turbo Jot has Steve’s eyebrows firmly raised, and rightly so. If your marketing strategy involves AI-powered form-submission bots with rotating IP addresses, it may be time to reconsider some life choices.
The Royal Society for the Blind has two very different campaigns to examine. One leads with cuteness and cost. The other invites you to see the world differently. David, who sees the world very differently indeed, has some pointed thoughts about what was gained and what was left on the table.
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 Ukrainian Students Under Siege Can Teach Every Small Business Owner
Steve opens with something he rarely does: an admission that current world events knocked him sideways. The Iran conflict’s ripple effects, the sense that randomness has been laid bare, the difficulty of staying focused when dread is pulling at your sleeve. He brings this to the table not as a digression, but as the point.
Drawing from a Sam Harris interview with Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, Steve shares a story of Christakis delivering lectures in Kyiv when the air raid sirens sounded mid-session. The group relocated behind Soviet blast doors two storeys below ground. His students were beaming. The contrast with American students demanding safe spaces from ideas is left to speak for itself.
CS Lewis, writing in autumn 1939 as war clouds gathered over Europe, makes a case that lands with equal force today: life has never been normal. Human culture has always had to exist alongside something far larger than itself. The search for knowledge and beauty never waited for safety, and it never should.
David brings it home through Viktor Frankl. Three sources of meaning that helped people survive concentration camps: love, purposeful work, and choosing how to face suffering. If you can hold onto even one of those, you are better placed than you think.
15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Breaking Badly: The Book Every Driven Small Business Owner Needs to Read Carefully
Georgie Dent’s memoir Breaking Badly charts a familiar trajectory: high achiever, relentless drive, a body and mind quietly filing complaints that keep getting ignored. By 24, she was a lawyer at a top Sydney firm and, as she puts it plainly, miserable, chronically ill, and strung out.
David traces the arc of her story with care: the years of undiagnosed generalised anxiety disorder, the physical symptoms that kept multiplying without a clear cause, the eventual collapse, and the GP who finally treated her like a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms. The two lessons she carries forward, on not taking mental health for granted and on doing work that carries genuine meaning, are not motivational poster material. They are hard-won and practical.
The connection to small business is direct. People who start small businesses are rarely in it for the easy path. They are compelled by something. That drive is a strength, and it is also a risk. As David notes, if you keep pushing through on empty, there may come a point where there is genuinely nothing left. In small business, no one else picks up the slack.
26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Turbo Jot and the Art of Making Yourself Deeply Unwelcome
Steve manages more than a hundred websites, which means he has a front-row seat for the full parade of digital nonsense that arrives through contact forms. Turbo Jot, a service that automates mass form submissions at scale, uses rotating IP addresses, a stealth browser, and AI-powered captcha solving to land uninvited in inboxes everywhere. Its founder, apparently named Alyssa, describes this as beating cold email on ROI.
Steve and David are not persuaded. David’s distinction is worth keeping: cold calling is not inherently wrong. A human talking to a human, listening, responding, showing there was a genuine reason to reach out, that is a legitimate way to do business. Automated bulk form submission dressed up with AI is not that. It is noise with extra steps.
30:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The Royal Society for the Blind: When Good Thinking Needs Better Framing
Two RSB campaigns side by side. The first leads with a puppy named Charlie and a training cost of $25,000. Sweet, clear on the numbers, and, as David observes, somewhat light on the thing that actually moves people: the freedom and agency a guide dog delivers to the person holding the harness.
The second campaign, built around the tagline “see differently,” is intellectually braver. Inviting sighted audiences to consider that blind people might experience the world in ways worth understanding is a genuinely interesting idea. David, who has been blind since birth and sits on the RSB’s client advisory committee, appreciates the ambition. His reservation is precise: the RSB carries 138 years of brand recognition. Building a thought experiment on top of that foundation would have been more powerful than attempting to replace it.
His suggested reframe is brief and elegant. Sometimes the clearest path is the one that keeps not being taken.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S08E03
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Talking about marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders produced by Steve Davis and David o. I’ve 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 purse per cassity.
Yes. You heard that? Correct. 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: David, you’ve taught lots of people about understanding geopolitics and war and all those sorts of things. Do you think we’re gonna survive? What’s happening at the moment with the skirmishes in a run? What’s our pulse check?
David Olney: We’ll definitely survive. It’s just gonna be a bit bumpy and bumpy can turn into really bumpy if it drags on for too long.
Steve Davis: Shall we try and smooth out some of those bumps in our next. Bit of half an hour or so.
David Olney: Either that, or we can just buy a hover graph
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps. Number one person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wild. 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[00:02:00]
Steve Davis: in the person segment. Uh, for this episode, we’re going to travel to Ukraine. Are you with me, David?
David Olney: I am.
Steve Davis: We are doing it. Not alone, thank goodness. Uh, but with Nicholas Kki, now you’ve, you’ve actually interviewed him before. Who is he to the best of your He’s at Yale.
David Olney: Yeah. It would be one of the first big guests we had on Blind Insights.
So it’s probably early 2018 maybe. So it’s a long time ago now. Uh, Yale Professor Humanities wrote a really interesting book on. If you give people the opportunity, they will genu generally be kind that that’s the default behavior. Um, he was really nice to talk to, but I remember coming away from the interview going, wow, this is one of the most.
Ungrounded floating in the stratosphere. Academics I’ve ever spoken with, and I think my groundedness has probably annoyed [00:03:00] him and his other worldliness has certainly annoyed me, but I still love the book and it was loads of fun talking to him. So I’m actually really glad to know that he’s grounded himself and gone to Ukraine and gone.
This is the world we live in.
Steve Davis: Well, he was interviewed by Sam Harris in, well, I’ve got a small collection of go-to podcasts that I love outside of ours. Uh, this one’s called Making Sense by Sam Harris. And so he had a chat about what technology is doing to us. I mean, that part of the interview is worth us revisiting in a future episode.
But I think with the world at war at the moment, either directly or by proxy, uh, all of us, I think if we’re on us, are carrying some degree of extra anxiety. Because, you know, in life we really dunno what’s gonna happen the next day, but we kind of feel comfortable most of the time that we have a pretty good sense at the moment.
It’s the, the randomness of it all is laid bare and we are feeling that many of us are. And so I thought for this [00:04:00] segment, what can we do to anchor. Some perspective for ourselves so that we don’t give up, we can focus on what we need to do at a time when ourselves, our businesses, our family, our friends need us to be present.
And that’s why I love this little story that Nicholas relates from his time having to go to Ukraine to deliver a. Uh, a series of lectures and it came after Sam and Nicholas were talking about the sense of entitlement that American students are showing and certainly were showing, uh, in the last few years of being, needing to be wrapped in cotton wall, uh, to sensitive, to have any concept put in front of them that made them feel unsafe.
And then he went to Ukraine. And experienced this.
Nicholas Kristakis: I got there like first night at like eight o’clock, and it was just packed with students and it made me really [00:05:00] ashamed, you know, like, like how, how eager and hungry these students were to learn. And the, the adversity with which they had to put up with and, and the fact that, you know, American students were complaining about safe spaces by which they meant not necessarily hearing ideas they disagreed with, but you know, the Ukrainian students, literally their notion of safety was like, would they be safe enough to complete their education?
Would their society still be there given the Russian attack? So it was just. Very, very sobering and uplifting to see these students that were so engaged, uh, in their learning. And anyway, the second day I, there was a, a, the air raids went off in the middle of my lecture and we had to relocate into a bomb shelter across the street, which was two stories down in this old Soviet building, which had been built to resist a chemical warfare attack from the United States.
There were these huge. Thick steel doors with those like round wheels that you see in submarines to steal the blast doors, to steal the blast doors. And, um, we just relocated to this little subterranean room. And, uh, [00:06:00] I gave my lecture behind the blast doors. And the students, the students, Sam, were beaming, you know, and I think they were beaming partly because they were so happy I was there to witness their experience, you know, like what it was like for them to be, uh, learning in a time of war.
I actually, I released a video of this on, um, on the YouTube channel for the love of science about this whole, a little documentary that was done about this little journey. But anyway, it was just an extraordinary. Extraordinary experience. And I wanted, you know, I was just sort of thinking about learning in a time of war and how, you know, how reinforcing the transcendent importance of learning even in a time of war or in a time of chaos and fear is important not only in the United States, and not only in Ukraine, but also in the United States.
And this ties it back to what we were talking about. That actually having these deep commitments during this time. We are right now of all this pol political polarization, all this chaos, all this ascendant stupidity that we see around us, [00:07:00] recommitting to these fundamental values of truth and learning, which by the way, are also deeply humane.
Uh, values is really important and good for us actually to do.
Steve Davis: David, you’ve lectured before. How would your students at Adelaide University have coped? If midway through a lecture the air raid sirens went off and you all had to go across the road downstairs into a huge shelter designed to, um, survive a chemical attack by the us,
David Olney: uh, it would’ve been a meltdown because.
There was no time to adjust and there was nothing like it in their experience in if that had ever happened, I would’ve really hoped that I had a class full of refugees from Iraq and Syria and South Sudan, kids who actually were grounded, [00:08:00] who I could then, you know, get them to help motivate, move, and organize everyone else.
Steve Davis: And that’s because they’ve already, uh. Being exposed almost like vaccinated.
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: Against panic.
David Olney: Yep. The, their first thought is, hang on, how do we take action together for collective safety and default to that through experience
Steve Davis: there? There’s a bit of overlap there to the mindset that the stoics talk about isn’t there, of preparing yourself for when things are bad by.
Systematically giving yourself a taste of things that are bad to inoculate your senses.
David Olney: Yep. The difference is they often had bad early on and that’s why they ended up coming to Australia as refugees. But in some ways, as much as they have those difficult experiences, it also sets them up to be much better risk takers, to be much better explorers, to to feel safer in being inquisitive.
’cause they have a much better idea that they [00:09:00] can cope and that they not just can cope, but that they can probably find a way to thrive.
Steve Davis: Well, I’ll be honest, during the aftermath of this attack on Iran and Iran’s retaliation and, and everything that’s going on, and it’s the threat of it all cascading, um, did take my eye off the ball.
I must say. I. I felt it, uh, it really knocked me for six and I’ve taken a lot of energy to draw myself back into the saddle, which is why I wanted to bring this topic up in this episode. ’cause this podcast is about not just the businesses we run, but us so that we can keep running them. And Nico. In his interview, right towards the end says, actually Sam, someone’s just brought to my attention words by the author CS Lewis from a sermon he preached, a speech he delivered in 1939, autumn of 1939.
So we’re talking about World War [00:10:00] ii, the world freshly remembering World War I and now the clouds of war. Are upon us and this speech I think could be written to us today as if it were back. Then I just wanna read you the first couple of paragraphs the war creates. No, absolutely. New situation. It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men and women had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with normal life.
Life has never been normal. Even those [00:11:00] periods which we think most tranquil, like the 19th century, turn out on closer inspection to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, and emergencies. Reflect on that for us, David,
David Olney: it’s amazing to reflect on how some things could be literally reread every decade for a different group of people in a different place.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: You know, normal in the way we’ve understood normal in Australia is abnormal. For it to be so calm for so long and for people to come here having had the harrow experiences of what is actually more normal, which is turmoil and ups and downs and uncertainty and fear, and they come here and go, wow, that kind of chaos doesn’t happen here.
We can get on with other stuff, but what you get to learn when you. You know, you get to know people that have come from hard places and seen [00:12:00] hard things is they were still curious there. They still looked for beauty when they could. They still looked for knowledge when they could because it’s in those things that transcend the suffering of normal chaos that humans excel and come up with ideas for how to make things better.
Steve Davis: So the takeaway for this person, segment for me is this. As Nicholas noted with the students in Ukraine, who despite, I mean, he said later, um, he’s been in touch again with the students and the faculty, some of their buildings have been hit. They’re now living in the caves, the cave systems from old villages.
In the midst of all that, the students are still keenly committed to learning. To wanting to stretch themselves this creative learning endeavor. And then we’ve got CS Lewis reminding us that, you know [00:13:00] what, what’s happening now is almost the state of normal in the scope of world history. So please, despite us understandably feeling anxious or wondering what’s the point, my plea to myself and everyone is.
To not give into that, to find a focus. Uh, Viktor Frankl in man’s Search for Meaning one of the things he came away from Nazi concentration camps, understanding is those people who had the center of their focus outside themselves, but in something to do with the community were the ones who were able to survive and get through bleak time.
So I think for all of us. It’s okay. We, stuff might happen beyond our control, but let’s not sacrifice the opportunity. We’ve got to continue achievements with our businesses, achievements with our interpersonal [00:14:00] relationships. David, anything final to add?
David Olney: Yeah, I’ll probably just expand a little bit on Frankl because.
It makes it even clearer what you need to do when things are difficult. What Frank will learn in the concentration camp is that people who have meaning, meaning beyond themselves can cope with nearly anything. And there were three simple ways he defined meaning. There’s meaning in love, meaning in work, and meaning in how you choose to confront suffering.
So if you can only focus on one of those. You’re still gonna be better off. If you can focus on two, you’re gonna cope even better. If you can keep all three in mind, you’re gonna get through. ’cause that’s what he saw time and time again in the concentration camps, people can deal with anything if for the sake of love, something they want to achieve and the right attitude towards suffering.
They get through and then they go on and apply that meaning to make the world a better place.
Steve Davis: David, I love working with you to make this [00:15:00] podcast to help make the world a better place.
David Olney: Thank you, sir. Me too.
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 overeducated.
Steve Davis: David. I never watched Breaking Bad.
Georgie Dent: Did you?
Steve Davis: Did you watch Breaking Bad?
David Olney: No. There were a few clips and I thought. I’ve got better things to do with my life.
Steve Davis: Yeah. Actually now I actually, I did watch part of the first episode and thought, oh my god, there’s just people being chopped up into little pieces over drugs.
I think I had the same view. I dot need
David Olney: this in
Steve Davis: my life. I don’t need it. Um, anyway, at least I’ve worked out how to really clean the bath. Uh, that’s [00:16:00] one thing I picked up. Very useful
David Olney: skill.
Steve Davis: Um, but if we just expand that a little bit to Breaking Badly, that’s the title of a book by Georgie Dent that you’ve recommended I should have a listen to.
I haven’t had a chance yet, but you have. Can you give us your dust cover summary?
David Olney: Absolutely. Georgie Dent, uh, as a young woman went off to boarding school and when she describes her behavior from age 12 onwards at boarding school is quite anxious and it affects her health. And at 19 she gets diagnosed with they think endometriosis, and then a year later with Crohn’s disease and despite really big health problems, by 24, she’s at a top tier law firm in Sydney and doing well and then has a monumental health crisis.
Um. Literally collapses in the office and can’t go back to work. Ends up [00:17:00] having to move back to a small town with her mom and dad and looking for a way forward. And the doctors just keep identifying more symptoms for not getting to a cause. And eventually a lovely GP in her parents’ town reaches out and says, well, look, I might not have an answer, but I would like to see if I can help.
Please come and see me. And he takes a totally different approach. He sort of says to Georgie, Georgie, I’m sorry, you’ve been through such an awful time with your health. So immediately he’s treating her like a person. He then moves on to, in my 35 years of experience, what I’ve found is that when someone has a lot of symptoms that we can’t work out where they’re coming from, there’s almost always a huge amount of stress leading to at least some of those symptoms.
And if you live with those symptoms and the stress long enough, you eventually become distressed. [00:18:00] Would you like it if we started working on how to address the fact that you are now distressed by what’s going on so that we can reduce your stress, maybe alleviate some of the symptoms, and then get a clearer vision of what the cause might be?
So the first time at 24 at rock bottom.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: She suddenly is being treated like a, a whole person and the, the path forward he proposes is to go into a psychiatric hospital and address the distress and the stress. And she agrees and she discovers that she’s had generalized anxiety disorder probably since she was 12.
And despite that has been an overachiever and despite all the health issues, has just kept doing things that are amazing. And the book, once we’re at this point, is all about rebuilding her life and getting on with her life with two really big [00:19:00] lessons. And the two really big lessons are don’t take mental health for granted.
’cause if you do, when it knocks you down, it will knock you down big time. And that you can get the tools to do something about it, but you have to choose to do the work, learn to use the tools. And the other side of it is life’s hard. You need to be doing things you value that are meaningful. She was studying communications and law at the same time, getting better marks in law and could see a clearer path.
So she became a lawyer. The reality is that the pressure of the job on top of everything else probably contributed to the stress and the distress. After she recovered, she became a journalist and despite all the pressures of having her first baby with her husband in England, away from their families having two more children when he was qualifying [00:20:00] to be a reconstructive surgeon, and she’s a serious editor in important publications in Australia.
Despite all this stress, because family and being a journalist matter to her so much, she has handled. Her anxiety, she has handled her health problems and kept putting her best foot forward. ’cause there’s so much meaning in her life that she wants to keep achieving. Um, and just the power of going, you can deal with almost anything if you do the work.
And pick the right thing to do with your time because it makes it easier to do the work.
Georgie Dent: I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question. Finally getting tired of their own bullshit. Elizabeth Gilbert, at age 24, my life was almost a cliche. Six years of study were behind me. I was holding down a plumb job as a lawyer in the city. [00:21:00] I was living with my lovely boyfriend.
I had great friends, and the world was seemingly at my feet from the outside, it might’ve looked charmed. In truth, it was anything but I was miserable and chronically ill. My self-esteem was in taters, and I was strung out, constantly panicked and painfully thin. For 12 months, I had been ignoring the worsening symptoms of my autoimmune disease, the heightened state of stress in which I existed.
The self-loathing I couldn’t overcome. I woke up day after day after day, ignored how wreck I felt and kept pretending. I figured if I pushed aside my misery for long enough, it would go away. It didn’t. It came to a head one night when I fell over at work with what I believed was a spell of vertigo, which developed into debilitating dizziness.
It soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to pass as quickly as it arrived. Instead, it gathered momentum and within a few weeks, my life had crumbled around me. [00:22:00] I was unable to work. I moved back in with my parents, and I spent four months either in bed or in various hospitals unable to function.
Physically, I felt horrendous. My days were plagued with nausea, dizziness, weakness, and as my head continued to spin, my grip on the world slipped with every passing day. It culminated in depression and anxiety severe enough to warrant my admission to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. One day it seemed I was an ordinarily functioning member of society, and the next I had been more or less sectioned, barely able to participate in the outside world.
How did that happen? What went so wrong? These are the questions I was forced to examine forensically in the psychiatric hospital. Subjects I return to regularly in the weeks, months and years afterwards.
Steve Davis: So you use the term grounded a lot when we first started this episode, and [00:23:00] we always talk about how do we land this to be practical principles for those of us who are leading or owning or running, uh, small businesses, and I’m picking up on a couple of things here, but one is. Your stress levels being really aware of
David Olney: when it goes from positive to negative?
Yes.
Steve Davis: Yes. ’cause we, I mean, there’s a certain amount of stress that is what keeps our system bubbling along
David Olney: and makes us excited about tomorrow. Like we can have butterflies in our stomach, but still be excited. That’s good, positive stress. We be glad you have it. Otherwise, it would be a boring day. But recognize when it starts going to the negative stress from which you aren’t recovering, that is starting to reduce your performance.
That’s starting to affect how you relate with the world and how you connect with people and your own perception of yourself.
Steve Davis: And one of the levers we’ve got to pull there is sleep.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: Because you were talking about how stress is so [00:24:00] correlated with our, uh, cortisol levels. Yep. Uh, so sleep gives our body a fighting chance, but we need to then look at the.
The triggers and the systems that we are in that are really elevating our yes dysh unhappiness.
David Olney: A really big thing. Georgie realized as, until her breakdown, well, not really her break whatsoever. Uh, well, she says it herself breaking badly. We can call it her breakdown, I guess. Um, is that until then, relaxation was for a couple of days at the end of the semester.
Or every few months, once she joined the law firm, she could have a whole day off. No, absolutely no. You need to be paying attention to do you have any energy? Are you looking forward to something fun? However you, you know, okay, at the end of the day to go out with friends and family and recharge your batteries.
If you’re not, you [00:25:00] already have gone too far down the path of negative stress. You have to stay in a space where you’re looking forward to things and the things you do recharge your emotional and physical batteries. ’cause if you don’t do that, this business you’ve built, these relationships you’ve built, it’s all gonna be at risk.
Steve Davis: Wow. So that’s, that’s the other side of the coin is hopefully being involved in something that we love, that we’d almost do for free if we could do it for free. Which sounds high and mighty and, and pie in the sky for for many people. But are you saying we can’t afford to be cynical about this perspective?
David Olney: No, and particularly for our audience and the people we work with, where it’s normally small business, no one starts a small business because it was the easy option. They started ’cause they felt compelled. Something about it is fun, something about it is meaningful, something about it. It’s the thing they’re really good at.[00:26:00]
So they get joy doing it and they desperately hope people will pay to let them keep doing it. Like really small business people are some of the most connected to their core drives, people I think you could ever meet, which means they’re even at more risk. Because it’s really hard to work out how to be a successful small business person in a world that’s going over big bumps and you think you can fight through and you can push through.
Be careful how far you push, or you may discover there’s nothing left in the tank and the only thing left to do is to lay down in a heap for a while. And in small business, there’s not normally someone to pick up the slack for you.
Steve Davis: On that note, good note, David.
David Olney: Good night, Steve.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps, number three problems. [00:27:00] 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: in the problem segment. I, I manage, uh, quite a number of websites. Um, more than a hundred. I I haven’t actually counted them recently. And I’ve noticed a submission come in on forms one by one, uh, from a place called Turbo Jot or something like that, uh, from Alyssa. And it says, hi, my name’s Alyssa. I’d love to invite you to try Turbo Jot.
I actually founded the company. It’s built to automate contact form submissions at scale. Simply upload a list of URLs and turbojet automatically finds and submits contact forms on those sites. It beats cold email and paid ads. [00:28:00] On ROI return on investment and costs just 10 cents per submission. It’s powered by a rotating IP network.
And a stealth browser, so they keep changing the IP address so people can’t block them effectively and a stealth browser so they can’t be seen. Nothing shady about this so far, David, nothing
David Olney: at all.
Steve Davis: It also has AI capture solving, so they use artificial intelligence to get past the thing that’s meant to keep you out and human-like browsing behavior.
You can sign up for free and give it a try here. I’d really appreciate the support. Well, Alyssa, I’d really appreciate if you stopped this stupid business that is part of the rot of this world and get a proper job. Do something constructive. ’cause this is bs. Anything to add? David?
David Olney: Alyssa, please get a real name.
Steve Davis: Seriously, I get angry. I know we were meant to to finish then, but [00:29:00] this is the rubbish that just wastes everybody’s time. If their offer is full of all the stuff. That bad actors use run a million miles an hour. Don’t give in to that little part in the human psyche, which says, oh, this sounds like it’s easy, which isn’t.
You’ve gotta give them the list of URLs, so you are doing all the work. You might as well. Oh, and then it is cold calling. It is spamming.
David Olney: Well, it’s worse because if you cold call, you can respond to the person you’re talking to.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: And you can immediately show them that it might be a cold call, but that you are listening and you thought there was a good reason to ring them and maybe you could help them with something.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: So cold calling isn’t evil. It’s a necessity of business, but there’s a right way to do it, and it’s a human talking to a human.
Steve Davis: Goodbye, Alyssa.[00:30:00]
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four purse per cassity. Let’s examine a campaign from the past and ask would it work today as Oscar Wild believed. Our one duty to history is to rewrite it. So let’s see what we can learn.
Steve Davis: David, in per sy uh, in this episode, which is where we look at old campaigns and compare them to new ones or how they would work today, I feel like it’s going to be the blind leading the sighted. You’re gonna take the lead.
David Olney: This is a scary concept, but we, we can manage this. There will be a cane, then me, then Steve, I, I will put him directly behind me so I have to fall over shit first.
Steve Davis: I, I think that just is collegiate love and I think Georgie Dent would [00:31:00] love that.
David Olney: I hope so.
Steve Davis: Yes. So we’re talking about Royal Society for the Blind, and we’ve picked a couple of, uh, online video slash commercials that they’ve run just to contrast and compare. And we’re gonna go back in time first, David.
David Olney: Back in time we go.
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Steve Davis: So Charlie, change for Charlie. What’s your takeaway? So I’m getting from this that, uh, they want our donations to [00:32:00] fund the training of guide dogs.
David Olney: The cute factor in this is very powerful with little Charlie. Mm-hmm. And you know, with Ella, the guide dog. But where’s the purpose factor? We’ve got a young lady who has Ella as a guide dog.
And could have spoken about all the things she can do more easily in her day with Ella and seeing her freedom and agency grow through having Ella in her life. Would’ve been, I believe, a more powerful way to get people to go, oh wow, that’s amazing than the cute factor is.
Steve Davis: So there’s the practical thing that it costs this much money to, to train them, et cetera.
David Olney: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: And I guess this is where this particular commercial has veered over the, the facts, the features of what’s involved rather than the benefits at the other end.
David Olney: Acute and cost.
Steve Davis: [00:33:00] Yeah,
David Olney: without purpose to me was a, a lost opportunity
Steve Davis: and we are juggling 30 seconds of time. So judicious choices need to be made, uh, in this thing.
But my intuition is with you that if I could see the things that could do now that she couldn’t do without Ella, I’d be Wow. Yeah. I, how good to be facilitating that
David Olney: Precisely.
Steve Davis: Now I wonder if it was successful. Anyway,
David Olney: I think it’s just the constant work. That the RSB does to always find a new way to do the same thing.
You always need to train more guide dogs. It’s an ongoing cost.
Steve Davis: Yes,
David Olney: and eventually they probably cycle through everything, but I’m guessing that AD was probably expected to do very, very well to people. This should attract more attention. Did it.
Steve Davis: I, I suppose we should note also that you, you are connected to Royal Society blind in, in, in some ways, wouldn’t we?
David Olney: Yeah. I’m on the client advisory committee just [00:34:00] there to talk about my own experience of being blind and interacting with the organization and what perhaps the organization can do for people and do to connect with the community better.
Steve Davis: So that ad that was from a long time ago.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: More recently there’s been a different.
Tagline, see differently. Let’s have a listen to this.
RSB: Close your eyes. What do you see? Look beyond the emptiness, the challenges, the doubt, because there is more. Listen. You’ll see the world in the sounds around you. Watch the wind whistle. Watch the rain pitter-patter. Reach out. Feel what the people around you look like. Let the ups and downs of a thousand words paint you a story.
See the world your own way. [00:35:00] Losing your sight is a daunting experience, but you don’t have to go through it alone. We’ll move forward together. Side by side, we’ve been helping people change their view on blindness and vision impairment for the past 138 years, and we’ll do the same for you. We’ll give you the vision to imagine what’s possible, we’ll help you see differently.
Steve Davis: All right. Does that help you see the RSB? Differently, David?
David Olney: I think it’s both intellectually and emotionally quite an inspired choice. The idea of saying to people that blind people see the world differently is a really good way to promote thought and to get people to sit and go. Hmm. But, and to me this is the very big, but the RSB has wonderful brand [00:36:00] recognition in South Australia.
You know, it’s now in its hundred and 40th year, and to my mind changing the key thing from the Royal Society for the Blind to see differently. The idea could have been bundled with the high brand recognition rather than trying to replace the high brand recognition with a thought experiment. So I, I, I kind of wish it had been handled differently so that it had the power of its old brand and the power of a big idea.
Steve Davis: So if you were ruler of the world, what do you think would’ve helped this approach? ’cause as you say, good thinking, good insight. What would make it land? Do you feel there, is there anything in particular that springs to your mind? I mean, you haven’t got the benefit that the agency would’ve had hours and hours and hours to reflect on this.
Um, I’m putting you on the spot. What
David Olney: I would’ve simply turned the words around. It’s the [00:37:00] moment it’s see differently with the Royal Society For the Blind, I would’ve gone with Royal Society for the Blind. Everyone sees differently
Steve Davis: to tap into. The known quantity.
David Olney: Exactly. And then add the thought experiment to it.
Steve Davis: What was the call to action?
David Olney: Um, yeah, I think that ad might have just been the help get people used to. The new branding, which again, is a lost opportunity. You know, so they, they go into the whole thing of they’ve been helping people for this length of time, but then they end with talking about seeing differently.
Well, yeah, the thought experiment’s great, but this has cost money and it’s cost people’s attention. So what do you want them to do with the attention, you know, in a IDA terms, you know, attention, interest, desire, action, um, it wasn’t strong on the attention and. The action was too understated in my opinion.
Steve Davis: And it there was, was, what’s interesting is it seems [00:38:00] to be, I wouldn’t say targeted, but there’s a strong focus on people who become blind at some point through life as opposed,
David Olney: because that is the majority of clients. So I am a minority to be an RSB client who’s been blind since birth. The majority of people who’ve lost their side along the way.
So, you know, there are very different people. The RSB helps and the two extremes are someone like on my end, who, you know, had 5% vision when I was born and has had a life of, you know, working strange jobs and doing strange things. And the other end, we had people who had very. It not normal ’cause it’s a terrible thing to say.
Mm. But they had lives lived in the sight of world as fully sighted people for a very long time before something happened and they had the rug pulled out from under them and have to adapt.
Steve Davis: So, to apply our perspicacious thinking, uh, to bring this to a, to a close, if we look at and compare the two of them, the first one.
[00:39:00] Focused on a particular aspect or service, and the second one was more abstract and ideological. Perhaps that that process of picking some one particular way that traction is gained between someone who is losing their sight or has lost their sight and what the Royal Society for the Blind can bring.
Maybe there’s, there’s a harmonious point there where we get a chance to see differently and take some action.
David Olney: Do you think exactly tell a different story every year about a different person and what they needed and what the RSB helped them to achieve or now what see differently help them to achieve?
Like to my mind, the what seems to me obvious path. It is the path that keeps not being obvious,
Steve Davis: you see, because you do see things differently.
David Olney: A little bit.[00:40:00]
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 [email protected].
That’s [email protected]. So want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast. You can book 20 minutes with [email protected]. 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 [00:41:00] about.