What does a Henry Lawson poem read aloud on South Australian election night have to do with your small business? More than you might expect.
In this episode, Steve Davis and David Olney take Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians seriously, not as nostalgia, but as a working framework for building businesses that last.
Alongside that, they wrestle with a 1985 book that predicted social media addiction decades before the first smartphone, examine a CEO’s cringe-worthy burger video, and flag a quiet data-harvesting threat hiding in the app store.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:45 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
What Henry Lawson Knew About Culture
Duty arrives early.
South Australia’s premier quoted Henry Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians on election night. The verse urges Australians to welcome newcomers, find them people who speak their language, and make space for them to become part of what’s being built. Steve and David found it worth unpacking for anyone running a business.
The core insight is this: you cannot assimilate until you have language. Steve knows this firsthand, having lived in Hungary in the early 1990s where finding other English speakers was the bridge that eventually allowed him to become part of Hungarian society. The same principle applies inside your business.
David makes the connection plain. Inclusive workplaces are not a nice-to-have. They are the fastest path to higher productivity, better behaviour in front of customers, and stronger resilience in hard times. And the place to start is not with customers — it is with the people you hire. If your staff look miserable while you waffle niceness at customers, every customer notices.
The harder truth is this: we now have smartphones, social media, and algorithmic echo chambers that allow people to live in entirely self-constructed worlds. Building genuine connection takes more deliberate effort than it once did. David’s suggestion is to start in the square metre where you are working. Because at work, everyone is already on common ground — shared purpose, shared customers, shared stakes. It turns out the phrase “work-life balance” may have the right word first.
13:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman saw it coming.
His 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death argued that the real dystopian threat was never George Orwell’s vision of forced oppression — it was Aldous Huxley’s vision of a population that would willingly surrender its attention and agency in exchange for endless entertainment. Postman was writing about television. He did not live to see social media. He did not need to.
Steve and David note that a US jury recently found Google and Meta liable in a landmark social media addiction case, with a 20-year-old woman’s claim that these platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive. A Meta representative reportedly suggested that 16 hours of daily Instagram use might be “problematic” but not quite addiction. Draw your own conclusions.
What does this mean for your business?
David frames it directly: why did you start your business? It was almost certainly not to amuse people to death. You probably wanted to solve a real problem, deliver a genuinely uplifting experience, or connect customers to something that felt like knowledge or beauty or meaning — not just distraction.
The tools of social media are unavoidable. You need to be present where your customers are. But Postman’s real counsel, as Steve reads it, is awareness. When you understand the limits of these platforms — that they are shallow by design — you stop expecting depth from them and start using them intentionally. Content that informs, entertains purposefully, or genuinely helps someone is doing something the platform itself was not built to do. That is worth doing.
25:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Stranger Danger for Apps
Not all AI is equal.
A Mashable article flagged ten apps among the worst offenders for leaking personal data. Most of them sound uncannily like the legitimate tools many of us already use — names like “Chat and Ask AI” and “Chatbot AI” that sit in app stores, free of charge, right alongside the paid versions of trusted products.
These apps harvest chat history, search behaviour, and personal disclosures — the kinds of conversations people have about medical conditions, financial concerns, or relationship difficulties. That information trains the app and, depending on the terms of service, can be sold.
David’s advice is straightforward: read the terms of service. And Steve adds a practical upgrade to that — if you are not going to read a long and confusing document yourself, copy and paste it into a trusted AI tool like Gemini and ask it to assess what you are signing up for. Using technology to scrutinise technology is a reasonable form of self-defence.
The short version: stick to known quantities and apply the same scepticism you would in any other unfamiliar situation.
29:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The McDonald’s CEO and the Big Arch
Authenticity still needs to be engaging.
The McDonald’s CEO posted a video of himself tasting the new Big Arch burger. It did not land well — not because of the burger, but because of how he spoke about it. He referred to it as “product.” He mentioned it had already been tested in Portugal, Germany, and Canada, which the audience heard as “we tested it on people with lower standards.” His camera presence was flat and his enthusiasm unconvincing.
Steve and David are clear that this is not an argument against authenticity. It is an argument for recognising that authenticity still needs a yard rule held against it. Will this convey genuine enthusiasm? Does it have something useful or interesting to offer the viewer? If not, it probably should not be published — regardless of how real it feels.
By contrast, the television advertisement for the same Big Arch burger fared considerably better. It focused not on ingredients but on the simple promise of a large, filling meal when you are genuinely hungry. There was honesty in that simplicity. Steve and David gave it a mark above midpoint — modest praise, but meaningfully better than the CEO’s effort.
The takeaway is not that you need a production crew. It is that publishing something unpolished does not automatically make it trustworthy. Authenticity and purposefulness are not opposites. They need each other.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S08E04
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.
David Olney: Steve,
Steve Davis: are you Australian? And if so, how do you justify that claim? I,
David Olney: I am Australian. All my relatives arrived after World War ii, so I sometimes look back at Australia’s history and go, wow, indigenous people have been here thousands and thousands of thousands of years, and lots of people have had family here since some point in the 19th century.
And yet, because I dunno anything else, despite the fact my family hasn’t been here long, to me it feels very easy to be Australian.
Steve Davis: Okay. That was a longer answer than I was anticipating, but it seems fine. Uh, there is something that just does feel home about the landscape we have here to me, and that is probably purely a function of.
It being the landscape I have seen for the majority of my life, there’s acclimatization.
David Olney: Yeah. Whereas I think what I’m really talking about is the [00:02:00] human terrain of Australia is what makes me feel at home. Again. Heat is heat, cold is cold, dry heat’s dry heat. We know all about that in Adelaide, but really the laid back attitude, the kind of complaint about everything, but get on with Itness of Australia and at our best, we just keep including people.
And then they become part of us and then we include some more people and they become part of us and we change. And that’s nice to change. ’cause stops things getting boring.
Steve Davis: Well, I’m gonna mix things up now and we’ll start the episode proper,
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. [00:03:00] That’s what each of us is here for.
Steve Davis: We’ll all be runes Ed. Hanrahan.
David Olney: I’m giggling, but I’m not sure how a meant to respond.
Steve Davis: It is probably one line of Australian poetry that anyone says Australian poetry to me. I always remember that one, uh, because it really captures that spirit of. Living on the land as a farming family and would all be ruined either because it is raining.
Because it’s not raining or ‘
David Olney: cause it rained at the wrong time. Yeah, that’s the one I remember from my farming childhood or childhood on a farm.
Steve Davis: We’re heading into this territory because in the person segment we think there’s something interesting to pick up from the. Henry Lawson poem. So changing gears now to a Henry Lawson poem that, uh, our premier here in South Australia quoted on the election night.
Uh, so this is a poem called The Duty of [00:04:00] Australians, and we thought for the person segment, there’s a few things we can pick from this that apply to us as we live and breathe as fellow Australians running businesses here in this community. Should we have, actually, let’s have a little listen to the premier reading a couple of these verses.
Advert: It is the duty of Australians in the bush and in the town to forever praise their country, but to run no other down. When a man or nation visits in the heyday of its pride. It is the duty of Australians to be kind but dignified. It is our duty to the stranger landed may be, but an hour to give all the information and assistance in our [00:05:00] power to give audience to the new chum and to let the old chums wait lest his memory be embedded.
By his first days in the state, tis our duty when he’s foreign and his English very young to find out and take him somewhere where he’ll hear his native tongue hung to give him our last spare moment and our pleasure to defer. He’ll be father of Australians as our foreign fathers were
Steve Davis: alright. When I first heard this, David, there was one line that did, did resonate with me because I moved to Hungary, uh, many years ago and lived there for two, two or [00:06:00] three years, thereabouts. And there’s a line in this poem that says when someone arrives, they’re foreign. Their English is young. Find out and take him somewhere where he’ll hear his native tongue.
Now, there are gonna be some people going, no, no, no. Don’t do that. We want everyone to assimilate. I was ready to assimilate when I moved to Hungary, but you can’t assimilate until you have language.
David Olney: Not into Hungarian, you can’t. No.
Steve Davis: And finding other expats who spoke English, and of course, luckily most Hungarians are.
Quad lingual. Yeah. Quad lingual. Yeah. Um, and that was a blessing in disguise of being able just to talk where there are common assumptions was a beautiful thing with the hope being that the longer I stay there, the more I get to become part of society. Do you think that’s what Henry Lawson’s referring to here?
David Olney: I think that’s a very big part of it. The, the, my real takeaway from it from [00:07:00] so many years of teaching young people who’d only been here for short periods of time often was if we build an inclusive space and we give people a sense of safety, then they start talking and engaging and becoming part of what’s going on, and then Australia becomes bigger and better.
And it works on a national level. It works on the level of a classroom in a university. And to make it relevant for this podcast, the best businesses are the ones with inclusive cultures that make people feel safe. And you don’t make people feel safe by telling them they’re gonna be safe. You make people by safe.
By acknowledging who they are and making space for them. Because when you do that, they want to reciprocate and they want to join in, and they want to connect, and they wanna make space for you and other people. And the [00:08:00] virtuous circle of a good culture. That includes people and build safety is the fastest way to up productivity, the fastest way to put great behavior in front of customers and all those things are the fastest way to making more money in hard times.
Steve Davis: So when you say this inclusiveness, are you referring to the people you hire or are you talking about the customers that you try to Uh. Get
David Olney: if you, if you can’t or won’t do it for the people you hire, then when you attempt to do it for customers, you’ll look like a hypocrite because if you are waffling niceness and your staff look miserable, every customer notices, it’s that old line.
Don’t pay attention to how your date treats you. Pay attention to how you date treats the serving staff.
Steve Davis: Yeah. Yeah, that, that, that’s good. I’m, I’m trying to be a little [00:09:00] bit devil’s advocate to get this down to the realms of pragmatism because the initial reaction is it’s gonna be harder and things might be slower as you are trying to integrate someone with different worldview, different experience, uh, into your world.
Do you. Acknowledge that
David Olney: that is absolutely true. So we’ve always got two alternatives. We can try and make the world around us just like us, in our comfort zone and crush everyone out of shape and have a tiny world that just reflects us. Or we can go a little bit slower and work a little bit harder and find that our world just keeps on growing and in ways we can’t predict.
They really are the choices.
Steve Davis: Hmm. But you are arguing, and I, I agree with you and in fact, a lot of literature points to this, that when you have diversity in your workplace, [00:10:00] and I know, um, Donald Trump would vomit at that point, but. I’m talking about grounded diversity.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Not, not ultra, um, theoretical diversity, just diverse, just different opinions.
Your business does have more robustness and deeper resources to draw from for tackling problems because you’ve got different edge around the table.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: Hmm. So, from a person perspective, this poem, uh, is something not to shy away from. Uh, I think you’re arguing there’s a model there that that’s not a small thing to do,
David Olney: no
Steve Davis: to, to live this.
David Olney: But do you wanna live in a small world? Because if you wanna live in a small world, everything eventually becomes a threat to it because you’ve put up barriers and you’ve demanded that things be similar to you and your experience from yesterday. You’re cutting yourself off from tomorrow. And all the opportunities [00:11:00] that come with it if you’re not afraid, and if you’ve got people to help you bridge the gap from here to there.
Steve Davis: There is one thing that makes it harder now than it used to be. So even back in the days when I went to Hungary, which was early nineties, we didn’t have smartphones and therefore no social media when waves at different immigrants came to Australia after us. Um. There wasn’t much to do other than a few TV stations.
So people would talk over the back fence. Mm-hmm. And you’d get, and, and, and once you get talking to someone and you’ve shared a meal or something, the difference starts diminishing.
Amusing Ourselves To Death: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Um, but it’s, you don’t have to now you can live in your own cocoon, your own world. So I think it is a bit harder now, and it probably is why there are many people who are worried that enclaves.
Of certain cultures, of any culture gather that feel impenetrable to those of us who have been here a long time. [00:12:00] So all I’m saying is there is somehow a way that we need to find to be deliberate about cracking into those habits and those patterns to try and. Get mutual awareness happening again. I can’t see us getting through this and having people join our melting pot until we’ve worked that out.
And maybe you start in the square meter where you are living or working.
David Olney: Mm-hmm. And work is in some ways the ideal place to do it. Mm-hmm. Because at work everyone’s on good behavior. ’cause everyone needs to earn money and everyone needs the customers to come back. So in some ways. Connecting at work is easier than connecting randomly over the back fence.
’cause at work, we know why we are there. We know what the purpose is. We know who the customer is, we know who the boss is. In real terms, we’ve got more in common at work than we have in social settings.
Steve Davis: [00:13:00] Wow. So maybe. The work-life balance is correct to have work as the first word in that phrase.
David Olney: Yep.
Hadn’t thought about that before, but I think there’s some serious truth to that in the world as we’re living it
Steve Davis: and we better hurry up before AI takes that work away.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: And that’s when we will need to band together as fellow humans to fight back,
David Olney: fight the machine.
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.
Speaker 6: David, do you think
Steve Davis: you could be amused too much? [00:14:00]
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: How? Why?
David Olney: Um, there’s times where I’ve tried to sit and listen to those very long Billy Connolly kind of. I gag every 30 seconds for three hours kind of recordings of, uh, performances from the early nineties. And a certain point, I just get fatigued by the gags and the fact that it’s like, yeah, that’s funny.
And it was funny, but, and now I’m starting to see the pattern of how you’re setting it up and it stopped being funny.
Steve Davis: Mm. So. You’re dead, right? That you’re, what you are doing is you’re saying there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
David Olney: I think so,
Steve Davis: and I think we’ve talked about that before. Um, and someone had a book that looked at, uh, when.
Your body releases endorphins. Uh, when you have to work hard for something and you get it, you go, ah. Whereas if you had to pop a block of chocolate
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: Um, we get habituated [00:15:00] too easily. So then it’s two blocks, then three blocks and four blocks. Yeah. It was that
David Olney: great book where the book was great, but her reading off the book
Steve Davis: was,
David Olney: it was terrible.
Really problematic.
Steve Davis: Anyway, today what we’re talking about in the principle segment is a, a book that goes back to 1985 by Neil Postman. It’s called Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it’s freely available if you have Spotify. It’s hard to find in Audible, but Spotify, there’s a version of it and had to listen to it.
The crux of his story. Is this, there were two dystopian views of the world captured in, uh, literature, George Orwell and 1984 and Aldis Huxley and Brave New World. And what, um, Neil Postman argues is this. He said, many of us, he’s talking about himself back in the seventies. Were very worried that George Allwell might be right, that the dystopian future is when [00:16:00] we are oppressed by force.
You know, the double talk, all that sort of stuff, which you know, Donald Trump calling. The Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of War, and all those sorts of things, um, and playing with words that just become plastic and meaningless, et cetera. And he said, that’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening in America is more of Als Huxley’s view in brave new world in which everyone was given amusements.
Uh, like they, anything they want, you know, they could just enjoy themselves and they weren’t oppressed into becoming, um, docile, subservient beings. They chose to ’cause it was lovely and comfortable. And so when you have tv. Now it’s streaming so you can binge and. Any moment can be filled with doom.
Scrolling. This is way beyond his time, but it all applies. We are amusing ourselves to death because we are [00:17:00] paying less and less attention to those core relationships around us.
Amusing Ourselves To Death: There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison, and the second the Huxley culture becomes a burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison cultures whose structure or well described accurately in his parables.
If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm and then for good measure, Arthur Kessler’s, darkness at noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny.
Is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right or left wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable. Surveillance equally rigorous icon worship, equally pervasive. What Huxley teaches is that in the [00:18:00] age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.
In the Huxley and Prophecy, big Brother does not watch us by his choice. We watch him by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or ministries of truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk.
When in short a people become an audience and their public business vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk culture death is a clear possibility.
Steve Davis: We’ve ground this in some business insights in a moment, but David, what would you add to Postman and his. Amusing ourselves to death thesis.
David Olney: That really the fact he was writing this argument 20 years before the internet, 30 years before social media, and yet he absolutely grasped where we were heading.
And that is the [00:19:00] problem wasn’t going to be what you know, other people did to repress us. It’s how like in the rat experiments, we let the rat, you know, keep having drugs and the rat keeps pressing the button for the drugs until the rat gives itself so many drugs. It dies.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: The rat goes. Yeah. I love the buzz.
We press the button and the fundamentally the combination of internet pornography and social media, we are amusing ourselves to death. Even El Huxley with his marvelous imagination. Only imagined kind of free safe sex and a drug that didn’t have terrible side effects where you could go to work the next day.
You know, even he didn’t see it as the absolute destruction of human agency meaning and purposeful identity that we’ve actually, you know, succumbed to.
Steve Davis: So are we as a society, the victims of our own [00:20:00] success? I mean, we toil away in the field. Figuratively, uh, literally for some people, uh, with the carrot that’s dangled is we’ll get some downtime to enjoy the dip in the pool, the movie, all that sort of thing.
Well, we’ve got really good at making the movie everywhere. Um, and it’s easy just to satiate our desires easier.
David Olney: Yeah. And in a way that if we go back to the wonderful, you know, CS Lewis speech. Where’s the knowledge? Where’s the beauty? Where’s the art? Where’s the curiosity?
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: All the things that rise humans above the difficulty of being alive on planet earth.
Where’s all that stuff gone? In porn and social media.
Steve Davis: And just, uh, last week at the time of recording this, a US jury found that Google and Meta were liable for about $3 million. US. In damages in a landmark social media [00:21:00] addiction lawsuit where a 20-year-old woman accused the companies of causing her harm by deliberately designing addictive platforms.
And I note that in one of the articles, uh, someone from Meta, uh, mentioned, yeah, look, 16 hours a day using Instagram. I wouldn’t call that addiction. Uh, I, I might call it problematic. This is the beast. These are the beasts, the people who are amusing us to death.
Advert: Hmm.
Steve Davis: It’s a really, there’s a sickness to this part of society and here in business we make use of these tools because they’re also communication tools.
You and I have talked about this before. Mm-hmm. So how do we take what Postman sees for some agency for us? And our businesses. What principles come to your mind, uh, that we can learn and apply from this?
David Olney: I think the key [00:22:00] thing is why did you start your business? If you know why you started your business, it wasn’t so that you could amuse yourself to death, and it probably wasn’t to amuse someone to.
You probably wanted to start your business to solve people’s problems or to give them an amazing experience that would be so uplifting that it would connect them to that sense of beauty or curiosity or knowledge or insight to take them out of the ordinary in a way that isn’t just amusement or distraction,
Steve Davis: which is fine, but I suppose our customers are humans too.
We’ve gotta get their attention.
David Olney: We do. And it’s totally what we need to do is use the tools, but use the tools to offer the things that CS Lewis valued, the things that Viktor Frankl valued. Use the tools to get people from amusement to something [00:23:00] actually to add some value to their day. Makes them feel more engaged, makes them feel more connected, makes interacting with you and your company.
The highlight of their average day.
Steve Davis: So Neil Postman himself, the, um, where he gets to at the end of his book is if we stop and we have this awareness of the power. Of media, which today we’d also say social media and smartphone apps. It gives us a chance to resist, um, do we get rid of it? He even said then, no, you just have to recognize the limits on of depth that these things can go to.
So in many ways, this old book, which is relevant today, uh. Marries with the advice we’ve been giving ourselves and anyone who listen that yes, we have to wade in the waiting pool of social media so that we can talk to our [00:24:00] potential customers. But if we are there and we are not. Doing the crap, we’re going a little bit harder to at least bring value, whether it’s entertaining or instructional or helpful.
Um, at least we’re fighting the good fight. We’re doing something productive. We can sleep well, we can live with ourselves, and we are doing something to maintain a degree of sanity when it’s just so easy. To plunk in front of the couch and do the same old, same old, and just fall for yet another scam where you pay $17 a month and have some AI tool make all your social media content for you, that’s just gonna play regurgitation of the lowest common denominator.
Over and over again. Maybe go a bit titillating to get some cut through and just leave us all. Just like Dave would trying to watch extended marathons of Billy Connery, just exhausted.
David Olney: I’d rather be exhausted doing something constructive.[00:25:00]
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps, number three problems. These are the marketing challenges, keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, we ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening
Steve Davis: in the problems segment. Just one. There’s probably a timely reminder. There was an article on Mashable about the 10 apps. That are the worst at leaking our personal details. Now, I’ll go so far as to say most of us won’t know any of these apps. Um, however, they do look surprisingly like a lot of apps that we might think we know of.
Um, things like, I’m just getting a couple names in [00:26:00] front of me. Things like, um, chat and ask AI by code way, um, chat bot ai. See, these are all sounding very similar to the normal things that we like chat, GPT. They’re not chat GPT, they sound like it. And suddenly in the app store, they’re free versus the paid versions.
And so people are using them. But the downside is this, and that’s why this is in the problem segment. All kinds of data is being harvested by these free apps. Um, our, the actual data of what we’re searching on and talking about our chat history, which means you could be asking about medical conditions, uh, relationship advice,
David Olney: and financial advice.
Steve Davis: Yes. Um, you could also have. Gone to a Vietnamese restaurant before, uh, recording two podcasts, having handled chili with your fingers and then needed to visit the bathroom afterwards. And you [00:27:00] might want to chat about how you alleviate certain strong. Stinging sensations where they shouldn’t be, those sorts of things.
David,
David Olney: it wasn’t sensational.
Steve Davis: Um,
David Olney: well, so he tells me
Steve Davis: all this stuff is being left accessible in those apps.
David Olney: It’s training those apps.
Steve Davis: It is. So this is only a very short segment. Please. Ah, what would be the advice?
David Olney: Look at the privacy statement. Look at the terms of service. Literally look at them because if it’s in their favor.
Do you really want to be using it?
Steve Davis: Now, this is what I use against most scammers these days, and I saw something the other day for, uh, someone was talking about the downside of blood pressure tablets. And there was one, this long, long piece went on and on and on talking about how doctors will just pedal the pills.
But there’s these little fibrous things that build up in your blood system and that’s what really causes blood pressure. And [00:28:00] lo and behold, there’s a particular herb. That you can take or an extract, but only the one of this strength, which is certain com. Anyway, I copy and paste these things these days, and I found Gemini to be very good at this.
I put it in Gemini and say, look, can you please analyze this for me because this is sounding a little bit like hyperbole, and sure enough it says, ah yes, here we go. The old doctors are bad and there’s only one cure scenario and it just rips it to shred. Perhaps those terms and conditions you talk about, David.
No one really reads them as a human, but you can copy and paste them
David Olney: and get Gemini to
Steve Davis: get Gemini to assess them. What am I leaving myself open for
David Olney: The tool? Yep.
Steve Davis: This is, perhaps we can use this tool, this technology, to fight back, because A, I just wouldn’t go for unknown apps. I would stick with known quantities, but B, use a trusted AI source to check what you are handing over.[00:29:00]
And you might not think there’s any problem with that, but it’s when you least expect it. Who knows who they’re selling this information for? And lo and behold, you’ve lost some money or your identity’s being used somewhere, it’s just not worth it. And many of these apps are the ones sneaking in AI stuff for free.
Just be cautious Exercise caution. It’s like the old Stranger Danger Ads, but it applies to apps in app stores.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four purse ity. 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.[00:30:00]
Steve Davis: David, how many hands does it take to handle a whopper?
David Olney: Two or stuff slides out the other side.
Steve Davis: Correct. Now that’s Hungry. Jack’s AKA Burger King.
David Olney: Proper food when you’re eight.
Steve Davis: Proper food when you’re eight, or when you have eaten McDonald’s. We’re just gonna touch base on McDonald’s for this episode of this segment of Per Per Cassidy, and look at an ad and look at the CEO.
I know lots of people have talked about this till the cow come home. Maybe not. Some of the cows who, they never made it home, they never made it. But we had the McDonald, CEO, uh, Chris Kaminski, uh, he posted a video of himself trying the new big art burger didn’t go well. I think that’s fair to say, mainly because.
He doesn’t have a great presence on camera and he kept referring to the burger as product [00:31:00]
David Olney: and saying they’re testing it in other markets. No one cares.
Steve Davis: Yes. Which makes it sound like we’ve tested it in places with lower standards and we got away with it there. Now we are ready. That’s, that’s how it, that’s how we hear it.
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: Um, anyway, let’s have a listen. To this, and you might have heard it by now, but it’s worth listening to. One more time. Just don’t eat while you’re listening.
The Big Arch: Chris K. Here with, you’ve heard about it. Here it is the big arch. This is something that we have tested already in Portugal, Germany, Canada. I love this product. It is so good. I’m gonna do a tasting right now, but I’m going to eat this for my lunch, just so you know. So here we go first. Holy cow. God, that is a big burger.
We’ve got a very unique kind of sesame. Poppy sort of bun on it. We’ve got two quarter pound patties, A delicious, [00:32:00] big, large sauce, and of course some lettuce. So, oh, there’s so much going on with this. First of all, let’s try to get this thing. I don’t even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. Oh, there’s also some crispy onions on here as well.
I see those kind of coming out. Alright, the moment of truth. Uh, that is so good. That’s a big bite for a big arch. It’s distinctively McDonald’s. Only McDonald’s could do this type of burger, but it also is unlike anything else on our menu. It’s a delicious product. You know, you’ve got sort of the cheeses and the gooeyness, uh, but those crispy onions as well ’cause a nice texture.
And of course we’ve got the pickles. So, uh, I’m gonna enjoy the rest of my lunch. But big arch, try it when you can get it
Steve Davis: Doesn’t make me wanna rush out and get one day, but
David Olney: doesn’t make me want to be CEO of McDonald’s either.
Steve Davis: Yeah. Surely someone would be aware of this and just rerecord it. [00:33:00]
David Olney: This seems like one of those terrible moments where they got the idea of authenticity. Which is a very good thing. But recognize, you need to recognize that authenticity still needs to be engaging and purposeful.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: And that’s neither engaging or purposeful, which is not a very helpful form of authenticity.
Steve Davis: No. And there was much made of. His approach to the mouthful that he took that looked like he was nippling the smallest amount possible. He argues he wasn’t, but it’s not really what he argues.
David Olney: No. Again, you know, brand perception is customer perception.
Steve Davis: Now the interesting thing is this is per per cassy. We often look at TV commercials and then compare how they would work. There is actually a TV commercial for the big arch burger, let’s. Have a look at that one or listen
David Olney: and make sure you’re sitting down and make sure nothing can fall off your desk.
Steve Davis: Okay, here we go.[00:34:00]
Advert: Got Big McDonald Tanger, the new big arches here.
Steve Davis: As far as ads go for fast food. I kind of don’t mind this. I mean, it’s vacuous. Uh, you’ve got the people in the office. They’re a bit hungry. Every, anyone who’s worked in our office will feel that you’re sort of, you’re not a free agent with your time unless you’ve snuck a muley bar in or something. You, you kind of have to wait till it’s your turn to, to go and eat and someone across the room.
Has got themselves a big [00:35:00] arch and they’re tucking into it. And then of course the, the tummy rumbles.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Then the next person’s tummy rumbles and everyone, and next, but the buildings, the
David Olney: building shakes and yeah. Then it’s got ridiculous. And then we get that very typically strange end of advert British voice.
Steve Davis: Yes. But the interesting thing I find here, unlike many of the other. Ads for the burgers where they bring pineapple back or they’re putting sizzling bacon. This doesn’t focus so much on the ingredients. This focuses on. This is big. This will fuel you up when you are hungry. Mm-hmm. And you know what I, I feel like there’s more of an honesty here.
Um, let’s just get to the chase.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: If you are starving, this will
David Olney: do the job.
Steve Davis: This, yeah. You just take one of these, lay down and don’t make any videos for your company. That’s basically the advice they’re giving.
David Olney: Yeah, and I think the idea was great, but they could have done [00:36:00] so much more than the rumbling stomach thing, like the after effect of the burger could have made a great ad.
Steve Davis: Or even the lead up to be done a bit more. ’cause
David Olney: yeah,
Steve Davis: I was starving. Um, because not, I’m, not that I’m saying you were late getting here, David. I wouldn’t say that publicly. I
David Olney: wasn’t late getting here. I I stood in the door because you were so busily working for about four minutes before I deliberately made a noise.
So you finally realized I was standing right in front of you.
Steve Davis: Uh, and look, when you’re really starving,
David Olney: you don’t pay attention to the rest of the world.
Steve Davis: No, you don’t.
David Olney: No.
Steve Davis: But I wonder if. It. I mean there’s so many different, different ways. I was gonna say you can skin a cat, but probably not best to, to do that analogy when we’re talking about fast food.
You’ve got a burger and they’re shoving perhaps a second quarter Pounder burger into it and extra this and extra that. There could have been a way to really emphasize. How it’s being [00:37:00] built from the ground up. Uh, getting bigger and bigger while someone’s waiting. I’m hungry. How hungry? This hungry. I can go more this, this,
David Olney: that would’ve been a much better ad where you had the contrast between the person at the front saying how hungry they were.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: And some kid at the back gone. I could add more meat. Yeah, I could add more cheese.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: Oh, more pickles.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: Like it could have been a really good ad
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: Instead of just an ad.
Steve Davis: I mean, and it wasn’t bad though, I mean, as far as a fast food
David Olney: that’s, say it was above, it was a bit above midpoint.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: For a food, a junk food ad.
Steve Davis: Yeah. So, uh, our takeaway is. There are some cases when your pre-planned communication might be better than authenticity. When you’re going for that, if you’re going for authenticity. We don’t have to publish everything we make. We still need to put a yard rule against it to make sure that it’s met some standards of conveying enthusiasm, interest, perhaps some [00:38:00] novelty.
Mm, and something helpful.
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. Podcast at, talked about marketing.com. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with [email protected]. No cost, no obligation, and it’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about. And that’s not being talked [00:39:00] about.