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Talking About Marketing

Talking About Marketing

By: Auscast Network
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Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

2026 Auscast Network Economics Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Are you talking to me? Social media marketing in the angertainment era

    Are you talking to me? Social media marketing in the angertainment era
    Jun 29 2026
    Ed Koper’s book Angertainment gives Steve and David a precise vocabulary for what most of us feel but struggle to name: the social media machine is not broken, it is working exactly as designed, and that design is not working for you. David draws the line that every small business owner needs to hear: your customers are not the mob, and the mob does not care about your business. A couch cleaning search goes sideways when Steve finds a local tradesperson’s website where the Adelaide suburbs have migrated to Darwin, Alice Springs, and Melbourne, and the copy reads like it never met a human being. Clive Palmer’s 2014 political ads get the Perspicacity treatment, and the verdict is the same lesson in a different costume: if your message starts with what matters to you, not what matters to them, it lands nowhere. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.Ed Koper’s Field Guide to the Eight Types of Online Rage (and Why Your Temperature Rising Is Not an Accident) Steve opens the final episode of Season 8 with Angertainment, Ed Koper’s forensic examination of how social media platforms and their most active users have turned anger into a business model. The book’s central argument is not that social media is unpleasant but that its unpleasantness is deliberate, repeatable, and categorised. Koper names eight distinct post types designed to generate heat rather than light, and Steve and David walk through each one with the kind of wry recognition that comes from having seen all of them in the wild. The eight types cover a lot of ground: Righteous anger activation (moral language designed to recruit, not inform)Tribal identity framing (are you with us or against us?)False consistency shaming (collapsing complexity into a gotcha)Decontextualised rage bait (the 10-second clip stripped of the 30 seconds that would change everything)Cancel mob mechanics (collective punishment at scale)Merchants of outrage (coordinated discontent dressed as grassroots)Propagandatainers (whose primary business model is keeping you angry)Distraction (look over here while the real story disappears) One example from the book: a single can sent to a single influencer, and a social media structure that turned a minor marketing decision into congressional investigations and millions in lost sales. Steve frames the eight types through the lens of The Emperor’s New Clothes: once you can name what you are looking at, it loses its power over you. David adds the Jonathan Haidt layer, noting that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.What the Rage Has to Do With Your Next Facebook Post (More Than You’d Like) The Principles segment moves the Angertainment conversation from survival to strategy: if this is the environment, how does a small business owner post anything at all without being swept into the current or mistaken for part of it? David’s position is direct. You are talking to a hero who needs a guide to solve a problem. That is your job on social media. The moment you wander outside that lane and into tribal commentary, you stop being a guide and become just another voice in the emotional weather. His practical guidance covers the basics: Share photos of great workTell the stories of people who love what you doDescribe the new thing you have worked out you can help people with Accept that these posts will not go viral. Accept that the likes will be modest. And then ask yourself the only question that actually matters for a business: are the people who do engage calling you, enthusiastically, ready to talk about how you can help them? Steve adds the cautionary note from personal experience. He has a standing rule about not engaging in political discussion on social media because the medium strips out every nuance that makes such conversations worthwhile. When pitchforks arrive at your gate by accident, David’s prescription is equally clear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short. 21:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.When the Map of Adelaide Puts Norwood Where Alice Springs Should Be Steve’s couch needed cleaning after an 18th birthday party. What followed was a cautionary tour of local tradesperson websites that had apparently been generated entirely by AI, reviewed by nobody, and published without a moment...
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    31 mins
  • If You Are Not Engineering Your Time In This Age It Will Be Engineered For You

    If You Are Not Engineering Your Time In This Age It Will Be Engineered For You
    Jun 15 2026
    David Epstein’s Inside the Box argues that the freedom to do anything is often the enemy of actually doing something. Steve and David work through what that means for busy business owners making decisions every day. Google’s AI-driven search overhaul has changed the rules for small business websites, and not quietly. Steve walks through what has shifted, what it means, and what you can do about it. Two early Google TV ads from a simpler internet era get the Perspicacity treatment. Steve and David trace how search went from genuinely useful to something rather different. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Case for Constraints: Why Less Choice Gets More Done David Epstein spent months unable to commit to a new book topic. Approaching the search like a dating app, always wondering if something better was around the corner, he eventually came across a quote from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about commitment: “The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living.” That day, Epstein chose his topic and started writing a book proposal. Two weeks later he was ten times more invested in it. Steve uses this as a jumping-off point into some confronting numbers about human cognition. Our conscious mind can hold roughly three to four chunks of information at any one time, and they decay within two to three seconds. A modern smartphone processes information at speeds our brains cannot come close to matching. The result, as David describes it, is that technology floods us with information faster than we can decide whether it is worth thinking about. By the time we have worked that out, we have already spent our cognitive allowance for that moment. Steve also shares a practical browser adjustment he has been using: pinning email and social media tabs in Chrome so the notification numbers disappear from view. It removes the visual trigger that pulls attention away mid-task. David draws the parallel to switching your phone to Do Not Disturb for an hour. PS The snippet of David in this segment, comes from this podcast, below. 23:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Think Slow, Act Fast: What Pixar and a Danish Researcher Agree On Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has studied why some large projects come in on time and on budget while others do not. His finding: the successful ones think slow and act fast. They spend longer than feels comfortable defining the problem before anything is built. The failures rush into execution, then learn their lessons expensively and with momentum already behind them. David Epstein applied this to his own writing process. His first two books went to the deadline wire. Inside the Box was finished a month early, because he spent more time than ever before understanding the territory before he started writing. Steve and David are careful to separate thinking slow from going slow. Thinking slow is deliberate risk reduction: finding the problems before you have committed resources to a direction. Going slow at every step is a different thing, closer to institutional risk aversion than strategic preparation. David’s illustration from his teaching days makes the principle concrete. He would ask students to spend two hours on initial research the night an assignment was set, then do the rest the night before as usual. Those two hours seed questions the brain keeps processing quietly in the background. You have not worked more. You have worked earlier. And your final answer benefits from it. Steve draws a parallel to the 2025 Frankenstein film, noting it is one of the rare cases where nearly a century of reflection has allowed a story to become more fully itself on screen. PS The snippet of David in this segments, comes from Steve’s favourite podcast, Econtalk, below. 32:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.Google’s AI Search Overhaul: What Small Businesses Need to Know Now Google has moved decisively to an AI-driven search experience, with results now built by Gemini, its AI tool. Answers are personalised based on everything Google knows about the user, their history, habits, and interests, with a small selection of links shown below. Organic search positions that businesses earned through quality content have been pushed further down the page or removed from view altogether. Steve walked through a real example: a Darwin fishing charter business, established for 15 years and consistently appearing on the first page of results, simply gone. An aggregator site had taken every relevant position across the first three to four pages. Steve and David note the blame sits on more than one desk. SEO operators spent years gaming rankings with techniques that had nothing to do ...
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    56 mins
  • When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson

    When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson
    May 25 2026
    John C. Maxwell’s How to Get a Return on Failure lands on the TAM desk, and Steve and David put it through their own filter: the folksy bits, the genuinely useful bits, and the bits where a neuroanatomist and a business coach turn out to be saying the exact same thing. David reflects on the day he realised he would not finish his PhD, and why that 2-out-of-10 moment turned out to be one of the most important recalibrations of his working life. A Meta phishing scam that apparently does not breach community standards has both hosts reaching for their Lord of the Flies analogies. And a 1977 Ford Granada ad raises a question that cuts deeper than any car commercial should: have we traded a learner mindset for a judger mindset, and what have we lost in the process? Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.When Shame Gets Off the Table In the Person segment, Steve and David dig into Maxwell’s central argument: that failure is an investment, and like any investment, you can get a return on it if you handle it properly. The catch is that shame gets in the way before you even have a chance to analyse what happened. David’s reflection on his abandoned PhD is the anchor here. At the time, it felt like a solid 2 out of 10. In retrospect, it was the moment that freed up everything that came next. Maxwell’s book, How To Get A Return On Failure, puts language around that kind of reframe, and David gives it real weight by grounding it in lived experience rather than theory. The dinner table story lands particularly well: a father who asked his children every night what they had failed at that day, and celebrated every answer. The only exception? When the failure had a moral or ethical dimension and the child had not yet recognised it as such. For every other kind of stumble, the response was curiosity, not correction. As Steve notes, that is the fastest way to raise someone who does not spend their school years too embarrassed to put their hand up. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Six Steps, Zero Excuses The Principles segment takes Maxwell’s framework and applies it directly to the business context. Steve walks David through six steps drawn from a video Maxwell produced alongside the book, and two of them dominate the conversation. The first is the distinction between a good miss and a bad miss. A good miss is one you learn from and adjust. A bad miss is one you excuse. Maxwell’s line here stops both hosts in their tracks: a really good excuse is a really bad excuse, because it is convincing enough that everyone believes it, including you, and so you stop adjusting and start collecting excuses instead. The second is the idea of keeping failure and success together rather than fixating on either one. Maxwell uses a slightly laboured physical exercise to make the point, which David declines to take seriously, but the underlying principle holds: success without failure creates pride, and failure without success destroys resilience. Keep them together and you stay balanced. Separate them and you lose the lesson from both. David draws a line to Stoicism, and Steve connects the whole conversation to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living from the previous episode. The message is consistent across a neuroanatomist and a folksy American business coach: breathe, reflect, then ask what resources you have and what you do next. 28:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.Meta’s Community Standards Are a Riddle The Problems segment is fuelled by genuine frustration. Steve received a message flagging a copyright claim against his content, reported it as a likely phishing scam, and was told by Meta that it did not breach community standards. What Perplexity confirmed is that these scams are sophisticated: the emails genuinely come from Meta’s servers, triggered by legitimate business manager accounts with deceptively official-sounding names. The notifications are real. The requesters are not. And Meta’s automated systems cannot, or will not, distinguish between them. David’s verdict is delivered without hesitation: hiring humans and treating them with respect would solve the problem, and that is precisely why it has not been solved. The practical takeaway is simple and worth repeating: trust nothing in your inbox or your social accounts that asks you to take urgent action. Bounce it off someone you trust before you click anything. 32:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.The Ad That Would Need a Trigger Warning In Perspicacity, Steve plays a 1977 Ford Granada television advertisement in which a man at a drive-in keeps getting into the wrong car and being ejected with escalating indignation. The ad’s ...
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    39 mins
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