Anti-Viral: A Human Approach to Marketing

Everyone's telling you to use AI for everything right now. And if you're being honest, part of you probably wants to. It's fast, it's cheap, and it doesn't complain about deadlines. But there's a hesitation because we all get the feeling that something gets lost when a machine writes the thing that was supposed to sound like you. This episode is about finding the line. Not whether AI is good or ba...

The part that trips most people up isn't the channel. It's knowing what to actually say in it. We blame attention spans for this. People have the focus of a goldfish, three seconds and they're gone. But that's not really true. You'll sit through a two-hour movie or read a whole book if it's good. So it was never an attention problem. It's a "do I care about what you're telling me" problem. This ep...

You already know the internet is noisy. You know the algorithm isn't your friend. So you did what everyone told you to do. You got busier. More posts, more platforms, more ads. And it worked, sort of. But the clients that actually came? They came the same way they always did. A referral, a conversation, someone who already trusted you. That's the gap most business owners don't talk about. All that...

Every business owner I've met has the same story. They started something because they're good at it. Then they Googled "how to market my business" and fell into a hole they haven't climbed out of yet. It's not that the advice is bad. It's that there's too much of it, and all of it sounds urgent. So you try to do everything, and you end up doing all of it poorly. Meanwhile the thing that would actu...

The internet is getting louder. Every business with a social media account can now publish endless content without anything worth saying. Every platform responds by showing more of it. And we scroll faster just to get past the noise. That's not an accident. It's what happens when the cost of making content drops to almost nothing and the only playbook anyone knows is to do more of everything. But...

Most businesses are building their marketing for something that will never buy from them. Algorithms don't have wallets. AI can't become a loyal customer. Machines don't have friends to refer. And yet here we are, feeding platforms content for content's sake, prompting AI to write posts designed to perform well inside systems built by other machines. I call that the algorithm trap. And this show i...