Anti-Viral: A Human Approach to Marketing

Most of us built our entire approach to being found around one company's rules, Google. We learned them, we followed them, and it more or less worked. Now there's a new acronym going around, GEO, and entrepreneurs are trying to learn how it works when most marketers barely know either.

I think the rush to understand this new system is the same rush that ended up giving us the internet we have now. Full of slop, blogs no one reads, and an intense need to cater to algorithms.

So this episode is less about tactics...

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 bad for your marketing, because that conversation is already tired.

The real question is what you're willing to hand over and what...

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 episode is about the oldest fix there is, which is storytelling. It's the thing you already do without thinking. When something interesting happens...

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 activity, all that effort, and the thing that actually moves the needle is something you weren't even doing on purpose. You've been treating busyness...

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 actually move your business forward is sitting underneath the noise, waiting for you to slow down long enough to...

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 something is shifting. People are forming smaller communities. They're starting to check if something was made by a real person. They're starting...

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 is about getting out of it.

In this first episode, I introduce the idea behind Anti-Viral and the marketing philosophy I've been building for the past ten years...