The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

Back in the 1960s, the TV program was called The Twilight Zone. It was an anthology series that explored fantasy, science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller elements.

In today’s complicated new marketing and media world, it can feel like we are living in a Twilight Zone.

Marketing is about getting people to become aware and engaged and building trust. If you work in a vacuum, then your messages are delivered more organically to the recipient. But when you try to use a delivery platform like a social media or search platform, your message has additives of other content surrounding it and the timing as to how and when it’s delivered.

We are in the part of the business year that is like another Twilight Zone. It’s the two months between Halloween and New Year’s Day.

If you are in the consumer market, you are primed for people to be in a good mood and spend a lot of money on themselves and gifts for others. If you are in the business-to-business market, you are trying to finish the year strong while the people you sell to are winding down.

No one can predict what 2025 will be like for business. AI will continue to grow in power and popularity, but how will your clients and audience use and adapt to it?

If you watch broadcast TV, I am sure you are happy the election is over and all we have to watch now are pharmaceutical and Christmas commercials.

One of the interesting things I heard in post-election analysis was that a billion dollars was spent on TV ads. At the same time, the most decisive information was distributed via free-to-access websites and apps. This was described as paywall and non-paywall media. I never really thought about that but it makes sense.

It becomes a matter of trust. Voters trusted without needing journalistic and regulatory confirmation that the information was accurate or even true. That works for elections, but you cannot take trust that lightly in business.

Like a human body, trust is a complex system with some essential parts, needs, and truths. It has a brain, digestive system, lungs, and a heart.

The body is a system, and the brain, the stomach, the lungs, and the heart all need each other for the body to function and survive.

Trust in business is the same thing. It takes thinking, seeing, and feeling to ensure your business relationships are built on respect and trust. They need to be fed with consistent quality information, thought leadership, and a dash of advice. You must constantly breathe new life into relationships while expelling the negative. It also takes heart to feel and empathize with how a relationship is mutually beneficial and not merely transactional.

AI has been part of our culture for a long time. Think about the movies that have predicted where we are now.

Although this is Hollywood and entertainment, we have realized most of this already:

The biggest thing holding AI back or impeding it’s progress is it knowing who it’s talking to. Personalization will need to go way beyond what information is available on the Internet. What it will need (and what you want to do with your marketing) is called Hyper-Personalization.

The problem with data is that it constantly changes. A real-life example is trying to do something very old-school: sending US Mail to customers. Chances are, you have a database or CRM where the records are old.

In no way, shape, or form am I saying that digital marketing (social and email) wastes time and money? I can tell you that human-to-human interaction will increase interactions with your digital presence.

Humans are complex, fickle, and emotionally charged beings. It takes just being there as another human being to build that trust again and again, as needed.

I have a problem. “Hi… my name is Brian… and I am addicted to tabs.”

I normally have four Chrome browser windows open with 20 to 30 tabs open in each—that’s over 100 tabs.

As you age, things slow down (I can’t run or jog as fast), and I believe your brain gets full. My memory is still sharp, but I have to admit that there are many more ideas, facts, and concepts that I had to remember before the lightning-fast, internet-based information overtook reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

My main point is “You be You!” You have to define your voice, style, and process. No matter what you write, AI can be a great tool, but it does not replace the need to integrate your style and personality. Remember, AI uses other people’s content to help you make points, but your thought leadership is an active tool that AI has not mastered… YET!

I recently came up with a Billion-Dollar Idea. I am sharing it with you, so please don’t share it with anyone else. It’s going to make me rich, and I would not want anyone to copy or steal it.

I created an app that will stop delivering snail mail, emails, texts, radio, and TV commercials once you have voted in an election. The only problem I have not been able to work out is that it does not work if your spouse or partner has not voted yet.

Political marketing is about how a candidate or a party will affect you, your family, and your life. Business marketing is about getting attention and then getting people to make a choice (buy or vote for) and take action (buy or vote). What I mean by vote is to choose to interact with or at least not block or unfollow.

Automation and AI in marketing help collect, analyze, and utilize data faster, better, and maybe cheaper. This is the allure, but it lacks the emotion necessary to develop a relationship. That takes people.

Sometimes, your most powerful tool is pen and paper or a note-taker app. Capturing that information and transferring it to your CRM or ERP will give you data that will become useful for AI or even a word cloud app to gauge the pulse of business today.

Back in the day (circa 2013), I spent a lot of time networking. I attended up to 20 events per month. It has slowed down since, but I have always found some value in networking.

That all changed in 2020.

The pandemic shut down in-person events and everything went virtual via Zoom. While it decimated some groups, others thrived due to the ability to network with others not within driving distance.

In 2022, in-person events were coming back, but people were reevaluating the time and costs of local networking.

I have always said, “Relationships are the currency of business.” I also tend to view business relationships as a way to help my clients and contacts make more money. By focusing on business and not just sales, you create relationships that were not built around the transfer of cash but the cooperative transfer of wisdom, insight, and quality connections.

It’s incredible how fast things change. Do you remember that slogan? “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.”

That phrase was used in an advertising campaign for Virginia Slims, a brand of cigarettes marketed specifically to women. The slogan was introduced in 1968, and cigarette ads were banned in 1971. It lasted only three years but was so successful that it’s still remembered and used today in cultural references.

In the first four years of the 2020s, technology has not changed much except that it has become cheaper, faster, and more powerful. But when it comes to marketing, the game has completely changed.

Today, I want to discuss the three things we must pay the most attention to and how you can increase your ability to break through the marketing morass and noise.

Some of you may remember the Toys R Us ad “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” which touted play and toys. I still have that feeling today. I love toys. AI is a toy that helped me come up with this post. Computers are fun because they help us do so many things: become organized, be better communicators and more analytical thinkers.

I believe that thinking of marketing as play with data, computers, and tools can help us focus on the fun and not the function. And be careful not to choke on your marketing efforts.

I confess that I try to simplify things down to binary choices: good and evil, easy and hard, the boogeyman and Superman. But I think that in our ever-polarized world, there is becoming a blurred line between truth and opinion.

When it comes to marketing, I tend to think of Google and Search as the boogeyman and content marketing as Superman. Yet, like energy, they are a symbiotic and correlated existence that exists and has to function to help businesses market to their audiences and prospects.

I believe you have to think like a superhero like Superman to overcome the erosion in website traffic. I know companies are hoping to find a superhero to help them overcome the challenges of getting their content in front of the new and right set of eyes to help them maintain and grow their business. I believe that you have to be either the actual superhero or at least the sidekick like Batman’s Robin.

I believe that superheroes are not just fictional characters like Batman or Superman. I know that they are more like you and me. We are heroes if we learn and grow from our experiences and use them to help others better their lives.

A question often asked is whether it was easier to reach your buying audience in the past or today. My answer is both. Less choice meant you had less to learn but took a more significant risk. With more choices, you have more to learn and often have to use more marketing platforms to reach the same audience, but you run the risk that multiple could fail simultaneously.

The one thing that has never changed is the audience. What you were selling in the past and what you are selling today may have changed, but people are still people. People may have changed where and what they are paying attention to, but little has changed in what attracts and motivates them to act regarding ads and messages.

It may seem that AI is making email and websites less relevant, but due to the evolving landscape in search and answers of AI, I am here to tell you that I find them more important than ever before.

I wish I had a crystal ball to help predict what next new technology will help make your business more successful, but alas I don’t.

As I hinted early on, the one thing that does not change is people. They may change what tools they use or how they consume content, but they are still people. They have needs, biases, and emotions that can be directed and affected by what and how you communicate to them.

There is a debate about whether and when AI content will be as good or better than human-generated content.

I believe that it will always be a mix of both.

The two lists above (the binary choices and 3 options) were generated by AI. I rearranged and edited them to my liking so they fit better with the concepts I am trying to get across today. Although there are people in marketing who will use AI to generate content and post that as humans, I believe that both are needed, necessary, and can co-exist in marketing to help create awareness, educate, and generate sales.

If someone is an expert in websites or social media, they will argue that they are more important. Then, people who work in the AI world will say that AI is faster and more cost-efficient than the human version of content creation.