Anti-Viral: A Human Approach to Marketing

Make Me Care

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 to you, you don't lead with the ending. You go "you're not gonna believe what just happened," and the person leans in. That instinct is the same one your marketing keeps forgetting it has. Your marketing doesn't have to be about your product at all. Nike isn't selling shoes, they're selling the dream of what happens when you keep pushing. Patagonia talks about the planet more than the jackets. When a company tells you what it cares about and you care about the same thing, you don't feel sold to. You feel found. That's what branding actually is, by the way. Not the logo or the colours. The story underneath. I also get into two ways I build stories, the three-act structure and a way of working backwards from the end, so you walk away with something to try this week and not just a nice idea. Because the goal underneath all of it is simple. You want people to remember you and choose you over the noise. And the only way that happens is if you make them feel something first. This show is hosted by Jiun Liao, owner of Lobo Media Marketing: Website: https://lobomedia.ca [https://lobomedia.ca] Newsletter: https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/ [https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/] Chapters 02:02 Storytelling Is in Our DNA 05:11 Marketing and Storytelling 07:17 Storytelling Examples in Marketing 11:28 It Doesn't Have to Be About Your Product 13:28 What Branding Actually Is 16:30 The Three-Act Structure 20:13 Building Stories Backwards 23:32 Making People Feel Something

Busy Is Not a Strategy

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 like it's the same thing as strategy, and nobody told you it wasn't because everybody around you was doing the same thing. In this episode, I get into what strategy actually is and why it's different from planning, from tactics, and from just doing more of everything. I talk about why the marketing funnel, a model that's over 126 years old, doesn't fit the world we live in anymore. And I introduce a different way of thinking about it that I call world building. Instead of a linear path that you push people through, you build a world they choose to explore. Like a choose your own adventure book where every path eventually leads somewhere meaningful. I also talk about why your audience is a community whether you think of them that way or not, why 85% of the people who are perfect for you aren't ready to buy right now, and what marketing strategy actually looks like when you stop confusing it with being busy. --- This show is hosted by Jiun Liao, owner of Lobo Media Marketing: website: https://lobomedia.ca [https://lobomedia.ca] newsletter: https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/ [https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/] --- Chapters 00:00 Strategy Is the Thing Nobody Does 01:30 Strategy Is Context 03:00 Strategy vs. Planning 05:05 Busy Is Not a Strategy 07:48 The 126-Year-Old Funnel 15:33 World Building 22:06 Your Audience Is a Community 28:56 The 85% Aren't Ready Yet 31:08 What Marketing Strategy Actually Is

Zero To One

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 notice it. In this episode, I talk about what actually matters when you're going from zero to one. Why picking one or two channels beats spreading yourself across everything. Why being yourself saves more time than building some corporate alter ego. I get into the only number that matters in your reports and a concept I think every new business owner needs: the kill switch. A way to know exactly when something isn't working so you stop dragging it along out of hope. The gap between zero and one doesn't close by doing more. It closes by doing less, better, and showing up again tomorrow. --- This show is hosted by Jiun Liao, owner of Lobo Media Marketing: website: https://lobomedia.ca [https://lobomedia.ca] newsletter: https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/ [https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/] --- Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:59 A Brief History of the Internet 05:41 Why Everyone Sounds the Same 10:02 How Algorithms Got Here 12:30 AI and the Content Flood 14:49 The Attention Paradox 17:23 Small Communities and the Rise of Real 23:19 The Meaning Economy 27:16 Perspective Over Productivity 30:27 How to Show Up Differently

The Quiet Advantage

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 to value things that took time to make. I think we're at the beginning of a different kind of economy. Not the attention economy we've been talking about for the last decade. Something that runs on meaning instead. In this episode, I trace how the internet went from a loose collection of microblogs and genuine curiosity to what it is today. I get into why loud used to be a competitive advantage and why it isn't anymore. And I talk about what standing out actually looks like now, which has almost nothing to do with how much you can produce. --- This show is hosted by Jiun Liao, owner of Lobo Media Marketing: website: https://lobomedia.ca [https://lobomedia.ca] newsletter: https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/ [https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/] --- Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:59 A Brief History of the Internet 05:41 Why Everyone Sounds the Same 10:02 How Algorithms Got Here 12:30 AI and the Content Flood 14:49 The Attention Paradox 17:23 Small Communities and the Rise of Real 23:19 The Meaning Economy 27:16 Perspective Over Productivity 30:27 How to Show Up Differently

The Algorithm Trap

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, which I call Human Marketing. It's less a strategy and more a reorientation. It starts with one simple premise: people are not numbers, and treating them like people is actually good marketing. I talk about why most small businesses grow through referrals at the start, and how that same relationship logic gets abandoned the moment they try to scale. Why reports are useful but deeply limited. Why marketing and sales are not the same job. And why the best metric you can build toward isn't clicks or impressions, but trust. --- This show is hosted by Jiun Liao, owner of Lobo Media Marketing: website: https://lobomedia.ca [https://lobomedia.ca] newsletter: https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/ [https://lobomedia.ca/subscribe/] --- Chapters 00:00 The Algorithm Trap: Understanding Marketing's Disconnect 02:36 Human Marketing: Building Relationships Over Numbers 08:56 The Stages of Relationship Building in Marketing 17:45 The Shift from In-Person to Online Marketing 23:55 Being Real: The Key to Standing Out 26:01 Navigating the Post-Algorithmic Marketing Landscape 30:03 Intentional Marketing: Quality Over Quantity