Digital Ad Market Update: 10/6 - 10/20 2023
Joe and producer Alex are in the studio to break down the latest marketing, tech, and culture news. Hear it all in 33 minutes or less.
Top Stories:
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are colliding fan bases and the NFL is obsessed.
Sports betting scandals, Sunday Ticket confusion, and Toy Story football? All in store for this episode.
Amazon has its sights set on the world. Elon Musk and 'X' want to control your identity.
Articles Mentioned:
ESPN Bet: https://bit.ly/472duRT
Amazon Will Make Your Ads: https://bit.ly/48Z97J3
Elon Tests Anti-Bot Theory: https://bit.ly/4951xg7
Joe and producer Alex are in the studio to break down the latest marketing, tech, and culture news. Hear it all in 33 minutes or less.
Top Stories:
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are colliding fan bases and the NFL is obsessed.
Sports betting scandals, Sunday Ticket confusion, and Toy Story football? All in store for this episode.
Amazon has its sights set on the world. Elon Musk and 'X' want to control your identity.
Articles Mentioned:
ESPN Bet: https://bit.ly/472duRT
Amazon Will Make Your Ads: https://bit.ly/48Z97J3
Elon Tests Anti-Bot Theory: https://bit.ly/4951xg7
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Today on this long forthcoming episode ofthe of Record podcast, we will talk
about the NFL and that dude andthat chick who are apparently dating, Elon
musk x plans, where is Amazongoing with prime ads, and how is
sports gambling going to change sports?All on this week's of Record. Of
(00:33):
Record is a podcast focus on themarketing and advertising industry from the perspective of
industry expert Joe Clements. Joe Clementsis a co founder of Strategic Digital Services,
a digital marketing firm based in Tallahassee, Florida, and founded in twenty
fourteen. I'm Joe Clements and thisis the podcast of Record. Everybody.
(01:14):
Welcome to this week's episode of theof Record podcast. Back from a six
week hiatus. How long? Sixseven? Yeah, we moved offices,
had to tear down the studio,rebuild the studio. It's a whole event.
But we're back. We're here now. No Kirsten, I think she'll
(01:36):
join us for the next episode,but it's just me now, so you
gotta deal with it. Alex.Have you found the NFL season to date
good? Yeah, Jaguars are doingwell, so that means it's good.
The toy story broadcast. Did youdid you catch this a few weeks ago?
(01:59):
Yeah, they edited the game.It wasn't edited. It was almost
like an ar The game was playedin real time and you could watch this
feed that looked like it was takingplace in Andy's bedroom. Huh. Yeah,
so just like all the players justhad an avatar that looked like a
toy. Interesting. Yeah. SoI think the NFL this year, you
(02:24):
know, which always kind of setsthe standard for sports media, has after
a couple of years of looking prettybad. It had a tough time with
COVID and the empty stadiums and thepolitical stuff and got hammered and had the
lowest viewed Super Bowl in twenty twentyone and then didn't really recover much in
(02:45):
twenty twenty two, has finally startedto dig back up into some cultural relevancy.
I think the toy story thing.There's like a billion games internationally this
year. There's Germany, like tenLondon games going on. The of course,
(03:06):
what's the other story in the NFL. There's like a tight end and
some chick oh Taylor Swift ah thatone, yeah, which we've talked about
this. My conspiracy theory on thishas always been that this is a little
bit romance and a little bit ofvery intelligent pr play by someone at the
NFL, and don't at me onthis. Taylor Swift has very sophisticated people
(03:30):
working for her, like they knowwhat they're doing. These aren't accidents.
Yeah, it looking At the sametime, Taylor Swift has a movie coming
out or that comes out this week, it's already out, okay, And
Travis Kelce has a documentary about himand his brother that's out on Amazon.
So at the same time they bothhave a movie out, and like,
(03:53):
I don't know, it just feelslike there's a lot of layers there that
are working together. Yeah, probablya lot of stuff that we don't know
about. But yeah, is yourMike on Yeah I think so, Okay,
you were just leaning far from it. Yeah, yeah, I see
the new set up here on thetable as alex Is Mike arm is fully
extended, but it's not right infront of him, so he's got to
really lean down into it, likehe's fielding a ground ball in base.
(04:17):
The NFL is leaning into the TaylorSwift thing. Yeah. I'm getting ads
on Instagram for Eagles jerseys with Swift'sname on. Oh Man Yeah, brutal.
What I think is funny. Hereis the blowback side of this,
and we'll go to this deeper wherewe have Kirsten on She's our pop culture
phenom. Uh. But there's like, the people who are most into it
(04:39):
are the people least likely to everwatch football. They're the yay sports crowd.
Yeah, and then I feel likethe dudes are just like, get
this out of here. I don'tcare what I can't stand anymore? Are
the commentator little like puns? TravisKelty finds a blank space in the end
zone, which is verbatim a quoteI heard on a game. But I
(05:04):
think it's pretty clear the NFL hasclawed its way back from the brink of
falling as the top professional sport inthe United States. Yeah, and I
haven't seen I'll pull some ratings numbersfor next episode, but I haven't seen
ratings. But my guess is they'reup now. The problem I think the
(05:25):
NFL has on the marketing side thatis frustrating as a fan. It is
really yellow Stoning itself. Do youget what I mean by that? Yellowstone
has this bizarre arrangement on who hasrights to show the back in the day
when they were still making new ones, they had the if you wanted to
(05:46):
watch prior seasons, the old seasonswere on Peacock. If you wanted to
watch the current season, that wasonly on Paramount Network. So they broke
up the the streaming rights and theshowing rights in such a way it was
confusing how to watch it. TheNFL this year, I've noticed, is
so fragmented in terms of where youhave. Some games are just on ESPN,
(06:12):
plus some games are just on NFLNetwork. Then of course you have
your CBS, your Fox games.You have your Monday night game on ESPN,
you have your Thursday night game onAmazon streaming only, uh, you
have your Sunday night game on NBCand Peacock. It's it is uh much
(06:35):
too much. Yeah Yeah, toplaying that many different time slots, that
many nights of the week, Ithink that's maybe the biggest challenge they have,
and it has a u We've talkedabout this before, but as a
Sunday Ticket YouTube TV owner, oneof the one of the issues there is
you pay a premium for Sunday Ticket. But I think the average NFL team
(06:59):
is playing two games that are ina non traditional time slot so they're not
a Sunday one or Sunday four,And then you have some teams that play
four five games outside of that timeslot. So if you're buying Sunday ticket
for a team you're following, it'sactually less valuable the better your team is.
Yeah, sounds like a bad dealfor some people. Yeah, but
(07:21):
at least you can get it nowwithout a satellite. That's true. So
that's the uh, you know,the biggest kind of culture sports marketing.
Do you see anything else going onin the NFL worth noting? I don't
think so. Yeah, it's justno, you know Taylor. I mean,
we'll forget totally about the Taylor SwiftTravis Kelse thing in another month,
(07:42):
but right now, it's big anotherthing happening in sports this year, and
I think that you can see andI guess it's been ten years now since
the rollout of Daily Fantasy when DailyFantasy FanDuel DraftKings, we're spending literally tens
of million dollars an afternoon when theywere growing their apps. I think this
(08:05):
was twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,maybe so eight years ago. We've matured,
So I don't know if mature isthe right word depends on where you
are in sports gaming past that wherethe ads you see now are for straight
up sports books, and there isa lot of them on TV and they're
available in some states not available inothers. Speaking of something that's confusing for
(08:28):
the consumer. But I think thebiggest deal in that space was announced earlier
this year over the summer, andit's that there's going to be ESPN BET,
a new sportsbook partnership with Penn Entertainment, which owns Barstool, which means
that we now have a unlikely partnershipbetween Dave Portnoy and Mickey Mouse. Wow.
(08:52):
Because Penn owns Barstool, which isDave Portnoy. Disney owns ESPN and
ESPN Bet, which means Dave portand Oil and the Mouse are now in
partnership. That's crazy. Yeah.The Pizza Guy now is part of Disney.
Yeah. Uh So. I havemixed thoughts on sports betting and how
(09:16):
it impacts the overall value of theleagues that are involved. What are your
thoughts? Well, I think,on the one hand, it is you
can make this case that it's probablyan economic liberty concern if you want to
spend your money on sports gaming,sports betting. You should be able to
do it. It makes the gamesthat you don't care about more interesting.
(09:39):
You'll follow a game if you havea bet on it, even if it's
just like one dollar, It'll beone hundred percent more into it. So
I think it's good for that.It's probably overall good for TV ratings,
right, because if there's more gamesyou're invested in, you're going to be
more into what you're into. Ithink it is bad for individual teams because
(10:03):
it starts to slowly shift the focusaway from a single team, and this
will be an intergenerational effect. Ithink you know you grew up, Hey,
I'm a fan of a team.I grew up I'm a fan of
a team. I think, especiallywith football, you run the risk of
doing a little bit of what basketballhas done. And basketball has become really
(10:24):
a player centric league, so muchso that the next media deals for the
NBA are going to cut players inon the media rights piece of it,
which is I think recognizes the realityof how those leagues work. But in
football, you're going to have apiece of this that if you degrade the
(10:48):
fan loyalty to a specific team,and it just becomes more league centric.
I don't actually know what that endsup looking like for the value of of
the team in the future. Andso is there a fifty year horizon where
you just look at the NFL askind of like a travel league almost It
(11:09):
rolls into your city, they playlike a little tournament in your city,
and then you know, roll outHarlem globetrotter style where it doesn't matter if
the team is a fixed to agiven city. Yeah that's weird. Yeah
it is weird, but you yeah, traveling circus and maybe they still have
because they have these big h youknow arenas they play in in stadiums.
(11:31):
Maybe you still have they're fixed toa city. But like, you're just
as likely to be a Las VegasRaiders fan if you live in you know,
Chicago as you are if you livein Las Vegas. You start to
break the geographic connection. Huh.The other thing that is I think an
(11:54):
inevitability is there's going to be atsome point, I don't know when,
I don't know who, there willbe a major sports fixing scandal. The
money to be made in betting insports will vary quickly in the next few
(12:16):
years for people involved. Assistant coaches, bench players, kickers, people who
make good money are going to havethis. There's going to be this like
moral challenge there where they can placea bet and make better money but also
influence how the bet turns out.And I'm not saying you'll have people throwing
(12:41):
games necessarily, but you'll have spreads. Right, So what if you have
a kicker and he's bet the spread, his team's already winning, and he
just decides, maybe I missed thiskick, so we stay within the spread
and I think it starts, orreferees can get into this, or offensive
coordinat or deep or position coaches.Yeah, And I don't know how you
(13:05):
you avoid that. Probably just areally harsh penalty for the first person who
gets caught doing it. Yeah.The problem is, I don't know how
do you make the penalty harsh enoughthat you potentially overcome a multi million dollar
windfall? Death row death row.The NFL gives you the death penalty.
(13:30):
Uh, so you know, rollingin from from that, And I think
what you're going to see in thesports betting world has the smart TV streaming
app world comes more into play,is you're going to see the ability to
place bets right on your TV screen. Uh And they haven't gone into this
(13:50):
yet, but I think Amazon's bestposition and we'll get into my uh my
Amazon eats the world theory here ina minute. Can you hear my dog
snoring? Oh yeah, oh yeah, he's going he's going out of hey
dog. Thank you. The SoAmazon is going to start having Prime TV
(14:11):
ads. So we've talked about thisa long time that eventually Amazon was going
to flip the switch on ads onPrime and it was going to be a
major player in TV ads because thevalue of a TV ad on Amazon is
not only can you show the product, but people can click the button,
buy the product, tell Alexa tobuy the product. It can beat your
door the next day. So AmazonTV ads big deal. But Amazon is
(14:37):
saying if you buy, commercials willmake them for you. So Amazon will
will make your ad if you buy, So they'll take a loss on that
for the first couple of people whodo it. I think it's part a
little bit of a press stunt andpart a way. So what they have
to do Amazon to be successful atselling these ads. The goal is you
(15:03):
have a really good targeting, reallyniche audiences. It is not actually that
valuable for like Procter and Gamble tobuy an ad on Amazon and target it
because it's a mass market it's amass market product. They're just as valuable
buying ads on nationwide broadcast TV.It is most valuable for a niche brand
(15:28):
that sells in a tight geographic areathat sells to a small number of people,
you know, like people who Whittlewould in the southeast right, like
who sell there in Those brands probablyhave some experience advertising digitally, but probably
have never produced a TV ad becauseit never made sense for them to produce
a TV ad. So in orderto introduce and unlock those company budgets that
(15:54):
are probably in the total half millionto two three million dollars a year range,
you have to be able to getthem in doing a TV ad like
that. And these are also brandsthat may not have even done YouTube.
They may only have done very basicsocial media ads, or if they did
YouTube, they were just running theirsocial media ad on YouTube. So I
(16:15):
think that's what Amazon is trying todo is lost leader, get them in,
run the ad, have some examplesof what creative works so they can
show other potential clients. Put itout in a toolkit smart so the Amazon
eats the world theory. Have youheard me say this before? I think
(16:37):
so. Yeah, It's it's basicallythis that Amazon is the number two or
three player and almost everything you lookat, music, video, advertising,
They're now the number three behind Metaand Google. You know, consumer pathckage,
(17:00):
good products. They have the AmazonPrime brand. Logistics. They're the
third biggest I think, behind FedExand ups in terms of doing logistics and
grocery. I think they're the fourthor fifth largest grocer with Whole Foods,
which they own. So they haveall these disparate parts that so far are
mostly unconnected from one another. There'sa little bit of synergy, but they
(17:26):
haven't started to connect them in Ohand I forgot to mention they also own
the digital infrastructure. All this stuffruns on with the cloud service Amazon Web
Services. So Amazon is very smartin how they go about it. And
they haven't plugged their things into oneanother yet, or they do it very
(17:48):
slowly so they don't attract too muchattention from regulators. How do you feel
about Amazon taking over the world?Has an Amazon shareholder, great, has
somebody who does anything else in theworld. It will probably if it doesn't
now and this hasn't been the companies. This hasn't been the company's way of
(18:14):
doing business, of squashing competition.In fact, like Amazon wanted they could
close Amazon to everything besides Amazon brands, but they still allow competing brands to
sell on Amazon, and they haven't. And so I think they've acted relatively
non monopolistically. But I think inevitably, if the power exists, it will
(18:37):
be abused. And so what they'llstart doing is plugging pieces into each other.
And that TV piece, I thinkis a flywheel part. You have
Prime, you have Amazon Store,and you also have Amazon Ads. When
you plug those things together, youinstantly make the most valuable ad product that
(19:00):
exists today. It has the targetingcapability and the direct response of social media
and digital ads, and it hasthe big screen in your face, totally
immersive properties of television. When youcombine those things together, you get something
(19:22):
that is enormously powerful, very measurable. You can see how many people click
from your ad, how many peopleordered from your ad, and then also
scalable, So you go from beingable to sell to maybe a few thousand
advertisers in the country to being ableto sell to perhaps a few hundred thousand
advertisers in the country. So mostof the clients we work with can't buy
(19:47):
TV at a significant scale. Allof the clients we work with, however,
could buy Amazon Prime ads at asignificant scale, because that scale is
if you spend ten dollars, youcan reach the right audience and you can
get ten dollars of value. Theway most TV works is you have to
have this minimum threshold before you startto see any value. So that's what
(20:10):
Amazon's doing, and then I thinkthe next step for them is to start
to disintermediate brands from their consumer.So an example of how this works is,
so you're watching You're watching the show, and in the show there is
you know, let's say it's noteven let's say it's product placement. Amazon
(20:33):
makes a show and there's a dudein the show and he's wearing this cool
jacket and Amazon lets you know,hey, click, you can buy this
jacket. But Amazon's only pushing thatjacket to you because they know you're a
loyal like I don't know Patagonia jacketwearer. And what they're going to do
is use that they know what you'realready buying, they know what you're interested
(20:53):
into, and now They know howto position a product in front of you,
to disintermediate you from a brand,from a brand that they don't own,
to a brand that they do own. Yeah, and they can do
that with launching into Charge, andthey can do that with soap, they
can do that with everything. Yeah, that's kind of smart having it all
like integrated like that. Yeah,well that's monopoly. You just discover monopoly.
(21:18):
But there's whole accounts on like Instagramthat basically just let you recreate the
outfit from somebody on a TV show, like, oh, here's what he
wore. Yep, this three hundreddollars shirt, two hundred dollars shoes.
So it's gonna get even easier.Amazon's just doing that from the get go.
Yeah, we talked about this mantwo or three years ago when Amazon
first picked up Thursday at Football,that it would be like, you know,
(21:40):
a team would be wearing a newjersey and you'd be able to click
and order that jersey. And that'swhat they're doing right now. You can
you know, it'll push hey,buy your team gear here. They should
get into public transportation. I mean, they're all about logistics. Since yeah,
I don't think there's much money.No, yeah, I think the
(22:03):
money is moving around stuff, notpeople. I think the future is like
high speed rails or something expensive.Yeah. Yeah, it seems Amazon's willing
to take like the red, likebe in the red a little bit until
a lot of bit. Yeah,that's what that's what they'll do. But
I think the business models you havethere, this is why you know UPS
(22:25):
is more profitable than Delta Airlines.Delta moves people. It's expensive to move
people way, way, more way, cheaper to move products, it's true,
and better margin to move products.All right, X for when do
we have to when do we stopsaying formally noticed Twitter? I think there's
(22:48):
people who will never never never letnever let it go like never. Uh.
So X is experimenting in Philippines andNew Zealand, charging a one dollar
annual fee to new users, hasa way to filter out bots. Okay,
which goes to this must be thetheory episode we've talked about the X
(23:14):
theory, which is the X theoryis what X is really doing is not
building a social media platform about youbeing able to say whatever you want.
What it's doing is it's building anidentity validation tool that can be hooked into
anything else to validate who you are. And the future of being able to
(23:36):
say what you want on the Internetis going to be connected with you proving
that you are a legit individual humanbeing. So the degree to which you
can show that, yes, I'mJoe Clements, you can validate that I
exist and I live here and Ihave you know, full legal rights is
(23:57):
useful not only for like has aspeech argument, It's also valuable for keeping
platforms clean of bots. It's alsovaluable for doing things like going through the
airport and you know, buying aconcert ticket and signing into other applications who
(24:17):
don't have identity verification tools. Andso the key thing of X is going
to be I think selling identity varicationservices is an API to other companies.
Yeah, that's pretty safe, bet. Yeah. So you go through the
airport, pull up your X app, scan your x app, and you're
(24:38):
through. If LinkedIn doesn't beat themto the punch, yeah, because I
know they partnered with clear on somethingidentity verification, and they'll be competitors in
there. Yeah. And then theother thing with X is going to be
once you have identity and you havefinancial information, is going to be money
(25:00):
transmission. So imagine you combine thatwith like venmo. So if you like
something you see, you can likegive it a tip. You can tip
it like, you know, atenth of a penny, because you're not
you're just moving fake numbers around insidethe app. So you don't have to
(25:22):
do it in penny increments. Youcan do it in fractions of a penny
increment. So that is where Xis going. The like so and so
said this on X is not thenot the main thing that it's going to
become interesting. I'm gonna leave acouple of these here for when we have
(25:45):
Kirsten in the What have you seenon like brand responses on Israel Palestine?
Uh, I've seen a lot ofNFL teams speaking out about it, yeah,
like denouncing terrorism and all that.But businesses I've I don't know if
(26:07):
they've actually made any statements. Yeah, I think most of them have navigated
it pretty well as far as Ican see, and my pretty well.
I mean, like I don't needto know where McDonald's is on terrorism.
Yeah, yeah, like they don't. We don't need to know your opinion
about it. The exception would beif I had like a if I had
(26:30):
a business in Miami Beach. Idefinitely do it because I have a large,
a big part of my customer base. Are you know, in that
part of Florida, they're not onlyJewish, they probably also hold an Israeli
passport, So like I would doit down there if that was a big
(26:51):
part of my customer base, forsure, it would make sense. Most
brands is like anything else. Idon't know where getting into it really gives
them anything except that everybody feels compelledto ask everybody else to make a statement.
Yeah, like every celebrity feels theneed to make a statement. Yeah,
it's like we don't care. Butalso, like my assumption was that
(27:17):
you would not support people paragalating intomusic festivals and shooting the place up like
that would be My default is thatlike you're there, no like this statement.
On the other side, if you'relike, oh yeah, I'm good
with that, well that's notable.Probably deserves a statement. But you know,
everybody else who's like that's terrible,I don't necessarily from a business perspective
(27:41):
or a brand perspective, we assumeyou think it's terrible. Yeah, stop
using you know, like slave laborin other countries and true. Another bad
part about this is that there seemsto be two equally devoted sides to it
that are like arguing to the daypretty much just about who's right who's in
(28:03):
the wrong. Oh, you meanpolitically in the US or physically in Israel,
like on Twitter, Like there's thereseems to be two sides to this
coin that are like equally fighting,like no, like you're corrupt, no,
no use. Yeah. Yeah,I just don't know if it's good
for any brand to get into it, because what are you going to get.
Like I said, if you havea large Jewish customer base, you
(28:29):
should do it. It makes totalsense in that scenario to do it any
other brand. I don't know thatyou really get a win out of it
one way or the other. Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe there's
maybe you've got board members or investors, or you have like you know,
Israeli venture capital funds or like,you know, I can see something unless
(28:49):
you have a really compelling reason,like the diner down the street, I
don't know they need to take astance on it, Nor does my soap
brand. No, or as muchas like the only stance you should take
is like denouncing violence like that that'sall you gotta do. Yeah, even
it is funny to me. Andthis has to just be a product of
(29:14):
not just media coverage, but thatnow there's this record in social media of
what you say, and so itseems to be like important to like just
have things on the record for likeposterity or signaling or some reason that like
fifteen years ago really didn't exist.The only time I can remember prior to
(29:37):
maybe twenty twenty ever really seeing itwas was nine to eleven. Like after
nine to eleven, yea, therewas you know, that was happening.
But otherwise like not really no,you know. The other this the other
kind of brilliant thing about X though, is anything that happens it's part of
(30:00):
the story. Oh well, wheneversomething happens and people are debating it,
there's then a debate on, well, one is they said it on X,
and two there's a debate on whetherthey should have been allowed to say
it on X. Yeah, whichjust draws attention to X. Yeah,
(30:22):
that's true. Now I'm starting tofeel compelled to denounced terrorism on this podcast.
Well, we need to put adisclaimer at the beginning. We denounced
terrorism, We denounced rorism and violenceby any party. Right, that's the
correct thing to say. Well,this is the issue, right, Like
(30:42):
you don't actually know what the correctthing is to say. Yeah, which
is why, like I'm always justas a business owner loathe to jump into
this stuff because like you think you'resaying the right thing and then three days
later, like you actually didn't saythe right thing. Yeah, yeah,
you would be like just justified sometimesyeah. Yeah. So like like it's
(31:06):
just a difficult situation to find,you know what, what is the win
for anybody? All right, everybody, thank you for listening to this episode
of The of Record. We willbe back doing a weekly podcast through the
end of the year. If youliked what you heard, please leave us
a review on your podcast app ofchoice. This has been a record.
(31:49):
Of Record is hosted by me JoeClements with the assistance of producer Alex Ryan
Hard. Of Record is produced atthe Trailway Studio in Tallahas. This episode
was edited by producer Alex Reinhard.Our theme music is composed and performed by
Rob Goki. Special thanks to ourentire team here at SDS. You can
(32:10):
see more information about the show onour website. Podcast a record dot Com.
As always, we'd appreciate your reviewsand ratings in your podcast app of
choice. These ratings and reviews helpmore people discover the show, which helps
us keep delivering quality content each week. Thanks for listening.
Today on this long forthcoming episode ofthe of Record podcast, we will talk
about the NFL and that dude andthat chick who are apparently dating, Elon
musk x plans, where is Amazongoing with prime ads, and how is
sports gambling going to change sports?All on this week's of Record. Of
(00:33):
Record is a podcast focus on themarketing and advertising industry from the perspective of
industry expert Joe Clements. Joe Clementsis a co founder of Strategic Digital Services,
a digital marketing firm based in Tallahassee, Florida, and founded in twenty
fourteen. I'm Joe Clements and thisis the podcast of Record. Everybody.
(01:14):
Welcome to this week's episode of theof Record podcast. Back from a six
week hiatus. How long? Sixseven? Yeah, we moved offices,
had to tear down the studio,rebuild the studio. It's a whole event.
But we're back. We're here now. No Kirsten, I think she'll
(01:36):
join us for the next episode,but it's just me now, so you
gotta deal with it. Alex.Have you found the NFL season to date
good? Yeah, Jaguars are doingwell, so that means it's good.
The toy story broadcast. Did youdid you catch this a few weeks ago?
(01:59):
Yeah, they edited the game.It wasn't edited. It was almost
like an ar The game was playedin real time and you could watch this
feed that looked like it was takingplace in Andy's bedroom. Huh. Yeah,
so just like all the players justhad an avatar that looked like a
toy. Interesting. Yeah. SoI think the NFL this year, you
(02:24):
know, which always kind of setsthe standard for sports media, has after
a couple of years of looking prettybad. It had a tough time with
COVID and the empty stadiums and thepolitical stuff and got hammered and had the
lowest viewed Super Bowl in twenty twentyone and then didn't really recover much in
(02:45):
twenty twenty two, has finally startedto dig back up into some cultural relevancy.
I think the toy story thing.There's like a billion games internationally this
year. There's Germany, like tenLondon games going on. The of course,
(03:06):
what's the other story in the NFL. There's like a tight end and
some chick oh Taylor Swift ah thatone, yeah, which we've talked about
this. My conspiracy theory on thishas always been that this is a little
bit romance and a little bit ofvery intelligent pr play by someone at the
NFL, and don't at me onthis. Taylor Swift has very sophisticated people
(03:30):
working for her, like they knowwhat they're doing. These aren't accidents.
Yeah, it looking At the sametime, Taylor Swift has a movie coming
out or that comes out this week, it's already out, okay, And
Travis Kelce has a documentary about himand his brother that's out on Amazon.
So at the same time they bothhave a movie out, and like,
(03:53):
I don't know, it just feelslike there's a lot of layers there that
are working together. Yeah, probablya lot of stuff that we don't know
about. But yeah, is yourMike on Yeah I think so, Okay,
you were just leaning far from it. Yeah, yeah, I see
the new set up here on thetable as alex Is Mike arm is fully
extended, but it's not right infront of him, so he's got to
really lean down into it, likehe's fielding a ground ball in base.
(04:17):
The NFL is leaning into the TaylorSwift thing. Yeah. I'm getting ads
on Instagram for Eagles jerseys with Swift'sname on. Oh Man Yeah, brutal.
What I think is funny. Hereis the blowback side of this,
and we'll go to this deeper wherewe have Kirsten on She's our pop culture
phenom. Uh. But there's like, the people who are most into it
(04:39):
are the people least likely to everwatch football. They're the yay sports crowd.
Yeah, and then I feel likethe dudes are just like, get
this out of here. I don'tcare what I can't stand anymore? Are
the commentator little like puns? TravisKelty finds a blank space in the end
zone, which is verbatim a quoteI heard on a game. But I
(05:04):
think it's pretty clear the NFL hasclawed its way back from the brink of
falling as the top professional sport inthe United States. Yeah, and I
haven't seen I'll pull some ratings numbersfor next episode, but I haven't seen
ratings. But my guess is they'reup now. The problem I think the
(05:25):
NFL has on the marketing side thatis frustrating as a fan. It is
really yellow Stoning itself. Do youget what I mean by that? Yellowstone
has this bizarre arrangement on who hasrights to show the back in the day
when they were still making new ones, they had the if you wanted to
(05:46):
watch prior seasons, the old seasonswere on Peacock. If you wanted to
watch the current season, that wasonly on Paramount Network. So they broke
up the the streaming rights and theshowing rights in such a way it was
confusing how to watch it. TheNFL this year, I've noticed, is
so fragmented in terms of where youhave. Some games are just on ESPN,
(06:12):
plus some games are just on NFLNetwork. Then of course you have
your CBS, your Fox games.You have your Monday night game on ESPN,
you have your Thursday night game onAmazon streaming only, uh, you
have your Sunday night game on NBCand Peacock. It's it is uh much
(06:35):
too much. Yeah Yeah, toplaying that many different time slots, that
many nights of the week, Ithink that's maybe the biggest challenge they have,
and it has a u We've talkedabout this before, but as a
Sunday Ticket YouTube TV owner, oneof the one of the issues there is
you pay a premium for Sunday Ticket. But I think the average NFL team
(06:59):
is playing two games that are ina non traditional time slot so they're not
a Sunday one or Sunday four,And then you have some teams that play
four five games outside of that timeslot. So if you're buying Sunday ticket
for a team you're following, it'sactually less valuable the better your team is.
Yeah, sounds like a bad dealfor some people. Yeah, but
(07:21):
at least you can get it nowwithout a satellite. That's true. So
that's the uh, you know,the biggest kind of culture sports marketing.
Do you see anything else going onin the NFL worth noting? I don't
think so. Yeah, it's justno, you know Taylor. I mean,
we'll forget totally about the Taylor SwiftTravis Kelse thing in another month,
(07:42):
but right now, it's big anotherthing happening in sports this year, and
I think that you can see andI guess it's been ten years now since
the rollout of Daily Fantasy when DailyFantasy FanDuel DraftKings, we're spending literally tens
of million dollars an afternoon when theywere growing their apps. I think this
(08:05):
was twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,maybe so eight years ago. We've matured,
So I don't know if mature isthe right word depends on where you
are in sports gaming past that wherethe ads you see now are for straight
up sports books, and there isa lot of them on TV and they're
available in some states not available inothers. Speaking of something that's confusing for
(08:28):
the consumer. But I think thebiggest deal in that space was announced earlier
this year over the summer, andit's that there's going to be ESPN BET,
a new sportsbook partnership with Penn Entertainment, which owns Barstool, which means
that we now have a unlikely partnershipbetween Dave Portnoy and Mickey Mouse. Wow.
(08:52):
Because Penn owns Barstool, which isDave Portnoy. Disney owns ESPN and
ESPN Bet, which means Dave portand Oil and the Mouse are now in
partnership. That's crazy. Yeah.The Pizza Guy now is part of Disney.
Yeah. Uh So. I havemixed thoughts on sports betting and how
(09:16):
it impacts the overall value of theleagues that are involved. What are your
thoughts? Well, I think,on the one hand, it is you
can make this case that it's probablyan economic liberty concern if you want to
spend your money on sports gaming,sports betting. You should be able to
do it. It makes the gamesthat you don't care about more interesting.
(09:39):
You'll follow a game if you havea bet on it, even if it's
just like one dollar, It'll beone hundred percent more into it. So
I think it's good for that.It's probably overall good for TV ratings,
right, because if there's more gamesyou're invested in, you're going to be
more into what you're into. Ithink it is bad for individual teams because
(10:03):
it starts to slowly shift the focusaway from a single team, and this
will be an intergenerational effect. Ithink you know you grew up, Hey,
I'm a fan of a team.I grew up I'm a fan of
a team. I think, especiallywith football, you run the risk of
doing a little bit of what basketballhas done. And basketball has become really
(10:24):
a player centric league, so muchso that the next media deals for the
NBA are going to cut players inon the media rights piece of it,
which is I think recognizes the realityof how those leagues work. But in
football, you're going to have apiece of this that if you degrade the
(10:48):
fan loyalty to a specific team,and it just becomes more league centric.
I don't actually know what that endsup looking like for the value of of
the team in the future. Andso is there a fifty year horizon where
you just look at the NFL askind of like a travel league almost It
(11:09):
rolls into your city, they playlike a little tournament in your city,
and then you know, roll outHarlem globetrotter style where it doesn't matter if
the team is a fixed to agiven city. Yeah that's weird. Yeah
it is weird, but you yeah, traveling circus and maybe they still have
because they have these big h youknow arenas they play in in stadiums.
(11:31):
Maybe you still have they're fixed toa city. But like, you're just
as likely to be a Las VegasRaiders fan if you live in you know,
Chicago as you are if you livein Las Vegas. You start to
break the geographic connection. Huh.The other thing that is I think an
(11:54):
inevitability is there's going to be atsome point, I don't know when,
I don't know who, there willbe a major sports fixing scandal. The
money to be made in betting insports will vary quickly in the next few
(12:16):
years for people involved. Assistant coaches, bench players, kickers, people who
make good money are going to havethis. There's going to be this like
moral challenge there where they can placea bet and make better money but also
influence how the bet turns out.And I'm not saying you'll have people throwing
(12:41):
games necessarily, but you'll have spreads. Right, So what if you have
a kicker and he's bet the spread, his team's already winning, and he
just decides, maybe I missed thiskick, so we stay within the spread
and I think it starts, orreferees can get into this, or offensive
coordinat or deep or position coaches.Yeah, And I don't know how you
(13:05):
you avoid that. Probably just areally harsh penalty for the first person who
gets caught doing it. Yeah.The problem is, I don't know how
do you make the penalty harsh enoughthat you potentially overcome a multi million dollar
windfall? Death row death row.The NFL gives you the death penalty.
(13:30):
Uh, so you know, rollingin from from that, And I think
what you're going to see in thesports betting world has the smart TV streaming
app world comes more into play,is you're going to see the ability to
place bets right on your TV screen. Uh And they haven't gone into this
(13:50):
yet, but I think Amazon's bestposition and we'll get into my uh my
Amazon eats the world theory here ina minute. Can you hear my dog
snoring? Oh yeah, oh yeah, he's going he's going out of hey
dog. Thank you. The SoAmazon is going to start having Prime TV
(14:11):
ads. So we've talked about thisa long time that eventually Amazon was going
to flip the switch on ads onPrime and it was going to be a
major player in TV ads because thevalue of a TV ad on Amazon is
not only can you show the product, but people can click the button,
buy the product, tell Alexa tobuy the product. It can beat your
door the next day. So AmazonTV ads big deal. But Amazon is
(14:37):
saying if you buy, commercials willmake them for you. So Amazon will
will make your ad if you buy, So they'll take a loss on that
for the first couple of people whodo it. I think it's part a
little bit of a press stunt andpart a way. So what they have
to do Amazon to be successful atselling these ads. The goal is you
(15:03):
have a really good targeting, reallyniche audiences. It is not actually that
valuable for like Procter and Gamble tobuy an ad on Amazon and target it
because it's a mass market it's amass market product. They're just as valuable
buying ads on nationwide broadcast TV.It is most valuable for a niche brand
(15:28):
that sells in a tight geographic areathat sells to a small number of people,
you know, like people who Whittlewould in the southeast right, like
who sell there in Those brands probablyhave some experience advertising digitally, but probably
have never produced a TV ad becauseit never made sense for them to produce
a TV ad. So in orderto introduce and unlock those company budgets that
(15:54):
are probably in the total half millionto two three million dollars a year range,
you have to be able to getthem in doing a TV ad like
that. And these are also brandsthat may not have even done YouTube.
They may only have done very basicsocial media ads, or if they did
YouTube, they were just running theirsocial media ad on YouTube. So I
(16:15):
think that's what Amazon is trying todo is lost leader, get them in,
run the ad, have some examplesof what creative works so they can
show other potential clients. Put itout in a toolkit smart so the Amazon
eats the world theory. Have youheard me say this before? I think
(16:37):
so. Yeah, It's it's basicallythis that Amazon is the number two or
three player and almost everything you lookat, music, video, advertising,
They're now the number three behind Metaand Google. You know, consumer pathckage,
(17:00):
good products. They have the AmazonPrime brand. Logistics. They're the
third biggest I think, behind FedExand ups in terms of doing logistics and
grocery. I think they're the fourthor fifth largest grocer with Whole Foods,
which they own. So they haveall these disparate parts that so far are
mostly unconnected from one another. There'sa little bit of synergy, but they
(17:26):
haven't started to connect them in Ohand I forgot to mention they also own
the digital infrastructure. All this stuffruns on with the cloud service Amazon Web
Services. So Amazon is very smartin how they go about it. And
they haven't plugged their things into oneanother yet, or they do it very
(17:48):
slowly so they don't attract too muchattention from regulators. How do you feel
about Amazon taking over the world?Has an Amazon shareholder, great, has
somebody who does anything else in theworld. It will probably if it doesn't
now and this hasn't been the companies. This hasn't been the company's way of
(18:14):
doing business, of squashing competition.In fact, like Amazon wanted they could
close Amazon to everything besides Amazon brands, but they still allow competing brands to
sell on Amazon, and they haven't. And so I think they've acted relatively
non monopolistically. But I think inevitably, if the power exists, it will
(18:37):
be abused. And so what they'llstart doing is plugging pieces into each other.
And that TV piece, I thinkis a flywheel part. You have
Prime, you have Amazon Store,and you also have Amazon Ads. When
you plug those things together, youinstantly make the most valuable ad product that
(19:00):
exists today. It has the targetingcapability and the direct response of social media
and digital ads, and it hasthe big screen in your face, totally
immersive properties of television. When youcombine those things together, you get something
(19:22):
that is enormously powerful, very measurable. You can see how many people click
from your ad, how many peopleordered from your ad, and then also
scalable, So you go from beingable to sell to maybe a few thousand
advertisers in the country to being ableto sell to perhaps a few hundred thousand
advertisers in the country. So mostof the clients we work with can't buy
(19:47):
TV at a significant scale. Allof the clients we work with, however,
could buy Amazon Prime ads at asignificant scale, because that scale is
if you spend ten dollars, youcan reach the right audience and you can
get ten dollars of value. Theway most TV works is you have to
have this minimum threshold before you startto see any value. So that's what
(20:10):
Amazon's doing, and then I thinkthe next step for them is to start
to disintermediate brands from their consumer.So an example of how this works is,
so you're watching You're watching the show, and in the show there is
you know, let's say it's noteven let's say it's product placement. Amazon
(20:33):
makes a show and there's a dudein the show and he's wearing this cool
jacket and Amazon lets you know,hey, click, you can buy this
jacket. But Amazon's only pushing thatjacket to you because they know you're a
loyal like I don't know Patagonia jacketwearer. And what they're going to do
is use that they know what you'realready buying, they know what you're interested
(20:53):
into, and now They know howto position a product in front of you,
to disintermediate you from a brand,from a brand that they don't own,
to a brand that they do own. Yeah, and they can do
that with launching into Charge, andthey can do that with soap, they
can do that with everything. Yeah, that's kind of smart having it all
like integrated like that. Yeah,well that's monopoly. You just discover monopoly.
(21:18):
But there's whole accounts on like Instagramthat basically just let you recreate the
outfit from somebody on a TV show, like, oh, here's what he
wore. Yep, this three hundreddollars shirt, two hundred dollars shoes.
So it's gonna get even easier.Amazon's just doing that from the get go.
Yeah, we talked about this mantwo or three years ago when Amazon
first picked up Thursday at Football,that it would be like, you know,
(21:40):
a team would be wearing a newjersey and you'd be able to click
and order that jersey. And that'swhat they're doing right now. You can
you know, it'll push hey,buy your team gear here. They should
get into public transportation. I mean, they're all about logistics. Since yeah,
I don't think there's much money.No, yeah, I think the
(22:03):
money is moving around stuff, notpeople. I think the future is like
high speed rails or something expensive.Yeah. Yeah, it seems Amazon's willing
to take like the red, likebe in the red a little bit until
a lot of bit. Yeah,that's what that's what they'll do. But
I think the business models you havethere, this is why you know UPS
(22:25):
is more profitable than Delta Airlines.Delta moves people. It's expensive to move
people way, way, more way, cheaper to move products, it's true,
and better margin to move products.All right, X for when do
we have to when do we stopsaying formally noticed Twitter? I think there's
(22:48):
people who will never never never letnever let it go like never. Uh.
So X is experimenting in Philippines andNew Zealand, charging a one dollar
annual fee to new users, hasa way to filter out bots. Okay,
which goes to this must be thetheory episode we've talked about the X
(23:14):
theory, which is the X theoryis what X is really doing is not
building a social media platform about youbeing able to say whatever you want.
What it's doing is it's building anidentity validation tool that can be hooked into
anything else to validate who you are. And the future of being able to
(23:36):
say what you want on the Internetis going to be connected with you proving
that you are a legit individual humanbeing. So the degree to which you
can show that, yes, I'mJoe Clements, you can validate that I
exist and I live here and Ihave you know, full legal rights is
(23:57):
useful not only for like has aspeech argument, It's also valuable for keeping
platforms clean of bots. It's alsovaluable for doing things like going through the
airport and you know, buying aconcert ticket and signing into other applications who
(24:17):
don't have identity verification tools. Andso the key thing of X is going
to be I think selling identity varicationservices is an API to other companies.
Yeah, that's pretty safe, bet. Yeah. So you go through the
airport, pull up your X app, scan your x app, and you're
(24:38):
through. If LinkedIn doesn't beat themto the punch, yeah, because I
know they partnered with clear on somethingidentity verification, and they'll be competitors in
there. Yeah. And then theother thing with X is going to be
once you have identity and you havefinancial information, is going to be money
(25:00):
transmission. So imagine you combine thatwith like venmo. So if you like
something you see, you can likegive it a tip. You can tip
it like, you know, atenth of a penny, because you're not
you're just moving fake numbers around insidethe app. So you don't have to
(25:22):
do it in penny increments. Youcan do it in fractions of a penny
increment. So that is where Xis going. The like so and so
said this on X is not thenot the main thing that it's going to
become interesting. I'm gonna leave acouple of these here for when we have
(25:45):
Kirsten in the What have you seenon like brand responses on Israel Palestine?
Uh, I've seen a lot ofNFL teams speaking out about it, yeah,
like denouncing terrorism and all that.But businesses I've I don't know if
(26:07):
they've actually made any statements. Yeah, I think most of them have navigated
it pretty well as far as Ican see, and my pretty well.
I mean, like I don't needto know where McDonald's is on terrorism.
Yeah, yeah, like they don't. We don't need to know your opinion
about it. The exception would beif I had like a if I had
(26:30):
a business in Miami Beach. Idefinitely do it because I have a large,
a big part of my customer base. Are you know, in that
part of Florida, they're not onlyJewish, they probably also hold an Israeli
passport, So like I would doit down there if that was a big
(26:51):
part of my customer base, forsure, it would make sense. Most
brands is like anything else. Idon't know where getting into it really gives
them anything except that everybody feels compelledto ask everybody else to make a statement.
Yeah, like every celebrity feels theneed to make a statement. Yeah,
it's like we don't care. Butalso, like my assumption was that
(27:17):
you would not support people paragalating intomusic festivals and shooting the place up like
that would be My default is thatlike you're there, no like this statement.
On the other side, if you'relike, oh yeah, I'm good
with that, well that's notable.Probably deserves a statement. But you know,
everybody else who's like that's terrible,I don't necessarily from a business perspective
(27:41):
or a brand perspective, we assumeyou think it's terrible. Yeah, stop
using you know, like slave laborin other countries and true. Another bad
part about this is that there seemsto be two equally devoted sides to it
that are like arguing to the daypretty much just about who's right who's in
(28:03):
the wrong. Oh, you meanpolitically in the US or physically in Israel,
like on Twitter, Like there's thereseems to be two sides to this
coin that are like equally fighting,like no, like you're corrupt, no,
no use. Yeah. Yeah,I just don't know if it's good
for any brand to get into it, because what are you going to get.
Like I said, if you havea large Jewish customer base, you
(28:29):
should do it. It makes totalsense in that scenario to do it any
other brand. I don't know thatyou really get a win out of it
one way or the other. Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe there's
maybe you've got board members or investors, or you have like you know,
Israeli venture capital funds or like,you know, I can see something unless
(28:49):
you have a really compelling reason,like the diner down the street, I
don't know they need to take astance on it, Nor does my soap
brand. No, or as muchas like the only stance you should take
is like denouncing violence like that that'sall you gotta do. Yeah, even
it is funny to me. Andthis has to just be a product of
(29:14):
not just media coverage, but thatnow there's this record in social media of
what you say, and so itseems to be like important to like just
have things on the record for likeposterity or signaling or some reason that like
fifteen years ago really didn't exist.The only time I can remember prior to
(29:37):
maybe twenty twenty ever really seeing itwas was nine to eleven. Like after
nine to eleven, yea, therewas you know, that was happening.
But otherwise like not really no,you know. The other this the other
kind of brilliant thing about X though, is anything that happens it's part of
(30:00):
the story. Oh well, wheneversomething happens and people are debating it,
there's then a debate on, well, one is they said it on X,
and two there's a debate on whetherthey should have been allowed to say
it on X. Yeah, whichjust draws attention to X. Yeah,
(30:22):
that's true. Now I'm starting tofeel compelled to denounced terrorism on this podcast.
Well, we need to put adisclaimer at the beginning. We denounced
terrorism, We denounced rorism and violenceby any party. Right, that's the
correct thing to say. Well,this is the issue, right, Like
(30:42):
you don't actually know what the correctthing is to say. Yeah, which
is why, like I'm always justas a business owner loathe to jump into
this stuff because like you think you'resaying the right thing and then three days
later, like you actually didn't saythe right thing. Yeah, yeah,
you would be like just justified sometimesyeah. Yeah. So like like it's
(31:06):
just a difficult situation to find,you know what, what is the win
for anybody? All right, everybody, thank you for listening to this episode
of The of Record. We willbe back doing a weekly podcast through the
end of the year. If youliked what you heard, please leave us
a review on your podcast app ofchoice. This has been a record.
(31:49):
Of Record is hosted by me JoeClements with the assistance of producer Alex Ryan
Hard. Of Record is produced atthe Trailway Studio in Tallahas. This episode
was edited by producer Alex Reinhard.Our theme music is composed and performed by
Rob Goki. Special thanks to ourentire team here at SDS. You can
(32:10):
see more information about the show onour website. Podcast a record dot Com.
As always, we'd appreciate your reviewsand ratings in your podcast app of
choice. These ratings and reviews helpmore people discover the show, which helps
us keep delivering quality content each week. Thanks for listening.
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