June 1, 2023 • 31 mins
Digital Ad Market Update: 5/26 - 6/1 2023
Joe, Kiersten, and producer Alex are in the studio to break down the latest marketing, tech, and culture news. Hear it all in 32 minutes or less.
Top Stories:
Not every business knows how to traverse public opinion, especially during Pride month. Let's dive into it.
Presidential launches in Twitter Spaces? Yeah, you heard that right. What could go wrong? Let's discuss.
Articles Mentioned:
North Face Pride Pushes On: https://bit.ly/3N44RPB
Target Pride Backlash: https://bit.ly/3qgkxpS
Joe, Kiersten, and producer Alex are in the studio to break down the latest marketing, tech, and culture news. Hear it all in 32 minutes or less.
Top Stories:
Not every business knows how to traverse public opinion, especially during Pride month. Let's dive into it.
Presidential launches in Twitter Spaces? Yeah, you heard that right. What could go wrong? Let's discuss.
Articles Mentioned:
North Face Pride Pushes On: https://bit.ly/3N44RPB
Target Pride Backlash: https://bit.ly/3qgkxpS
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
On this week's episode of The Recordpodcast, the Pride Month marketing conundrum is
discussed and we break down the RonDeSantis Twitter presidential launch. Of Record is
(00:21):
a podcast focus on the marketing andadvertising industry from the perspective of industry expert
Joe Clements. Joe Clements is aco founder of Strategic Digital Services, a
digital marketing firm based in Tallahassee,Florida and founded in twenty fourteen. I'm
Joe Clements and this is the Podcastof Record. Everybody, Welcome back to
(01:02):
another long delayed episode of the ofRecord podcast. I'm your host Joe,
with co host Kirsten and producer Alexis back on the buttons. Yeah,
not even my dog is in hereto join us for this episode. What
are we paying him for? He'sI don't know. He's usually here to
(01:23):
be the fan, the one,the one download. Um. All right,
well let's see where do we start? Where do we start? The
big news and marketing this week,well it's been for the last two weeks.
Is the Pride Month marketing and marketershaving no idea how to handle anything
(01:46):
at all anymore. All the sudden, this very open like brand like ally
ship is just not working for alot of brands right now. So background
on this, if you haven't listenedto all the episodes of the show,
go backstart episode one, back in. It was an April at this point
(02:08):
the bud Light, Yeah it was. It was March or April. Since
then, bud Light has been downdouble digits every week, twenty seven point
seven percent the week of May thirteenth, the most recent week for which I
have numbers. Since they did theDylan mulvaaney influencer deal, it wasn't a
(02:30):
spokesperson deal. It was an influencerdeal. And if you don't know how
influencer deals work in big brand world, it's usually like some twenty four year
old is like, go get asome influencers, kid, and so they
go to an agency and the agencygives them a bundle of influencers and then
it just goes out and everybody makeslike a hundred bucks, you know,
something like that. But the brandmanager for bud Light, who's since left
(02:54):
or been fired, who knows,sent a custom bud Light can to Dylan
mulvaney, which set off the wholerampant rampant exodus from bud Light, and
since then has begun spilling over intoother brands, most notably is Target,
(03:17):
which started rolling out It's Pride Monthgear and like March, I'm right about
that, right they started is Istarted seeing in like March April? Yeah,
I would say I don't know aboutMarch, but definitely in April.
And I kind of thought the samething because I even had a second thought.
I was like, wait, isit May or June is Pride Month?
And then I was like, oh, it's June. So so Target
(03:39):
last week announced they were gonna Theydidn't use specific details, but they said
they're gonna not have some merchandise andhave other merchandise, which reliably has drawn
the backlash of the LGBTQ I Aplus activist who say, no, you
are not real, ally you're fake. So that is the stand has things
(04:06):
are going into Pride Month. Sothoughts at Kirsten what should And by the
way, I think our record onwhat should brands be doing in this case
has been pretty good. Yeah,we've been pretty on it. I'm not
gonna lie. I just want toadd that, you know a part of
this is that you know, Targetmoved a bunch of their Pride stuff which
(04:27):
used to be the first thing whenyou walk in. They always have a
showcase of like a brand. Ithink the issue for them was they had
kids stuff and that's what was triggeringpeople. You know, okay for something.
I'm looking for the answer on this. Every year they have had this
stuff. Why was it so triggeringthis year? It's the environment. The
issue is just more and more contentious, you know. It just it doesn't
(04:50):
like I don't know, like itjust seems like it was like almost like
the first time Target ever put Pridestuff out, and like you would think
this is the freak out over it, But I notice in my Target they've
been doubling down on it year overyear. In fact, Target has some
like ongoing Pride stuff where they'll likenote on the shelves like this was designed
(05:11):
by a gender non binary curtain designer. Oh yeah, they do that.
But I did notice in my Targetthat they moved the Pride stuff from being
the first thing you see in thestore to the back. And Alex goes
to my Target too, he knowswhat it's back in the women's fitness stuff.
Now, yeah, I saw that, and I was they actually thought
(05:33):
it was really confusing when I walkedthat corner. But I read that.
You know, a big problem withthat was that Target said, hey,
our employees are getting so harassed overthis that they had to move it away
because it was too close to thekids stuff. Yeah, they literally moved
it to the most opposite side ofthe corner of at least my store,
(05:57):
and it doesn't share any like wallslike the children's department. Yeah, to
me, what's going on here ispretty obvious. It'll like, by the
way, all the analysts I've readand analysis I've read in the marketing coverage
is really bad. Like if you'rea marketer and you're reading like E Marketer,
you're reading or you're reading any ofthat. The analysis of the situation
(06:19):
is so bad. Like if youcould sue a media company for if they
were practicing professionally, they would probablybe sued for some sort of malpractice.
Really, they're misreading of the situationis completely awful, and like, you
know, a lot of it iseven on the marketer side, like they're
they're in full on political mode.They're not thinking about consumer mode, Like
(06:43):
I have a E Marketer thing herethat points out it's like, uh oh,
there isn't evidence that viral conservative boycott'sthe consumer goods out are all effective.
Countless similar incidents involving brands like Nike, Currig and more have gone viral,
But we're a blipp in sales.The outrage machine is huge, and
(07:08):
a wave of lgbt legislation across UScould leave brands confused. On the other
hand, though seven two point sevenpoint two percent of US adults identifies LGBTQ
plus per gout pulling. Additionally,thirty five thirty four percent of consumers say
they're more like your shop with brandsthat support LGBTQ plus causes. The obvious
(07:30):
problem with that is if you area mass market brand, thirty four percent
of people is not a mass marketbrand. Yeah, great brand. If
you had thirty four percent of consumersgood brand, you're probably worth hundreds of
million dollars. If you aren't Target, if you are Walmart, if you
are My Life, you're idio ofthose brands and your mass market thirty four
(07:53):
percent does not get you there.You would You should not mess around with
like trying to cater to a thirdof your consumers if it alienates another third
of your consumers, which, bythe way, I think the north Face
one. Have you seen the northFace one? I have not, so
north Face maybe they're just smarter likeNike, I think is actually smart about
this because Nike understands who their consumeris. They can get all the outrage,
(08:18):
but then they don't lose any consumersbecause they know their core consumer.
I think the north Face is thesame thing. All of the you know,
yuppies on the front range of Coloradoare gonna double down on their north
Page purchasing, and no one isreally going to stop buying north Face because
their core consumer is center left,so it really doesn't doesn't matter. But
(08:39):
this is like tricking other brands intothinking they're the same sort of thing.
Like north Face is not a massmarket brand. It's a style brand that
sells to young people or people whoare educated in high income So I think
the mistake that's being made here isnot understanding what's happened, which is but
(09:00):
the rainbow flag. The Pride narrativehas always been kind of a blend of
lifestyle and politics that the politics hasalways been blended in it. What's happened
in the last several years, reallyaccelerating over the last year, is it
is primarily seen has a political banner. Now. So for let's call it,
(09:26):
a third of your consumers in amass market situation, they walk in
and they don't just see the lifestylestuff. Now they see the political banner,
which may as well be a defacto Democratic Party political banner. So
that is the problem these brands arerunning into that they haven't recognized is the
(09:48):
thing they see is used to bekind of lifestyle plus politics is now viewed
overtly by thirty fifty Americans has directlyand only political that there's a political message,
a political narrative, a political setof policy that comes along with it.
And it is no longer just ahey, you know, call back
(10:11):
to the gay rights movement twenty yearsago, Hey just leave us a loan.
We want equal rights, equal protectionout of the law. This is
much more includes a broader policy setthat comes along with it, not just
the leave us a loan. Wewant to be the same right. So
that's what's happened to the brands thatthey haven't figured out. Yeah, how
(10:33):
would you get around that? Ifyou were target you do like an NRA
setup in the sports section drops somedon't tread on me flax and nur a
flag. Yeah, I mean,like that's you could roll out your Fourth
of July stuff to be a littlemore edgier. But don't tread on me.
(10:56):
Surety, that's smart. You could. You could play that ball game.
But you know, just like budLight we talked about, you can't
play two courts at once. Youkind of have to pick your side.
You can't, especially in this casewhere like reliably, like the lgbt QIA
plus movement understands the politics. They'renot us, their groups are not.
(11:20):
Their groups are sophisticated politically. Yeah, so they know that, Oh no,
you can't back out. If youback out, we're going to punish
you two and so now you geta no win situation. I would if
I was Target probably not even doa Pride collection. It would just be
a year round thing where I constantlyam featuring like LGBTQ plus like yeah,
(11:43):
artist, designers, cooks, umand that, and just like you said,
you can you can identify it someplaces and Target have like this was
created by like a black artist orsomething like that. Just constantly always have
that on the shelves just for justabout all your products. Yeah, because
then it's baseline it factors into thebaseline. What get you in trouble is
(12:05):
when you deviate from the baseline.Yeah, you can kind of slow boil
on the baseline too, you cancamp it up a little bit, a
little bit, a little bit andbe pretty overt about it. But I
think you might be right. It'swhen you get like a quick swing in
something and then you don't have todo a whole rollout and deal with the
every year nonsense of people being likeI don't like that, Like you just
(12:26):
always have it in store. Peopleeither shot there or they won't. And
then if people go, oh,Target doesn't support Target goes, oh,
yeah we do. We carry thisstuff you're around, And well, I
actually I think you're right about that. I think the reason there's a push
to do the bigger campaigns is becauseof the political element associated with it.
(12:48):
Yeah, So objectively, what youwould want from a social outcome, if
you want to complete equality, islike it's not even noticeable being of any
gender or non gender or any sexualyou know, whether the L or the
(13:09):
G. It would just be baseline. It would almost be unremarkable. Just
be like, you may as wellbe straight, gay, whatever you would
want it as part of the baseline, if that would be the ultimate social
goal. What I think you're seeingis is the political narrative becomes more and
more entrenched. Being the baseline isnot the social goal being And this is
(13:33):
every interest group in the country.You don't just want to be part of
the group. You want to betreated as exceptional from the group for some
reason. You should be more equal, you should have more rights, you
should have more government programs, moregovernment spending aimed at you, preferential treatment.
(13:56):
That is the goal fundamentally of everyinterest group. Every political group wants
that. None of them just wantto be baseline, even though that is
what is the ultimate social good.So I think what you're what you would
see is if you did that,you wouldn't maybe arouse as much like pushback
on the right, but you wouldstill not make the left happy. Sure
(14:18):
it's just a little too little,Yeah, Alex, do you have any
thoughts on what you would do makeconservatives cry? Which doubled down? Which
would be a good brand position ifyou were building a brand, If you
are a mass market brand, you'regoing to be in trouble because if your
(14:43):
target and you need to sell to, I don't know, one hundred and
fifty million people across the spectrum,and you alienate a third of your consumers,
Like even the hardest core like Democratscanna be like I'm selling that stock.
They're going to go short you becauseyour sales are going to fall.
You don't think that the LGBTQ andpeople who just don't care will double down,
(15:09):
and like maybe people switch going toother grocery stores and start going to
Target, and then I don't know, like Costco becomes like middle of the
line conservatives whatever, and then Targetsjust becomes a safe place for people who
So it's possible, right that thatis a possible outcome. The issue you
(15:31):
would run into is if it wasyour job, would you bet your career
on it? Huh No? Becausethe counter argument to that would be,
like, yeah, we'll get anominal bump for some time, but if
we tell a third of our consumersto screw off, they will always remember
(15:52):
we told them to screw off andnot come back. The consumers that we
made happy maybe like marginally less loyal, but they were probably already like in
our court anyway. So how muchcan we overcome will will they spend effectively?
Double with us is what you'd haveto do. If you shaved off
(16:15):
a third, you need your otherthird to spend double and the people who
don't care, say the middle third, would spend the same. The only
thing I see is that the peoplewho are speaking out against their partnerships and
like having meltdowns and targets, isthat really the clientele you want, Like
people who are getting overly emotional andthings that don't really affect them. That's
(16:37):
Walmart crowd. I don't know nooffense. I do shop at Walmart two.
So what you're going to get intothere is this is this is where
the question so has a like havingworked in politics for a lot of my
career, you're exactly that is whatwe would do. That would be the
political thinking on it. We doubleddown on the message, we'd peel away
(17:02):
the people who are In fact,we would get double the support for making
other people mad. We would raisemoney off of it. It would be
great. Once we on the campaign, we should everything down. We don't
need anything long term. From themarketing perspective, sure, maybe you don't
want like the handful of people whohave meltdowns and target but what you find
(17:22):
is Yeah, there's those people.But then there's the other, say five
hundred people that come into your storethat aren't gonna say anything because they're not
gonna make a big deal out aboutit. Now this because, by the
way, and the narrative that EMarketer says is, oh, people prefer,
people prefer to shop with stores thatpromote their values. So it's about
(17:44):
sixty percent of people say they wantto shop with stores or brands that promote
their values. So you're picking likethat like promotes their value side like splits
the baby pretty hard because the conservativethey're also going to shop with brands that
support their values. Yeah. Butlike Alex, by the way, I
(18:07):
think you're right. I think thefuture of the economy is that I think
the future of the economy is ared economy blue economy. Like, you
know, one side doubles down andsays, like, we don't want the
racist transphobes here. The other sidedoubles down and says, you know,
we don't want the woke commies here, and you end up with essentially two
(18:27):
economies operating parallel to one another.But wild, but that is going to
let a lot more business, isgonna let some businesses rise, but it'll
take a target. Target is abusiness, but light is a business doesn't
work without a third of its marketshare. And the argument might be,
(18:49):
maybe, like mass market products don'tmake sense in the Maybe mass market products
made sense for like a short periodof time in history, but I would
actually make sense most of the time. But I think your play is like
north Face. That is the obviousplay for north Face, Right, that's
(19:10):
what you do, RII obvious playfor Ora brands like that Nike. It's
the brands that have to have,you know, eighty percent market share,
ninety percent market share to function wherethey get into trouble. Can I please
tell my favorite target story of alltime? Yes, the time this started
(19:30):
my whole Target Quotes book when Iwas standing in the pasta aisle and there
were two college kids in there,and this kid went, oh my god,
they have gay macaroni and picked upa rainbow colored Kraft mac and cheese
box and I and he said it'sso happily And I was like, and
I am starting my list of targetquotes gay macaroni. That's a great title
(19:52):
for a book too. Oh mygod, they have gay macaroni. Yeah.
I had to walk away. Iwas like gonna laugh so hard.
He was so happy. I thinkit just was a unicorn on it too,
because I went back to check itout anyway. Yeah, but the
other thing with Target is they dohave a little better installation than bud Light.
(20:15):
Bud Light is so easy to subout of targets, a little tougher
to sub out of product selection locationharder. So for them, probably what
they should have done is just quietlymoved the stuff to another part of the
store, which is what they kindof did. No, they made an
announcement about it. They should havejust very quietly done it, gotten through
(20:37):
the month, let people forget aboutit, and then keep it in another
part of the store from years onit and then roll out the school supply
stuff, and roll out the schoolsupply stuff, and then the Halloween stuff'll,
yep, exactly then Christmas. Butthe back to the issue that brands
(20:59):
are dealing with is not understanding thatthey're not talking to consumers when they roll
that out like they're they are activatingthe political coding in the consumer's mind when
they do that. The Pride stuff, the Rainbow Flag essentially a need discussion
of trans at this point doesn't encodefor necessarily like lifestyle social issue. It
(21:26):
now encodes for politics in a verydirect way. Yeah, same way guns
do. Target doesn't sell guns,um so, and neither does Walmart,
I think anymore. They sell certaintypes. I think, yeah, OK,
gotcha. But that's the uh,that's that's the update in the Pride
(21:51):
month stuff. You know. Also, I think but light will be the
only casualty. By the way Ithink Target is I went to get that
kitten and I found some toys,and there were no cat toys, but
the Pride cat's toys. Oh mycat has all these little Pride toys.
It's just kind of funny. Idon't know. There was no like normal.
Your cat could probably be famous onTikTok right now. Well, I'm
(22:12):
trying to get her there. Sheneeds a TikTok. She's on my TikTok.
Oh, well, you're on yourTikTok. You can't share TikTok,
can't you guess? Not? Soflipping the other side of things. Want
to talk about the de Santis announcement? Oh boy, do I want to
(22:33):
talk about this? Well, itwas a bold Well you gotta give the
background. Rhonda Santis is running forpresident in twenty twenty four. He announced
his campaign in a very unique style. He announced that he would partner with
Elon Musk and his Twitter spaces todo the announcement there and then, depending
(22:55):
on who you believe, either RhondaSantis broke the Internet or Twitter as a
club. Yo, my, ohmy. There are a lot of ways
the story could go. You couldsay that there is no earthly way that
Twitter could have possibly stress tested thoseservers for that response, which you know,
every news network and everyone is reportinga completely different number on who how
(23:17):
many people actually tuned in. Idon't think we'll actually ever have a solid
number, but it was a lot. It was a lot to the fact
that it broke Twitter or melted theservers. Either Twitter wasn't ready for it,
or the Internet wasn't ready for it, or the response was too good,
or the response was not good enough. There's I think the numbers are
going to be. I think thenumbers are impressive. Delay or no delay.
(23:42):
You know. I saw some placessaying, oh, he only had
three hundred thousand people listening. Isay, well, yeah, like maybe
one point. But I remember therewas a point where there was like six
hundred thousand people. The timeline waswhen they were trying to get up on
Elon's Twitter, they had like sixhundred thousands something people. What they had
to do is changed to host itfrom the other host, David Sachs Twitter,
(24:06):
and then that's when they kind ofstabilized in the three hundred range.
But you're right, that is aconcurrent count. That doesn't count all the
people who came in left came inleft, and also doesn't count views after
yeah, because it continues to acrew views, so you know, live
like that wouldn't surprise me if totalviews at this point were three to four
(24:29):
millions. Oh yeah, well,let's not forget that Fortnite Travis Scott concert
had twelve point three million players streaming. Was that on Twitch? No,
it was on Fortnite. I wasjust on Fortnite. Oh oh yeah.
And like when you get into that, like you can never no matter how
big politics seems, it's never evenin the same ballpark as entertainment. It's
(24:49):
never ever even close. It getsa lot of buzz and attention because people
like to talk about it, butit never even comes close to entertainment.
Night that Taylor Taylor Swift does anaerostour. There's like four or five streams
on TikTok with like twenty to fiftysixty k people wat. Yeah. Yeah,
like that's insane, it is.I think that's absolutely nuts. But
(25:15):
so de Santis more popular than theaverage cable news show, true less popular
than Taylor Swift, Yeah, whichis about what I would market. Yeah,
most politicians around there, most politicians. Yeah. A lot of people
are saying that that launch was notgood in a really bad way to kick
things off. What do you think? So you you and I identified this
(25:42):
when we heard it, like,oh god, that's going to be a
problem, because you and I've doneenough live streams that you know how finicky
they are, and on a newproduct like that, you knew wasn't going
to work cleanly, and it didn't. So I would say that means it
went poorly because that became part ofthe story. Yeah, But there's a
(26:03):
meta part of the narrative that iseasy to overlook, which explains a lot
of the negative media coverage, andit's this. He did not announce using
any of the major corporate media.He didn't go to Fox News, he
didn't hold a big press conference,He didn't interview with the New York Times,
(26:23):
he didn't do an interview with theWall Street Journal. He went direct.
He cut out the middlemen, whichis overtly a threat to their business
model. Ye. No, likeI'd argue most media just kind of reports
what they see on Twitter anyway,So what's the difference. But he didn't
give the TV cable news networks anyvideo. There's no video from that that
(26:45):
they could play, and he didit with numbers that are probably well in
excess of what they could have generated. Absolutely. Yeah, you know your
average I think prime Time, Ithink the Tucker numbers where he was doing
like couple million a night. Somebodycan check me on that. But you
know, for most like cable news, like a million person audience in the
(27:08):
evening is big. That's a lotof people. Yeah. So the meta
thing that he did was be likeI don't really need I don't need the
media to scale my message, right, which imbued like double negative coverage.
How is that going to shape thisnext presidential run for everybody? Is there
(27:33):
going to be a trend of that? You think that? No, that
because the media is largely a democraticconstituency. So whoever, the democratic nominee
is, assuming that's Joe Biden.We'll do we'll do everything through the media
because it'll be relatively friendly, rightfor the most part, and leveraged.
And then just like you've seen thelast several years, the candidates who are
(27:57):
you know, off to the sideand eating, We'll try to use social
media, podcast interviews and YouTube andrumble. So like, let's just look
at like the Republican primary, Likewe're not gonna like, we're just gonna
look at who's going to get thatticket. Do you think that could shape
that election? I think so.Let's say, the only thing that matters
(28:22):
in the Republican primary as far asmainstream media goes as Fox News. I
think Fox News is less influential nowthan it's ever been. Yes, this
may be the last election that it'sactually influential. So to the degree Fox
News plays heavily for one person,I guess it could matter. Yeah,
(28:47):
I think it's going to play ahuge role. And I don't even want
to like get off topic, butlike the deep fakes we've already been seeing
hilarious are insane, like hilarious.This election is going to be so different
and chaotic than from anything I thinkwe could ever, like think of our
experience before the de facts that arejust getting pumped out by the meme machine
(29:11):
people. I mean, that's justlike a dude in his house. There's
one where it's like a Michael Scottscene from the office where he's wearing a
women's suit, but it's Rodney Santis'svoice saying all the lines. And that's
coming out from like the Trump Party, like like Trump Party champaigne. Yes,
it might be, yeah, butI mean the way that is going
(29:36):
to be weaponized is going to bescary, and I won't be surprised if
there's some sort of like law orregulation that's going to end up going into
effect because of this. Um.Yeah, that's probably a conversation for another
time. Yeah, I don't wantto get on it. What I see
in this is, uh, youknow, we're already back into where all
(29:56):
the marketing stuff is political stuff.Yeah, de facto. Nobody can just
sell things anymore. All right,we have to wrap up, So if
why can't I talk? I dothe same thing every week. If you
like what you heard, please leaveus a review on your podcast app of
(30:18):
choice. Until next time. Thishas been the of record Podcast of Record
(30:40):
is hosted by me Joe Clements withthe assistance of producer Alex Reinhard. Of
Record is produced at the Trailway Studioin Tallahassee, Florida. This episode was
edited by producer Alex Reinhard. Ourtheme music is composed and performed by Rob
Goki Special thanks to our entire teamhere at CS. You can see more
(31:00):
information about the show on our website, Podcasts of Record dot com. As
always, we'd appreciate your reviews andratings in your podcast app of choice.
These ratings and reviews help more peoplediscover the show, which helps us keep
delivering quality content each week. Thanksfor listening.
On this week's episode of The Recordpodcast, the Pride Month marketing conundrum is
discussed and we break down the RonDeSantis Twitter presidential launch. Of Record is
(00:21):
a podcast focus on the marketing andadvertising industry from the perspective of industry expert
Joe Clements. Joe Clements is aco founder of Strategic Digital Services, a
digital marketing firm based in Tallahassee,Florida and founded in twenty fourteen. I'm
Joe Clements and this is the Podcastof Record. Everybody, Welcome back to
(01:02):
another long delayed episode of the ofRecord podcast. I'm your host Joe,
with co host Kirsten and producer Alexis back on the buttons. Yeah,
not even my dog is in hereto join us for this episode. What
are we paying him for? He'sI don't know. He's usually here to
(01:23):
be the fan, the one,the one download. Um. All right,
well let's see where do we start? Where do we start? The
big news and marketing this week,well it's been for the last two weeks.
Is the Pride Month marketing and marketershaving no idea how to handle anything
(01:46):
at all anymore. All the sudden, this very open like brand like ally
ship is just not working for alot of brands right now. So background
on this, if you haven't listenedto all the episodes of the show,
go backstart episode one, back in. It was an April at this point
(02:08):
the bud Light, Yeah it was. It was March or April. Since
then, bud Light has been downdouble digits every week, twenty seven point
seven percent the week of May thirteenth, the most recent week for which I
have numbers. Since they did theDylan mulvaaney influencer deal, it wasn't a
(02:30):
spokesperson deal. It was an influencerdeal. And if you don't know how
influencer deals work in big brand world, it's usually like some twenty four year
old is like, go get asome influencers, kid, and so they
go to an agency and the agencygives them a bundle of influencers and then
it just goes out and everybody makeslike a hundred bucks, you know,
something like that. But the brandmanager for bud Light, who's since left
(02:54):
or been fired, who knows,sent a custom bud Light can to Dylan
mulvaney, which set off the wholerampant rampant exodus from bud Light, and
since then has begun spilling over intoother brands, most notably is Target,
(03:17):
which started rolling out It's Pride Monthgear and like March, I'm right about
that, right they started is Istarted seeing in like March April? Yeah,
I would say I don't know aboutMarch, but definitely in April.
And I kind of thought the samething because I even had a second thought.
I was like, wait, isit May or June is Pride Month?
And then I was like, oh, it's June. So so Target
(03:39):
last week announced they were gonna Theydidn't use specific details, but they said
they're gonna not have some merchandise andhave other merchandise, which reliably has drawn
the backlash of the LGBTQ I Aplus activist who say, no, you
are not real, ally you're fake. So that is the stand has things
(04:06):
are going into Pride Month. Sothoughts at Kirsten what should And by the
way, I think our record onwhat should brands be doing in this case
has been pretty good. Yeah,we've been pretty on it. I'm not
gonna lie. I just want toadd that, you know a part of
this is that you know, Targetmoved a bunch of their Pride stuff which
(04:27):
used to be the first thing whenyou walk in. They always have a
showcase of like a brand. Ithink the issue for them was they had
kids stuff and that's what was triggeringpeople. You know, okay for something.
I'm looking for the answer on this. Every year they have had this
stuff. Why was it so triggeringthis year? It's the environment. The
issue is just more and more contentious, you know. It just it doesn't
(04:50):
like I don't know, like itjust seems like it was like almost like
the first time Target ever put Pridestuff out, and like you would think
this is the freak out over it, But I notice in my Target they've
been doubling down on it year overyear. In fact, Target has some
like ongoing Pride stuff where they'll likenote on the shelves like this was designed
(05:11):
by a gender non binary curtain designer. Oh yeah, they do that.
But I did notice in my Targetthat they moved the Pride stuff from being
the first thing you see in thestore to the back. And Alex goes
to my Target too, he knowswhat it's back in the women's fitness stuff.
Now, yeah, I saw that, and I was they actually thought
(05:33):
it was really confusing when I walkedthat corner. But I read that.
You know, a big problem withthat was that Target said, hey,
our employees are getting so harassed overthis that they had to move it away
because it was too close to thekids stuff. Yeah, they literally moved
it to the most opposite side ofthe corner of at least my store,
(05:57):
and it doesn't share any like wallslike the children's department. Yeah, to
me, what's going on here ispretty obvious. It'll like, by the
way, all the analysts I've readand analysis I've read in the marketing coverage
is really bad. Like if you'rea marketer and you're reading like E Marketer,
you're reading or you're reading any ofthat. The analysis of the situation
(06:19):
is so bad. Like if youcould sue a media company for if they
were practicing professionally, they would probablybe sued for some sort of malpractice.
Really, they're misreading of the situationis completely awful, and like, you
know, a lot of it iseven on the marketer side, like they're
they're in full on political mode.They're not thinking about consumer mode, Like
(06:43):
I have a E Marketer thing herethat points out it's like, uh oh,
there isn't evidence that viral conservative boycott'sthe consumer goods out are all effective.
Countless similar incidents involving brands like Nike, Currig and more have gone viral,
But we're a blipp in sales.The outrage machine is huge, and
(07:08):
a wave of lgbt legislation across UScould leave brands confused. On the other
hand, though seven two point sevenpoint two percent of US adults identifies LGBTQ
plus per gout pulling. Additionally,thirty five thirty four percent of consumers say
they're more like your shop with brandsthat support LGBTQ plus causes. The obvious
(07:30):
problem with that is if you area mass market brand, thirty four percent
of people is not a mass marketbrand. Yeah, great brand. If
you had thirty four percent of consumersgood brand, you're probably worth hundreds of
million dollars. If you aren't Target, if you are Walmart, if you
are My Life, you're idio ofthose brands and your mass market thirty four
(07:53):
percent does not get you there.You would You should not mess around with
like trying to cater to a thirdof your consumers if it alienates another third
of your consumers, which, bythe way, I think the north Face
one. Have you seen the northFace one? I have not, so
north Face maybe they're just smarter likeNike, I think is actually smart about
this because Nike understands who their consumeris. They can get all the outrage,
(08:18):
but then they don't lose any consumersbecause they know their core consumer.
I think the north Face is thesame thing. All of the you know,
yuppies on the front range of Coloradoare gonna double down on their north
Page purchasing, and no one isreally going to stop buying north Face because
their core consumer is center left,so it really doesn't doesn't matter. But
(08:39):
this is like tricking other brands intothinking they're the same sort of thing.
Like north Face is not a massmarket brand. It's a style brand that
sells to young people or people whoare educated in high income So I think
the mistake that's being made here isnot understanding what's happened, which is but
(09:00):
the rainbow flag. The Pride narrativehas always been kind of a blend of
lifestyle and politics that the politics hasalways been blended in it. What's happened
in the last several years, reallyaccelerating over the last year, is it
is primarily seen has a political banner. Now. So for let's call it,
(09:26):
a third of your consumers in amass market situation, they walk in
and they don't just see the lifestylestuff. Now they see the political banner,
which may as well be a defacto Democratic Party political banner. So
that is the problem these brands arerunning into that they haven't recognized is the
(09:48):
thing they see is used to bekind of lifestyle plus politics is now viewed
overtly by thirty fifty Americans has directlyand only political that there's a political message,
a political narrative, a political setof policy that comes along with it.
And it is no longer just ahey, you know, call back
(10:11):
to the gay rights movement twenty yearsago, Hey just leave us a loan.
We want equal rights, equal protectionout of the law. This is
much more includes a broader policy setthat comes along with it, not just
the leave us a loan. Wewant to be the same right. So
that's what's happened to the brands thatthey haven't figured out. Yeah, how
(10:33):
would you get around that? Ifyou were target you do like an NRA
setup in the sports section drops somedon't tread on me flax and nur a
flag. Yeah, I mean,like that's you could roll out your Fourth
of July stuff to be a littlemore edgier. But don't tread on me.
(10:56):
Surety, that's smart. You could. You could play that ball game.
But you know, just like budLight we talked about, you can't
play two courts at once. Youkind of have to pick your side.
You can't, especially in this casewhere like reliably, like the lgbt QIA
plus movement understands the politics. They'renot us, their groups are not.
(11:20):
Their groups are sophisticated politically. Yeah, so they know that, Oh no,
you can't back out. If youback out, we're going to punish
you two and so now you geta no win situation. I would if
I was Target probably not even doa Pride collection. It would just be
a year round thing where I constantlyam featuring like LGBTQ plus like yeah,
(11:43):
artist, designers, cooks, umand that, and just like you said,
you can you can identify it someplaces and Target have like this was
created by like a black artist orsomething like that. Just constantly always have
that on the shelves just for justabout all your products. Yeah, because
then it's baseline it factors into thebaseline. What get you in trouble is
(12:05):
when you deviate from the baseline.Yeah, you can kind of slow boil
on the baseline too, you cancamp it up a little bit, a
little bit, a little bit andbe pretty overt about it. But I
think you might be right. It'swhen you get like a quick swing in
something and then you don't have todo a whole rollout and deal with the
every year nonsense of people being likeI don't like that, Like you just
(12:26):
always have it in store. Peopleeither shot there or they won't. And
then if people go, oh,Target doesn't support Target goes, oh,
yeah we do. We carry thisstuff you're around, And well, I
actually I think you're right about that. I think the reason there's a push
to do the bigger campaigns is becauseof the political element associated with it.
(12:48):
Yeah, So objectively, what youwould want from a social outcome, if
you want to complete equality, islike it's not even noticeable being of any
gender or non gender or any sexualyou know, whether the L or the
(13:09):
G. It would just be baseline. It would almost be unremarkable. Just
be like, you may as wellbe straight, gay, whatever you would
want it as part of the baseline, if that would be the ultimate social
goal. What I think you're seeingis is the political narrative becomes more and
more entrenched. Being the baseline isnot the social goal being And this is
(13:33):
every interest group in the country.You don't just want to be part of
the group. You want to betreated as exceptional from the group for some
reason. You should be more equal, you should have more rights, you
should have more government programs, moregovernment spending aimed at you, preferential treatment.
(13:56):
That is the goal fundamentally of everyinterest group. Every political group wants
that. None of them just wantto be baseline, even though that is
what is the ultimate social good.So I think what you're what you would
see is if you did that,you wouldn't maybe arouse as much like pushback
on the right, but you wouldstill not make the left happy. Sure
(14:18):
it's just a little too little,Yeah, Alex, do you have any
thoughts on what you would do makeconservatives cry? Which doubled down? Which
would be a good brand position ifyou were building a brand, If you
are a mass market brand, you'regoing to be in trouble because if your
(14:43):
target and you need to sell to, I don't know, one hundred and
fifty million people across the spectrum,and you alienate a third of your consumers,
Like even the hardest core like Democratscanna be like I'm selling that stock.
They're going to go short you becauseyour sales are going to fall.
You don't think that the LGBTQ andpeople who just don't care will double down,
(15:09):
and like maybe people switch going toother grocery stores and start going to
Target, and then I don't know, like Costco becomes like middle of the
line conservatives whatever, and then Targetsjust becomes a safe place for people who
So it's possible, right that thatis a possible outcome. The issue you
(15:31):
would run into is if it wasyour job, would you bet your career
on it? Huh No? Becausethe counter argument to that would be,
like, yeah, we'll get anominal bump for some time, but if
we tell a third of our consumersto screw off, they will always remember
(15:52):
we told them to screw off andnot come back. The consumers that we
made happy maybe like marginally less loyal, but they were probably already like in
our court anyway. So how muchcan we overcome will will they spend effectively?
Double with us is what you'd haveto do. If you shaved off
(16:15):
a third, you need your otherthird to spend double and the people who
don't care, say the middle third, would spend the same. The only
thing I see is that the peoplewho are speaking out against their partnerships and
like having meltdowns and targets, isthat really the clientele you want, Like
people who are getting overly emotional andthings that don't really affect them. That's
(16:37):
Walmart crowd. I don't know nooffense. I do shop at Walmart two.
So what you're going to get intothere is this is this is where
the question so has a like havingworked in politics for a lot of my
career, you're exactly that is whatwe would do. That would be the
political thinking on it. We doubleddown on the message, we'd peel away
(17:02):
the people who are In fact,we would get double the support for making
other people mad. We would raisemoney off of it. It would be
great. Once we on the campaign, we should everything down. We don't
need anything long term. From themarketing perspective, sure, maybe you don't
want like the handful of people whohave meltdowns and target but what you find
(17:22):
is Yeah, there's those people.But then there's the other, say five
hundred people that come into your storethat aren't gonna say anything because they're not
gonna make a big deal out aboutit. Now this because, by the
way, and the narrative that EMarketer says is, oh, people prefer,
people prefer to shop with stores thatpromote their values. So it's about
(17:44):
sixty percent of people say they wantto shop with stores or brands that promote
their values. So you're picking likethat like promotes their value side like splits
the baby pretty hard because the conservativethey're also going to shop with brands that
support their values. Yeah. Butlike Alex, by the way, I
(18:07):
think you're right. I think thefuture of the economy is that I think
the future of the economy is ared economy blue economy. Like, you
know, one side doubles down andsays, like, we don't want the
racist transphobes here. The other sidedoubles down and says, you know,
we don't want the woke commies here, and you end up with essentially two
(18:27):
economies operating parallel to one another.But wild, but that is going to
let a lot more business, isgonna let some businesses rise, but it'll
take a target. Target is abusiness, but light is a business doesn't
work without a third of its marketshare. And the argument might be,
(18:49):
maybe, like mass market products don'tmake sense in the Maybe mass market products
made sense for like a short periodof time in history, but I would
actually make sense most of the time. But I think your play is like
north Face. That is the obviousplay for north Face, Right, that's
(19:10):
what you do, RII obvious playfor Ora brands like that Nike. It's
the brands that have to have,you know, eighty percent market share,
ninety percent market share to function wherethey get into trouble. Can I please
tell my favorite target story of alltime? Yes, the time this started
(19:30):
my whole Target Quotes book when Iwas standing in the pasta aisle and there
were two college kids in there,and this kid went, oh my god,
they have gay macaroni and picked upa rainbow colored Kraft mac and cheese
box and I and he said it'sso happily And I was like, and
I am starting my list of targetquotes gay macaroni. That's a great title
(19:52):
for a book too. Oh mygod, they have gay macaroni. Yeah.
I had to walk away. Iwas like gonna laugh so hard.
He was so happy. I thinkit just was a unicorn on it too,
because I went back to check itout anyway. Yeah, but the
other thing with Target is they dohave a little better installation than bud Light.
(20:15):
Bud Light is so easy to subout of targets, a little tougher
to sub out of product selection locationharder. So for them, probably what
they should have done is just quietlymoved the stuff to another part of the
store, which is what they kindof did. No, they made an
announcement about it. They should havejust very quietly done it, gotten through
(20:37):
the month, let people forget aboutit, and then keep it in another
part of the store from years onit and then roll out the school supply
stuff, and roll out the schoolsupply stuff, and then the Halloween stuff'll,
yep, exactly then Christmas. Butthe back to the issue that brands
(20:59):
are dealing with is not understanding thatthey're not talking to consumers when they roll
that out like they're they are activatingthe political coding in the consumer's mind when
they do that. The Pride stuff, the Rainbow Flag essentially a need discussion
of trans at this point doesn't encodefor necessarily like lifestyle social issue. It
(21:26):
now encodes for politics in a verydirect way. Yeah, same way guns
do. Target doesn't sell guns,um so, and neither does Walmart,
I think anymore. They sell certaintypes. I think, yeah, OK,
gotcha. But that's the uh,that's that's the update in the Pride
(21:51):
month stuff. You know. Also, I think but light will be the
only casualty. By the way Ithink Target is I went to get that
kitten and I found some toys,and there were no cat toys, but
the Pride cat's toys. Oh mycat has all these little Pride toys.
It's just kind of funny. Idon't know. There was no like normal.
Your cat could probably be famous onTikTok right now. Well, I'm
(22:12):
trying to get her there. Sheneeds a TikTok. She's on my TikTok.
Oh, well, you're on yourTikTok. You can't share TikTok,
can't you guess? Not? Soflipping the other side of things. Want
to talk about the de Santis announcement? Oh boy, do I want to
(22:33):
talk about this? Well, itwas a bold Well you gotta give the
background. Rhonda Santis is running forpresident in twenty twenty four. He announced
his campaign in a very unique style. He announced that he would partner with
Elon Musk and his Twitter spaces todo the announcement there and then, depending
(22:55):
on who you believe, either RhondaSantis broke the Internet or Twitter as a
club. Yo, my, ohmy. There are a lot of ways
the story could go. You couldsay that there is no earthly way that
Twitter could have possibly stress tested thoseservers for that response, which you know,
every news network and everyone is reportinga completely different number on who how
(23:17):
many people actually tuned in. Idon't think we'll actually ever have a solid
number, but it was a lot. It was a lot to the fact
that it broke Twitter or melted theservers. Either Twitter wasn't ready for it,
or the Internet wasn't ready for it, or the response was too good,
or the response was not good enough. There's I think the numbers are
going to be. I think thenumbers are impressive. Delay or no delay.
(23:42):
You know. I saw some placessaying, oh, he only had
three hundred thousand people listening. Isay, well, yeah, like maybe
one point. But I remember therewas a point where there was like six
hundred thousand people. The timeline waswhen they were trying to get up on
Elon's Twitter, they had like sixhundred thousands something people. What they had
to do is changed to host itfrom the other host, David Sachs Twitter,
(24:06):
and then that's when they kind ofstabilized in the three hundred range.
But you're right, that is aconcurrent count. That doesn't count all the
people who came in left came inleft, and also doesn't count views after
yeah, because it continues to acrew views, so you know, live
like that wouldn't surprise me if totalviews at this point were three to four
(24:29):
millions. Oh yeah, well,let's not forget that Fortnite Travis Scott concert
had twelve point three million players streaming. Was that on Twitch? No,
it was on Fortnite. I wasjust on Fortnite. Oh oh yeah.
And like when you get into that, like you can never no matter how
big politics seems, it's never evenin the same ballpark as entertainment. It's
(24:49):
never ever even close. It getsa lot of buzz and attention because people
like to talk about it, butit never even comes close to entertainment.
Night that Taylor Taylor Swift does anaerostour. There's like four or five streams
on TikTok with like twenty to fiftysixty k people wat. Yeah. Yeah,
like that's insane, it is.I think that's absolutely nuts. But
(25:15):
so de Santis more popular than theaverage cable news show, true less popular
than Taylor Swift, Yeah, whichis about what I would market. Yeah,
most politicians around there, most politicians. Yeah. A lot of people
are saying that that launch was notgood in a really bad way to kick
things off. What do you think? So you you and I identified this
(25:42):
when we heard it, like,oh god, that's going to be a
problem, because you and I've doneenough live streams that you know how finicky
they are, and on a newproduct like that, you knew wasn't going
to work cleanly, and it didn't. So I would say that means it
went poorly because that became part ofthe story. Yeah, But there's a
(26:03):
meta part of the narrative that iseasy to overlook, which explains a lot
of the negative media coverage, andit's this. He did not announce using
any of the major corporate media.He didn't go to Fox News, he
didn't hold a big press conference,He didn't interview with the New York Times,
(26:23):
he didn't do an interview with theWall Street Journal. He went direct.
He cut out the middlemen, whichis overtly a threat to their business
model. Ye. No, likeI'd argue most media just kind of reports
what they see on Twitter anyway,So what's the difference. But he didn't
give the TV cable news networks anyvideo. There's no video from that that
(26:45):
they could play, and he didit with numbers that are probably well in
excess of what they could have generated. Absolutely. Yeah, you know your
average I think prime Time, Ithink the Tucker numbers where he was doing
like couple million a night. Somebodycan check me on that. But you
know, for most like cable news, like a million person audience in the
(27:08):
evening is big. That's a lotof people. Yeah. So the meta
thing that he did was be likeI don't really need I don't need the
media to scale my message, right, which imbued like double negative coverage.
How is that going to shape thisnext presidential run for everybody? Is there
(27:33):
going to be a trend of that? You think that? No, that
because the media is largely a democraticconstituency. So whoever, the democratic nominee
is, assuming that's Joe Biden.We'll do we'll do everything through the media
because it'll be relatively friendly, rightfor the most part, and leveraged.
And then just like you've seen thelast several years, the candidates who are
(27:57):
you know, off to the sideand eating, We'll try to use social
media, podcast interviews and YouTube andrumble. So like, let's just look
at like the Republican primary, Likewe're not gonna like, we're just gonna
look at who's going to get thatticket. Do you think that could shape
that election? I think so.Let's say, the only thing that matters
(28:22):
in the Republican primary as far asmainstream media goes as Fox News. I
think Fox News is less influential nowthan it's ever been. Yes, this
may be the last election that it'sactually influential. So to the degree Fox
News plays heavily for one person,I guess it could matter. Yeah,
(28:47):
I think it's going to play ahuge role. And I don't even want
to like get off topic, butlike the deep fakes we've already been seeing
hilarious are insane, like hilarious.This election is going to be so different
and chaotic than from anything I thinkwe could ever, like think of our
experience before the de facts that arejust getting pumped out by the meme machine
(29:11):
people. I mean, that's justlike a dude in his house. There's
one where it's like a Michael Scottscene from the office where he's wearing a
women's suit, but it's Rodney Santis'svoice saying all the lines. And that's
coming out from like the Trump Party, like like Trump Party champaigne. Yes,
it might be, yeah, butI mean the way that is going
(29:36):
to be weaponized is going to bescary, and I won't be surprised if
there's some sort of like law orregulation that's going to end up going into
effect because of this. Um.Yeah, that's probably a conversation for another
time. Yeah, I don't wantto get on it. What I see
in this is, uh, youknow, we're already back into where all
(29:56):
the marketing stuff is political stuff.Yeah, de facto. Nobody can just
sell things anymore. All right,we have to wrap up, So if
why can't I talk? I dothe same thing every week. If you
like what you heard, please leaveus a review on your podcast app of
(30:18):
choice. Until next time. Thishas been the of record Podcast of Record
(30:40):
is hosted by me Joe Clements withthe assistance of producer Alex Reinhard. Of
Record is produced at the Trailway Studioin Tallahassee, Florida. This episode was
edited by producer Alex Reinhard. Ourtheme music is composed and performed by Rob
Goki Special thanks to our entire teamhere at CS. You can see more
(31:00):
information about the show on our website, Podcasts of Record dot com. As
always, we'd appreciate your reviews andratings in your podcast app of choice.
These ratings and reviews help more peoplediscover the show, which helps us keep
delivering quality content each week. Thanksfor listening.
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