Morning Brew Daily - Ads Are Finally Coming to WhatsApp & Credit Card Wars Heat Up

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Episode 606: Neal and Toby discuss Meta bringing ads to WhatsApp for the first time after years of avoiding the model. Then, anti-tourism protests are sweeping Europe where locals are spraying tourists with water guns. Also, JPMorgan and American Express are planning major changes to their premium credit cards in an effort to attract America’s biggest spenders. Meanwhile, Toby examines the trend of knitting, and more broadly, why younger Americans are getting into old-people hobbies.  00:00 - ‘Jaws’ returns to Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest 3:15 - WhatsApp turns on ads 8:00 - Overtourism problem in Europe 12:00 - Credit card clash 17:00 - Toby’s Trends: Knitting 21:00 - Sprint Finish! Gain the edge with Amazon Ads by going to advertising.amazon.com/startnow Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning, Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Amex and Chase take off the gloves in their heavy metal credit card showdown.

Then what has ads now? WhatsApp does after Meta finally decided to monetize it. It's Tuesday, June 17th. Let's ride. America's long national nightmare is over. Joey Chestnut, the best competitive eater

the world has ever seen, will return to the Nathan's hot dog eating contest this year, he announced yesterday. Last summer, the 16-time champ was banned from participating over a sponsorship dispute. He signed an endorsement deal with the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, and Nathan's, which views vegan hot dogs as a competitor, said that violated its rules. Chocking up the fiasco to miscommunication, Chestnut said he and Nathan's had buried their processed beef, and his body is feeling in tune and ready to guzzle some gusel some gussing. Glizzies, pray for the rest of the field.

He's in sterling form, too. He just broke his own popcorn eating record this month by downing 42, 24-ounce servings in eight minutes. The president of Major League eating is taking his return totally normally and not overreacting at all. He said, I don't think it gets much bigger in any sport. Finally, no offense to Patrick Bertellelli, who ate 58 hot dogs last year to win the title, but that mustard belt has an asterisk.

That tally would have lost to Joe. Joey Chestnut every single year of his 16 titles except for one, far behind Joey's world record of 76 dogs. So yes, possibly the biggest story in sports. It's great to see the champ back to the jump. And now a word from our sponsor, Amazon ads. Neil, honest question, when was the last time you watched something not on a streaming service?

Does an internet rabbit hole about medieval swordsmithing count? Only if the swords were also optimized for small business marketing. But seriously, if you're a small and medium-sized business and your customers are watching streaming content, your ads should be there too. And that's where Amazon streaming TV ads come in. And you don't have to sell on Amazon to advertise with Amazon ads. You don't have to blow your entire marketing budget. You just get one easy tool that helps you plan, launch, and actually measure your campaign. You're putting your ads in front of real audiences watching real shows on streaming TV services like Prime Video with insights from trillions of shopping, browsing,

and streaming signals. So while you're catching up on your favorite series, your business could show up right there with it. Help take the complexity out of advertising, just smart reach and measurable results. Gain the edge with Amazon ads by going to advertising.com slash start now. That's advertising.com slash start now. There are only three certainties in life, death, taxes, and meta monetizing its social apps through ads. This time it's WhatsApp that is getting the money-making treatment as Zuck looks to cash in on the world's most popular messaging service used by 3 billion people monthly. The ads will appear in the status section of the app,

according to the Financial Times, kept in a separate area from your main conversations. That was part of the reason for the introduction of the Updates tab a few years ago to create a distinct place for users to interact with brands without infringing on their personal chat space. Still, there is plenty of prime real estate

for brands to capitalize on WhatsApp statuses, its version of stories, were the most viewed stories product in the world last year, according to WhatsApp director of product. So even though you're likely stalking your ex through Instagram stories, it's really the WhatsApp updates tab that is hoovering up eyeballs attracting one and a half billion users daily. You know, before Facebook bought the company for $19 billion back in 2014, the WhatsApp mantra was no ads, no games, no gimmicks.

But the opportunity to monetize one of its last remaining platforms was too much for meta to pass up as the AI race heats up in every extra ad dollar. counts. I mean, the scale of WhatsApp is truly mind-blowing. So you mentioned that this particular tab within this app gets 1.5 billion visitors per day. That's 19% of the world's population. There are over 3 billion monthly users, and there are 100 million people here in the U.S. that use WhatsApp. It's not the biggest market. That would be India and Brazil, but it is growing fast here. And meta, with a flick of a switch, can just turn on billions of dollars in revenue. It's already running ads that go to WhatsApp on Facebook and Instagram.

That's estimated to be at $10 billion a year just by itself. So sending people from Facebook and Instagram to WhatsApp is already a multi-billion dollar business. We don't know how much money they're going to make. It's going to be a ton, but no messaging app or any consumer app this big has ever been monetized before like this with a flip of a switch. So, I mean, we just don't know how big this market is. It could be massive.

Wall Street has for years on earnings call going told meta execs, what's your plan for WhatsApp? What are you doing with this absolutely massive user base? And so finally on this news, it did seem like investors were pretty happy with it. Meta stock finished a day up 3% yesterday. And the question of how big could the business be, maybe is something that you have to look at Instagram for. Eight years after modernization was turned on for Instagram when the platform fully matured, it was bringing in over $30 billion in ad revenue a year. so that could be a good proxy, maybe a few years down the line for WhatsApp. The one caveat, though,

is that WhatsApp may not be able to charge as much for ads as you, as MediCAN on Facebook and Instagram, because those two platforms, they have this huge treasure trove of user data, but privacy has been such a big tent pull of WhatsApp's business model for so long. So there are some additional challenges to, you know, mining user data when you have a privacy-focused platform. So maybe these ads won't sell at the premium that Instagram and Facebook do, but the sheer scale of it should mean that this is going to be a healthy-sized business. Right. They're telling businesses that you can target based on very general information like a person's location or the language their device is set to, but WhatsApp has created distinction for itself as an end-to-end encrypted app. And the founders of it,

who sold to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, they had this slogan attached to the app called no ads, no games, no gimmicks, and those two guys clashed with Zuck after it was bought, and they ended up leaving the company. So they would not like to see WhatsApp monetized at all, even though it's happening now, but they just don't have a say in the matter because they got booted. Yeah, the reason why this is happening now, too, is I mentioned it a little bit at the start of this segment, artificial intelligence. I mean, it's expensive.

It's very expensive. They just shelled out $14.3 billion to buy scale AI. They're planning to spend more than $50 billion on AI this year. So if you're looking at where we can get additional revenue from, of course, WhatsApp was going to be circled within internal meetings at Meta. So very fascinating to see how big this business ends up being and how much money of it ends up being plowed right back into artificial. And how much backlash there will be. Even though it's not in the messaging area, we'll see what users, WhatsApp users have to say about this. They're probably not so happy.

The Mona Lisa had some unexpected alone time yesterday after the Louvre, the world's most famous museum, shut down for hours due to a surprise strike by staffers fed up with the throngs of visitors who visit the Paris icon and the inadequate infrastructure ready to handle them. They're hardly alone in saying enough is enough. Across southern Europe this weekend, thousands of locals in cities like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Venice marched through the streets demanding that tourists leave, spraying out of towners with water guns and heckling. them as they sat at cafes. Over-tourism has become an increasingly sore subject over in southern Europe, with visitor antagonism reaching new heights every summer. Residents of these cities, hugely popular with visitors, say short-term rentals have juiced housing prices, making it unaffordable for regular people to live there, while degrading the local character by attracting monoculture shops like bubble tea and souvenir stores. The Louvre is an example of what

can happen when something receives too much love. It welcomed 8.7 million visitors. last year, which is more than double what the facilities were designed to hold. French President Emmanuel Macron recently announced a major renovation of the museum that will put the Mona Lisa in a room of her own with ticketed entry, but that's years away and doesn't solve the pressing overcrowding problems. Toby, they're not exactly rolling out the welcome mat over there. Yeah, it was a staggering site yesterday because you had these incredibly long lines. I mean, the Louvre always has incredibly long lines, but this time there was no hope of getting in. A lot of people within those lines were saying,

got no, you know, communication. We didn't know what was happening because this strike happened pretty last minute where I think these employees just looked outside and said, you know what, we are done at this point. There's just too many people flowing through here. We cannot support it anymore. But yes, this is a theme that we've seen across, not just Europe, but all across the world, really. I mean, I think back to the town in Japan that installed this big screen that blocked a view of Mount Fuji because too many tourists were stopping and clogging up the road. to go take a picture there. In Greece, they've started issuing timed tickets

to try to keep people moving through the Acropolis in Athens. And then Venice started charging a daily access fee to come and see that city because just too many people were coming through. So clearly you are seeing this upswelling of anti-tourism sentiment. Water guns has to become this big symbol of that movement. But, yeah, the line outside of Louvre yesterday

was just another kind of indication that people are just fed up with too many tourists. And one big target of the anti-tourism crowd is Airbnb. I mean, you have rising housing prices, and the locals say that Airbnb's entrance into their market has contributed in a big way to that, and they want Airbnb's gone.

Barcelona and Spain have taken very drastic measures more so than maybe any other jurisdiction around the world in order to curb short-term listing rentals. Well, last week, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky had a little retort to all that criticism. He said that Airbnb has become a convenient scapegoat for a failed policy and deep, longstanding housing issues. And he stated a stat that said housing prices in Barcelona have rose 60% over the past decade,

which is an astonishing rise. But at the same time, Airbnb listings actually decreased. And he did some scapegoating of his own, which what do you think is for Airbnb, it's hotels. And he said that hotels are the real problem. They make up almost 80% of guest nights in the EU. in this broader tourism conflict, you have Airbnb being singled out in Chesky pushing back in a pretty big way last week. Yeah, there's just going to always be inherent tension because obviously these cities and places

do rely on tourism revenue to just function as an economy, but too much makes no one have a good time. So finding that balance between attracting visitors, but also, you know, keeping the crowds manageable, that's the name of the game. I mean, Barcelona is a city of 1.7 million people. It had 15.5 million visitors last year. That is a lot of people. At the same time, you're right, though, this is a huge part of their economy.

12% of Spain's GDP is dependent on tourism, so they're going to have to strike a balance. The perk measuring contest between longtime rivals, American Express, and J.P. Morgan Chase is ratcheting up. Made the heaviest card win. Yesterday, MX announced that its super fancy platinum cards for consumers and businesses would get a major update later this year, calling it the company's largest ever. investment in a card refresh. President of U.S. Consumer Services, Howard Grosfield, said, quote, we're going to take these cards to a new level, not only in what they offer in travel, dining and lifestyle benefits, but also how they look and feel, presumably to up the clang factor when you throw it down at a restaurant table. Now, Amex's refresh of its premium card line

would be worthy news of its own, but it's extra juicy considering what happened last week. That's when J.P. Morgan Chase said it was rolling out a refresh of its premium credit card, the Chase Sapphire Reserve this summer. Perhaps that provoked the response from Amex because you can't let your nemesis hog the spotlight for too long. It's the latest escalation in a year's long scrum for the most lucrative kind of customer, the jet setter foodie, free spender who doesn't mind paying a steep annual fee for hotel and airport lounge perks. While we don't have any details on what the new cards will feature, you can be pretty sure that those steep fees will only get steeper. The last time Amex refreshed its platinum card in 2021, it jacked up the annual.

cost from $550 to the current $695. And it looks like we could be getting a comma in that as well, because if the fee really gets the size $1,000, the question is, are people actually going to pay one grand for access to a credit card? And Clint Henderson, the travel editor for the Points Guy website, thinks that yes, and actually that's not a bug. That's a feature of the card because basically what they're trying to do is position themselves as the apex predator in the credit card market.

and having the highest annual fee actually kind of does that. It makes you the most exclusive card there. It is a marketing strategy in its own just as long with all the benefits it offers. If you have the highest fee, that means something when you put it down. The clang factor means something when you put it down when you go out to eat with your friends. So yeah, glossing up the brand as much as possible is actually the entire point of this refresh, even if, you know, the actual increased benefits aren't as crazy as they might seem. just the fee alone is enough to, you know, be some good marketing for AMX.

That would be a site, a thousand dollar annual fee card. Amex didn't have to do this for the past few decades. I mean, the platinum came out 40 years ago. And Amex was the Apex Predator. There were no other competitors to this premium card market, this very high-income customer. But then Chase kind of sent things into a whole new stratosphere in 2016. I don't know if you guys remember that, but remember, they came out with this Chase Reserve

intro offer, which was a hundred thousand point bonus. That was worth up to $2,000 in travel. And it kind of set the credit card world on fire because Amex, which had dominated the space for so long was finally getting a run for its money by the reserve in 2016. They've toned down the bonuses because it was costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. And then you had Capital One come in with the money. Venture X. So now there's sort of three big players here. Amex wants to, which still has the lead. It wants to extend that lead even further, but we'll see what Chase has up its sleeve because it's

giving the reserve a major refresh as well. Up next, we got Toby's Trends. If your Friday night contains more cross-stitching than clubbing and more needle-pointing than nightlife, then you're part of a growing portion of young Americans who are taking up grandma hobbies. Today's Toby's trends is all about young Americans skipping middle age entirely, as the Wall Street Journal put it, and embracing main character and a cozy British miniseries vibes. Grandma hobbies or Granny Core, whatever you want to call it, includes doing things like joining a knitting circle, junk journaling, or really anything low tech that requires less scrolling and more slip stitches.

In a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, the research firm Mintel found that 86% of Gen Z identifies as crafters. Young people say that embracing hands-on activities help them slow down, gives them a routine, and provides an oasis of calm during busy work weeks. It's nice to know that even if work feels super stressful, I can go home and cosplay as a 70-year-old retiree, a 22-year-old elementary school librarian told the Wall Street Journal. The market is catching on, too. Shopify reported that in May alone, sales of cross-stitching patterns jumped 89% year-over-year,

while embroidered canvas sales jumped 88%. So why are younger generations flocking to hobbies once reserved for their grandparents? Maybe it's burnout from phones. After years of doom scrolling in way too much screen time, people are craving something slower and more tactile and granny hobbies deliver. Neil, it's just nice to make something that isn't made up of pixels. It is. And with so many of these Toby's trends that you point out,

I think a lot of it also has to do with influencers on social media, kind of pouring gasoline onto this fire. you have the British Olympian diver, Tom Daly, who's kind of a social media influencer himself. He held his first knitwear exhibition in Tokyo last November. He was posting about his needlework throughout the Olympics. There are other content creators who have shown off their stuff. It looks super cool. And, you know, I think the average person thinks, hey, with a little bit of work and with maybe some mentorship from some of my friends who actually know how to do this because their grandmas actually did this and taught me,

then I can do this. And it's so nice to be able to, you're right, create something tangible. And I think also a big part of this is digital detox. People don't want to be on their phones. They want to be staring at something that's like physical and not a screen. And I think that's led to these surging sales and interest in this particular hobby. Yeah, there's a lot of mental health benefits to one study published in the National Library of Medicine

found that knitting helped people with eating disorders, manage their anxiety. 74% of participants stated that it had a calming and therapeutic effect. Then in a different study, researchers found that crocheting made almost 90% of almost 8,000 individuals in the study feel calmer, which I am not so sure about because our coworker Macy tried to teach me croceing. And calming was not the word that I would use because it felt like I was using my toes for hands. I just didn't have the dexterity to do it.

But if you practice and get better at it, then I could see where those calming effects come in. But yeah, we're seeing this all across entertainment, not just in hobby. but also people are flocking to comfort content. A lot of consumers just aren't in the mood to watch anything is stressful now because the world is stressful enough as is. I mean, Abby Bailey from UTA said time and time again, I get people saying I just can't bring myself to watch anything serious. Like, all I want to do is watch Bravo.

So I think we're seeing it in hobbies, but also the media that people are consuming. They just want to chill out. They don't need to be watching these stressful shows. They don't need to be doing special things on their phone. phone, it's all about, you know, knitting and watching Bravo. What are your, if you had to choose one, what's your grandma hobby? Well, okay, mine's different.

Mine is just going out for a run, which I think is kind of- That's not a grandma. I know, it's not, but that's how you detox. But you play like, you play like card games. Yeah, card games are fun, but I mean, again, not exactly stress-free. Some of these Uker games. So, yeah, I guess I do love the card games, but my way to, you know, de-stress to just go out and go for a little jog.

Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Donald Trump's trip to Canada for the G7 summit ended abruptly after the president Irish exited last night, saying he had to be back in Washington, D.C. to deal with the Israel-Iran war. After holding out initially, the U.S. did sign on to a joint statement that calls for peace and stability

in the Middle East after Israel and Iran traded missile attacks for the fifth day. The early Trump exit means that little was accomplished at the G7 on the trade front. The other leaders in attendance like India's Narendra Modi had hoped to grab some face time with the president to persuade him to bring down the U.S.'s steepest

tariffs on their goods. That's not happening anymore. Yeah, trade issues were supposed to be this major focus, but instead Israel-Iran strikes dominated most of the talks. Trump's press secretary, Caroline Levitt, did say that Trump accomplished a lot at the summit, including cementing the trade deal between the U.S. and the U.K. Trump also had a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday, which they were kind of floating a potential deal between the countries within the next 30 days to resolve all these import taxes. But it looks like all those guys. got overshadowed because, yeah, Trump had to return to Washington a little bit early. What do Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, and Donald Trump all have in common?

All three have attached their names to a phone service recently, with President Trump becoming the latest to get in on the mobile game yesterday. The Trump Organization, the family business operated by the president's children, announced that it is launching a phone service called T1Mobil. It will offer an unlimited wireless plan for $47.45 a month, a nod to Trump's presidencies. It will also loop in 24-7 roadside assistance and access to telemedicine, though the details on how it can provide those services at that price point were a little murky. The company will also sell the T-1 phone, a $499 Android smartphone with a golden paint job, that the organization claims will be designed and produced in the U.S. Neil, Trump made over $600 million last year attaching his names to various products like

Bibles and watches alongside his real estate and crypto holdings, now add a mobile operation to the list. And this, as you mentioned, is becoming a pretty hot thing for celebrities and big name people to get into. It's called a mobile virtual network operator agreement. And it's basically a resale deal with the major wireless carriers where they sell excess capacity to other companies. And they get customers as well through the process.

But Mitt Mobile, Betro, U.S. Mobile, Trump Mobile, now, the SmartList Mobile, they're all doing this same shtick. And, of course, whenever the Trump Organization, I'm sorry, you get them mixed up a little bit. And that's exactly what I want to talk about. There are critics that say that this is a huge conflict of interest. First of all, he's going to, this organization is, this company is going to be regulated by FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who Trump appointed and is currently his boss. And then the other aspect of this that is raising ethical concerns and conflict of interest concerns is that Trump holds the keys to tariffing other countries and tariffing other phones that come from other countries. This phone is made in the United States. So he could say, hey, Apple, 100% tariff on you.

And then you're like, oh, well, Trump's phone becomes a little more attractive in that sense. But he says that he is not involved in the day-to-day businesses. His sons are running it. But overall, this sort of resale wireless network business is huge, as we're seeing over the past few years with Ryan Reynolds, smartless guys, and now Trump getting into it. Finally, Britain's legendary spy agency, MI6, has a new leader, and for the first time in its 160-year history, it's a woman.

Well, for the first time in actual history, it was run by the Dame Judy Dench in a couple of James Bond films. Blaze Metro Wellie is the real-life Judy Dench, a career intelligence officer who will now be charged with keeping identities of international British spies a secret and protect against a growing number of threats from adversarial countries like Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran. In her current role, M. Terewellie served in MI6 as Q, which you may remember from the Bond films as the head of technology who supplied him with all those cool gadgets. That is a real position. Now, after her

promotion, she'll be known as codename C. I'm not going to lie. I didn't know that Q was going to be a real position within MI6. So this was an illuminating story for me. But yeah, she enters at a time when the intelligence relationship between Britain and the United States is a little bit tense right now. I mean, Trump has proposed breaking up the five-eyes intelligence partnership that includes Canada, United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. There's also just a lot going on right now in the world. Trump fired the director of the NSA recently. A lot of senior analysts have left the administration. So tough time to be stepping into the role, but also finally time.

where real-life spies are catching up with, you know, James Bond movies and Metrobelly is taking over absolutely deserving of it, career intelligence officer and has obviously operated at high levels in the technology and innovation department of MI6. So pretty cool role to have on your CV for sure. Yeah, I mean, this is just cool. Like there's really interesting lore about MI6. So the letter C, the code name C for the head of MI6, you might think that stands for chief or captain, but no, It's actually named after the first head of the Secret Service Bureau in the UK, Captain Mansfield coming. And another interesting fact about this guy was he wrote in green ink.

And so to this day, the head of MI6 is the only person in Whitehall who can write in green. So green ink, C, Q, it's all pretty interesting in the world of British spies, that's for sure. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments or feedback to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer.

Raymond Liu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup was knitting before it was cool. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

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