Morning Brew Daily - Can Liquid Glass Save Apple's Dominance? & Power Ranking Brands' Marketing

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Episode 609: Neal and Toby sit down with branding and marketing expert Ashwinn Krishnaswamy (@shwinnabegobrand) about Apple’s recent WWDC conference and if its Liquid Glass redesign is worth the hype. Also, the latest brand moves by OpenAI, Nike, and HBO. Then, what’s the future of influencer marketing and how will AI become a powerful tool in the advertising business. Plus, what’s the real reason a company should do a rebrand and if it actually yields returns. Finally, a quick power ranking of some of the best marketing moves in the last couple years. 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

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Good morning, Brew, Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today we have a special Friday interview episode coming your way. We're talking with a branding and marketing expert about Apple's liquid glass redesign, smart list launching a wireless company, and why AI marketing kind of stinks. It's Friday, June 20th. Let's ride. Raise your hand if you've ever had some thoughts on a company's logo change or redesign.

Yeah, a lot of you. Everyone has opinions on marketing and branding, but perhaps no one's thought more deeply about the subject. than our guest today, Ashwin Krishna Swami, on a special summer Friday episode of Morning Brew Daily. Yesterday, Juneteenth, was a company holiday for Morning Brew. So today you get to hear us talk to Ashwin. He's a consumer brand builder extraordinaire, helping launch numerous consumer-facing companies

through his own design agency. He's the guy you'd go to to bring your idea for a pickleball shoe company or a non-alcoholic champagne brand to life, advising you on stuff like, what should your logo be? Who's your ideal customer? Are you even good at pickle?

We asked him about some recent branding debacles like HBO Max changing its name every other week and Jaguar doing whatever that was. Ashman also told us the one thing every AI company is messing up when it comes to their marketing. All in all, it was a super fun conversation where you'll hopefully learn a lot more about all that goes into a company's design language and brand, but also get some hot takes along the way. But first, a word from our sponsor, Amazon ads. Neil, you know that feeling when you show up to a podcast and realize you prep for the wrong. wrong topic. What? No, I've never done that before. Honestly, you haven't, but I certainly have and basically just Rift over here. But I hated that feeling and want to avoid it in the future, which is why Amazon streaming TV ads are so helpful as someone who is trying to build a

small business. It helps you avoid that feeling of preparing for the wrong thing and helps you meet relevant customers where they are watching. Whether you're a local business, a service provider, or just trying to grow on a budget, Amazon ads help you show up while your audience is watching the shows they actually care about. And you can measure what's working, tweak what isn't, and get help improving every step of the way. That's how you market like you mean it. Gain the edge with Amazon ads by going to advertising.com slash start now. That's advertising.com slash start now.

Now without further ado, here's Ashwin. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. College PC.

So Apple just announced a major design shift, their first in a decade, to a new language called Liquid Glass. What do you think was the strategy behind Liquid Glass, and what do you expect the reception among users to be when it comes to their phones this fall? So it's so interesting to see the difference in commentary on TikTok versus Twitter, which you've probably, you may be seen on Twitter, especially among like design community and like more older people. There is a ton of feedback that it looks horrible and you can't see anything. And then you go and look at the commentary on like TikTok and people are like, oh, this is so fun,

This is so exciting. It's like customization. I can change it however I want. And I think it's just like it's going to polarize people in a couple of different ways. I mean, I've now had the iPhone since 2009, and I've been so accustomed to a very specific design system. Sure, they've gone like skeuomorphic to what it is now, but like the liquid glass stuff is a little bit different. And I think we don't like change. Did they invent this out of thin air, or were there existing examples that they sort of drew inspiration

from? I think there's always existing examples that they draw inspiration from. I don't know what this specific inspiration for this is, but I think Microsoft probably had some similar stuff from older versions where they pull this idea of like frosted glass. It's funny because the screenshots that I see of users complaining about it is they'll pull down like their main screen. And it's like when you have glass and just frosted glass, you still like picks up the image from behind, so you lose a lot of detail in the icons, and people are there any designers, like, left working at Apple who actually, like, care about design? I saw some Galaxy Brain takes of how they're pushing towards a, you know, a multi-modular system where, like, it's based off, like,

the Vision OS software. Yeah. And so, like, where they're going to be layering things in, like, real space and time, so they're, like, seeding people into getting used to that. But in the meantime, while we're still having iPhones, it stinks. Like, the readability stinks. So I'm glad that you're seeing some people loving it and some people not liking it. But it kind of brings me to my next question. Do you think Apple is okay right now? Like there's been a lot of reports of its demise and how it's just doing this facelifts when they should be getting on the AI train. Where do you think Apple is right now and their evolution as a company? Yeah, I think they're, so number one, I think they're just fine, right? And it's like people always talk about like the biggest companies in the

world and it's like they're dying, they're dying. There's this idea in like technology called the Lindy effect, which is like the longer thing has been around, the longer it takes to die. So this was often brought up when people would be like, Snapchat is the Facebook killer. Well, it's like, Facebook's been around for 20 years. And like, if anything, they're going to die equally slow death. It's going to be like 20 years.

But they've just reinvented themselves a number of times. And so Apple's like very aware of the writing on the wall and that they're losing like some of the AI kind of like war to GPT. And I think they're just, they're going to be investing in it. And it's like they're not a stupid company, right? They are very smart. and they know how to design and build the products.

Speaking of Smart, that's actually a very good lead to this next question. The host of the SmartList podcast just announced that they're starting a mobile wireless company. This is kind of a wild departure from the kinds of brands celebrities typically launched. Does this make any sense to you? Well, Ryan Reynolds has his telecom company, right? Mint Mobile that sold for like a billion dollars or something. So maybe they were looking at that. And they're like, okay, we're not going to do, Jason Bateman and who else, a few other guys are.

Yeah. Yeah, so they're like, all right, we're not going to do a beauty brand. We're not going to do like a creator-led alcohol brand. Let's do telecom. I'm not sure what the positioning is on this one, but it's interesting. Do you think this speaks to any bigger shift in celebrity entrepreneurship away from, you know, those comforting brands like alcohol and beauty to a more maybe Ryan Reynolds approach where he's like, I'm going to get my hands dirty in like an actual business? I have a buddy who does talent partnerships at WME, a big talent agency, and they do a lot of, like, celebrity brand partnerships.

And I always tell him, I'm like, dude, B2B is the next wave. We ought to bring in, like, celebrity software brands. And I always said it joking. But then recently I saw, I want to say it's Ed Edward Norton. He launched, like, a pitch deck company, like better software. It's called Boardroom or something, like better, like, pitch-making software. And I think that's the first play, and especially as the bearer. to entry of creating software decrease, I think we're going to see this play of, you know, just

different celebrities saying like, hey, yeah, beauty and alcohol and some of these, like, traditional categories, they're a little bit saturated. They're really, really hard to win in, and you have to be operationally excellent on so many fronts. But, hey, if we have this distribution, we have a slightly different audience, maybe they're a little bit older, there could be some interesting software to make. And that, and that's different than Matthew McConaughey being in a Super Bowl ad for Salesforce. You're talking about someone getting down and dirty with the product. Totally. I mean, I don't know that it's so far-fetched to think of a celebrity who is super fit and loves to run going and creating like a Strava competitor with the right team.

What do you think is like the future of influencer marketing kind of on this topic? Is it evolving in a way that you think is a departure from kind of slap your name on this brand and just let it do the rest? Is it becoming more in the weeds? Yeah, I think, I think, I think, we are at a point where the audience is so fatigued by celebrity brands that they can very easily see when it's a cash grab. Last year, I think Kendall Jenner launched maybe five or six brands and posted about it in a two-month period. And by the fifth one, people are like, what is going on here? Like, you're talking beauty, you're talking like an alcohol product, you're talking a jeans product, like in such a short time period. And people know when there's that cash grab and they're like,

you're already rich. It's hard to build kind of resonance, especially if there isn't product market fit already. So that doesn't mean there aren't tremendous opportunities for like creator and celebrity led brands, but this era of like, let's take this category, find this like super narrow white space, put a face on it, and then we're off to the races and it's going to be successful. Let's shift gears a little bit to AI. Since Chatty came out, there's been numerous instances of tech companies stumbling when it comes to their AI marketing. I'm thinking here of Google's ad during the Olympics where they had a dad using Gemini to help his daughter write a letter to her hero. Also, the massive backlash that Duolingo got when they CEO came out and said,

hey, we're an AI first company now. What are companies getting wrong when it comes to talking about AI to their customers? Everyone makes AI the hero. And no one cares about AI. They care about their problems being solved faster for them. So make AI the secondary thing and talk about how you speed up workflows or experiences or like get people to a desired outcome. And this was so apparent to me. I was driving on a highway in San Francisco. Every single billboard was like AI, the power of now. I'm like, what does this even mean? Yeah, it's become like you're not even showcasing the benefits anywhere. You're just saying the words and just hoping people say, ah, AI does it all. But also, we just saw Sam Altman, an open AI, shell out a lot of money, $6.5 billion to bring in Johnny I,

the former Apple developer to make an AI-first hardware product. We've already seen some stumbles with Humane's AI pin that didn't work out. What do you think this could be? Like, what could be the hardware iteration of AI? I think it probably starts. So when you look at the existing model that people are familiar with, it's like Alexa in their home, and we talk to this thing. And so I think that's a decent place to start

because you have to look at where people's behaviors are because you can't shift behavior that drastically that quickly. So if they use that as the starting point and say, hey, here's this device that's in your home now that you can interface with, and maybe now instead of you having to say, hey, Alexa, answer this for me, maybe it's always ambiently kind of like listening and processing and then gives you this kind of active feedback.

And I think they're probably going to take a lot of insight from how people are talking to chat GPT. I talk to chat GPT all the time. Like after meetings and I just download notes. notes into it. So I think they're going to use that and then look at some common hardware behaviors that we're already used to and then try to like blend those two. I think our audience is probably very interested in how you're using chat JPT or AI in your workflow. So you say you talk to it all the time, like what are you having it doing?

I talk to it all the time, but I'll give you like a kind of tactical example of something that I did super recently. So I have a brand and we just did a ton of customer interviews. You probably did 50 customer interviews and then we did a survey with another hundred customers. And so this includes both structured and unstructured data. When I'd say unstructured data, just off the cuff them talking about the product. We wanted to take all this information and then use it to inform our ads, the audience that we go after, as well as how we talk about our product from like a copy and messaging standpoint. Before kind of AI, I would have to parse through all of this, pull out the insights. It'd be an exercise that takes me a couple of weeks to do.

With AI, I feed it all of the data and then have it analyze it and think like a really smart copywriter or market strategist and say, hey, what are the ads or angles we should test? What should our landing page copy look like? Where is our Amazon storefront coming up short? Are you using it for any actual creative outputs? Are you asking it to generate images for ads? Are you asking it to generate actual copy that makes it into marketing materials? So I use it because I have some background in design.

I use it to generate background assets or supplemental images. I do not use it to generate the entire ad creative that many people do. It's like we saw Twitter was a blaze when 4-0 came out. People were like, oh, this is, I'm just going to generate hundreds of like sloppy images and run it. It's like, no, you still need to be like a decent marketer and like think about the angles. And I think it can, you know, what would otherwise have taken me, hey, I got to get this really specific shot of this mug on this table, and that's just going to be this blurred background image. Well, now I can just generate that image and then create the rest of my create.

All right. We'll be back with more Ashman right after this. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel. advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. We need to talk about some marketing flops because that is extremely fun. What can we learn from the HBO Max, HBO Max branding debacle? What I am curious about is what has the leadership or management change looked like at HBO over the past four years and how often are people cycling in and out?

Because oftentimes when you see brands do these big rebrands, thinking that's going to solve their problems, that's just a sign that like a new, you know, CMO or head of brand has come in and they want to put their thumbprint on things. And that's the easiest kind of place to start, right, is overhaul the visual identity. So I think it's almost comical, right? It's a meme, but it's almost getting them this like earned awareness where people are thinking about and talking about HBO and Max more than they ever have been. Do you think they're playing 4D chess? Do you think they're doing that? Or no, it's just bad leadership. Having talked to a few of these large streaming services

from a content and social standpoint and kind of like modern marketing standpoint, there's no way they're playing 4D chess. They just don't understand, like, the internet at that level. Yeah, people rarely. Although the last HBO Max rebrand did come with a lot of memes, a lot of, like, leaning into the joke. So I do feel like someone in their social department,

at least figured out like, hey, guys, this is what people are saying about us. Let's just get out ahead of it. So there was a little bit of chess going on. I don't know if it was 4D at that point. Yeah, maybe just like they're just responsive to what's happening. On that note, like, how much does a company's or brand's name matter? For a, when you look at physical products, right, the physical, like, when I say physical products, anything sold in like a Whole Foods 7-Eleven, you know, any like object that you're purchasing,

brand names and brand identities matter a lot for recognition, discoverability, like word of mouth. When you get into services businesses and then you get into streaming businesses, especially, right, when we're talking about HBO versus Max versus HBO Max, I think it matters a little bit less because it's like, well, you have the app, you generally recognize it. You maybe use three or four different streaming services. So it's not like, oh man, I can't remember that one thing. it's like, I just want to watch Game of Thrones. Like, where is it? I'm going to figure it out anyway.

So in some categories, it matters quite a bit. In other categories, I think you're okay kind of making these, like, mistakes. We have seen a couple of major rebrands recently. One, minor rebrand was actually Walmart just slightly tweaking its logo. Another big reband was Jaguar changing its entire visual identity. Both of them elicited pretty strong reactions from customers. What is it about a rebrand that brings out those strong feelings? Yeah, so the Walmart one is interesting because Walmart changed their logo ever so slightly, right?

imperceptively. And then the public or like the meme is, oh, this was a rebrand and someone got paid tens, hundreds of millions of dollars to do this thing. And what they see is like the meme that gets shared is like before and after. And people are like, I could do that. I could type out the word Walmart. But then you actually go into the entire design system that was built for Walmart. What I mean by design system is as a brand grows and you have an international brand with so

many different touch points, physical touch points, digital touchpoints, apps, services, all on the side of trucks, boxes, et cetera. You need a consistent visual system, right? Everything from illustrations to iconography, to wordmarks, to type, to colors, that can expand on this system. And what often happens as companies grow very quickly is that all of these different departments will make ever so subtle tweaks because they're hiring external agencies. And then you're like, oh, now we have this like Frankenstein design system where we have 73 shapes. of blue and we should have just had three to maintain this consistency. So a rebrand that like Walmart did is actually just a

slight evolution, but it's really a lot of this behind the scenes like foundational design system work that matters that like a lot of people who aren't designers or have ever operated in those fields, they don't understand the value of that, especially at the scale of Walmart. Like creating consistency there is going to save them a lot of time and money. But it's fascinating to see how emotionally invested, regular people are in a company's design decisions. For some reason, it elicits the most strong reactions of any sort of corporate decision that a company can make.

Well, here's the thing. It's the easiest thing to have a decision on. And the easier thing is to have a decision on, the more input you're going to get. We've all designed something, right? Even if the last thing we designed was in high school, like, you designed a book cover for some report. So we have, we feel like we can have opinions on, like, color and look and look and feel of things, whereas it's like, hey, should we change our shipping route from like, you know, this country to this country? No one can talk about that. No one has, has the right to have any

opinion on it. So that's where I think we see like a lot of the public getting very invested in that type of stuff. All right. So we talked about some flops. What are some of the smartest product launches and associated marketing campaigns you've seen this year? You know, one that stands out to me is Jake Paul, like creator-led brand. Um, well, Well, he's not a creative-led brand, but he launched W, which is a, you know, men's body care line. He launched a deodorant and all these other products. And what I found fascinating about his launch is he didn't say, hey, one day I'm just, like, going to launch this thing. And it's this one and done thing where I kind of contrast this to Beyonce launched a hair care brand called Sacred.

She, I think, maybe posted about it one day. But if you go to her account, like there's no association between her and this. brand at all, which can be a strategic and intentional decision on its own merit. But Jake Paul's like, I'm the master of commanding attention. So I am, and this was around the time of the Tyson fight too, so leading up to it for a week, he was creating all of this content. Him and this brother did this like phenomenal like lie detector test video that actually turned out to be an ad halfway through for W. They rolled out in Walmarts nationwide. And then for probably like three weeks afterwards, W played some role in every one of his videos, his reels, his YouTube videos.

He changed all of his, like, social avatars to W and, like, driving traffic there. And that's where I think a creator-led brand has a higher likelihood of getting traction and success when there is a creator who knows how to garner attention and then is repeatedly talking about it over a long period of time. Seems like you're talking about commitment to it. Yes. Yes. Is, I mean, Jake Paul and Logan Paul, obviously they command a lot of attention, not all of it good attention all the time. Do you delineate between all attention is good attention or does it have to be like the right kind of attention?

Because there's people who can make headlines, but not all of them the most positive. Do you think that brands need to be supported by someone with more positive headlines than negative or does it just not matter? I think it's a question of like what, how negative is negative, right? If they, you kind of look at Elon Musk and like the impact that it's had on like Tesla and SpaceX and like how kind of polarizing he has been with like certain views. And it's like can be seen as super negative by a large population of people. I don't see a similar thing. Like Jake Paul and his brother like they act stupid a number of times. Like the most negative headline was probably like 15 years ago from them.

And so I think in that stage as long as there isn't this like tremendous like reputational risk. when they come out and say something, it's kind of just like additional like eyeballs and attention on them. If you did want to launch a brand in the year 2025, how would you do it? And would it be much different

than it was maybe five years ago, 10 years ago? Five or 10 years ago, the play was really, we can find an opportunity. And if there's enough, you don't even need that much gross margin on your product.

We can just play this arbitrage game on Facebook, right? We can acquire a customer for five bucks. We have 20 bucks of gross margin, and then we can scale that really quickly. Those days are completely over. So one of the conversations I was having, someone was saying, hey, where's the arbitrage right now? And I'm like, you know, for the past 12 months, it's probably been TikTok shop. It'll probably be TikTok shop for the next 12 months.

So I'd probably start and lean pretty heavily, like reverse engineer the product and brand to work very well on social, right? So what this means is for TikTok shop, it's high repeat purchase. It is maybe in the beauty or skin care space. There's a clear kind of demonstration or use case of the product. And it probably sits at under a $40 price point. Again, that's if you want to build a product that can kind of like take advantage of some arbitrage that exists from a customer acquisition standpoint. But in terms of like foundational brand building, all of that stuff is really the same. And it's like you have to build a community.

You have to build loyalty. You can't just rely on one channel. you have to build a kind of like omni-channel business. And those tenants mattered 10 years ago. They mattered 30 years ago. They still matter today. It's just the tooling has changed a little bit. You recently went to a Sephora.

What did you learn there? It's my first time. It was my first time actively in a Sephora looking around. There's so much beauty product. And there's so many unique names for them. And I'm like, oh, they rebranded lip gloss into like a collagen lip plumber. Turns out when you do that verbal gymnastics, you can 4x the price of the product. So I think it was an interesting exercise in seeing how the variety of products, all of the ways that they talk about these products.

And then you have some brands that lean heavily beauty and then some brands that lean so heavily into the science and clinical studies that you don't even know what they're saying. And K-18 was one brand that stood out to me. they're like biomimetic hair science. And I'm like, do I, I might believe this. So it sounds like we have to launch a biomechanic lip plumber with collagen on TikTok shop and generate some headlines if we want to launch a brand in the year 2025. That seems like that's all the Venn diagrams right there, right? I'm in for a million.

All right, there we go. That's what I'm talking about. All right, we're going to finish off with a kind of fun segment. I just want you to power rank these brands or companies, what it calls. comes to their marketing right now, and we're going to start you off in the running space. I know you're a big runner. Power rank on, Hoka and Nike.

So Hoka, one, on, two, on to Nike three. Why is Hoka one? Probably, number one, I really like my Hoka CALA X. Number two, I think on, I was really liking until they did this partnership with Zendaya. Which I think it just like fell flat for a number of reasons for me. I think the partnership didn't like make a whole lot of sense,

especially as Zendaya has come out and been like, I don't really like run or exercise. And it's like, okay, well, why is he like, she plays tennis? She plays tennis. The ambassador. Kind of. On screen. Kind of.

Yeah. Kind of. So I was like, okay, what is that? But obviously On is absolutely crushing it. And so it's like, okay, did that one campaign. The one campaign didn't hurt them. But it's like me as I'm staring at it. I'm like, does that make sense?

And then Nike lost his fastball a little bit? You know, I think Nike pulled back so much from their retail distribution and leaned in so heavily in performance marketing, and that's been like the big story and kind of conversation of Nike. And now they're realizing, okay, that was a mistake. And we need to like go back into retail and like take care of marketing in a less performance-oriented way. Let's do beverages next. Celsius, Monster, Red Bull. Celsius?

Well, I think Red Bull's number one. Red Bulls like still goat, right? If we're ranking marketing, consistently their videos and stunts like still pop off and garner so much attention. And they've been so good at doing that in a variety of countries, a variety of ways tapping to so many different sports cultures. In a way that monster, I'm not like terribly familiar with what they're doing still on like a day-to-day basis. I'm sure this is doing quite well. And then Celsius, Celsius, I see their distribution. Like, you can think of distribution as marketing, and they're kind of everywhere, and they have these, like, phenomenal displays.

And they have a good product that is positioned to, like, more like a kind of corporate audience. But I don't see what they're really doing from, like, brass tax marketing. Yeah, that's a great point. Like, I don't see any marketing for them, but you see them everywhere. They're just so... Right when you walk into any convenience store. They're right staring you in the face at the front. Which in and of itself, to be clear, is that it's a really great form of marketing.

And that can work. And, you know, they had a huge investment by Pepsi that, like, opened up all of this distribution for them. But early on, I think their positioning was really smart. And I still think their positioning is really smart. All right. Let's go back to AI. And we're just talking marketing here. Open AI, Anthropic, Google's Gemini or Meta AI.

Meta AI, I haven't seen anything. So we'll actually go worse. We'll go Anthropic at the bottom. Oh, you don't like Anthropic. That's number four. I saw an out-of-home campaign from Claude, and none of it made sense to me, right? The messaging or the positioning.

And I think this is kind of a function of you're very close to the product and you know what it is, but the passerby, even people who'd be interested in AI, it's like, well, what does that mean? It was like one of the billboards was like, your thoughts up into the right? and I was like, it's so like SF-coded. And so there was one campaign that stood out to me, so I didn't like that, but I'm sure they've turned around

and they're doing just fine. It's interesting because Anthropic to me was the only one with like a visual identity at this point. They have kind of that tan color. They have kind of a fancy font, and I'm not sure any of the other ones quite have that same design language. That being said, I don't know what the words are saying

on their out-of-home stuff. They have, you know, a brand, but that's interesting that you ranked it so low because they may have jumped the shark a little bit when it comes to how RTS you can get with AI advertising. Well, you know what, now that I think about it, did meta AI do a ad for the Super Bowl? Yeah, they did.

Well, it was their AI glasses. There's the AI glasses. Okay, yeah, that kind of fell a little bit flat to me. So we'll rank that as number three. GPT is number two, because I just can't even think of anything that they've really done. They've just been in its dominant number one position that I don't know that they've gone.

too crazy with their marketing outside of that. And then Google Gemini, you referenced the Super Bowl ad. I thought that was a great ad, because it humanized a way in which you could use AI to some benefit. And I think when the bar is so low that all of these AI companies, it's just like they're talking to other AI leaders at their companies, this is the first one that's like, hey, let's take just like a human first approach and like, try to create this narrative that we're like solving their problem somehow, a little bit easier.

The bar is so low and people are limping over it at this point. Let's talk about people. These are just the PR images of certain celebrities, and I want you to rank. Sidney, Timothy Salomey, and Glenn Powell. Who's kind of on top of the heap right now? Timothy Shalame, I think, is winning. Timothy Shalame is winning after, what was it, is Oscar speech. Yeah.

Did he win an Oscar? I don't know if he did. He had some speech at some awards show. He had some speech that was super humble, and he just kind of, like, reinforced this idea of just, like, hard work and, like, humility. And I was like, okay, that's, like, really great. He didn't come in this, like, super braggia docha way. I think he just, like, got great swag that, like, a lot of people just kind of, like, you know, vibe with. And so we'll rank him as number one.

Sidney's just, like, been on a tear. And so I think she's number two. She did a partnership recently where she bottled up her bathwater with Dr. Squatch. And so she plays her cards to the audience, you know? What did you think about that in partnership? It gets attention. Yeah. It gets attention.

I'm sure they sold those bars. We tried. No one bought it. We tried to body up our bathwater. No one was really buying the. Yeah, complete fail. Complete fail on our part. Well, you know, I think we have a better idea in the bio-mechanical lip plumber.

Yeah, exactly. We got that going. Emily's telling me the Timothy Shalamey speech was at the SAG Awards, if you want to go watch. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was about him wanting to become great. Yes. I mean, hey.

Yes. If he should have passed on some of the greatness of the Knicks because it didn't work out so well for them. Neil, you want to do our final category? Sure. Final category, we got wellness trends, creatine, protein, THC drinks. God. It's protein everything. Chloe Kardashian just launched a protein popcorn.

Hilarious because it has like five grams of protein. And they're like, does that really count as protein? Like, that's hardly anything right there. So here's the thing. It seems that people want protein. Okay, fine. We can put it in more form factors. I think the question is, how, like, digestible and bioavailable does that protein come?

And I don't know the research or science behind that. And I don't know that a lot of people starting these brands also know that research in science. They're just trying to, like, load it up in there. And it's like, well, hey, you're only going to absorb two grams of the 30 grams here because you actually need it with all these other ingredients that make this an unsustainable product to create. So I'm kind of out on that.

I think there will probably be some conversation that like cools the jets a little bit on protein infused everything. Creatine has had this like interesting turnaround because when I was in high school it was like creatine was this kind of demonized thing. Creatine was almost like taking steroids, right? And it's like, oh, don't do that. It's going to like jack up your muscles. Now there's all this research coming out that it's like a performance enhancing. Like, you know, it decreases your chance of like dementia and Alzheimer's. and if you're tired, you can take it,

and it has all these great benefits. So seeing some of that, at least, headline research come out, I think, is turning the tides on creatine. And so there's a ton of demand there. And so if that's true, are we gonna see it in like creatine popcorn, maybe? And then, so now let me rank it.

THC drinks number one, creatine number two, protein number three. Why are you so bullish on THC? We have people drinking less. And I think if you have people drinking less and want to live a healthier lifestyle, it has to be, something has to take its place. Because why were we drinking in the first place? It's a social lubricant.

So it's like, okay, there's some drug. There's some, like, mind-altering substance that's going to take its place. And now that looks like THC, and they're putting in a beverage. So, like, similar form factor, you can drink it in the same situations. So I think that's hot category.

I don't know how much THC is a social lubricant for me. They're going to lubricate, just sitting and staring out. Just immediately down. And probably eating the, creatine popcorn because he got a little bit of the munchies. Ashman, thanks so much for dropping by. We love talking marketing and branding with you.

We could go on all day. If you want to hear more from Ashman, you can follow him at Schwinnabago brand. Great social handle on all social platforms. He posts videos breaking down the biggest marketing stories and brands of the day. So definitely give him a follow. Ashman, thanks for jumping by. Thank you for having me.

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