Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Business News: Railroads Merge, Prebiotic Pepsi Pops Off, Real Estate Investors Surge, and Chicago's Sports Collectors Convention Heats Up

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

SUMMARY Ryan Alford breaks down 8 major stories shaping business and marketing—from Shopify’s AI assistant and a historic railroad merger to PepsiCo’s prebiotic cola and Nike’s rapid sneaker lab. Plus: TikTok’s 60-minute videos, Sprite x Jalen Hurts, and more. TAKEAWAYS Shopify's introduction of the AI assistant Sidekick and its impact on e-commerce. The merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, creating a coast-to-coast railroad network. PepsiCo's launch of a prebiotic cola aimed at health-conscious consumers. Live Nation Urban's new creator network for connecting brands with influencers. The increasing role of investors in the single-family housing market. Nike's Air Imagination Lab for rapid sneaker prototyping using 3D printing. Sprite's NFL marketing campaign featuring quarterback Jalen Hurts and player-led storytelling. TikTok's testing of longer video uploads, potentially challenging YouTube. The National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago and its significance in the collectibles market. The overarching theme of reducing friction in business processes to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.  

This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Write About Now. It's our weekly business news recap here on August. It's first 20, 25. We were out last week. We brought you a best of edition. Hope you got value in

that, always trying to serve up value, give you business and marketing guidance that helps you get your business ahead or keeps you a little entertained. We try to do a little bit of both here. We want to entertain you, bring you the news, and make you think about what matters. At least it matters to us. Today, we're going to run you through eight stories. that are sending ripples across retail, freight, fizzy drinks, influencer marketing, housing, sneakers, soda brand storytelling, and the booming world of cardboard collectibles. I won't spoil the details just yet, but think AI cashiers cross-continental freight, colas that claim to help your gut, a new shortcut for brands that want culture on speed dial,

investors scooping up homes you thought you might bid on, 3D printed air, Air Max prototypes you can design from your couch, TikTok, long-form video, an NFL quarterback turning Sprite into social media fuel in a Chicago Convention Center that's becoming the hobbies Las Vegas this weekend. You ready? Let's roll. First up, Shopify's twice a year update landed with a thud. More than 150 new features bundled into what they call the Summer 25 edition. Is this a playlist? I don't know.

The headliner is Sidekick, an AI assistant that lives in the admin dashboard and answers in 20 plus languages. Merchants are already asking it to draft product descriptions, suggest bundle discounts, surface low stock alerts, and compose email campaigns. Two beta users reported to Shopify's community forum that Sidekick caught variant mislabeling mistakes before customers saw them. And one store owner said the bot suggested moving a slow selling item, to a buy-one get-one flow that bumped conversion three points overnight. On the physical front, the point-of-sale app now prints receipts three times faster and finally supports split shipments with one tap, a godsend for Omni-Channel shops trying to juggle inventory across a main warehouse, a pop-up, and a partner 3PL.

Where Shopify used to sell tools, it's now selling a copilot that keeps clicking even when you're sleeping. All right. Switching from digital checkout counters to the little tracks that move from those packages, let's talk railroads. While digital retailers tinker with smart assistance, America's two biggest eastern and western railroads decided the 19th century map wasn't big enough. Union Pacific will pay roughly $85.5 billion in cash in stock to acquire Norfolk Southern.

Norfolk. You know them northern folk, southern. Nothing confusing there. It's creating the first coast-to-coast railroad. The combined network would stretch about 50,000 route miles and touch every major American port. Executives say it'll shave two days off transcontinental shipping for commodities like grain, autos, and crude oil. Regulators are worried, of course, the Surface Transportation Board, It hasn't approved a class one deal this size in decades, but shippers are salivating.

One West Coast produce exporter told Market Watch that if the merger closes, he could get lettuce from Salinas to Boston and under 100 hours without a single handoff. Hey, we've got to get those salads. Trucking firms dislike the math and unions fear job losses, but early modeling says the blended company could find nearly $3 billion. and annual savings. If your supply chain relies on rail, dust off the contingency plans now, because whether the deal sells or stalls, price sheets and transit times are about to shift.

If coast-to-coast freight sounds heavy, let's lighten things up with something bubbly and surprisingly healthy. At the grocery aisle, PepsiCo is betting you'll pay for bubbles plus benefits. Is that like friends with benefits? It's bubbles with benefits. Meet Pepsi prebiotic cola.

Is that coloscomy? What is this thing? Original and cherry vanilla shelves next month with 30 calories, five grams of cane sugar, three grams of chickory root fiber, all in one 12-ounce can. Pepsi's R&D lead told reporters they riffed on the company's bubbly bounce line to find a formula that supports good gut bacteria.

Good grief. without the metallic echo of artificial sweeteners. Yuck. Early samplers say it tastes like a lightly sweet craft cola with a subtly earthy note. Is this wine or Pepsi? Marketing leans on TikTok challenges dubbed Better Fizz, featuring side by said burp tests. Yes, really, burp test. Between traditional cola and the prebiotic version, retail buyers we spoke with,

think Pepsi's move, pressures Coke to expand. beyond Coke Zero and into functional ingredients territory. If the FIS meets the fiber, promise, we could see the Kola War shift from sugar counts to symbiotics in record time. Now that you've got a chilled gut-friendly cola in hand, you'll need some fresh content to sip along with it. Brands looking for fresh storytellers may not need to hunt on their own much longer. Live Nation Urban just launched its creator network in partnership with Platform Breaker.

That's B-R-E-A-K-R. No ER. Unlocking a roster of 75,000 mostly black creators sorted by engagement metrics, genre, and audience demos. The goal is to let a brand or an artist on tour, book micro-influencers, bid tier personalities, or stadium-level stars with the same ease you reserve, a plane ticket. Need a dance challenge seated ahead of a festival drop? the dashboard shows cost, expected reach, and even a content approval timeline. Live Nation Urban's president says,

marketers kept asking for culture in a box, so we built one. For creators, the pitch is standardized contracts and transparent pay rates, a pain point in past brand campaigns. If you handle sponsorships, you might soon buy audience segments the way you buy ad impressions. Only this time the target is a human with a ring light. If you're finding value in these weekly business news rundowns, make sure you don't miss our Tuesday deep dive episodes. Every week, we're sitting down with founders, C-suite leaders, and investors who are reshaping their industries. These conversations drop right here in the same feed.

So follow right about now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and let the app do the remembering for you. Join us and get the kind of practical playbooks and insights. You can't get anywhere else. Switching to housing, the Wall Street Journal reports that investors now account for about 30% of single-family home purchases, the highest share in 14 years. The shocker, it isn't Blackstone swooping in. It's smaller players, each holding under 100 homes, especially in markets like Dallas and Tampa. High mortgage rates pushed first-time buyers to the sidelines, but local investors with cash or low LTV loans are pouncing. Sometimes negotiating bulk discounts from builders eager to meet quarterly targets. One developer in Houston admitted offering a five-house package at 10% below list to clear inventory. Economists warned this micro-landlord wave could tighten rental supply and keep prices high for would-be owners.

Policymakers debate rent caps. Investors counter that they provide needed rental stock. Either way, the line between mom and pop landlord and institute. buyer is blurry. And if you're house hunting this summer, no, you may be bidding against a neighbor with a private LLC and a spreadsheet model. Speaking of big purchases, let's lace up and see how Nike is shrinking sneaker design and prototyping for months to minutes. Over in Oregon, Nike opened the Air Imagination Lab. Air Imagination Lab. I felt like I needed to say it that way. The hybrid design studio and 3D printing warehouse

where fans craft custom AirMax sneakers. You type a prompt, say, Northern Lights Gradient, icy outsole, bamboo heel logo, and an AI trained on decades of Nike sketches returns four designs and under 30 seconds. Damn. Pick your favorite in a robotic arm prints.

The mid-soul layers from temperature-stable TPU fuses them to a knit upper and delivers a fully wearable sample in about two hours. Nike insiders claim the process slashes concept of prototype from six months to a single afternoon, freeing designers to iterate before factory orders lock. Long term, Nike sees hyper-limited runs. A YouTube creator could drop 50 pairs tied to a stream

or an e-sports team could sell branded AirMax for tournament merch. For now, the lab is invite only. getting one. But public pop-ups hit New York and Tokyo this fall, complete with live-stream design battles judged by sneaker influencers and shoe culture scholars. And while we're talking soda in sports, let's look at one quarterback who's about to turn a soda into a weekly highlight reel. Sports marketing keeps stacking crossovers. Sprite just signed Eagles quarterback Jalen Hertz to front its first league-wide NFL campaign. Gone are the slow-motion courtside, obey your thirsts. spots. Sprice New Era leans on TikTok-ready shorts with Hertz, miced up at practice, remixing

classic slogans into refresh your game. Limited cans shipped during preseason, each with an NFC tag that launches an AR drill challenge. Complete the moves, upload the video, and you can win sign game day gear or a sideline pass. The campaign doubles as a content factory. Coca-Cola calls it player-led storytelling and wants weekly micro-drops instead of one Super Bowl splash. If it works, expect other legacy sodas to borrow the blueprint and chase that Gen Z highlight scroll sweet spot. Next up, TikTok. It's quietly running a limited test that lets a small invitation-only group of creators upload videos up to 60 minutes long, far beyond the current 10-minute ceiling. The pilot spans both mobile and desktop uploads, and according to company

Insiders, is meant to see whether users will stick with deep dive tutorials, mini-docs, and shopping replays on a platform famous for quick swipes. Product managers say the experiment will run for several weeks, air quotes, before TikTok decides whether to expand the feature platform-wide. If the test graduates to a full release, TikTok could challenge YouTube for premium ad dollars and long-form sponsorships. Longer uploads would allow mid-roll ads, detailed product placements, and full-event recaps, the kind of inventory that commands higher CPMs than TikTok's current 15-second pre-rolls. Creators would gain one more venue for courses, episodic storytelling, or extended live shopping edits,

while brands could package longer demos and how-to content without forcing viewers to leave the for-you feed. Action step. Marketers who rely heavily on YouTube or Instagram for long-form content should earmark a small test budget now. Repurpose a top-performing tutorial or a product review for a vertical. 10 to 15-minute TikTok cut. Then monitor watch time, completion rate, and cost per view. If early metrics hold, you'll be ahead of the rush when the 60-minute door opens to everyone. If scrolling those best plays of the wee clips puts you in the sports mood,

wait until you hear what's happening right now in Chicago by the time this episode hits your feed I'll be on the floor at the 45th National Sports Collectors Convention at Chicago's sprawling McCormick place it's a half mile long haven packed with more than 100,000 collectors and 600 dealers you don't want to miss it though tons of fun tops this year cracking open its brand new Premier League set

live spotlighting Gold Lion foils and one of the premier pulls. That's just one per 25 hobby cases. And check this out. Every card packs a tamper-proof QR and NFC tag that links to a blockchain certificate and an AR replay of the goal or save on the front. Old school cardboard meets next-gen tech.

PSA has 48-hour on-site grading while Beckett counters with a 36-hour fast pass. Rumor has it, Fanatics might reveal an acetate showtime parallel and you can only pull with a VIP pad. It pays to be VIP. I'll tell you what. Here's a veteran tip, though, bring cash.

Those mobile card readers can easily crash during peak hours. Web traffic can be heavy. Internet light. We're comfy shoes. This place is huge. Oh, and watch those eBay prices. They tend to spike during the show. So time your rookie card hunt wisely.

We'll see you on the floor. If you're here, come to check me out. Did I mention? I'm starting to collectibles on SI podcast in August. That's this month. Yes, that SI, you know, Sports Illustrated. Ever heard of them? Only one of the most iconic brands in sports.

So I'm here at the National Sports Collector's Convention, interviewing all the big names and securing those ever-important sponsorship dollars. You know you want to end. And yeah, me and the boys might rip a pack or 300. Keep your eyes peeled for updates. collectibles. Show. Not.com. Collectibles. Dot show. That's all you got to do. Hit that. You can see how you can catch the first episode, sign up for the newsletter, and get all the goodies on a

billion-dollar industry and growing quickly. So where does that leave us? Each of today's stories is really about closing the distance between an idea and its execution. Shopify hands merchants and AI assistants so routine tasks take minutes instead of hours. The coast-to-coast railroad promises freight that moves in days rather than nearly a week. Pepsi infuses cola with functional benefits, giving consumers more than just flavor for those calories they're consuming. Live Nation's Creator Network lets marketers book authentic voices without months of outreach. Local investors streamline the path from for sale to for rent, reshaping entire neighborhoods. If you don't think you like your neighborhood now, wait until you got 20% of them renters.

Nike compresses sneaker prototyping into a single afternoon. while Sprite turns an endorsement deal into a steady flow of microcontent. Even trading cards now come with instant blockchain verified to authenticity. If there's a common lesson, it's this. Audience customers and partners increasingly reward the companies that remove friction first. Get rid of friction. Take a look at one slow-moving step in your own process, set a goal to cut the time in half, and you'll be following the same playbook that's driving this week's biggest moves.

That's the takeaway for the week. Hunt the gap, move first, shape the conversation. Keep that in mind as you plan, pitch, and pivot. Don't forget to follow right about now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Say hello on LinkedIn, Instagram, or X, and sign up for the newsletter. That's right. Visit Ryanisright.com. Put bash slash newsletter. You can sign up for that or just stay right there on Ryan is right.

I like to ring to that, at least in my own head. My wife might disagree. Hey, I got to get back to trading cards, ripping packs, and talking to the biggest names in sports. We're always bringing the heat, baby, right here, right now, right about now. We'll see you next week. We're out. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.

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