Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Weekly Marketing and Advertising News: TikTok replaces YouTube at VidCon; John McAfee found dead in prison cell; Google Marketing 2021 Takeaways; Nielsen Report on Branding in 2021

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Welcome to this week’s episode on The Radcast! In this week’s news episode, Ryan and Josh catch up on what’s happening with Amazon Prime, Subway Tuna sandwiches, and more.. They also discuss the following headlines: TikTok replaces YouTube as top sponsor at VidConJohn McAfee: Anti-virus creator found dead in prison cellTop 5 Takeaways From Google Marketing Livestream 2021 - Per Jerry Dischler from AdWeekBuilding and maintaining a brand takes more than simply maintaining sales - Nielsen Report on Branding in 2021If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, let us know by visiting our website www.theradcast.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Be sure to keep up with all that’s radical from @ryanalford @radical_results @the.rad.cast If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now? You're listening to The Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. I'm Ryan Alford. And I'm Josh Hill. And we are here for your weekly marketing and advertising news update. Today is June 25th, 2021. It's my mother's birthday. Happy birthday, mom. If you're out there, wherever you are, if you were to be listening, she doesn't probably listen to my podcast but she does say she listens occasionally josh so that's great yeah we can't not shit in the shout outs to the moms you know yes happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday mary linda she does have a double name uh ml ml she's a sprightly

i'm gonna just tell how old you are mom, 69. So coming up on the big 7-0 next year. Nice. Kind of gave her shit for that. That's a big one. We celebrated last weekend and I hope you're using your designer handbag that my wife bought you. Nice. But cool man, how's it going?

You had a good week? Been a good week. Yeah. Really productive. Got a lot of stuff done. A lot of new campaigns launched and great. Yeah. It's been good.

We've got a lot of new talent here at Radical. We've got a couple of new copywriters, Morgan, Caroline, helping push the envelope of marketing and advertising for us here at Radical. Shout out to them. Yeah. Shout out. Welcome aboard. of marketing and advertising for us here at radical. Yeah. Shout out. Hey, I'm a board. Hey, you know,

like good writing kind of, kind of is like the engine for creativity a bit, you know, like you've got design and you've got, you know, websites and ads and all that, but it kind of is the, uh,

the unsung, maybe, maybe it's not unsung, but I feel like it kind of gets lost sometimes, the importance of great writing and stimulating the creative process. It's kind of the one element that touches the entire picture. That's exactly right. So we're excited about that.

Lots of good growth here at the agency. And I'm going to kick it off with this one, Josh. We talked a little bit pre episode, but, uh, there was a New York times, uh, report this week, you know, for any of you subway fans out there, I'm not a gigantic subway fan. It's kind of like, there's only by necessity, typically like it's not bad, but I just, if I'm going to have a sandwich, there's just other places I go. Yeah.

If I'm going to have a sandwich, there's just other places I go. But a report from New York Times, they actually tested the tuna at Subway's, and there was zero DNA for the tuna found in the Subway. I mean, under the guise of not surprising, yet a little disappointing news of the week. First reactions? Subway can't catch a break, first off, from their previous, like, spokespersons to their whole bread debacle. Yeah. And then now to this. I've never had the tuna from Subway, but now I'm a little glad I haven't.

Yeah. I've had it. It's okay. And quite frankly, it tasted like every other tuna, you know, fish. You know, it's always got mayonnaise in it or something. And, like, it's just, I don't mind it. I like it, but it's never, there's always, like, six other choices ahead of it. Oh, right.

You know, and even growing up as a kid, I'm like, what kind of sandwich do you want? You know, like, I got tuna, I got this, that, the other, and it's always this that or the other yeah yeah i mean if i'm going to subway i'm getting either the spicy italian or the magnificent meatball sub you know it's really underrated at subway and if you're hungry right now just just get hungrier but uh the flatbread oh yeah spicy bmt flatbread toasted definitely underrated underrated quite good quite delicious i agree with you wholeheartedly on that Oh, yeah. Spicy BMT flatbread toasted. Definitely slept on. Underrated. Underrated. Quite good.

Quite delicious. I agree with you wholeheartedly on that. But then everything else, I'm kind of like, eh, you know, I'll pass on that. But yeah, 0% tuna. Subway came back and said, no, it's 100% wild-caught tuna, you know, from the shores of North Korea or wherever they get it from. I don't even know if they have tuna in North Korea, but, you know, it sounded good. Yeah, it sounds great. So, yeah, that was interesting.

And Amazon Prime Week Day weekend. I mean, I started getting the emails like, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, like pre-sale Prime Day, Prime Day pre-sale. Like they say it's a day. I feel like it's like Black Friday is no longer a day. It's like a weekend or a week. Prime Day is kind of like a four-day. Oh, for sure. There's like lead-up sales.

They really prime themselves for Prime Day, too. Yes, they do. If my email and notifications are anything. I did buy a battery-operated fan for the boat. So it's a rechargeable fan. It's like 16 inches. You can hook a hose to it, and it like mists on you. The 95-degree heat that's coming up in July here in South Carolina.

I'm going to fan it up a little. Might be the summer purchase of the year. Yeah, I know. But that was the only thing I bought on Prime Day, and it was just purely coincidental. I was kind of going for the purchase anyway, and it happened to be one of the Prime deals. But I wasn't as interested, and I wondered,

and I know you saw some stats on this. I wondered if maybe, I know e-commerce is going to grow year over year no matter what, but I kind of had a feeling like my own interest and with everything opening back up from the pandemic and people getting out there and shopping and having other things to do, if we might see some drop off and I saw a few figures on that. Yeah. This year was the probably one of the slowest year over year growths of the

last, like probably 10 years for Amazon prime day um prime day specifically not amazon's total sales right um i think it's really telling of kind of where um like e-commerce boomed i think there's a lot of sales happening throughout the year anyways i think it kind of spread out and then like you said people are going out i know prime day usually is kind of like tech heavy and like home goods heavy so i think people are starting to like look elsewhere for gadgets and stuff yeah and i wonder if them because it felt like it was a five-day event not a one-day event yeah if i i'm sure if you spread you know maybe the total ends up more and i'm sure someone's gonna go well they did it for five, so they had to have gotten more sales.

Okay, maybe. But by making it less scarce, because it felt like the deals were early and often, at least it felt that way, that if that hurt maybe the scarcity factor or the one-day factor. Very well could have. I know a friend texted me about what they bought on Prime Day, and I noticed, like, oh, I've got all day to do it.

And then I just, like, never went and looked again. Yeah, I don't know. But any crazy hashtags or trends you're seeing on TikTok this week? Oh, man. There's so many. But one of my favorites recently has been the videos with the song Nobody by Mitski. And kind of disco-y. And someone's running away from the camera.

And it says POV. Someone's on the way to do something to you. So it's like I've seen some where it's like POV. I'm on the way to ask you about your Zodiac sign or something, and you're just running away from it. I saw a couple agency-specific ones of POV, you're a graphic designer running away from the 10 creative changes that the client made. Yeah, I know. I have some neighbors that I might would you know film myself running away from coming over to ask you something oh right see you later yeah that's a good one i've been seeing

it's my favorite so far i like it well we'll get we talked a little news but now we'll get to the official news first so i saw this i was interesting um tiktok is replacing youtube as the top sponsor of vidcon so we've got the platform war wars are heating up and uh i thought this was pretty telling and interesting uh with where we're at i mean obviously they can ask if you're going to be a sponsor something you can outbid or something but i thought it was pretty telling for maybe more the place scale and size of tiktok more than a knock on youtube because youtube's still a fucking behemoth but like you know what any uh first reactions yeah i was um really surprised by that I know VidCon was like co-founded by

the vlog brothers Hank and John Green and Hank is one of the biggest creators on TikTok too yeah and so he I thought that was really interesting even this morning I did see him commenting on TikTok and saying

how TikTok gives makes more money than youtube but gives less to creators than youtube does which is a little interesting that's interesting i like that the i like seeing that parallel to the tiktok replacing them at his event exactly and you know and we didn't put this article up there, but related to it was just I keep seeing the ever creeping higher role of streaming and video, like other sources of video in overall time spent throughout the day of consumers. Just creeping up, creeping up between streaming, between social platforms and everything else. I mean, yes, this falls in the, yeah, we know category. I'm sure people are paying attention, but I don't know that we're quite magnifying it

to the level that it's actually happening. Yeah, it's like, we know, but do we know the scale? Yeah. It's growing more and more, and I'm sure plenty of us were like, surely it can't get much bigger than this. Yeah, exactly. And TV were like, surely it can't get much bigger than this. Yeah, exactly. And TV's like, I just,

I'm finding my own habits. Obviously, I mean, I'm 44 years old and probably different than a millennial or someone else, but at the same time, I still find myself, even the little bit of linear TV that I was, is i guarantee you if you look 12 months over 12 months for me it's probably at least 40 less yeah and so like so just in my own habits and the people around me i mean between streaming and netflix and uh Netflix and time on social channels and other things, I mean, it's just I might catch 20 minutes of linear TV on average a day.

And that's including like three hours on a Sunday when I'm watching golf. Otherwise, averaging it out, it probably falls like 10 minutes of actual during the week time. But you watch an hour of linear TV a week? Maybe. uh, excellent during the week time. But, uh, and I mean, but you probably don't, you watch an hour of linear TV a week. Maybe even if it's like, I don't have it. Um, yeah,

it'd be like a TV at like work, like, or like a commercial at like a bar or something like that. Yeah. So anyway, but I thought that was interesting. It looked, TikTok's a behemoth. I did see as well, unrelated, didn't have dissing it but just showing that

tiktok's kind of roaring past it in the overall presence of social platforms yes uh does that surprise you at all um yes and no here like it's kind of crazy the like snapchat the the comeback was surprised me um but yeah the way TikTok is just growing and just taking over everything it's kind of like like at this point I'm kind of just like yeah it's just going to keep going the the interesting thing for me with TikTok is not only the popularity and scale that it's gaining, but it's the way that it's changing, I think, the way people develop content holistically. Oh, for sure. It's like, yes, it has a specific format that's attention span driven, which is short,

but I feel like you're seeing that translate to other media now because there are people going, well, maybe they're onto something and the content that works there, I'm not saying in its exact form works in other places, but I think there's, there's parts, there's just parts of that that are transitioning into other places because people are realizing people want information quickly. They want to be entertained, but they want it, you know, served in a certain manner. Oh yeah, for sure. I can, I'm noticing in a lot of places where it's like more quick to the point, they're

not doing these big lead ups. There's not these big, like suspenseful, like you got to wait till next week. Like they are now. Yeah. So interesting. week but they are now yeah so interesting number two john mcafee antivirus creator was found dead in his prison cell i thought it was interesting for a few points for as far as marketing needs of the week number one it was a it made it sad i mean anytime someone passes i'm not making light of it at all but it was there's a few things i know you'll talk about some of the conspiracy side of it mine is more nostalgia remembering as a you know when the the cd started showing up in the mail

yeah uh you know that you activated like the the marketing tactics that i was kind of noticing even when i was like i don't know 13 12 whatever it first started i might have been younger than that when those cds started showing up for antivirus in the in the mail like literally like the pioneer of like you know direct marketing i always had the pop-ups in the bottom right of my desktop oh god i mean just everywhere yeah everywhere and so funny to learn after the fact like and i always was like you know yeah that it was like the right time right moment because pcs had exploded you know in popularity everybody was having one the internet was kicking and so viruses started like crashing every you know computers and like right time right place but i was always like is this really doing that you know it pops up and it's

like running through the uh the the window on the screen like oh it's doing these magical things on my computer i have no idea what it is it could have just been a screen saying it's doing it and doing absolutely nothing for all we knew well according to him who said he never used it on a single one of his computers i read that i'm not sure it did but it reviewed like one file you know like amazing but uh yeah and i know there's like there was like these conspiracy he's he had tweeted he was always a little strange yeah he's probably putting it mildly yeah i was reading a little bit more about his life story and like there is he was running from like someone like in one country his neighbor died and he had like

fled that country because of allegations of that, and he always denied it and, like, was always kind of aggressive. And he was in jail for tax evasion because he didn't want to pay taxes. I can understand that, I guess, but maybe not actually evading. Who wants to pay taxes? No one. But we do have to if we want to live in America. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, he had a tweet from a long time ago that's blowing up again.

He had a dollar sign whacked or schwacked, if you will. And he's saying, like, getting a lot of subtle hints that america wants to uh uh make me kill myself so he got that just as a little signal like if i if i show up dead it wasn't me so who's to say we'll see interesting or we will we won't see actually yeah exactly we won't see but uh definitely and i realized he was 78 or 77 or something older than i was yeah he had he either really took care of himself or had a lot of plastic surgery like his last photo was like he looked like he was like 55 or something yeah i'm definitely going to spend more time like researching more about what he was doing in those later years because there's going to be a movie about oh yeah for sure it was all these

random stories of like oh he did this in this country and this in this country it's like dude was just hanging out just getting places and i wait you made a few billion dollars so yeah on those cds and people like you know being convinced they needed to uh you know how many people like didn't really need it like added that virus thing and all it was like i feel like i remember adding it like bog the computer down it's like one more program you know back in the day you had like 44 megabytes of memory anyway. That whole CD was like 22. So I was like, we'll get rid of the virus, but we're going to slow the hell out of your computer. I feel like he, I mean, that name is now just kind of like a,

it's like the memories of, yeah, you had Internet Explorer, you had Microsoft Paint, you had McAfee, McAfee, whatever. Oh, yeah. It was one of those things. Every computer started coming with it on there, and you could activate it or whatever. It's like, yeah. It was one of those things. Every computer started coming with it on there, and you could activate it or whatever. It's like, yeah, antivirus, more like anti-memory, because you don't have any after it's loaded. He's in our memory, but took up your computer memory.

Yes. So there was an article I want to notate from Adweek. Jerry Dishler. I want to give Jerry some credit here for his five takeaways from the Google Marketing live stream this week. Any summation of what you saw there? What you think? We're being told by the powers that be at Google like we need to do to maximize our marketing on their platforms yeah um my whole my overall takeaway is use the tools available like you're not going i don't think you're gonna like find

some magical pathway without using the stuff available and like it's one of those things like if they have it available might as well test it out and like use their automations, use their platform, like expansions, their everything else. Um, cause it just gives you more opportunities to get in front of your customers. Yes. I was looking for more of those. Yes. Ding. I will say this. I did see, and I haven't done it yet. Cause you manage most of the ads now, thank God. Um, at least setting them up and and running them and making them optimized in your team the the biggest thing that i saw that i think needed improvement this is very tactical god it was painful setting up youtube ads i mean i remember

like even a year ago like we'd have clients or something i'd be in there like trying to set something i'm gonna play around with it i'd be in there like trying to set something. I'm going to play around with it. I mean, how fucking hard is it to set up a YouTube ad? I heard it's they've made it easier. So they say now doing your mobile device. I'm like, oh, what a vice. I couldn't do it on a desktop with four screens.

Yeah. I remember I finally like got through and set it up and it ran. And it's just like, after all that, like I might as well have just done something else. Like, I know it's like painful as hell. mean so supposedly that's gotten better i hope so like it's so funny we're doing automation and ai and we're sending people to mars but it takes four hours to set up a youtube campaign yeah you know like i mean i'm not lying here right it's painful yeah it's um we set up like programmatic across 27 platforms and it's and that's not easy but it's easier than setting up a freaking youtube ad just their ui in general just the have all

these weird pages and like layers and stuff to things and i think facebook's ad manager layout is a little bit more intuitive than yes and it's not it's gotten a lot better it used to be a nightmare too oh yeah so we'll see finally building and maintaining a brand takes more than simply maintaining sales this was a nielsen report nielsen great for insights and research if anyone out there is in marketing advertising no matter who you are really smart people at Nielsen, you're an agency, you know who Nielsen is. But if you're just small to be in business, go follow Nielsen. Lots of good tips. This is the go-to for industry knowledge, research reports. They have a great podcast report out. So I want to give them a shout out as an agency. Really appreciate all the insights we get from them. But this was interesting. This goes right at the heart of a lot of things that I talk about with companies and brands.

We've gotten so performance and sales driven, which I understand. Every CMO's got their feet to the fire for driving ROI. Totally get it. But the importance of a diversified marketing platform and approach, not forgetting the top of the funnel and those brand driving tactics. Got to feed the funnel. Yeah. Yeah. It'll run out and then you're stuck just scraping at the bottom of the barrel. Exactly. And I think people forget that it's a, you know, it's a sales funnel or cycle or whatever you want to call it, whoever's thinking you want to buy into it,

it's a cycle, it's a cyclical, it's a circle, it's a ever-changing, whatever you want to call it. The point is you have people at different interest points. You're not making a sale every day. And so brand building, awareness driving, larger, building tactics are so important with keeping an active funnel that will convert at all levels is so important and so lost today because we just want to go, okay, here's a product, here's a price point, and here's how it's going to sell. And any insert gimmick here for that. And we get it.

That's important. And we have e-commerce clients and we're fighting that battle every day. But until you create broader awareness and purpose and meaning behind your brand at scale, it's real hard to convert sales every day. I guess a simple rule of business. If you want to be a long-term business, you've got to do long-term marketing. If you want to just stick to the short-term conversion only and not do brand positioning, no purpose, sorry, but you're going to be a short-term business. You are.

I put my money where my mouth is. This podcast for Radical is a brand builder. We're the top 150 now in business and marketing-specific podcasts on Apple, but it's taken three years, but this is a brand builder for Radical. People get to know us. They learn our insights. They like the guests that we come on. It's not an ROI driver day one one but it's building the top of the

funnel right and now about every other client that hires us mentions the podcast yeah and it took three years for that to happen and it's going to continue to grow but that but this is a brand building mechanism for us and so it's like you have to understand that as a business. I know it's painful because everything's so margin-driven and investment-driven. You're either a startup, you've got no money, it's just you, and you're scrounging it together, and you need to make sales. Or you're investment-driven because you've brought in all this investment, and they want sales immediately. because you've brought in all this investment and they want sales immediately. It's hard, but you've got to fight for the long term and not focus just on today, because if you do, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

And this study and this report, which I really encourage people to go download, we'll have a link to it in the footnotes of the episode, it really calls out the importance of that top of the funnel driving tactics. Definitely. So, uh, yes, there is your marketing and advertising news for the week. Appreciate it,

Josh. Always good. Always good to be here. Always good. We hope everyone's good out there, wherever, however, whenever you are,

be safe and you know where to find us. The radcast.com at the dot rad.cast i'm at ryan alford on the platforms and at josh chill on instagram for josh go look josh up give him a follow we'll see you next time on the radcast to listen to full episodes or to contact us visit us on the web at the radcast.com or follow our host at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in.