Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Weekly News Update 8.21

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Weekly News Update, August 20, 2020, with Ryan and Reiley.In this episode, Ryan and Reiley catch up on the following topics in business in marketing news:B2B e-commerce: Touchland KUBAmazon Business SchoolThird party cookies being removedTik Tok -- Where's it going?Klarna music festival(Links below)https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200818005540/en/Touchland-Hand-Sanitizer-Launches-eCommerce-Platform-B2Bhttps://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-launches-small-business-academy-program/566729/https://marketingland.com/how-two-martech-companies-are-taking-on-the-cookieless-world-281076https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/18/software-firm-oracle-in-talks-to-buy-tiktok-and-challenge-microsoft-bidhttps://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/klarna-invites-music-lovers-klarnival-missed-festivals/1692200 Follow along @the.rad.cast | @RyanAlford | @radical_resultsIf you liked our podcast, please like, share and rate us! 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. 

You're listening to the latest Radcast News Update. Here's Ryan and Riley. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford and Riley Clark. Welcome to the 8-17, that'd be August 17th, weekly news here. It's, well, I guess I make them on Fridays, so I do 8-21. The week of 8-17. Yes, yeah. Okay, we can do it that way. The week of August 17th. Or the week ending August 21st. Exactly.

Exactly. Full week of news. Good to have you on, as always, Riley. Yes, thank you. Glad to be back. How's life? Life's pretty good. Nothing too crazy different, I guess.

But just, I mean, I feel like the Radcast has been having a lot of stuff happening this week and just been catching up on a lot of stuff. But how's your week been? It's been good. It's been a normal week. It's been like eerily normal. There hasn't been, for good, bad, or indifferent, there haven't been too many high highs

or low lows. There's usually, you know, running an ad agency. No other shoe about to drop. Yeah, like, you know, when you run a business, an ad agency, there's, you know, you're either putting out fires or creating new ones. Not a dumpster fire rolling down the hill. And so it's been pretty normal. You know, we've got a lot of website projects going on and some that I wish would kind of come to a conclusion, but websites are challenging and long, and as soon as you think you've got something figured out, you're like, oh, we could do this. So it's been good, and just normal stuff around the Offord house. The kids are somewhat going back to school.

Yeah, how's that transition? The new normal. So are you like teacher? Are you and Nicole like teachering? Sometimes. You know, we have the modern Brady Bunch, so we have my two boys half the time. And so when they're with us and, you know,

they only have school one day a week, and it starts next week. Are you serious? Yeah. And then Nash is in preschool, so he's back in preschool every day. That's so cute. And his school's been open all summer, and they do masks with the teachers and everything, but there's been no outbreaks. I mean, no teachers gotten sick.

Really? There's been kids at school, 300 kids in the preschool. Do they have to wear masks when they go into preschool? Not the kids. No way. None of the kids wear a single mask. And they're all under the age of five, six. There's been no outbreak.

So I think, you know, one school does not prove a point, but I think it shows that maybe kids don't transmit it as much because none of the teachers have gotten sick. That's interesting. Which you would think would be the opposite because aren't kids like super, you know. Oh, their hands are in their mouths and touching each other. I mean, my mom's a teacher. So anytime she would come home sick, like we just knew like everyone else is going to get it, you know,

because she brought something back from her kids. So I'm managing all that, but it's good. Looking forward to the week. I think we're going to do a little lake day for the team here on Friday. Yeah, I think that'll be fun. That'll be day for the team here on friday yeah i think that'll be fun that'll be fun yeah get on the boat but um what's uh in the news this week news this week well i'll give my radical news first okay my fun little our fun little segment all right um so clarna which is a swedish company um they i think this is so cool, by the way, I've seen other companies like take on this kind

of idea, but they're doing live broadcasting events of concerts, but it's giving you a festival feel because a lot of festivals got canceled over the summer, you know, obviously, because of COVID. So Klarna is doing these whole online events. But what's really cool about them is there's also a chance for you to learn how to do... It's interesting. You learn how to glamp better, like the glorified or... Not glorified. Glamour camping or whatever it's called. The glamping.

Learning how to do that. And then there's step-by-step guide to festival eye makeup and then um you know you want to go outside like there are things for outside you know you learn about your environment things like that so super fun kind of funky interesting kind of things um and that's going to be live for four days on august 20th so starting tomorrow, on Facebook and Instagram Live. Are these replacing, like, Coachella's? See— Because, like, Lollapalooza, if that even still exists, but—

Yeah, it's still— You know, these people go to Coachella. Don't they go to Coachella to drink their faces off and party? And, you know, I've been to, like, music festivals. I would argue probably drugs over the drinking probably happens. Pills being popped. I've been to music festivals. I would argue probably drugs over the drinking probably happens. Pills being popped. Are people in their New York chateau on Fifth Avenue or in Tribeca or whatever,

and watching this on their laptop and popping pills? What are we doing here? That would be entertaining, though. Starting tomorrow, just see people strung out in office places, and it's like, no, it's the festival, man. It was last night. Yeah. We did Coachella Live online. Klarna.

Klarna. Not Coachella this time. But is that what we're talking about here? Klarnaville is what it's called. Klarnaville. Klarnaville events. All right. But I think it's interesting. I think that kind of concept, because it's similar to what's happening in Fortnite, too.

Because Marshmello had a big concert in Fortnite and things like that. I think virtual concerts are going to become more of a thing. You know what I mean? In a game or online or whatever it is. But I think that's interesting. And proceeds are going to musicians that have been affected during COVID, which I think is really sweet. I always love that giving back circle. Yeah, because that is one of the things.

You know, freaking Dave Matthews and Marshmello and Kanye and the biggest of the big stars, they're not that affected by this. They still have revenue streams. It's kind of that mid-tier that can't tour that that lives off of touring i don't i'm not going to try to name any of those names but there's lots of them at every genre absolutely that lived and died or you know off of their income from live shows and merchandise and all those things and that's kind of gone away yeah hopefully their merchandise isn't affected as much.

But as far as like the live stuff, obviously, I mean. If they had a good e-commerce store set up. Because a lot of them sell merchandise at the concerts. That's true. That's true. And a lot of them do. There's a lot of stuff that's, you know, I don't want to say cookie cutter, but if they're with a good label, they get a website with, you know,

merchandising set up. Or you buy on their Instagram or something like that? Yeah. What about you? What's your radical thing this week? Well, it's actually interesting. As I was going through my feed on Instagram and Facebook, I found it ironic. So TikTok is advertising on my feeds as an agency owner who does digital marketing.

Good targeting, by the way, but they're marketing their business ad manager. So they're marketing to me to get our clients on TikTok to advertise. And it's in my Facebook feed, they're running ads, and in my Instagram feed. Literally before we started this podcast, I'd already had a Facebook ad, and I was going to talk about their ad platform that's launching. So you're going to start seeing, lo and behold, all those great videos you thought you were going to see on TikTok without ads. No, it's coming. It's already here if you're active on TikTok. But it's interesting that they're running ads on quasi-competitive platforms for their ad platform, which is actually getting pretty interesting. Josh, our digital media

manager here at Radical and I were talking about it as we're starting to experiment with some of the brands we work with on the platform and looking at some of the targeting, which is both interesting and limited at the same time. And so, but I just thought it was, it's not surprising, but it was just interesting kind of, I use the analogy of, if you were watching CBS and you saw a preview for NBC on it, a little bit. Right, yeah, yeah. And so being an ad guy, I shouldn't be surprised by this because, again, it's smart.

They're using the platforms where someone – You're over there taking notes. Oh, okay. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Exactly. But it was still nonetheless, especially with Instagram launching reels and different things. Yeah.

Right. But again, in all my TikTok scrolling or swiping or tapping, more than anything when you tap the next video, I've never seen Instagram ads. So maybe in turn you'll see such thing. So twofold. No, that's actually a good point. Number one, the interesting nature of where they're going

and the ability to market your brands on TikTok is kind of the macro news. But the more radical interesting news is Facebook and Instagram being the platforms which they market to people that would be likely to market there. Go figure. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. We can kind of get into that a little bit, actually, with one of the news pieces from this week. I feel like that's kind of a good segue. I know it's kind of out of order from what we talked about, but Oracle trying to buy TikTok versus Microsoft. Yeah. Interesting. I do think it's interesting that Facebook and Google don't get to have their hands in this because of the antitrust issues.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the big can only get so big. Facebook bought Instagram roughly 10 years ago. Yeah, I guess that's why part of me would have thought that could have made sense. But it's, you know. I think they're not going to let the big get even bigger at this stage.

What's interesting to me about that, and look, I would still put Microsoft as the most likely destination if I was betting on these horses. But Oracle has never really been a consumer-facing brand. They've got their hands in so many different levels of software. I think of them, again, back to the digital marketing realm, as kind of being the platform for data management with consumer data and being able to do more highly targeted advertising through their platforms and through their connected data, which tells you more about consumers and their usage and things like that. I know we have various levels of marketing people that listen to the podcast.

So I want to both simplify it but not, you know, seem like I'm dumbing it down or something. But it's interesting because they've never, you know, Microsoft, you know, there's probably 10 products in this room that are consumer-facing, that consumers buy and that you use. And so there's somewhat of an obvious connection there for how they might move into this space. Oracle is just quite interesting. I don't know where they're...

Well, because they're a cloud-based business. It's all cloud-based, yeah. So, I mean, one of the guys I was reading about was making a good point. It's like, this isn't even in their lane. No. But I think that's why Twitter was an interesting rival to Microsoft. But I think if Microsoft

gets it, it's going to give way more of a younger generation pool because they'll have more... I mean, they already did that with Xbox, but I think even more so with TikTok, they'll be able to see way more what millennials and Gen Z are really doing.

Yeah, it will definitely give them an eye into that. It will also give them a platform that will make it really interesting because, again, Oracle has all these tools and data streams that feed into these platforms and in these arrangements or contracts or whatever you want to call them with the Facebooks of the world, the Googles of the world, all of those platforms kind of feed into their data cloud. And to have and own their own network, it would make TikTok potentially extremely powerful for the targeting and data capability they would do because it would bring to them a really, I mean, the market leader for the most part in that kind of data aggregation and how you can use it for targeting and different things like that.

So in that instance, it would become extremely interesting. Um, and maybe it's a test place for them for where to activate their data sets and different things maybe, um, before launching on other platforms. It'd be interesting how all that all comes together.

There are deadlines coming up, though. September 15th, Trump's deadline. We'll see if that holds. Do you think it'll move? I think it's highly likely that it will sell. I just think the pressure is going to be there. But if it goes past November and we have a new president, then you never know.

Yeah, that's true. I don't think they really want to sell. No, I don't think they do either. But I think if they're forced to, and there will still be a, I don't know, I think the estimates are $20 billion to $40 billion payday. It's a pocket change. It's a pocket change. It's not like they $20 to $40 billion payday. Some pocket change. Some pocket change.

It's not like they're going to walk away empty-handed, but it'll be interesting how it plays out. Yeah. Another news this week, Touchland is this B2B whole deal with the sanitizers. Super sleek and sophisticated- looking designs of sanitizers. What are your thoughts about that one? Well, here's where I find it interesting.

They've launched a very consumer-feeling looking e-commerce site. Yes. It's built on Shopify. They don't actually tell you that. I did a little bit of my own digging behind the site itself. And with some of our developer tools, you can tell what it's built on, which makes sense. We're a Shopify partner. We recommend Shopify, whether it's B2B or consumer.

So it makes sense. But the interesting thing for me is, as we've been working with more b2b brands and telling them and persuading them to get more in that you know thinking more like a d2c brand like a direct consumer brand it's interesting on two levels one the technology uh that their touch lens using which is using the internet of things to um empower refills and different things so you know so you don't have to go by there physically, so the technology there. But then the platform and the way that they're selling direct to businesses through the e-commerce site is really on the forefront for what you're going to see with businesses.

And it's certainly being amplified and accelerated by COVID, but it was really something that started to kind of move. And I think it will be interesting to watch how their growth goes. They're expecting 75 to 100% growth just in this channel. From the sanitizer? Yeah, just from the B2B site. And so they're working with some big names. Louis Vuitton, Target. You've heard of those guys. Right. No guys. My wife has for sure. I may or may not be getting one for her birthday. Four Seasons Hotels, Square, Zuckerberg Initiative, maybe you've heard of that last name, Google, Equinox, SoulCycle, and just to name others. So already some huge names that are working directly, buying directly through the e-commerce channel.

So again, I think you're going to start to see, and B2B deals are so much more complex, which is why e-commerce on this hasn't taken off for the most part. But it's interesting to see a product that's been heightened. Don't get me wrong, hand sanitizer was important in January, but it's way more important. And it strikes me as one of those things that's not going to go away. I feel like we've all been, even when there's a vaccine or treatments and all this and everything seemingly back to air quote normal, I think everyone's going to have a bottle of it.

I'm paranoid anymore about my mask. Anytime I'm going into a building anymore, I'm like, wait a minute, I don't have my mask. It's like you think about those kinds of things. I mean, I think you're going to think about sanitizer always being on hand or things like that. So I'm excited. And so they've got these sleek stations. You can brand them, but you can buy these stands.

They look really modern. It looks like... I'm going to link them in the episode notes, by the way. And I hate to use the terminology, the Apple sanitizer of sanitizers. Right. But it has that minimalistic but squared off, basic look. And so very cool. And the e-commerce site is pretty slick. Went through it.

Did some testing. It seems legit. I want to get something actually for's pretty slick. Went through it, did some testing. Um, it seems legit. I want to get some actually for radical. Yeah. Get a branded, like our fist on it or something like that. Definitely.

And be like, you know, you better use this. Right. Cause it's so dirty here. Yeah. We got the implication. It's like,

yeah, you better use this. Right. But no, um, very interesting. Love the e-commerce site. Love where they're going direct to e-commerce for business-to-business marketing.

Really interesting and plays in line. And hoping actually maybe that you'll be able to convince someone from Touchland to come on for the e-commerce series. Okay. Well, you know, I'll do a little. Yeah, no pressure on my part. I'll do a little investigation and see who I can get on here. But I think it's – what about that transition, though, or transaction makes it so hard for B2B companies?

It's the layers. So, okay, think about it from this standpoint. So, like, I want a mug. I'm holding up my Radcast. Message Riley in the DMs and we'll send you one. Oh, yes. But my Radcast Tumblr here. You want a new Tumblr.

You go to Amazon. It's you only. Two clicks away and it's here to you about, what, two days later. Right. Super, no friction there. Right. You're the decision maker. You click the button.

You're done. For businesses making purchases, there's usually three to five decision makers in large purchases for the company. Especially, like, think about a Target. Oh, yeah. You know, yeah, there's a purchaser and things like that. But we're going to put these stations, this brand, in a thousand stores. They probably have more than that. I don't know their exact footprint.

Thousands of stores. I got to facilitate all of that. I've got to tell how many people do you have to communicate with to know that we're going to commit to this price point. We're going to have these branded stations. We're going to put them in these locations. Think about the complexity of that. And so it's not let me go to a website and push two buttons and it's here tomorrow. It's how many do I need?

Who needs to approve it? Who's going to design the covers for them all? There's just a lot more depth to the decision-making of every purchase for large B2B enterprise. Okay. Make sense? Yeah, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, cool.

But it doesn't mean you can't do e-commerce. Right. Because at some point, it's click to buy, whether it's one unit or 5,000 units. And making that easy, making that simple, using B2C principles, I'm 100% in line with and we'll be talking a lot more about on the e-commerce series. Right, right, right, which is the next series, by the way.

Yeah, and then as far as what's our other topic this week oh let's talk about amazon's business school yeah why do you think this is a good idea and why do you think this is a bad idea well first of all let me give you a little bit of background on what this is so um apparently a bunch of small business owners this was their initiative because they were wanting more people to feel more qualified in a small business space with amazon um like as you know their vendors or whatever so um the goal of this project which i think started i think two years ago and originally was supposed to start launching as a business school in february of this year but i think with the nature of covid they just just transferred to everything online. Because they have a, which I'll also link this

in the episode notes, by the way, but their business school now has just a bunch of virtual online webinars, basically, where you can learn a bunch of things about small businesses, but it gives you credits towards community college. Yep. It makes a lot of things about small businesses, but it gives you credits towards community college. Yep. It makes a lot of sense. Here's why it's good. A lot of small business, small to medium businesses sell. We work with some of them, thousands to millions of dollars,

and they leverage the Amazon platform for which to do it. A lot of them have zero marketing knowledge. They just know I have a good product. I've developed this product. I won't name names for clients that we work with, but you've developed a product. You need somewhere to sell it. And you can't match the marketing dollars of Amazon. So you haven't invested, which I disagree.

I'm going to talk on both sides here. You haven't invested in your own site. You haven't created demand on your own platforms. And so you can take headed there. Okay. But so you can take your, your product and you put it on Amazon and Amazon, you know, already has built in hundreds of millions of users, marketing dollars there. Yes, you still have to get in line, and there's tricks and different things, but they need to be educating their Amazon, recognizing, because they need these products.

They've got to have products on their site. That's what makes it sell. They're the facilitator. They are making some of their own products now. We'll get into that. But for the most part, they still rely heavily on those third parties to supply them with merchandise and stuff. So it makes a ton of sense.

It does help these smaller businesses which have limited marketing departments and limited knowledge on overall marketing learn. And it's a win-win for Amazon. And they've got some grant money and different things. So it makes a ton of sense. And if I'm selling primarily on Amazon, I'm all for it. How much education can I get? How much can I absorb? And how can I take my Amazon store sales even higher and market through the platform? And so it makes a ton of sense. The other side is we firmly suggest, and when we work with clients, we don't smack the hand that feeds us.

No one's fighting with Amazon. Are you sure? But you need to build your own platform, and you need to be building your own customer base because ultimately you want to manage the relationship with the customer. And you unfortunately don't do that for the most part through Amazon. You sell product, but you don't own the customer relationship for a lifetime value, for additional added services, for other things in that pipeline,

in that journey, so to speak, with the customer, because you don't get the customer data. They don't give it to you. They tell you where to ship stuff to, and they tell you not to contact them. That's interesting. they tell you where to ship stuff to and they tell you not to contact them. And so, uh,

again, so again, totally recommend using Amazon as a place to sell when, but getting on your own platform as soon as possible. But it's interesting news. It makes sense for Amazon. It makes sense if you're a third party to leverage it as much as you can. But, uh,

just know the deal you're of the devil you're a third party, to leverage it as much as you can. But just know the deal of the devil you're making it with. I've said that on previous episodes. I was going to say, yeah, you love Amazon. Hey, no, I do. I don't mind. I'm not like some, like, I'm just a realist with business. And for companies that we work with, I think it's just super important to own your own data,

own your own store, whether that's digital or storefront, like brick and mortar. And I think people get – and don't get me wrong. It's feeding them. It's the – but it's Kool-Aid that can turn sour. Right, right, right. Because Amazon decides to do something else or changes their algorithm, and suddenly you're not selling as much. If you haven't built your own channels, your own customers,

your own way to augment sales, then you can be left in a bad position. That makes sense. That makes sense. Speaking of customer data, let's transition a little bit to what's going on with some cookies, with the third-party cookies, the threat of it being banned and taken off of Google Chrome and a couple other places. Yeah. Well, that's coming. I think Google has said the end of 2021. Yeah.

You know, we work with a lot of first-party data, which puts us in a better position should this happen as an agency. Back to a little bit of discussion we were just having. But it's going to cause some havoc. There's a couple of companies that we actually work with that are actually on the forefront of this. One that I should say companies that I've worked with, one that we are working with, which is NuStar, and then Infutor, which is another company that I've worked with in the

past and in discussions with future relationships, a lot of which are around this, which these are data identity companies. These are companies that NuStar does a ton of things, but Infuture is primarily in the taking first-party data. So let's say you have the name of a person. I have John Smith, and his address is 123-something. It's like an incomplete data fill. And so you know you've got John Smith. You've got part of an email address.

They append additional information to that record. What does that mean? Well, they use data sources that they have to look up, okay, there's a John Smith. His email address is this. They'll add a phone number. They'll add an address. So they add information to that record, which empowers you as a marketer. And, again, it you as a marketer. Well, yeah.

And again, it's first-party data. And so it doesn't allow you or enable you to market to them illegally or in a bad way. But they do assist you with getting more accurate data for the first-party record that you already have. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. But it's the third-party cookies that you already have. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. But it's the third-party cookies that are... Correct. Well, this is where, you know, I was explaining more of what the companies do.

The third-party cookies are what essentially enables better targeting on the digital ad platforms. You know, people think of it as the following you around the internet, but it's really more of making the internet more relevant to you. The personalization of data, if you've gone to any sites now, that either add your name or your location, which changes the experience on the website, those third-party cookies that are on your browser

enable that more personalized custom experience. And there's the fight or the war, the ultimate, the end is Apple's already banned them on Safari and Grom's coming. And so you're going to see more and more of that where data privacy is a concern. And it is a concern, but it's also there's this balance of finding and keeping content relevant versus keeping your data private. And so these two companies, NuStar and Infuture, are working not together

but in similar paths towards data and identity resolution in ways that doesn't use third-party cookies. Okay, okay. So what does that mean for smaller marketing firm, you know, smaller marketing firms, third party data being gone? It's going to hurt them as far as audience. It's going to, you're going to see a lot more, if nothing, again, we've got, you know, 18 months or so before this hits absolute mainstream. But you're going to see less ability to target ads as relevantly as you'd like.

And so it's going to make it less effective. We work with first-party data for 90% of the clients that we work with. And so which enables us, it will hurt in some ways with some of the retargeting different things we may want to do, but it won't hurt our ability to serve up relevant content to that first party data that we're ultimately after. And so for us, it's not a huge pack, but for more medium-sized agencies, medium-sized brands that are running some of their own campaigns, the targeting capability is going to be limited.

But I'm highly, I'm glass half full on this, that these companies that we named are going to come up with, you know, that identity resolution and the ability to track user behavior and user data in a less maybe identifying way so that we can continue to serve relevant ads without giving up maybe some of the privacy issues. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you feel like third-party cookies are good, though? Do you feel like they're a good thing, or do you feel like they're a bad thing? I think that anything used in the right way is a good thing. Well, yes. I like tequila, you know, but, man, it can make you sick. Yes.

And you can become an alcoholic. Exactly. And third-party cookies can be used in nefarious ways, and that's the issue at hand. But it can also be used in ways to improve the relevancy and the experience that customers have or consumers have on the Internet. that customers have or consumers have on the Internet. So being a digital marketing agency owner, I lean towards the finding ways to use it in the right way. Rather than it completely going away.

Yeah, but it's going away unless something changes. But I think we're going to find ways with which to do it that works out for both ends of it. How do you think that's going to play out? Do you think it's going to be more behavioral or do you think it's going to be more? I think you're going to see a combination of behavioral and the ability for persistent identity to be, I feel like I'm using like a science, you know, marketing journal of terminology here. Here we go.

This is where the Radcast gets quite technical. But I do think that these are some really big, smart companies that are working on this. And I think you're going to find a solution that works for both. No one's ever completely happy. happy. I think in the short, long term, it's going to be a little wonky and not as congealed as it is today, those experiences. But I think long term, we're going to come to some... Consumers, the reality is there's so much on the internet that we consume that's free. Because we're giving in. When you say free. Like free news.

Free Facebook feeds. Okay. Free Instagram feeds. All that stuff costs money. But the reason it's free is because there's advertising on it. And the reason, if you want that advertising to all become real bad, then let's make it real irrelevant to anything that you do. And consumers aren't going to like that either.

So do you want to pay for every bit of knowledge and information that you get? Or do you want it to be free? And when you do get ads, do you want them to be relevant? So you can have it either way. We can go to all paywalls. Every piece of content that you consume can be paid if you don't want ads. And if you want them to be crappy ads that have no relevance to what you do, then let's do this too.

And so there's going to be – That's a very fine line, though. It is. And so consumers have shown there's been studies over and over again that they want the content to be free for the most part. Unless it's super premium, super relevant relevant content they're willing to pay for it in a netflix type environment but yeah generally speaking news and other information they're willing to accept and don't want to pay for it they'd rather have the ad experience so different

than your old newspaper ads you flip through them there's ads in there right and the reason it cost a quarter the machine on the corner is because there's ads in it right so different than your old newspaper ads. You flip through them, there's ads in there. And the reason it cost a quarter, the machine on the corner, is because there's ads in it. Right. So different than now. Right. But are you saying, like, hypothetically, if Instagram started making you pay,

or you had to pay for a membership for your Instagram account without ads? That's right. You might pay $20 a month to use your Instagram. I don't think you're going to get to that. I don't. That seems a little. To have no ads in it. And it might be more than that.

I don't know. You can say, well, I wouldn't pay for it. Well, then that's why you're going to get ads. Well, I was about to say that's how annoying YouTube is now. I mean, there's like five ads in a row. It is annoying, but at the same time, at least for me, I feel like 80% of the ads in my Instagram feed, I might actually buy. Maybe not that very moment, but they've got me dialed in.

No, absolutely. Certain hats, certain motivational shirts. No, for sure, for sure. Like some workout clothes or something i'm like okay i'm not buying that now i'm a victim of when i see the ad i go oh and then i do this see more and then i go and then i go and then i purchase i am that person but you know it's just like the concept of it that would be crazy to pay 20 for your instagram account yeah the um but those are that's But that's what people don't realize.

Like it's one or the other. That's the flip of it. And so one way or another, these companies make money to do what they do. And they're going to continue to make that money one way or another. So we'll see if we go to a paid model. But that's where, you know, that's where there's been fights of if it was $20 a month to pay for it and there was no ads but you still had influencer marketing, should the influencers be paying Instagram?

That's where it gets into because they're using the platform to promote products and services but in the natural feed. And that's why you've seen with the tools like Instagram making you say whether it's an ad or not. That's a good point. That's what it gets down to. Now, they haven't completely monetized that yet, but that's where that's getting into, in case they were to need to. Absolutely. I'm sure it's probably why they put that by the end of 21.

There's actually no fine line. It's just, you know, that's the goal for all this to happen. Exactly. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's kind of our news this week. I guess as far as, like, the Radcast goes news, we're going to start last eSports series on Tuesday. Super excited, though, for him.

So this is going to be a player and coach, pro guy. His name, if you are a gamer, you will know him as Fatal Strike. If you are not a gamer, you know him as Joe Iacquinto. And he is, that was a great episode. I'm super excited for that one. Joe was great. Yeah. I'm going to call him Fatal Strike, though.

Fatal Strike. Because it sounds so much cooler. It does sound so much cooler. Can we come up with a name for me? Like, uh, um, Bitter Rival. I don't know. I'll think about it. I'll think about it.

As your band manager, I'll think about it. I don't know. I'll be on the top. Just call me Ryan. Yeah. But, uh, you know, if I'm going to name him Fatal Strike. Fatal Strike. Yeah.

And then you do the Bearded Crew. And, like, it makes me want to, to, not that I could ever grow a beard. We might have to beat this out, but Bitslap is like, could that be like my new name, Bitslap? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, we'll put that on your new highlight on your Instagram feed. That'll go well. My wife will love that. Oh, I'm sure she will.

I'm sure she'll have words with you about it later. No, but yeah, so I'm super excited. That episode comes out on tuesday and then we'll start our e-commerce series after that so we'll have a whole new look for everything and we'll be getting out a bunch of e-commerce episodes in the next couple of weeks but as far as that goes that's kind of like my radcast news do you have anything else i think that's. I think that's the news for the week. Follow along at theradcast.com or at the.rad.cast on Instagram. Learn more there, and we'll see you next time. Have a great week. See ya.