The Ben Mulroney Show - Has "Heated Rivalry" made Canadian Tire cool?

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

On today's episode of "The Ben Mulroney Show," Ben welcomes back host of 'Chatter That Matters,' Tony Chapman, to talk all things marketing. From BMW's somewhat invasive integration with "Spider-Man" to "Heated Rivalry" star Hudson Williams' tote du jour, Tony and Ben break down what works and what doesn't in the world of business. ‪@ChatterthatMatters‬ If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Dentine, chew bold. I always love talking with my good friend Tony Chapman. He comes in. We get to talk all about brands and strategies and all that stuff that sometimes these things happen to us. And we're passive observers in it. But the more we know about how brands behave and how they view us, I think the more power we have when we're shopping and when we're making decisions walking around the world. Tony, welcome. Welcome.

It's a great way to frame it. Are we an informed consumer? or is information forming our decisions? So years ago, I think it was 2014, Apple decided that they were going to give everybody a big surprise and they woke up in the morning and they had been quote unquote gifted the new U2 album.

And a lot of people were like, well, hold on a second. Like, we don't like that. You didn't ask. Some of us don't like YouTube. But everyone in the world got this thing. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of what they did. And it was a big release for YouTube.

But some people felt a little violated. Like that's their piece of machine. They bought it. And they didn't like the fact that somebody could just go in and drop something and they didn't ask for. And this first story feels like that where BMW, essentially, now it did prompt people because there's a partnership between BMW and the new Spider-Man movie.

That they had this optional Spider-Man animation. I'm guessing like the lighting of the cabin and that sort of thing. So what happened? Well, it was a 19-second piece of film that they used the BMW screen inside your car to project on. So instead of branded content, I'm going to put a BMW in the Spider-Man movie. I'm going to put Spider-Man ad in the BMW that you bought. Now, you had to agree to take it on, so it didn't just show up when you started the car. But a lot of people were really upset going, that's my car, that's my screen.

You're not invited to start bringing advertising into it. Well, exactly. I guarantee you that on top of, it's not just about this one ad. They want to see, they are keeping data on how many people click through and say, sure, I'll take it. Because that means, oh, well, if they take this, what else are they going to take? Right. So this is the beginning of something.

The door has been cracked open and BMW is going to see how far they can open it and how big the pipeline is to be pumping ads into these BMWs. And BMWs has been going out this well for a while. If you remember a couple years ago, they were going to charge you a subscription fee to get heated seats. What? So they're going to charge you like $19 a month for your heated seats. And everybody just blowback. Listen, we're buying a car.

We're not renting it from you. And everybody wants recurring revenue. And the reason why is the shareholders value that. Yeah. Because that's recurring revenue every month. You don't have to go find the customer again. So at BMW is saying, wow, we've got the screen in the car. Can we start selling advertising?

Can we start offering it to people? What? Who else wouldn't be? Every insurance company would want to. be part of that. So, you know, it, and it's really a violation that a lot of consumers are saying, I bought it. It's my screen. Stay away from it. And this is not like, this is not like the movies that you buy on, on a platform, a streaming platform, which people mistakenly think you don't own those. You own a license. And it can get revoked at any point. People like to think, oh, it's my

library of movies. It's just like my DVDs. No, it's not. Like when I, at one point, I stopped paying for my Apple ID and all that stuff while I tried to get my financial house in order. And I could not access the movies I had paid for. Right. And so this is not that. No. This is, you own this car. Yeah.

It belongs to you. You don't have a license. You're not licensing the car from BMW, in which case they could probably do whatever they want in the terms of service. And the other thing that people are a little concerned about is what are they doing with all the data they're getting now? Because what we understand is some of them have been selling it to insurance companies, saying how much should you price that?

driver based on how they actually drive. How many kilometers can they go to the government that's writing off your kilometers as a tax write off? Can they start selling the data saying, well, actually, they didn't drive 15,000 kilometers. They did 9,000 and during the working hours, 3,000. So who's in control of it? Is my life, am I in control, or as soon as I excrete data? Yeah. Is that something get fertilizer for people to monetize? And I think that's the big pushback we're getting in society. But this is not going to go away. I mean, cars are increasingly connected. Unless you go out and buy a car from 10 years ago. These cars are all connected. And essentially, when they become all electric, they're going to have the power to do whatever they want with them. Yeah. And they can actually

stop you from driving, just turn over and say you're busted. You no longer have the ability to do it. So once again, the more we get digital, the more we think the world's within arms reach of desire, the more we actually are surrendering our identity. And that's something that we've got to decide. Now, young people, you talk to them, they'd say, I love the fact that I'm only getting ads that I'm interested in. I don't want diaper ads. Where the older people are saying, I don't want What do you mean you were listening in on my phone call? And next thing you know, I'm getting an ad for it. So it really is a generational thing.

But as a society, government loves to take. Obviously, they're with the boomer. They want to take this privacy to the extreme and ban and fine and do all the things they're doing with the big data guys. You're saying, actually, I'm just personalizing the offering. I'm giving you the best possible service you can ask for. And you've got to decide which side you're on. And more often than a not, it's your age. All right, let's talk about heated rivalry.

I will admit I have yet to watch this show, not to say. I won't. I just haven't yet. So I miss some big cultural awakening. But by all accounts, it's one of the biggest hits that anybody's had over the past few years. And it's made it stars on a lot of Canadians. I worked with Jacob Tierney, the director. As a matter of fact, he directed me in a movie he directed once. And so this thing is a phenomenon. And anything in its orbit is improved. The value of that thing becomes something more, right? When you get into a cultural moment where you're just so fascinated by the stars, and that star suddenly shows up. In this case, you know, one of the bags, you have a bag known they sell you a bag,

was Canadian tire, it's got a Hudson Bay print on it. He's carrying it around now everybody wants it. So, you know, everybody's, I can imagine, the Canadian tire army getting together in the boardroom saying, how do we take advantage of it? It's a moment in time. It's like when Kate Moss wore hunter boots, which were farm boots. That's what you wore in the farm when you're dealing with the pig muck. And next thing, no, they came the biggest fashion item.

wanted hunter boots. But that happens for a moment and then it disappears. Well, last, during season one, I guess one of them was wearing a fleece. I'm sure you heard this story. But as it turns out, so they decide to jump on board and make the fleece for sale because that fleece didn't actually exist. The clothing designer added something to a fleece. And so they went to a company called Province of Canada. And I know the founders of that very well. Say, we want you to make this fleece. But the problem was the fleece that was actually used in the show was from a company out of Montreal. It was called koala. And so there was this fight between the two online. It was a shame to see two Canadian companies because they're not the biggest retailers

having to fight it out for this thing. They should have originally gone to the source. That was the mistake. And you're right. It's people fighting it out where they said it could have been a massive opportunity. And I also want to add just before I lose it, the BMW story, BMW has just said, by the way, click on this ad and somebody out there today is going to win a brand new BMW. Yeah. Or click on this ad and you're going to buy one, get one, two tickets to the Spider-Man movie. We wouldn't have an issue because there would be a gift with purchase. 100%.

But because it looked like they're imposing. I don't want to lose that point. Sometimes you've got to put yourself in front of the consumer and say, what's in it for me versus just what's in it for BMW. Lastly, to go back to what we were just talking about, in Canada, we tend to under-assume. We under-index the impact that we can have culture. truly. And they were probably caught flat-footed with heated rivalry to a certain extent. And the same thing happened with the red gloves at the Olympics when Hudson's Bay made a certain amount of them.

And then they went down to Times Square, where it is, Rockefeller Center, to do the Today Show. And they show up, the people there show up with the red mittens. And they said, everyone loved them. They said, do you have enough for everybody in the square? And they said, no, we just brought enough. for the host of the show. And what happened is they missed this opportunity to put hundreds, if not thousands of these, into the bloodstream all over Manhattan. People would have seen these red gloves.

And they underestimated the popularity. And they'd already turned off the factory. They had to spin the factory back up and they missed weeks and weeks and weeks of being able to sell these things. The appetite was never ending for that stuff. But that's the risk appetite of a Canadian that doesn't realize if you got something

that looks great, feels good. Triple down on it. And you know what? Make it happen. versus going, I'm going to just do the bare minimum because I'd rather have it succeed a little bit than fail a lot. Yeah, they had no idea what they had on their hands. But I think that's where market research comes in.

I don't know. Well, even just sometimes it's intuition. And again, I'm dealing with American companies and Canadian companies, and I'm sorry to do this because I'm Canadian, but the risk appetite in America is so different than in Canada. Somebody in America would say, that's a big thing. Make sure everybody in the crowd has those myths so that they're all waving. So millions of people see what we have. All right.

Well, I'm going to stick around with Tony Chapman. he's the host and award-winning podcaster for Chatter That Matters, founding partner of Chatter AI. When we come back, we're talking about Tate McCray, because apparently she doesn't know how to take her makeup off, but that didn't stop Neutraina from taking what could have been a disaster and turning into a marketing gem. That's coming up next.

And Neutra Jena proved itself to be quite nimble. So, Tony, they hired Tate McCray of So You Think You Can Dance and Pop Fame. And she's had a few. odd missteps. She did a commercial for Team USA during the Olympics, and she's from Calgary. But anyway, she signs, she's, I guess, one of the faces of Neutragina,

and she was showing her post-concert routine or something, trying to take off her makeup, except her makeup didn't come off, and people were suggesting she was faking it or miming it. And then what happened? Well, it's the creator community where you hire these people to endorse your brand, hoping for authenticity because they have their own followers.

And so she used the whites, but when you look closely, she wasn't actually touching the skin with it. It's almost reminded me the CEO of the McDonald's. He took the nibble out of the Big Macs. So as opposed to using this and saying, the product, and saying, this is fantastic and look at my makeup removing. She didn't. So, I mean, first of all, Nutriena should have approved that and said,

look, you've got to do that over again. But they reacted really well. They made fun of it. The fact that they hired somebody to do this and they hadn't really used the product properly. And because of that, I think they responded in the way a brand should with a sense of humor and being a little disparaging, and being fun of their brand versus trying to make this, like the biggest issue that happens.

So what it does is, again, it gets the product back into discussion and this attention economy where it's so hard to get to anybody to pay attention to you. I think they did a pretty good job. All right, let's move on to Alex Cooper. She's got a media company that's now worth half a billion dollars. And Alex Cooper, she's got the, what, call me daddy? Call me Daddy. That's her podcast.

And it's super successful. But that success only gets you so far because she had a drink product as well called what unwell? So she uses the concept of unwell as one of the expressions in her show. Okay. And she went from about 10,000 listeners to a couple of million almost overnight. Great name, great name, great approach, a lot of stuff that makes you unwell, what's wrong with this world.

And so she created this water drink. The same time she's being valued at a half a billion dollars, she has a water drink called Unwell, which is a hydration drink, and they're not going to make it anymore because it's not selling. And this reminds me of the story about Prime. All right. That was KSI and I can't remember what the other guy's name is. It launched like this thing.

They were signing deals left, right and center with European football clubs and the UFC. Oh, Logan Paul, right? Between the two of these guys, huge social media giants. And they were able to move the needle and get people. people to try it and buy it, but not keep buying it. And now it's, I think in Australia, the company's all but collapsed. And it seems to me like the social media stardom can start people to be interested.

They can walk through the door, but if it's not a good product, it'll slam shut right behind them. Yeah, I mean, that's the form of the market. You can lead a horse to water, but it might drink it once when they drink it again. Mr. Beas is a great example. I mean, this is a guy that's that's now raised about $2 billion in capital. He's buying banks, mobile phones. He creates the gamification. He gets into products that requires some of what he stands for,

which is that sort of new generation, fun, don't take yourself so seriously. Creating a product from scratch is tough. But there's people that have made billions of English. Look at George Clooney with his Amigos. Casamos, yeah. Casa Amigos tequila. So you can pull it off, but you've got to have a great product. And if not, you're going to actually hurt your.

your brand is a social influencer because of the thing, you just did it for money. Yeah. You wouldn't drink it yourself. You wouldn't enjoy it. Yeah. And Mr. Beast had Beast Burger. Yeah. It was a ghost kitchen.

Yeah. They were doing really well during the pandemic. But I guess there was a number of complaints in terms of the quality of the food. So he shut that down. At least that's his narrative. I'm assuming there's somebody on the other side who would say something different. But he says he shut it down because he couldn't control the quality of the product. And he's going after stuff that he can control now, which is very much stuff on the cloud, platform economy.

And he's very successful. because he's got 500 million followers. So even if 1% go in, the cost of acquiring that customer is pennies compared to what you would pay. Listen, credit card. If you gets people to buy a credit card and it costs them nothing and banks are paying you $350 as their acquisition cost, think of the competitive advantage he has. So you can put a lot of money into the product as opposed to just acquiring the customer for the product. So that's the key.

Put the money into the product, something the customer wants. So if you were advising Alex Cooper or her company onto how to diversify our, what areas to diversify in? What should she be looking into? I would find a company that really understands brands, understands the four piece of brands, and have her just be the spokesperson, be the elite singer of it,

but she has to believe in it. She has to be someone that I expect that would use it and get excited about it, but don't get into the actual running of the company. I think when celebrities want to be the creative director, the fashion director, the fashion designer,

that's where you get in trouble. Do what you do best. You're elite singer, get the audience is excited about you, but get the backup band behind you. Well, explain Jaden Smith as the fashion guy at Lubutan. He does the men's fashion stuff. This kid gives all of us Nepo babies a bad name.

I don't think he's got two brain cells to rub together him, but I don't think he's ever been, I think he's been told every day he wakes up that he's special and he believes it. This kid is lost and he's got enough money that he can, he'll be fine. But have you heard this guy talk? Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. And the way the parents have set him up,

up on a pedestal that he was like the second coming. Yeah. He isn't. But what about a brand like Lou Boutin for throwing in with someone like this? They're just trying to get that young generation that hadn't heard about him. Everybody knows what the red heel is to a woman. They thought they could bring someone like this. But believe me, he's a facade.

They have designers behind. They'll bring him in a meeting. And he might say, change the color of the thread and make him feel like he's a creative director. But he isn't. But again, if he is not the right lead singer, if you get tired of him, you're not interested in him, he's going to go away. Look at Ryan Reynolds.

Look at the people that are really good at doing that versus the people that don't understand it. I think he at one point took credit for inventing flip-flops and socks. Yeah, I'm sure. There's family dynamics. The whole family, the Scientology, there's a lot.

There's a lot of reasons that might explain it besides just being dropped in your head. I can silo, like, you can be as weird as you want to be. Tom Cruise, one of the greatest actors of all time. Will Smith, one of the great actors of all time. I don't need those people for anything else but that thing. Their purpose built for me.

You're an actor. I want you to act. And if you act great, I don't care about the rest of your life. And that kid, I don't, I just, you know. Yeah, but even if you can act, stay within your lane. Don't suddenly come in and try to profess that you are, you know the secrets to life. Okay, well, speak of staying in your lane, open AI is, I mean,

every company's got their own merch, right? They love putting their logo on, on hoodies and zip ups and hats and back in the day, mouse pads and that sort of thing. But now they want to sell chat GPT, merch. Like, would you wear a $175 half zip or a $70 chat GPT basketball or baseball hat? No. No. So they're not looking to make money off of it. Well, I think the swag, the

staff loved the swag and probably their friends said, I love that. Can I get, can you get me one of those? And that suddenly gets somebody saying, well, maybe we should start merchandising. They're certainly not doing it to justify their stock valuation. They'd have to sell about a billion baseball hats to do that. But, you know, again, it's just, I would rather see them do some merchandise that said no one else is done. I don't know what that is, but I want to say, who's the coolest people doing the coolest stuff?

That's what we should be putting our logo on. Not like a hoodie. And also, like, I'm wondering whether this has anything to do. Open AI is promising that they've got some new device coming out. And I suspect it's going to be some version of a wearable. Wearable Tech for sure. Yeah, and I wonder whether they're trying to get people to wear their Open AI. I wonder if there's going to be something to do with that.

Now, that's interesting. If it's wearable tech, you've got a baseball hat. measuring whatever. I get that. Maybe your intelligence level, your IQ, I get it. But if it's just swag, I don't. Ora rings. I mean, they're going out evaluation of like 10 or 11 billion dollars. Like, what's just going to stop?

Like Fitbit. That was the only place to measure. An Apple Watch comes along. What was the last time we talked about Fitbit? I think it's crazy what people are getting in terms of value. I don't do wearables. I don't need them. I've got my phone. It's close enough.

It's as integrated into me as I need it to be. I don't need anything else. I got my, well, I got my AirPods, but that's it. I don't, I've tried the Apple Watch and I know it's a great, great product. I just, I don't need that level of accessibility to my tech. And it creates anxiety because you go, I didn't walk my 10,000 steps today. Yeah, no, even though, by the way, there's no scientific measure that 10,000 is just happen to be a great number to give people.

Yeah, it's a great. I try to get my 10,000 steps a day and I'm glad when I do. Yeah. What am I at now? I think I'm at like 12,000 already. I'm doing, I'm doing gangbusters today. 11,500. But how many, does that when you hop in the chair, they call it?

to stop? No, no, it's not even on me, man. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. And you take care. That was Tony Chapman, the host of Chatter That Matters, and the founder of Chatter AI. Paying too much for wireless is just the way it is, right? Wrong. Escape to Freedom Mobile and get a plan with coast-to-coast coverage,

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