The Ben Mulroney Show - How Netflix could kill Television using A.I. Targeted Ads

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Guests and Topics: -How Netflix could kill Television using A.I. Targeted Ads with Guest: Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters, Founder of Chatter AI If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Time to drive away from the grind and unwind in your new 2025 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross. No phones, no signal, no meetings. Just the smell of adventure. Lease the Eclipse Cross today for the equivalent of $89 weekly at 3.99% for 36 months. Plus get a no charge, two year maintenance package. Visit your local Mitsubishi dealer today or see mitsubishimotors.ca for details. Conditions apply. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered

to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your Monday with us. It's that time of the week where we like to talk about marketing and strategy and media with a good friend of the show, Tony Chapman. He's the host of the award winning podcast, Chatter That Matters, as well as the founder of Chatter AI. Tony, happy Monday to you. I got to love your studio. I love the fact that you're putting it out on YouTube. Well done. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Okay. You and I've talked about this a lot, about how streamers have an advantage when it comes to advertising because they can pinpoint the demographic that an advertiser is looking for down to the person. Very, very granular stuff. And now Netflix is going to be adding AI, I guess, to supercharge that offering. Yeah. I mean, traditional media was always about a big DREF net. Coke opens happiness. I'm going

to spread it across the entire world and capture wherever I can. And then when social media came along, they said, well, actually we can target it very precisely to the gender demographic location. And then mobile came along and said, but not only that, we can target the ad as the person's walking down the street saying, come in for a cup of coffee. What's happening now with generative AI and Netflix is another game changer, which is you're watching your program. They know who you are, how long you're watching, what else you stream. They know the genre you're watching.

They know the actors you're watching. They create an ad just for you. So they're fly fishing the exact ad with the exact bait at the exact time. For example, hey, I love what you're looking at. I love that turtleneck you got on. You can buy it right now. So that's how powerful we're getting in terms of your data,

which you excrete just by watching Netflix and their ability to fashion the perfect ad at the right time, very often they get you buy something you never wanted or needed, but suddenly you feel you deserve. But what's gonna happen to sort of traditional ad agencies if all of this is gonna be happening? I'm assuming Netflix is gonna be building this themselves.

So what's gonna happen to traditional ad agencies that are hired to come up with campaigns and to hire, to storyboard these things. And then they put a team together and they hire the actors and then they edit these things and then they bring them back to the company. And the company says, yes, I mean, how is this going to work? It feels like this will upend another industry. Yeah, it's the biggest sledgehammer to hit. And we're already seeing the big agencies imploding because they realize they can't hold on to the body of work that justified their fees and justified offices with pool tables and espresso machines. And now what's happening is Netflix not going to produce anything. AI is going to produce it. So the

reality is the data gets fed into an algorithm and turns into an ad. Now it will take three seconds, four seconds to create that ad, maybe a nanosecond in the future. So again, we've got to all come to terms with the society. What are we going to do when there's no jobs? Because AI is going to populate every corner of our marketplace. I could clone your voice in 10 minutes and have that show out in 50 different languages.

And you're going, well, what do we need producers for that? No, we just need AI. So we have to come to terms with society. This is one of many ways in which it's just gonna disrupt. What we used to take for granted was a good day's work. I mean, I was assuming that this would be obviously disruptive to sort of traditional broadcasters and all the ad dollars were gonna migrate

to a place like Netflix. I'm sure Amazon Prime is gonna be on this and so on. But I hadn't even thought about the sort of the people producing the ads, that this is gonna be something that happens. And as you said, could implode an entire other industry. And this is not stretching your imagination. There could be a thousand versions of your show airing

next month based on what I'm interested in hearing. And they know your voice, they take the data, they fashion the stories and they put it out. So I'm getting a very custom version of your show. I like your personality, I like your persona, I like your conservative views, but I'm really more interested in some of the things that when you talk about sports and entertainment

and as I tune into that, I will now get more of that show. It's the same reason why Spotify adjusts the playlist based on what you're interested, the Reco economy. With generative AI now, I'm not just recommending the Beatles, I'm actually creating a Beatle-like song for you. Sure, yeah, but the problem with that is every now and then I say something that pisses people off and that's one of the reasons people tune in. It's the Howard Stern effect, right?

They, for every one person that tunes in because they love Howard Stern, at least the old Howard Stern, there were two or three that tuned in because they couldn't stand him. And if it feels to me that what you're describing is a world where there will be a, there could be an AI version of the Ben Mulroney show

that is tailored exactly to what you like. And what you like is me agreeing with you all the time. And that's not the Ben Will Rooney show. The wild card is when I throw in, I throw in something that surprises people. It's also gonna affect in your tech sports and realize there's a spike of techs when people disagree with you.

So they're gonna make sure that friction is part of the show. So again, it's just like what George does and what your team does is human connections. What works and doesn't work and they put it together. Algorithms just do that through data. It's not to say that we don't need the human touch, but I can tell you something, someone like you is going to have an orchestra of 80 instruments, 78 of them are going to be AI and two of them are going to be human. And the reality is those two are going to have the most

extraordinary job in the world because they've got this massive orchestra. The other 76 are going to go, what happened to my job? And that's what, and people will be yelling at me for years, I'm doom and gloom and AI. It is coming. It's going to hit hard and it's going to impact all of society. And this is just one of the many stories. Well, yeah. Well, listen, I dovetails perfectly into this next story that artificial intelligence could

sound the death knell for entry level white collar jobs while causing us unemployment to rise as high as 20%. That's a huge number, but some are saying they could be even higher than that. Yeah, it's good. I think it's my prediction is it's going to be 40 or 50%, which is going to be universal income. We have to find a way because we can't sell lipsticks to AI. So we have to find in the consumer economy something to give consumers cash to do. But the most important thing is purpose. We find a lot of purpose in our jobs. A lot of people say, I hate my job. But the reality is you get social interaction, you get to go to work, you get to dress up,

you get to escape might be a pattern of sort of boredom to go off and to find your path. You take those away. You take the entry levels away, the rungs and the ladder where I first become an adult, where I start learning responsibility. And I wonder how that's gonna bode for a society. I really do think jobs are an important part of our psychology.

And until we figure that out, you can give me all the money in your work, do, but at Idle Minds is the devil's workshop. And we've seen time and time again when countries have high youth unemployment, it's correlated to crime, it's correlated to mental health issues. And I fear that's what's happening already in our society with 16% youth unemployment in Canada. I want to talk now about Caitlin Clark, the massive star in the WNBA and the impact that

she's having on the growth of that league. So apparently she was responsible for 26.5% of all WNBA economic activity last season. And by every metric or almost every metric, the WNBA is currently growing. And, you know, the question is, is her impact on the WNBA greater than Michael Jordan's was in the nineties. And what does the NBA have? What does a WNBA have to do to ensure that this moment that they're having is turned into a movement? Fantastic question. So first of all, it's apples and oranges because the NBA was already established. But what they need to do all sports needs is rivalry.

Having one person is your lead singer and you depend on it. It's almost a Gretzky effect. They go down to Los Angeles and suddenly people start falling in love in hockey. But it's only when there's tension, rivalry, debate, who's the best, who I think really fuels the growth of a sport versus just the growth of the individual. And you look back at golf, Tiger Woods for a long time just was a runaway train and golf kind of got very predictable. It started, as you start getting challenges. So what they need to do is they need to find other talent of that level that you can go out and start having the conversations. Who do you think is better? And that's what creates an appetite to watch. But you know, like, like I said, it's about keeping it going as well, right? Because

had, had Vince Carter not come to Toronto, Toronto would not have learned about basketball in the way that they did. And that education would not have turned into the passion that has now fueled basketball in Toronto and indeed across Canada. And it sustained the Raptors even in years where they're not competitive. And that's, I think the analog that I'm looking for

with the WNBA. What do they have to do to ensure that on days where Caitlin Clark isn't playing, if she's injured for long stretches, when she ultimately retires, what happens to that league when she is gone? Are they able to take advantage of this to bring in fans who aren't just fans of Caitlin Clark, but fans of the women's game, because that's what's gonna sustain them long after she's gone. That's the greatest challenge that all women's sports face because there's a real appetite for them.

They're getting sponsors right up front, giving them permission to go forward on it. But the thing is they've got to knock out, because we only have 24 hours a day and there's an absolute too much and too many chasing our time already. So what is women's sports going to do to knock out other sports so that we have a consideration to go to the games and spend our money. That's the biggest challenge any sport is not sort of in that top two or three phases. Tony got to run. Thanks so much. All right man talk to you later.

Tony, Tony, gotta run. Thanks so much. All right, man. Rick put you in there for a reason, sweetie. Mom, just say it! Get back here! This is for your own good! Rick and Morty. New season, Sundays on Adult Swim. Stream on StackTV. Get your mouth rounded.