The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Prof G on Marketing: Should Your Brand Take a Stand?

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Welcome to the second episode of our special series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today. In today’s episode, Scott answers your questions about whether brands should get political, how to pivot when industry assumptions no longer hold, and why marketers must adapt to a world where trust is shifting from institutions to individuals. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Welcome to Office Hours with ProfG. Today we're continuing our special three-part series, ProfG on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today. What a thrill. Let's bust right into it.

Okay, what do we have here? Our first question comes from Dom on Instagram. He asks, More and more companies are taking political stances as part of their branding. Growing up, I was told that businesses should never talk about religion or politics in order to stay out of trouble and not segment customers. Does this hurt companies in the long run? Do you think it is smart that businesses are moving in this direction?

This is going to require some nuance. So I've served on a bunch of public company boards, seven. I'm kind of a big deal, kind of a big deal. And probably 24 private company boards. And my general view on political statements is that it's mostly virtue signaling from the CEO likes to get in front, especially about three, four years ago, maybe five years ago, get in front of a younger workforce

and talk about all this woke nonsense. Because why it was nonsense is because they didn't believe it themselves. They were just trying to score, like acquire virtue. Like I don't have enough Gulf streams or shares or options here. So I want to capture social status. I think that's actually a pretty decent criticism of the democratic party. Instead of focusing on the material and emotional wellbeing of consumers, they

want to pretend that they're grabbing virtue rather than actually getting any fucking thing done at the ground level in terms of what actually impacts people see above inflation, et cetera. So I generally think it's a good idea to stay out of politics. I tried to separate the person from the politics. I live just south of Palm Beach and a lot of my friends are Republicans and I just think they're batshit crazy.

I just don't understand how they can tolerate some of this nonsense. But at the same time, I also recognize they're thoughtful, nice people and I enjoy their friendship. So I try to ignore it when they put out a reel saying, oh, finally the truth that these food products cause autism. And I wanna write, dude, didn't we go to college together?

Are you really that fucking stupid? Because I know that will damage the friendship. So I try to separate that. I also try to separate the company from politics. Now, Profit.G doesn't do that. You know, we're a media company, we're a small company. We are highly political because a lot of what we do is putting out thought leadership, opinion, et cetera. And still, we would probably be a bigger company

if I just focused on business and tech rather than taking political stance. But at this point in my life, I get to do whatever the fuck I want. See above, I'm gonna talk about. My favorite is when people say in my newsletter, they write, oh, get back to talking about business or things you know.

And basically, I got a lot of like, stay in your lane. You know what my lane is? Whatever the fuck I wanna talk about. And I've earned that and I'm finally there. Anyways, anywho, for most big public companies, you do wanna avoid politics. Now, having said that, occasionally an opportunity comes along. Race relations in the US were capturing a lot of attention.

Colin Kaepernick was a great quarterback, two-thirds of Nike's customer base under the age of 30, not kind of on board with how race relations were going in the United States. Anyone who was upset about them embracing Colin Kaepernick who burnt their Nikes had to go out and buy their first pair of Nikes. It was a very smart move. They probably alienated somewhere between five and 10% of their TAM to embolden or entrench or inspire 90%

of their addressable market. That's a really good trade-off. We are in that moment right now. And essentially I think that things have gotten so out of control where we're rounding up people with the wrong tattoo, doing really stupid shit around terrorists is gonna do nothing but elegantly reduce our prosperity, put thousands of small businesses

out of business, Doge, which was nothing but literally like, okay, how stupid can you be? We're gonna cut $2 trillion. No, I meant 150 million. No, I meant 60 billion. No, I meant 60 billion. No, I meant less than the subsidies to Tesla. I mean, that has been handled so poorly, so poorly that Americans and are so fed up

that the biggest commercial opportunity in a decade, and I said this last week and I'll say it again, I said it in the last office hours and I'll say it again, is to come out, not against Trump so much, but to come out in favor of American values, of decency, of competition, of being thoughtful around our economic policy, of embracing our great immigrant population, PhD students, of rule of law, of due process, all the things that we've come to expect are American. that company, that company will register a torrent of new business.

I mean, for God's sakes, this guy is flailing, literally flailing. This is the biggest commercial opportunity in the last decade. In sum, with rare exception though, let me finish where I started, you generally wanna avoid politics because you are likely gonna alienate

50% of the population. Having said that, on a risk-adjusted basis, this is a calculated risk worth taking. Our next question comes from Instagram. Ambreen asks, What marketing assumption about your industry or organization are you currently relying on that, if proven wrong, would fundamentally change

your marketing strategy? And how would you pivot? Each year we pick sort of a strategic imperative. I think it's important to have one thing that you like. This is the one box we have to check this year, because I think being an effective leader is not deciding what to do, it's deciding what not to do. And that is, you only have so much wood,

so I think it's important every year to say, this is our strategic imperative, we've got to check this box. For 2025, the strategic comparative for ProfG Media is to get much better and dramatically increase our video views. What I found just fascinating, kind of blew my mind, was that the primary channel of distribution for podcasts right now is not Apple, it's not Spotify,

it's YouTube. 20% of the listens of this podcasts right now is not Apple, it's not Spotify, it's YouTube. 20% of the listens of this program right now will be listened to on a television or watched on a television, which isn't a good idea. All of a sudden I get very self-conscious because listen to my voice. My voice, ooh, hello, Dreamy. I'm handsome, handsome voice.

Brad Pitt of Voices. Face, for those of you watching on TV, not so much, not so much. See Above, Lost Virginity when he was 19. Anyways, so my skills play well to audio, but here's the bottom line. Podcasts are moving towards video. Podcasts are essentially becoming TV shows

with strong audio components where you can just listen to the audio. If you look at, I think the next Joe Rogan is a kid named Steve Bartlett. When I moved to London two and a half years ago, the first thing I did was drive to the studio in Ipswich and Norwich or whatever the cool part of town is. And he had this incredible studio with eight people, cameras everywhere. And I'm like, this is like Charlie Rose. This is a, but you know, much more deft production quality. And he was basically doing a TV show.

And if you'll notice in the last two and a half years, Steven has busted into the top 10. He used to be in the top 10 in the UK and now he's in the top 10 globally. I think he's probably gonna be the biggest podcaster in the world. And if you look at the top 100 podcasts of the 1.6 million that are out there

and the 600,000 that put out content every week, the 100, the top 100, there's been huge churn. 50 new entrants into the top 100, 50 have dropped out. And what is the arbiter of who has churned in and churned out? It's their video game. So we have spent a lot of time trying to think about, we hired a kid named Billy Bennett,

he used to work for us, who's now was at CNN and is now working with us, just focusing on video. We have a full-time tech guy, our tech guy Drew, who's sort of our head of engineering and has been with us for about 15 years. The woman who runs my business, Catherine Dillon, is a creative at heart and edits and thinks about video.

The hard part is that the thing that played the my strengths in terms of video from a personal standpoint is I'm on the road about 150 days a year. So my studio was basically a Dopp kit that I could set up. I didn't even have a ring light. I would just try and find a nice part of the hotel room I was staying in and do a reasonable job of video. And that's not longer gonna cut it.

So we've spent a bunch of money on studios that we're replicating in the different places I spend a lot of time in, specifically New York, Florida, and London. But I'm not sure that's enough. So we're trying to be really thoughtful about marketing, pushing people to our videos, using more sound effects, usually using more visual effects.

The fastest growing part of our franchise, or our portfolio, if you will, is PropG Markets. And that's because it is tailor-made for graphic overlays because we talk a lot about stocks in the market and Ed's in the same place so they can create better production values. In sum, the assumption we made was that the new arbiter of who moves up in the world of podcasting

and who moves out is gonna be how strong your video game is. Now, your question is what would happen if that changed? I don't know. I guess we just have to pivot and be agile and try and figure out what that next thing is. I think the next thing YouTube is the new channel. I believe that in 2026, and I'm already starting to think about a strategy here that the new arbiter of success in podcasting

is not gonna be Spotify, it's not gonna be Apple, it'll still be YouTube, but more than anything, or the new player, if you will, that creates the difference between numbering number 300 and number 30 is the following, Reddit. I think Reddit is literally out of central casting in terms of its niche domains, it's the viscosity of commenting.

I think it was tailor-made to figure out how they become a platform for taking pieces of podcasts and threading them into different comments on Reddit. I think Reddit's gonna be the new platform that kind of picks winners and losers. A possible second to that on 26 is going to be Netflix, who's decided to get into the game.

And Netflix just has, with 350 million consumers, with custody of 350 million home screens, if they decide that they want to distribute Mel Robbins' podcast or Raging Moderates, that podcast will immediately shoot into the top 20 of podcasts globally. So they have so much custody of the consumer that they perhaps could be the new arbiter. In sum, I'm trying to think about

not only what's in front of our face, but think around the corner and make bets accordingly. But I think about this stuff a lot. So in sum, you gotta make a bet, you gotta have a strategic imperative, and hold people accountable, and invest additional resources in that imperative such that you can give people the resources to move against or act against what you think is important and where the puck is

headed. And also think about, you know, looking beyond the second corner. So what's the corner we're moving towards or where's the puck going? Video, hands down. Where do we think it might be headed? Reddit and possibly Netflix. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Whether you're a startup founder, navigating your first audit, or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to build trust by automating compliance for in-demand frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and more.

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When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? Vox. groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Welcome back. Our final question comes from Needalize on Reddit. They say, I started my career in big agencies back in the early aughts when the internet was young.

However, even then we were talking about how the media was splintering and how it was getting harder to get noticed. As you know, the trend has gone into overdrive. Audience attention is splintered across endless platforms and micro communities, and trust is shifting, from institutions to individuals, from brands to influencers. I keep coming back to this question, how does the humble media planner or marketer even navigate this reality?

The age of the all-powerful monolithic brand feels like it's fading fast, and now resonance doesn't come from one big message, but from a thousand fragments finding the right ears. Yeah, I agree. So it used to be, if you think about it, not that long ago, you could capture a third of America in about four nights, because two thirds of America

was watching one of three channels five hours a day. Now that media landscape has fragmented just wildly. And not only that, the costs fragmented just wildly. In all of that, the costs have gone way up. So we didn't realize how inexpensive broadcast advertising was, how cheap it was. You could capture essentially to a 30 second spot on the Academy Awards 30 years ago

was about a fifth of the price and it reached three times as many people as it does today. So it was 15 times, you have 15 times the ROI and yet people still do it. We didn't realize how cheap it was. So the fact that media was so inexpensive from like 1945 to 1995, maybe in 2000, created an ecosystem where the algorithm

for creating shareholder value was to have a mediocre truck, salty snack, sugary drink, shoe or car. Build an okay slash shitty car, the K car, or out of Detroit and wrap it in amazing brand codes of tough like a rock or apple pie, whatever it might be, or find soap then whatever it might be, or find a, find, you know, soap, then then craft it with, you know, okay materials or ingredients, and then talk about European elegance,

create a shitty beer and convince people that if they drink this beer, they're going to be hot and have a six pack and be more attracted to potential mates. And you could infuse these incredible brand codes really inexpensively using some creative agency of guys who wore black and gave you awards if you spent enough money on their ad campaign and can every year. That ship is sailed. That dog just doesn't hunt anymore because now we have these weapons of mass diligence that say, okay, and this is the example I always use. I usually used to stay at the Four Seasons, the Rich Carlton, or the Mandarin Oriental. One, because someone

else was paying, I was usually there speaking or with a client. And two, they always deliver an eight. But the reality is the Mandarin Oriental in Istanbul, it's just not where I wanna stay. The core associations of these hotel brands meant that they delivered, you know, always an eight. But then my social graph, trip advisor, friends, weapons of mass diligence, Google, OpenAI.

I go to OpenAI now and say, I'm going to South by Southwest in Austin. I'm in the midst of a midlife crisis and I want to hang out with younger, cooler people. And it literally comes back with, stay at the Austin proper. Boom, I don't need the brand. I've never heard of the brand. I just know that I trust these weapons of mass diligence more than the brand. So what do you have? You have people trying to figure out how to gain these algorithms in search. You have influencers, the rise of the influencer generation, the rise of Instagram. Do you know how much influence Instagram now has? Also at the end of the day, and this sounds very passe, the era of Don Draper is just over. The sun has passed midday on the bullshit of thinking

you're gonna have a mediocre product and a great brand. Now the product is the brand. And that sounds very passe, but it's true. The companies that have developed the most market capitalization over the last 20 years have really been victories not in brand, but in supply chain. Amazon, Alibaba, Netflix's supply chain.

They went direct to consumer with DVDs by mail, and then they went direct to consumer using broadband. How much money? What do the most valuable companies in the world have in common? They don't spend a lot of money on advertising. Why? Because they've put all their money into the product,

and oftentimes it's not just about the product, it's how you deliver it and discover it, i.e. supply chain. So what do you do if you're a marketer? You think about, okay, where's my core customer finding and doing diligence on my product? Sometimes the best CMO comes back and says, folks, I gotta be honest, we should put all our money

into innovation around digital to unlock new features with our product. Tesla doesn't spend a lot of money on advertising. And the bottom line is their brand has gone way down because Elon Musk is an enormous asshole, but also because the product has gotten really stale, right? So consumers can find the best product now

using this weapons of mass diligence. So what are you gonna see? You're gonna see reallocation of capital out of traditional marketing into supply chain, into influencers, into social and into product itself. And this is hand to hand combat. There's no single platform. If you wanted to bet on any two platforms,

I don't know, you'd probably bet on TikTok and Instagram, and also maybe YouTube. I mean, there's a cumulative effect here, right? You gotta kind of do it all, but you wanna have influencers, you wanna have evangelists, you wanna over-serve a core customer base such that there's word of mouth,

and they absolutely fall in love with your product. I used to use Norelco or Braun or these shitty brands to clip my head and then I found this clipper from a former East German factory that used to make propellers for Messerschmitts and they make this incredible clipper and I went online and I found out where it was and I ordered them and the more expensive

which is a pricing signal, but you can now find the best product or discover it online. So look, I'm not sure I'm saying anything revolutionary here, but the CMO that's like the second lieutenant in Vietnam that gets shot in the forehead within six to 18 months is the one that comes in and wants to do the brand identity and hire a big agency and talk about traditional media.

Boss, that ship has sailed. This is hand-to-hand combat. That is a combination of a better product with digital unlocks, that ship has sailed. This is hand-to-hand combat that is a combination of a better product with digital unlocks, huge supply chain investments if you have access to cheap capital, and then trying to identify evangelists slash influencers who can weaponize these platforms to your advantage. That was a mouthful. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursappropetiumedia.com. That's

officehoursappropetiumedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Proppgy pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Proppgy Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.