Elon Musk retweeted a parody Kamala Harris campaign ad without labeling it as misleading (an apparent violation of his own platform’s rules), and The fall of Nike was partly because of… performance marketing?

0:00Did you see how Elon posted a parody of Harris and there was no community notes on it being AI generated false straight through that and the last time I checked I had 120 something million views. Now what was it about? What was the content? What was it? It was a parody making fun of Harris's uh president. Oh the two minute one the two minute video right? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Now one note saying this is false. What was what was the parody? Can you explain what's in the content? It was straight up video making fun of her and saying the reason why she was running, making fun of Biden and her and talking about race and stuff like that.

0:49But the point I'm getting at it. It was, wasn't that when AI generated? It was. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. The point I'm getting at is people are going to trust these platforms less. If they trust these platforms less, it's going to affect your marketing. And you need to keep that in mind based on where you decide to advertise or not advertise. And I'm not telling you should or should not advertise on X. That's up to you. And it's not just X who's doing this. It's meta who's doing this. It's right. Just like the example we gave earlier when you're asking about the assassination attempt. It's meta.

1:22It's Google. It's X. They're all doing it to some extent. and it's kind of crazy because in essence this is a version of censorship right and you want to make sure that just the government i think should step in and stop all these players from sensory yeah you know one of those people will say like we're very different from one of those other countries you know that sensor and control and like we kind of do the same thing in the united States. You know what's funny? It's not funny, but let me tell you. So one, okay, if we run these big tech companies, we're going to operate according to our own incentives.

2:02We have other stakeholders, there's different board members, and we have to listen. Our hands are tied. It's not like in your situation, you have the lion's share of the equity, right? And in my share, same thing for me as well. We're kind of more free to make the decisions that we want to make. um that's one piece of it uh the second piece is kind of related what you're talking about so i did um i i met someone the other day here and um she lives in she lives in um shanghai right now she lives in shanghai okay um and so i was like hey like you know um do you guys worry about you know the evil united states so to speak right like do we do you know because in china there's rhetoric around you know oh we have to compete against china and then they're like in china they're like we don't give a crap like we just we live our own life but like they live in the future right um the way that their kids are so bright their kids are three four years old they're learning about ai they're learning about science or learning about engineering right at that age um they're just so far ahead and they work extra hard and you know you know how it is right in asian society like you know in for chinese people we don't have a god the only god is we have like a money god okay um so everyone's just working really hard all the time right and so they're not paying attention to the united states whereas on the other side like we're trying to like you know and i was like so you know we we hear that uh life is like you know way tougher in china the economy sucks like no everything's great everything's cheap people are very respectful to each other it's like when i travel to america i have to worry about if i'm going to be safe or not right so you have to also be careful what i'm getting at here is like when you and i or our parents used to watch and when we were younger everyone just believed what the news said um but now you have to understand more and more there's censorship going on you have to just really learn to think for yourself because that's what matters at the end of the day.

3:43Dude, and it's starting to start when kids are young. You know, my daughter's going to school. When she was in school, she comes home. She's like, Daddy, you're not being fair. I'm like, what do you mean you're not being fair? She's like, my teacher taught me that you need to be fair. Everyone, you know, you have to be equal and be treated the same. And I'm like, yeah, I get that. So like, really race, you know, like all the way to the front door. Yeah. And she starts talking about, oh, you need to be fair. Everyone's a winner. I'm like, oh, no, no. Everyone is not a winner. I don't care what your teacher told you.

4:13She is wrong. And there's first place, there's second place, there's third place. And I was telling her in marketing and in business, I was just like, look, there's either winners or losers. Are you going to be a winner or a loser? Either if you're going to be if, if you don't know who the winner is in the room, it's not you. And you ended up losing. And I'm like, you need to work really hard to try to win. And whatever you do, you want to be a painter, be amazing painter, you want to be a surgeon, be the best surgeon out there, you want to get traffic to your website, try to beat all your competition.

4:46You know, life is a challenge. It's a game. It's not as simple as everything is fair. And everyone gets treated the same way. I'm not talking about race or anything like that. And what the teachers were teaching her weren't about treating people, you know, from different colors or races or anything like that fairly. It was more so about people winning and losing and the way life works. I'm like, no, no, teacher is wrong. There's winners and there's losers in life. And I was trying to explain to her, I was like, do you have food on the table? And she's just like, yeah. And I'm like, how do we get around?

5:24And she's just like, we have a driver. I was like, what's the driver's name? And of course, she knows Spelman. He's been with us for years. I was like, do you clean? She's like, no, we have Franny. And I'm like, yes, but do you still help clean? She's like, yeah, I put away my clothes and, you know, help make my bed and stuff. I was like, okay, so you have all this stuff, right? And she's like, yeah, I'm like, do all your classmates have all this stuff? She's like, no. And I was like, do mommy and daddy have money or no money? And she's just like, a little bit. You always say we don't have enough money, and I can't buy stuff.

5:58And I just started cracking because I really do tell her we're broke, you know, and I'm not trying to make fun of others or other people's situation, but I want her to understand. I don't want to keep buying her toys. And what's funny is, is, you know, during that conversation, long story short, she understood we had stuff that others don't. And I said, we worked hard for it, but working hard doesn't guarantee that you're going to have all this stuff. There's a lot of people who work hard. you got to get creative and you got to figure out how to do well in life. And it's not just handed to you.

6:31If you go to college or if you work hard, there's no guarantee that you're going to be successful. You know, you know what really bothers me when, so you see a lot of polarization and maybe I felt like this when I was younger, maybe in high school, you know, there's envious like, oh, rich people, rich people, but like the people that are envious of rich people, it's like, okay, well, how did rich people become well to become rich? You have to be successful. Well, how did they become successful? Well, they had to create a product or service that other people were using and they had to do it at scale to become really successful.

7:00And so to me, a rich person at the end of the day is someone just that's a person of value, but people like to paint rich people as like this enemy, right? Which doesn't make any sense to me. It just shows that most people aren't really thinking that that's a whole nother thing. But going back to your point, we're talking about equal opportunity, not equal outcome, right? And some people, I can tell they they don't like it when I when I say that I'm just that's what I truly believe in right I think the starting line should be the same for everybody that to me is equal but if we all end up in the same place at the end of the day then what's the point of working hard there's no point in working hard like you wouldn't work hard anymore I would like we're gonna end up in the same place anyway I'd just rather just do nothing but that would be boring to me yeah it's like communism huh you know living in Cuba oh you're a doctor you you're a janitor you're a teacher and everyone just gets paid the same.

7:48And it doesn't matter if you suck, you're good at what you do. But I'm with you, I believe the starting line, it would be great if it was the same, although that's not reality. But your output and how good you are, and how creative you are should determine where you are in life. But a lot of people don't believe that. And if you look at Eric and I, we didn't grow up with silver spoons, we grew up with nothing, we both grew up poor. And our parents didn't have money we figured it out and they figured it out and you know we've done all right we're not rich like a bill gates or elon musk or anyone on the forbes list but we do just fine and we're still working hard and we're trying to you know we're trying to continually do better and we feel we can do so much more and there's way more to continually earn and strive for in life yeah and the last point on this one i would say for for both of us i think it's the vast majority of the people that do well, that we know are very humble, very nice people.

8:44And a lot of them made the money on their own. And even the ones that maybe their parents came from money already, they were brought up really well. Their parenting was really good. And they're just as good, if not better than other people that we know. And so I think it's people that you look down on, or maybe there's envy around rich people. It's not that, it's just that they're providing value. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners think YPO or EO but for agency owners and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials so this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her what do you like most about the group she said having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas the leads are great too yes we share leads in this group as well this one from Alian he says the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds great experienced members getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric getting advice from others as well.

9:39And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Neil, I have this one over here on, this one's a fun one. So basically the headline here is, you know, Nike stock has tanked, right? And then this, this former person that worked at Nike, I think it was an executive. He's basically attributing part of the fall to performance marketing.

10:14And you know Nike. They spend like billions of dollars on performance marketing. So let me share my screen over here. This one should actually work. So, Neil, do you see this? Nick, I can see it, yeah. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all U.S. e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready.

10:46Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year. You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing this for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school.

11:19Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. okay cool so let's move over to i think it's okay right here so highlight it over here so let's start with um a so one of the things that led to the downfall so it says what what happened in 2020 well the brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation all in because of that the cmo of that time made a few epic moves and i'm not going to read all this everyone this is a post from um mastimo junko i think sorry for butchering your name so a is shift we ship nike shifted from create demand to serve and retain demand that meant that most of the investment were directly directed to those who already uh were already nike customers or members quote unquote b i'm not going to read the whole thing here but it says b is massive growth of programmatic advertising investment as of 2021 to drive traffic to nike.com nike started investing in programmatic advertising and performance marketing net double or more of the share of resources usually invested in other brand activities.

12:25For sure, the former CMO was ignoring the growing academic literature around the inefficiencies of investment in performance marketing, programmatic advertising due to frauds, rising costs of mediators, and declining consumer response to those activities. Things that were suggesting other large B2C companies like Unilever and B &G to reduce those kinds of DC investments in the same exact period. Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars, billions, into something that was less effective but easier to be measured versus something that was more effective but less easy to be measured.

12:58In conclusion, an impressive waste of money. That was a mouthful of stuff. Go ahead, Neil. This person should be fired. I think this person doesn't work there anymore. This person doesn't work there anymore? I don't think so. By the way, this guy that left the comment, the comment that has – I know this guy. He actually has a holding company of agencies. So we'll see what his – You want to read his response? Tim ring. Go. Thank you for the analysis. I agree a hundred percent from the marketing perspective that catching lower, the final conversions will never replace a profound brand building. It has to go hand in hand, especially in times of social platforms and creating all the noise, Nike had to figure it all out for so many years until the conversion and loyalty trap kicked in and the brand building didn't become a priority anymore.

13:38I think Tim is wrong as well. It has nothing to do with marketing. the reason nike doesn't do as well as some of the other players if you actually if they this guy actually talked to their customers yeah i'm a nike customer i know quite a few who slowly stopped buying stuff from nike we all still buy a lot of shoes you're new new new look this guy worked there for 22 years yeah 22 years you know what the real issue is is they stopped innovating on a lot of their products and other people did if you look at like their apparel and clothing they haven't done much if you looked at the shoes there's other companies like on have you seen on no i've done you send it to me later i i don't know your size but send me your size i can go buy you a pair you have to go buy me a pair send me a link i'm not telling you to buy me a pair okay so on shoes nike had the option of doing those type of shoes they said no the person left nike and ended up going and creating their own shoe company but the point i'm getting at is they had a lot of options to innovate and become better.

14:37And they chose not to. That's really the downfall of Nike. When you see all these products on Instagram, and Facebook and TikTok that you're buying, they're using performance marketing, they're selling similar stuff to Nike, why are you buying them? Because their products seem better, at least from the ad perspective, than the Nike product. That's the real reason what Nike failed to do is continually innovate. Just like back in the day, they had air bubbles, right? They had really cool clothes. And they started coming out with these sweatpants that everyone would wear, like, maybe like 10 ish years ago, and they're really popular.

15:19But they stopped innovating, they started bringing out way more colors in their shoes. And they started doing a lot of crazy, unique stuff with the Jordan brand and having other celebrities join. But their playbook of, hey, let's just keep sponsoring NBA players and putting a logo on the shoes and have them sell it. Like that's cool and all. But Adidas does that. New Balance does that. Like with Steph Curry, like this playbook is getting old. They're not doing really anything that's innovative. And that's the issue. It's not performance marketing. I know a lot of shoe companies and apparel companies that are blowing up on performance marketing and through brand building as well.

15:54The real issue is, there's very little innovation on Nike. And when my wife shops at Nike, it just ends up being for shoes for our children. And that's it. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates.

16:23We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you wanna learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. So my perspective on this one is, Neil, he did say in this bullet over here, they shifted from create demand to serve and retain demand.

16:55So he's kind of, he's more, obviously he's been a brand guy for 22 years there. So he's going to lean heavily against brand. So I think that's why he's railing on performance a little bit. Let's leave that part aside. But I do think he said like, you know, part of the innovation piece is like when you're trying to create demand, you are focused on driving a lot of innovation, right? Versus just kind of playing defense and retaining. So I think he said it in a way, but I do agree with you because my friend who used to, you know, this guy, Thomas. so he every year he would send me the newest nike um you know met cons to buy the workout shoes right and i'll just keep buying like every year like i would just buy a new pair because every year i need a new pair of workout shoes and i just didn't know what was good right um now he's sending me a new stuff because nike the met cons that i've had over the i've probably had met cons for the last i don't know six seven years or so eight years maybe it's all the same thing and when you don't innovate that gives someone else the opportunity to come in and eat your lunch same thing so that that definitely applies to your product and service but that also applies to your marketing as well totally agree and nike keeps doing the just do it ads and they've been doing that for years and the branding is great and i'm not saying they should slow down on there but you can spend all the money you want on branding or even performance marketing but if your product sucks compared to the competition you're gonna lose out it's that simple yep i think that's it I think Eric got cut off.

18:18We'll see you guys tomorrow. Appreciate you guys tuning in for Marketing School. Have a great day and check out marketingschool.io slash agency, I believe is the URL.