Jennifer Lopez AI ad, Disney wants to sell networks, Prime Day falls short, Twitter launches creator rev share

0:00All right. Got a lot to cover today. First, we're going to talk about why Disney is eyeing the sales of its network. So Neil, have you heard about this? Yeah, they're looking to offload. ABC. ESPN and a lot of their traditional. ESPN they might look to hold on to. I read about ESPN as well. They're open to discussions about getting rid of a lot of the quote unquote non-digital assets as well as ESPN from what I read on CNBC. Which is, I mean, ABC seems to make a lot of sense because it doesn't seem very Disney-ish. What are the other networks that they have? Dude, Disney owns a lot of networks.

0:36Is it ABC as well? i think abc as well right what did i say abc already abc i don't think disney owns nbc that's comcast so they own abc oh dude i got there's a lot of them espn abc uh fx fox remember they bought fox it's all the fox ones and there's a lot more other channels like 20th television ffx um let's see star uh localish i don't know what localish is dude they just have a ton of them a lot of them are like fox related like national geographic um let me give you my take on this there's a lot of a and e networks i didn't know that was them as well yeah well here's my take on it right i think what you all can learn from this the reason why we're even bringing this up right now because a they own a lot of media but there also is a point in time where you can bloat yourself and have too much media.

1:34I think they went on a M &A spree, right? And Bob Iger was really good at buying Marvel, for example, Pixar. I think he was part of the Fox deal as well, right? And what I'm thinking about here is the macro picture here is a lot of companies are going back to basics. So I'm looking at a thread with my friend right now. So he had to step back into his business. And literally, it says, I fired my president and CEO, making some big time new new, new hires. Right. And he's like, Oh, I fired this, this person too. And you know, the balance is, is main thing he's saying here is like, everyone realized that it was when they, during the pandemic, that it was that they wanted to hire other people so they can step away from their job.

2:16And then they realized they hired a bunch of B and C players and they had to step back in. Meaning that everyone's, a lot of people are going back to basics, right? Like we, you and I, we have mutual friends. They're cutting a lot of products that don't make sense anymore. They're cutting staff that doesn't make sense anymore and it ultimately just comes back down to a level of focus at least that's what i believe no dude i totally agree with you on that and also some of these are legacy businesses and dying so might as well cut them now where you can get some sort of decent valuation on them uh before everything truly moves digital as well yeah and so again if you think about it like i don't know about you when i watch disney plus i don't watch any of the Fox stuff.

2:53I only watch the Disney stuff. Right. And like, it's on brand for them. I think FX, I don't think I've watched. I don't, I've never flipped it at channel for years and years. I maybe watched like one movie ever on FX. You probably more. Do you even have cable TV? No, I have YouTube TVs. That kind of counts. So yeah, that counts. Yeah. But the only stuff I watch is like, you know, the sports stuff or, but I subscribe to everything else. I'm sure. Same as you, um, point is everyone, I think that the, the key takeaway here, but before we move on is sometimes if you find that you are, the train is kind of running without brakes on, you have to slow down to speed up.

3:28And sometimes that means cutting stuff. Like we have a mutual friend, he cut 88 % of his, his marketing staff. And then a lot of people that haven't been operating for the last couple of years, they're, they're back in it. They're big. Like my friend that was texting me yesterday. He's like, yeah, you know, I thought I could hire all these people. And I was just sitting at home playing call of duty. I had a kid and I bought a new home and all that was just collecting my$2 million paycheck a year. And it's like, I was just thinking about it completely the wrong way. So in business or in marketing, not everything is always going to work out or sometimes things will work out, but over time you got to adapt and change.

4:02And sometimes you got to cut fat, uh, to adapt and change and you may not like it, but in many cases, it'll be the right thing to do. Dude, I'll give you one more right here. So Andrew Wilkinson mutual friend, right? So he wrote a tweet here saying pretty much every entrepreneur I've talked to, no matter how simple and wonderful their business is, thinks it's the worst, most stressful dumpster fire that could go out of business at any moment. Everything is hard behind the scenes. And so, you know, I thought this is when you see those success stories of people growing their companies at a rapid pace and then selling them.

4:36That's what you see on the outside. That's not really the case. And a lot of them are like, man, I can't believe we pulled this off. This is pure luck. You know, I remember when there was a social media app that lets you schedule tweets and shares or Facebook posts, whatever you want to end up calling it, ended up getting an offer from another massive social network. And they got an offer in the nine figures. And it was lucky for them when they started off. They never took it. And now the company isn't even worth nine figures probably 10 years later. Wow. Tough. look our point here is focus is one piece of it but related to the business piece that was a little tangentially related you just want to move the ball one inch some days it's going to be one inch sometimes you're going to throw a 10 yard pass sometimes it's going to be a hail mary and the key thing here is as long as you're moving forward that's what ultimately matters at the end of the day and focus helps you continue to move forward in the right direction so the second thing we wanted to talk about here was i don't know if you saw this but jlo there's a virgin ad It was a deep fake of her.

5:37So it was like her, like, like this, like, Hey, I'm Jennifer Lopez. Right. And then, then all of a sudden the deep fake turns off and it's like this, this, like, basically like this tech geek, like developer. Right. And it's like, you hear a guy's voice. And then someone else comes into the picture. It's like a, it's like a gal. She's like, let me try this instead. You suck at this. And she comes back to, and then the deep fake with JLo comes back on and it's like, hi, I'm JLo. And then, but basically the key here is that JLo is allowing her likeness to be licensed. and remember we talked a couple months ago about grimes basically allowing people to license her and then she would just take 50 of the cut we're seeing more and more of this and and drake wasn't happy with the overall concept nor was a weekend uh when people created music uh collab with both of them using ai but you're gonna see more of this and yeah you'll even give people a discount cool you can use my name and likeness and put it out there i get paid and i don't even have to go to a studio and film anything, that's great.

6:33Why would more people do that? Especially if they're using your name and likeness in a way that you approve of, right? I don't think most of these popular celebrities are going to end up approving stuff that just gives them money but can tarnish their reputation. You're going to see way more of this going forward. And you've already seen it in basic form. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of places and sites where celebrities will give a testimonial or endorsement that's non-video and text. It's because they got paid money in someone just, you know, said, Hey, here's an image, a general one that you can end up using.

7:05And here's a quote from JLo or Tom Brady or whoever it may be. You know, you know, we're just going to proliferate the adult industry. So we actually have a mutual friend who will be at the upcoming event. He's getting involved in the adult industry in terms of deep faking. So we'll let you, you know, take your imagination where you want, but I think that's going to be a big business. I'm curious how much mutual friend this is, because I've never heard about this until now. You know who he is and you would never guess who it is but you'll see yeah yeah um and actually i'll tell you something after once we're offline too but um the other thing we want to talk about i want to flip over to yours neil actually so neil put this one this one in but threads engagement is actually decreasing so just to last week we did a reactions video and i think at the time threads was maybe at 70 million users so now it's over 100 million and you know they're all talking about the fanfare oh my god it's over 100 million the fastest growing app whatever da da da da right so neil what have you seen Sure.

7:59So we did an analysis. We took 308 people, mainly marketers, who are on Twitter and threads and look to see who are posting similar pieces of content roughly at the same time. And we analyze the difference. And we also recruited some people to help and also post because we couldn't get enough people, quote unquote, naturally by just crawling threads. And when we're analyzing the data, we compared engagement. So when we're just looking at average hearts per post or likes, whatever you want to end up calling it, threads was at 31.4 versus Twitter was at 4.9. This is roughly a week's worth of data.

8:36And when you look at average comments per post, threads was at 4.3, Twitter was at 0.4. And you could be saying, oh, this is skewed, Neil. You may have a lot more followers on thread or Twitter. So then we started looking at the engagement ratio per follower. And when you do it on a per follower basis, with threads, it was 0.41 % for likes or hearts. And with Twitter, it was 0.015%. When you look at average comments per post on threads, it was 0.056%. And the Twitter version was 0.001%. But here was interesting in my post, funny enough, I also wrapped up and I pretty much broke down how engagement on threads will decrease.

9:20CNBC also ended up releasing an article on that. But I wrote this before I ended up even seeing that article. And when we're looking at the data, we're seeing overall engagement decreasing, because when a social network first comes on, it's hot, everyone's on it, people start logging in less over time. But we do believe that a over time reach will be suppressed once they start monetizing, but that's a long time from now, potentially years from now. And we do believe Threads will become more popular once in the next six months, once they open it up to way more countries. So overall, your engagement may go down per post or per follower.

10:01But if they can keep adding in more and more followers for you or more and more people onto the network, eventually it'll end up still giving you a decent reach and probably more than Twitter. and the main reason being is they're not going to cramp down and reach or suppress it because they're not monetizing right now right and what we said last week was we don't believe that it's an or so it's not twitter or threads it's and and it's they're going to coexist and i i think this is just how it's going to work it's just another social platform to post to so i think is, I mean, Neil, you haven't, have you posted this week at all?

10:41I have not posted this week, but funny enough, when you were talking about that, I wrapped up my blog post cause I got, I've been getting so many people asking which one should I use threads or Twitter. And I literally, and I'm going to read it verbatim. I wrapped up my conclusion, my blog posts, whether it's Instagram threads or Twitter has more engagement doesn't really matter. You can post similar types of content on both platforms. So might as well do so. Yep. And I, what I, the way I look at it now is like, sometimes I just use my Twitter or threads. It's like a stream of consciousness. And so I just let out whatever I let out.

11:14And if it works well, then obviously I'm going to post it to both first of all. And then second of all, if it does really well, then that's ideas for that's signal for me to pump out content, either for this podcast or for YouTube or whatever. Right. And so that's how I, it's like a little antenna that I have to guide the content that I want to be creating. So that's that. All right. Next one is prime day sales totaled 12.7 billion. It falls short of expectation. So I believe it grew, sales grew year on year by 6.1 % or something like that, but they expected 7.2%. So we're seeing a little bit of a deceleration here.

11:50And by the way, Neil, did you buy anything? I did not. My wife did, but I did not. I wasn't planning on buying anything and then i realized that my tv is almost 10 years old so i bought a new tv um so yeah did you know i've never bought anything from prime day not once i mean not even like toilet paper i bought a lot of toilet paper i've never bought anything dude you get toilet paper for 30 off why would you save a lot of money i i didn't know they sell toilet paper i thought it was 30 40 off that's that's very un indian of you to not look at these deals yeah i didn't buy anything on prime day i should have um but i also look at it as like if i buy a lot of toilet paper and i don't need it right away it's holding costs and now i have money tied up in toilet paper which i couldn't invest oh my god someone should clip you on that i'm being serious i know so many people that hoard and just buy stuff when it's at discount like so you bought three years worth and you saved 10 or 15 your money could have compounded and made you much more yeah it's like a couple hundred dollars but you know what by it adds up but funny thing here you're right i can't argue with you but funny thing is i accidentally had the subscription on for toilet paper for a long time and when i was moving a couple years ago one of my entire closets is all toilet paper wow yeah so that's you're right about the cost yeah look at all that money you lost and the space that was wasted too yes not just on the not just on the cost of the toilet paper but you would have made money if you invested it in something else.

13:17Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. So anyway, I think the key thing for me looking at this is a couple months ago, I was at a event and one guy, he does a lot. I think his name's Zamir and he has a lot of consumer data. And what he told me was that he saw consumer data, like for moms, people that are maybe middle age and higher, their spending has cut drastically, right? Whereas Gen Zers, they have a lot of extra money, stimmy money and all that. And they're just plowing it. They're just buying a bunch of stuff. Right. And so that continued. Whereas in 2022, people that are middle age plus, they decreased their spending sharply.

13:55Right. And so now I think we're kind of seeing things slow down a little bit. And I think this is a good signal. Like if, if this fell short of expectations, well, then I think we're going to see with the continued interest rate hikes, I think we have two or three more, whatever it is. Um, I think we're just going to see more softening and that directly affects how we go about marketing. Yep, totally. And going back on the threads topic, let's actually talk about Twitter because with Twitter, they launch ad revenue sharing. Oh, Twitter. Okay, got it. You're highlighted on the Twitch one. Yeah.

14:28No, Twitter launches ad revenue sharing for creators. And I think this is their way of trying to combat threads and all the press and the hype that they're getting. Did you see that screenshot? There was one gal, she shared a screenshot of her first day earnings it was like 24 or 42 000 something like that wow i didn't realize that i never saw that yeah and then i saw i saw someone else share and then he's um he's a well-known creator that talks about business i think his first payout was like three thousand dollars or something like that and so i think the how you would qualify this it looks like you clicked on a link it's you need more than five million impressions in uh in over like average in a three-month period is that what it is let's click on it real quick let's see have at least 5 million impressions on your post in the last three months yeah so in each of the last three months that means you need to average that it seems so then you need a right in each of the last three months you need to be subscribed to twitter blue or verified organization so i think it's like 20 bucks or a thousand bucks a month depending on whatever it is um and then you have to pass the human review i do i mean here's the thing i think um you know people are talking about threads last week but now this coming out i think is a big deal because i remember elon tweeted something to to mr beast um because mr beast was actually sharing his numbers on on the videos he's like hey post this stuff to youtube too we're going to try to match what youtube pays you as well so why wouldn't you do it dude and when you look at all these social networks they're all pretty much copying each other and trying to fight for the same attention just like twitch they added stories right so they're all doing the same thing to just gobble up the attention.

16:05There's nothing really new here. Yeah. I mean, look threads, okay. Ad sharing, Twitch, adding stories, and they, they might have different spins on it, but at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's a feature set that most people are used to. And that's what the social game is. Like if you were to look at it, maybe 10 years ago, oh my God, Instagram is so innovative. Stories are so innovative from snap. And once really meta started to pioneer the copying piece, everyone became okay with the copying. And so So that's just the way. I mean, there's no shame in copying as long as you're doing good for your users.

16:37And speaking of copying, Shopify did the same thing now, right? They're doing buy now, pay later. Just like Max Lechon with his, what's his company called? Affirm. Affirm. And then Square or Block has what? Afterpay, I think it is called? Yep. And Shopify is releasing the same thing. There's nothing wrong with copying. A lot of corporations do it, ends up working. Why Shopify doing it? It'll help end up boosting your e-commerce conversions and make you more money over time. And they're doing up to 12 months interest-free payments, up to 24 months with interest. And it sounds pretty good, especially if you're selling things at high ticket prices for e-commerce EX televisions or dishwashers or anything that costs like a thousand plus dollars.

17:23I mean, I think as people look, the economy is going to get a little tougher. I mean, here's the thing, Neil, like as a side note, you know, we're talking about this hard landing, but there's like a outside possibility. It's a soft landing, but just in case it is a hard landing, which is what I still think we're both thinking money is people paying for stuff. It's just going to become harder and harder. And so what Shopify put in here for their buy now, pay later, BNPL, is it says the platform can provide users two payment options for orders between$50 and$17 ,500, up to 12 months interest-free payments, up to 24 months with interest.

17:58Sounds pretty useful if you're selling high ticket items in the current economic climate, right? So you can be selling like a course or you can be selling special, I don't know, like one-off drops with your merch or whatever it is, right? Right. But the key thing with a BNPL is, do you know how they make money? Neil? It's a huge, like the interest rates are huge. That's what it is. It's just like credit cards. Yep. It's people putting money on credit cards and not paying it till later on. It's the same concept. Yeah. And so the key thing, by the way, if you're like a consumer, I think we, which we all are right.

18:28Credit cards at the end of the day, the smart way to use them is just don't carry a balance. Right. So don't wait to have to pay that interest. That's all. But that's what it is anyway. So the next topic here, so the reason I brought this on up, I was listening to a pod, Um, and Sam ovens was on it and Sam ovens. So he's, we've hung out with him a couple of times, really smart dude, really sharp guy. He used to have a company called consulting.com, which is doing about 36 million a year, top line five or 6 million in profit. And he's just spending a lot on ads. Right. And, you know, for him, he was actually one of the, I'd say he probably wouldn't like being called an internet marketer, but he was using a lot of internet marketer tactics to drive people in his courses.

19:11Right. Now, what I found interesting is that because I put some money into his new company school. Do you know what school does, Neil? No, I know it's a software product and consulting.com, if I'm not mistaken, he ended up selling it. Right. Because there was a new owner at least he sold it. Yeah. By the way, the new owner is coming in a couple of weeks. So new owners coming from consulting.com. He sold it to this guy, Rhian Doris or Ryan Doris. and main thing here that I want to call out is is going back to almost the first topic that we talked about earlier which is this whole idea of focus right so for him he actually read a book called I think it's lean thinking or something like that and it's all about customer obsession right and so what he did was he shut down his he basically cut all the staff from his 36 million dollar a year business made it into a mastermind where he's charging 50 grand a year for the mastermind.

19:59And basically there's like five staff running it. And I believe all the revenue like came down a lot, but he was still doing like five or 6 million a year in profit. Right. So with a lot less headache. Correct. Correct. Because what he learned before was that, and this is good for marketers to understand, because sometimes we get a little sidetracked. Like Neil and I are here talking about strategies, tactics, the newest things and all that. But like the key thing is what he learned is that his company was too focused on marketing. They're too focused on the funnels. They're too focused on the hooks.

20:27They're too focused on looking good. And when he flipped it over thinking about the customers first, he's like, oh crap, I have it all wrong. So that he cut his 50, the staff of 50 people to five and just made it really profitable. Focused on the mastermind, did a really good job there while he built school, which was his passion. He's always been passionate about building software. So I think the key thing here, two key things is one, focusing on the customers and then two, really locking down and building what you think works for you. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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22:37Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. No, totally. And how's this new software company doing? So here's what he said on that pod. Basically, he put 10 million of his own money into it. It's doing really well right now.

23:18And he's basically saying for every like 100 people that sign up, that enter a community, 1 % will become users of his software. And so he's seeing like a viral effect. And I think he's running close to break even right now. Keep in mind, it's still a startup. But it seems like he's having more fun than he's ever had. Yeah, good for him. And by the way, I have one more thing because this relates to both of us. Speaking of doing what makes sense for you, like it doesn't matter what I say on this podcast, how you should do things or what Neil says, even though sometimes we say you should do things.

23:52But at the end of the day, you should do what's right for you. Right. This is the thing that you should do. Do what's right for you. And what I mean by that is when Sam said that, it's like, oh, man, he really relates to us because he's like, yeah, I have one pair of shoes. I wore the same stuff all the time. And that is it. And that's literally Neil and I. Like I just wear Lululemon stuff or aloe or like all yoga stuff. Right. And Neil just wears Henleys all the time. That's right. I wear the same Henleys. I have 20 of them and I don't think they're that expensive. Maybe like 20, 30 bucks each.

24:20Yep. There you have it. That's why I want to talk about Sam. The new ones have no holes though. I got all new ones. Lift your shirt up. Lift your shirt up. No holes. Oh, no holes. Look at that. So for the longest time, Neil was wearing these Henleys that had holes in it. I don't know if he's trying to look for it. Same one I'm wearing now. I just got new ones without holes. Because Eric and other people would poke their fingers in my holes and they'd laugh. I think it's funny because literally everyone had a hole. I've had them for so many years. Yeah. I was like, honey, you need to buy new ones.

24:46They just look so terrible. I was like, okay. Anyway, look, by the way, I'll add one more thing here. One more wrinkle. This is just what came to my mind. Like I've been testing a lot of these creator services for like Twitter. And there's one guy out there that has been starting multiple agencies at the same time. Like he has one for like design. He has one for clips and all that. and I've been trying these services and what I realized at the end of the day is man, like, you know, you can try all these services but I'm like, nothing is better than just like, in my opinion, having something in-house where someone really understands your stack and what you're trying to do.

25:21I tried to give these all a shot but, and they all came with big promises but a lot of these creator services, man, like, yeah, I don't know. So I don't know how you, like, I feel like you try a lot of these things too so maybe we should speak to it for a moment. I don't try too many of them. I think you try maybe way more than I do. Yeah, maybe I test these a lot more. And then, by the way, there's another gripe I have. How most service companies call – I'm just complaining now. But how most service companies call their revenue ARR. Like if you're an agency, you call all your revenue ARR. For the most part, if you're a smaller agency, your revenue ain't ARR.

26:02Well, even for large agencies, a lot of it is just revenue. But software companies, AR stands for annual reoccurring revenue. And if your revenue is all reoccurring, by all means, you can call it that. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. But it's funny because a lot of people count. I was looking at a software company today. They did 3 point something million, 3.5, I think, in revenue. And they were just like, yeah, this is ARR. And I was like, but you just said last month, 153 ,000 was reoccurring. The rest was one time. I'm like, this is not all annual reoccurring revenue. Some of this is reoccurring.

26:34some of it is one time. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, look, if you want to, that that's like, that's just us complaining a little bit more so since I started it, but anything else from your side? Nope. That's it. Make sure you guys rate review this podcast. We really appreciate it. Thank you guys for your time. Goodbye.