MrBeast Gets Sued for $100M, Dave Portnoy Buys Barstool Back for $1, How Forbes does SEO, Barbie's Marketing Results & More

0:00All right, we got a lot on the docket today. It's another time for reaction videos. It's been a very chaotic couple weeks and Neil and I will give quick updates. But I'll just tell you what's on the docket today before we get started. We're going to be talking about Dave Portnoy buying a barstool sports back for a dollar. Mr. Beast getting sued for$100 million. WPP, which is a large ad holding company, lowering their guidance. We're going to talk about kind of down rounds, kind of what's happening in the venture world and how that relates to marketing. We are also going to be talking about how Forbes does SEO, a little bit of that.

0:31and we'll also be talking about how barbie actually spent over 150 million i believe on marketing so we'll do a little recap of that one and also a recap of the leveling up founders mastermind that we just did so that was this past week in la and i'll actually let neil kick it off because he could update everyone maybe on why it was chaotic and also his thoughts on the event so the event was overall really good and you guys are going to hear some podcast episodes from some of the speakers coming up on the marketing school podcast so you'll get quite a bit of insights and there were some really good talks from macroeconomics so what's happening how it's going to affect marketing and business to how to do mna to grow faster to how to invest more in personal branding and how to do it right from someone who spends over 60 million dollars a year on influencer marketing and when i look at the event overall it was great venue was amazing the food uh i think you did level up the food as well.

1:30It was a Wolfgang Puck restaurant. I think that used to be a restaurant too. I could be wrong, but I think it was before. So overall, I was really pleased with the event. I didn't get as much out of the event as I wanted to and had nothing to do with the event. Right now, my wife and I are in the middle of a big move and the move is really chaotic and only have a few weeks left to move. So we're interviewing builders trying to find homes to buy instead of building. We brought our kids with us trying to find new schools to put our kids in. So when you start combining a lot of this kind of stuff, it just started adding up where we're just like, okay, this is really chaotic and this is going to be tough.

2:14And for that reason, I didn't get to spend as many hours with the attendees and other members of the mastermind that I would have liked. I went to the first networking night. I went to the lunches on both days. I attended some of the sessions, but I wish I was there for the whole time. And that was my biggest regret from the event. I was looking forward to hearing some of the speeches. Larry Kim, I heard the second half of his speech. I can't wait to get the recording because the second half was amazing. And I heard the first half was great as well. I missed Devin's speech. I've known Devin for years and I already knew what he was going to talk about.

2:50But still, there's always amazing nuggets in there that can really help from a marketing end. But yeah, biggest regret was I just didn't spend enough time at the mastermind due to personal reasons. Cool. Well, I'll share some. So as Neil mentioned, we'll share some of the clips from some of the talks, not exactly the full things in the upcoming weeks. And we'll share the whole thing of the marketing school Q &A that's kind of become a tradition that Neil and I do. It's easy for us. We kind of riff. Sometimes we'll agree on stuff. Sometimes we'll disagree on stuff. And it's just a fun time. and just a recap so neil this was actually the highest scoring mastermind the mps score was 100 that's the absolute maximum you can get just for reference here it's not exactly exactly apples to apples no pun intended but apple mps is 73 and a typical good mps score is 54 so ours is 100 that's in quantity that's in quantity right so apple has so many people filling it out yeah so 73 like on volume it's like the whole world right and which is like again it's not an apples to Apple's comparison here.

3:47And then most of our speakers got above like a 60, which is pretty good for an MPS score. And what I will say is I'll just share a couple of stories here before we move on to the next topic. So we talked about the MPS score. It was hosted at the Beverly Wilshire, and we had about 90-ish people come through. And so here's a couple of stories. One guy in the company, his business does about$500 million,$600 million a year. It's a family business. And he was trying to figure out how to divest from the company. And actually, he found the the perfect person to talk to. And another person in the group is looking to perhaps buy two companies, not just one, but two companies from within the group.

4:23Okay. And one person actually reached out to me and offered up their business potentially for sale. Right. And so that that's, those are kind of the conversations, the high level conversations that are happening in the group. I'm going to share my screen real quick. Those of you that follow us on YouTube, if you're not, you're, you're missing out, but you can see over here, we had a dinner on the first night. Neil, unfortunately, was unable to make it. The screen is trying to pop up right now. It'll pop up when it does pop up. And if it doesn't, I'm just going to keep moving along. So let me stop sharing and let me reshare again.

4:52You didn't see it, right? No, I just saw three dots. Here, here, here. Let's do this. Okay, there we go. You see that? Yes, now I see it. Okay, cool. So this was kind of the dinner on the first night, you know, mostly speakers. And then this guy over here, Ravi, so he's from Microsoft Clarity. and special thanks to the Microsoft team, Ravi and Scott, for sponsoring the event. And he actually had one of the highest rated talks, right? And then Devin, who you just mentioned over here, he's a fellow YPO member. He is really good at buying businesses and he's really good at terms. So he talked a lot about terms, deal terms and all that, and M &A.

5:27And his score, his MPS score was 100. And there's only one other party that got 100, right? And so anyway, this is Syed over here. Just a great group, Jasmine, Star, and Steve from Prey.com. Anyway, and Dan Fleischman over here, but we'll continue on. I'm not going to go through the entire summary here, but the other thing too with this thing is we did pickleball. Not everyone came to pickleball, but pickleball was really fun. We did a national pickleball day. And the final thing I'll say is I always like giving away books, right? So this time was really special. Neil, I don't know if you know this.

5:59You probably didn't even pick one up, but you probably weren't even aware. But this book is written by Stripe Press. It's called Scaling People, and it's like the modern day how to – high output management. So it's a management book, basically. And you can't buy this on Amazon, the physical copy. You can't get it right now. And so we had to work out a special deal with them. And Tamara from Stripe Press was gracious enough to offer. Why can't you get it out? Because it's like in high demand. That's why. Oh, it's sold out. Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, you can buy the Kindle version if you want, but it is what it is.

6:30So anyway, that's it on the event. Speaking of which, Neil and I were kind of talking, and feel free to tweet or DM me, but we're actually considering doing a general public kind of marking school event again, just cause our events team evolve events, Deanna from the evolve events team, Carol, they did such a good job. And we're just like, dude, if it's such a good job and we don't need to worry about that much, then like, you know, we'd be open to it because Neil and I are going to be living really close to each other. So, so that's that. Next topic is you can pick here, pick from the list. Let's talk about a barstool sports.

7:03Everyone's, you know, if the story's been going viral on how we pretty much got the company for free, that is actually not true. It's the furthest thing away from the truth because in there, I don't know if you saw the fine print, depending on how he monetizes, you know, if monetization happens, they get a cut of all the revenue. Well, the only thing I saw, Neil, was if he sells for, if he sells the company to get 50 % in proceeds, are there other terms? Monetization as well. I read an article. I don't know how accurate it was, but it said if he monetizes, they get a cut of the revenue. oh okay that's a big difference than like if he sells he gives up 50 because it's like oh i'm like technically if he bought it for a dollar and if he sells he gives a 50 but he keeps it forever he really got it for free but if there's all these other terms then it's actually it it's not as you know it's not exactly like the headline so yeah but a lot of people are saying he just took away the company for free that is not true they're getting a you know depending on how he monetizes they can make money there, at least from the article I read.

8:01And if he sells, they can also make money there. It's still a good deal though. It's still a good deal, but it makes logical sense, right? You're just like, eh, this isn't doing really well within our organization. Let's spin it out. Let's give it back to the founder, let him run it. And let's make the best of the situation and still have potential upside. I just think it just goes to show, I don't know if his payout was like 800 million or something like that. It just goes to show that buying these media companies and trying to just continue to monetize it through media isn't necessarily the play.

8:28We've talked about on the podcast here, if you're going to build the attention, if you're going to build media, have a monetization model, like an agency, for example, like what both of us are doing here and what Gary Vee is doing. Or even Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast is creating products and using the media to monetize his products. And funny enough, speaking of Mr. Beast, he got sued, right? Yeah, I mean, that's our next topic over here. So the headline here is he got sued for a hundred million bucks by the Mr. Beast burger chain that was kind of fulfilling for him. So do you know about the details of the story or no?

9:00No, I don't know the details of the story. I saw that he was getting sued though. Okay. So from what I'm hearing, I think he's trying to get out of his contract, but because he's such a big name, here, I'm going to pull up the article over here. So because he's such a big name, like if I were the kind of virtual burger kind of fulfillment company, I would be suing the crap out of him, right? So let me just share my screen over here and we can kind of go through this together. So you see this, yes? yes okay so let's go through a couple so virtual dining concepts and celebrity virtual dining vdc are suing the youtuber and his beast investments for failing to honor his contractual obligations as well as intentional tort torturous tortuitous interference damages are alleged to exceed 100 million dollars and so blah blah blah okay let's look at this over here so jimmy jimmy who's mr beast jimmy donaldson sued vdc and his parent company last month seeking to determine the deal for his restaurant chain alleging among other things that the burgers it served were disgusting revolting and inedible and damaged his reputation last week vdc fired back calling the youtubers lawsuit meritless and ill advice claiming that donaldson had breached his agreement with the virtual restaurant company and tempted and recently attempted to negotiate a deal to serve his own monetary interests and give up more of the brand to him determine his existing contractual obligations without cause.

10:23So basically, from what I heard at the event, someone else was talking about it. He behind the scenes was trying to rework, renegotiate the deal. And then when he realized that he couldn't, that he sued them. And so if that is actually true, that is negotiating in bad faith. Yep. Now, speaking of getting sued and Mr. Beast and, you know, being out there, something else has been out there. They don't really have to deal with lawsuits, but they're out there quite a bit. And they have been a ton in marketing, just like Mr. B's. And they've been capturing actually more of the headlines than he has in recent days.

10:59And that is Barbie. The movie hit over a billion dollars in box office revenue, which is kind of crazy. And they outsource a lot of their marketing as well. And Eric, do you want to cover that? Yep. So on the screen over here, so this is written by Alex Garcia. He's a great marketer. So the real genius behind Barbie success was a$150 million marketing budget. So the thing is, they pushed their licensing agreements to 100 plus brands. And I'm going to talk about what that means in a second. And I think this is pretty genius. This is why they felt everywhere. So I don't know about you, Neil, but where I live, I live close to a mall, and it was plastered everywhere, right?

11:36In Japan, you saw a big like, or Dubai, you saw big Barbie, like one of those packages, and you can see like kind of like a virtual Barbie walking out. So they collaborated with Airbnb, so you can rent Ken's Dreamhouse, Burger King, so the pink burger, Xbox, so custom hardware. And basically what happened was that they went in a different direction. And so I'm going to give an example over here. So usually, if you're like another toy company like Hasbro, for example, so they might have G.I. Joe, Dungeons and Dragons, Transformers, right? They fully control the marketing and the rights. And so they bought a production studio for$3.8 billion in 2019.

12:14Last year, they sold it for$500 million. So they lost$3.3 billion on that, right? So basically, Mattel, which owns Barbie, they crowdsourced their marketing and they maximize collaborations and they gave a lot of creative freedom to the people that they're collaborating with. And that helped really push it. And I think, Neil, do you have numbers? I think it's one of the top grossing films. I think Neil, you're trying to Google it right now, right? I am trying to Google it right now. Yeah. So I'll continue on while Neil finds it. So at the end of the day, it's creative genius from all these big companies.

12:48It's everyone combining to do something amazing to hit the numbers that they hit, because I think they blew everything out of the water because of their super strong marketing. And they kind of rebranded Mark, Barbie. I actually didn't watch the movie, but I've heard what they've done with the movies that they've kind of repositioned Barbie as a company or a brand. All right. Want to guess the worldwide number? Five billion? I don't know. No, no. One billion, $66 million. How does that compare? So for original Reese, I think for this year, yearly let's see what the yearly uh yearly number one was super mario brothers then top gun or actually it's not yeah for this year 2023 it was super mario brothers 2022 was top gun at 7 billion which is kind of crazy but if i look at just this year uh total gross release date number of theaters and i don't know why it would be seven billion dollars i don't know how they're looking at total gross versus average but i'm on i'm using box office mojo i'm funny enough to you i'm going to share my screen yeah go ahead go hit the share thing the share screen share screen and where's box office mojo there you go so you guys can see right so for 2023 it's saying top gross or total gross with super mar brothers when i click through on it and this is why i want to share my screen the total gross here shows 574 million i think that's total for the year of all movies uh got it but either way yeah you're probably right there uh so number one was super mario brothers number two was barbie barbie did exceptionally well barbie might win i mean so just stay on the screen real quick go back to it well let me see if that's true top gun yeah you're right it's just total gross for the whole year okay so okay if we look at barbie right so super Mario is 574 and then Barbie is 492, right?

14:47But it came out in July 21st. This is domestic, by the way. I'm pretty sure that this number right here is domestic. And then Mario has been out for a while. So I think Barbie might end up winning out. It might actually be the number one film for the year. Which is crazy because no one would have ever guessed that, by the way. No. No way. I mean, this is… You can see a time range, right? Super Mario Brothers has been out for a long time. April 5th. Barbie, July 21st. It's not even a month. As it's recording, yeah. It's not even a month. Yep. And so April, May, June, July, August. So it's like four and a half months for Mario, right?

15:21Let me share my screen. We can move on from here. So this is from Axios. And Barbie has earned more than$1 billion in worldwide box office sales, creating a comp score. And then it's the first film solely directed by a woman to ever cross$1 billion in global box office sales. That's great. and then 459 in North American tickets and 572 from theaters overseas and no movie in Warner Brothers history 100 year history has sold so many tickets so fast and I think a huge part of that has to go to marketing and how really a lot of people understand what what Barbie is right so anyway we'll move on from this one we'll move on to the next subject what is the next one Neil next subject is WPP one is the bit which is one of the biggest ad agencies globally has lowered their guidance.

16:07And there's an article on CMO that ends up breaking down how, or Wall Street Journal that ends up breaking down how WPP is just seeing a slowdown in marketing. But the good news is they're optimistic and so is Google and so is Facebook about the rest of the year. So that's a good sign as well. Have you read this one yet? No, but I've read similar articles on WPP's guidance They all say different things, but the overall message is terrible first half of the year. People are seeing it slowly starting to rebound and they're being a little bit more optimistic. So, okay. Previously you said, so for this year's projections, like for like revenue, less than pass through cost, less pass through cost, sorry, to grow between three and 5 % this year.

16:51Let's just call it revenue to simplify things. Okay. Now it expects that figure to sit between 1.5 and 3 % growth. growth. And so the company's like-for-like revenue, less pass-through costs grew at 2.3 % in second quarter. And the main thing here that we want to take a look at is really this last sentence over here, right? So look, you know, the tech, they lost like a chunk, like what, what is this? 18 % of tech revenue. So lower spending in that area made an outsized impact on results. And he said, one of the chief executive, Mark Reed said, in the long run, that's a source of growth talking about the tech sector, right?

17:25In the second quarter, there's no doubt that it hurt us. And so I think, look, in the long term, like things will be fine and, you know, lowering guidance, like I understand. But we, I think Neil and I, remember we're talking to Mark Moss who attended the mastermind and we were both kind of wondering because Mark is really good and really understands macroeconomics. We're like, when do you think customer sentiment is, or consumer sentiment is going to change? Do you remember what his answer was? No. I don't remember his answer either, but I think he was still a little bearish, I would say. But we don't want to make predictions here because we've already done it on this podcast.

18:04We still say 50-50. So that's that. But now, the other thing I wanted to break down that's kind of similar to this is what the venture market tells you about the markets right now. And so this comes from Tomas Tunguz. He's a venture capitalist. And he's actually, what he's doing is he's taking data from Carta. And so Carta, they have a lot of cap tables. They do cap table management for startups, which means they will help kind of organize who your investors are, how much equity they own, and all that type of stuff, right? So they released their state-of-the-market report, and Tomas said, a few data points stood out to me.

18:43So those of you that can see the screen here. So down rounds constitute 20 % of all rounds. That's up 2x from historical norms. So down rounds mean that when you raise more money, your company is valued at less. That's why it's called a down round. Bridge rounds account for 38 % of all rounds in Q2. And then 2.9 % of rounds recapitize the company. Recaps effectively delete the previous cap table and start a new one. So the main point here is that these are all signs of the harder fundraising times. But the glass half view is that 80 % of all rounds are flat or up. What are your thoughts here? Yeah, I think things were really overvalued in the first place.

19:23So I just think it's coming back down into reality and a normalization. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style.

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21:43Sales cycles in general are longer, whether it's raising money or whether it's closing a deal. If you're like a SaaS company or an agency company like ours, and this is roughly consistent with the lengthening in sales cycle software. There you go, right? Enduring with customers, perhaps there's a parallel in buyer psychology and software and venture capital. The last point I'll make over here and we can move on. So here, check this out. So last employees have exercise options at the lowest rate since the dawn of COVID at 26%, down from 46 % two years ago. And basically, the investors are now waiting for employee confidence to come back, which is looking at sentiment, right?

22:23So the greater the employee confidence in a business, the more compelled an investor could be to lead a round. Yep. So dude, right now, what do you think is going to happen with venture capital funding? And in the next 12 months, if you had a guess, I think, I think it's still, people are going to stay kind of bearish and they're going to kind of just wait. I think people are just continuing to wait and see like you and I, the reason we had that question was kind of, we're waiting and seeing right now and our customers or our prospects are waiting and seeing. And so we just kind of have to wait and see, because the thing is all the, all these rate increases, what are we at now?

23:025.25 % or something like that. All these rate increases. I don't think we've actually seen the, the effects yet. We don't, we haven't seen kind of the lagging effects of it yet. And so again, neither Neil and I are economists here, but we're, this is just our best guest. So I don't know. I'm curious. What do you think? Dude, I think you're going to, once rates start going down, you're going to start seeing things become more aggressive. But until then, I think you're going to start seeing, you're going to see the market being cautious and slow. You know, we had George Gammon speak at the event and George Gammon has a YouTube channel with like 500k subs and another one with like 150k.

23:41And he mainly focuses on talking about macroeconomics. And still his base case is stagflation, which means the economy stagnating with a case of inflation in there. And what he was kind of saying is like, look, anytime the yield curve has inverted, and so we don't want to get too much of macro here, but when the yield curve has inverted, meaning that the, I believe it's short-term rates, you get a better return to long-term rates, there always is a recession afterwards, right? Besides one case. I don't know, there's always exceptions to the rule, but his case is still that. And I think it's still the same thing with, with Mark Moss as well.

24:18So I'm cautiously optimistic. That's what I'll say. I don't know about you, Neil. Yep. No, totally. Dude, I'm optimistic as well. And, but time will tell, but neither you and I, like you said, are economists, nor do we know what's going to really happen. Yep. So the last thing we want to talk about here is Neil, I don't know if I, I don't think I sent you this, this episode, but, um, Gail, Gail, I think, I think Breton maybe from authority hackers. He did a really good podcast with an ex SEO strategist at Forbes. And they actually do a lot of interesting stuff. Do you know about this? Do you know what they do with their SEO, Neil?

24:52I don't. Okay. So they actually spend more time on updating content versus new content creation. And they mainly focus on VIP pages that drive a lot of revenue. So an example of this might be best home warranty, right? And so they focus, they have entire teams that just focus on these money pages and not as much on new content creation because they just have so much authority, right? And there's a lot of internal linking going on. They don't mind about the anchor text. They're pretty aggressive with internal linking anchor text. And they use a tool called the versionista to monitor competitor changes.

25:27And so for example, let's say Neil ranked number one for the keyword marketing agency, right? And I wanted to rank number one for that keyword. Well, then I might just use versionista and monitor Neil's pages and see how it's affecting his, see what changes he's making and maybe I can cross reference that with how he's ranking on that page as well over time right um so those are just a couple things I thought was really interesting definitely go check out that podcast and yeah I I don't know I'm just fasting now like maybe we should just hire people from Forbes so dude Forbes has done really well but they also have a really strong brand which does help their SEO and people take that for granted if you have a lot of brand queries brand queries being that when someone does a google search they may search your brand name if you look at a lot of the most popular search queries on the web they're like gmail youtube amazon facebook these are all brand names and the more brand queries that you get we've seen a direct correlation with higher rankings as well dude neil do you remember um e-how or e-zine articles e-zine articles back in the day yes yeah and like that is an example more but yes I mean, they just rank for everything, right?

26:33They were like authority sites back then, but they just had really thin content. This is like, that is known as kind of like a gray hat-ish thing, right? But this is like a gray hat-ish thing done in a white hat way. Forbes is a really good example. Yep. Wait, wait, wait. Let me show you. I forgot to pull this up over here. So this is Forbes. Like you can see in the month of July, they published 1 ,900 new pages and they republished 613. in june they published new pages 2400 and they republished 1000 it's a lot it's a lot updating your content does really well that's yeah it does so well you know i actually looked at yours too let's look at yours so like here publish once 97 republish 156 your ratio is higher so for my ratio for what?

27:26I can't read. So new page. Okay. So in June of 2023, it republishes higher than you. Correct. Yeah. That sounds right. So, so anyway, is that, is that the list for this week? That is a list for this week. Oh wait, there's one more thing. One more thing before we get out of here. So our friend, our mutual friend, Syed actually showed me this. I'm going to check this out. Have you heard of this one? I'm just going to show one of these tools over here. Actually, I'll show two because we're, we're nice. So have you heard of Rask.ai. I have from your event. Oh, that's right. All right. So we can thank Syed for that.