MSNBC Dumps the Peacock Logo & Job Certs Don’t Actually Pay Off

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0:35Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, MSNBC was teased mercilessly after announcing a new name. Then a private membership club Soho House is ditching the public markets. It's Tuesday, August 19th. Let's ride.

0:55Good morning and happy Tuesday. Is it possible that Disney adults are even more powerful than we thought? Disney expert AJ Wolf has just released the definitive book on Disney adults and shared a truly shocking stat on a recent podcast episode. After conducting meticulous surveys at Disney theme parks last year, her team found that 42 % of people in line to meet Buzz Lightyear were adults without kids. 42 %! Lines for other characters didn't quite reach that mark, but at a minimum, 24 % were adults without kids. Overall, she said her team saw more adults without children in the park than adults with children.

1:33Toby, which Disney character would you wait in line for? Well, this is not a hypothetical. I am from Florida, so I went to Disney a lot growing up, and I have pictures with Goofy, Mickey, Chip and Dale. The chipmunks were my favorite, though. But I come to this stat not with judgment but with understanding because there are Disney adults everywhere for those with eyes to see. adults are the new thing in the toy industry, buying plushies, blue boos, and Legos. Adults and teens make up over a quarter of toy sales these days, so I'm not surprised to see adults descending on Disney. It's also not their fault that they were raised during the golden era of Disney.

2:09I mean, going from Little Mermaid in 1989 to Tarzan in 1999, of course they developed an emotional attachment to some of those characters. And then finally, other consumer companies would kill for this level of fandom. So that spans decades. So all this to say, I'm not a Disney adult, but I can see how you would be and I shan't judge you for it. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Neil, you've hired a lot of people in your time here at Morning Brew. Including yourself. Yes. Fantastic decision, I should add. But what is something you look for when putting out a job opening? Well, on my end, variety is the spice of life.

2:45I want to see as many different qualified people as possible, so I know I'm making the best decision. And that's why LinkedIn is a lifesaver. So many great candidates sitting there to peruse. It's that same variety that makes it such a great marketing platform too. It's got over 10 million C-suite execs and over 130 million decision makers, aka the people you need for your business on their platform. And you can target by job, title, industry, company, and more. Most importantly, LinkedIn ads can help you stop wasting money, time, and resources on mis-targeting something that 71 % of B2B ads suffer from.

3:18Just like it can link you with the right candidate for a job opening, it can link you with the right audience for your brand. So check out LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you a$100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. HBO execs are breathing a sigh of relief because for the first time in months, there's a new media rebrand for everyone to make fun of. Yesterday, MSNBC said it will be changing its name to MSNOW, which stands for My Source News Opinion World.

3:54The reason is that NBCUniversal is spinning off most of its cable networks, including MSNBC, sorry, MSNOW, and wants to avoid confusion between MSNBC and NBC News. As part of the rebrand, MSNBC will also drop the iconic Peacock logo that appears on many NBC properties. The change is sure to ruffle some feathers, Peacocks included. The CEO of the company that will oversee MS Now, Mark Lazarus, assured employees back in January that the MSNBC name would not change as part of the spinoff. Now he's backtracking, saying the rebrand, quote, gives us the opportunity to chart our own path forward, create distinct brand identities, and establish an independent news organization.

4:33Lazarus said that despite the new name, the brand's commitment to its audience will not change. Reading between the lines, expect more of the left-leaning commentary MSNBC has been associated with since it came onto the scene in 1996. Looking ahead, as MSNBC morphs into MSNOW and leaves its parent company, it'll have to build up much of the news infrastructure that it had previously relied on NBC News for. The network has been hiring for 100 new positions to stand up its own newsroom independent of NBC News. Neil, everyone did not like this. It was roasted up and down the internet. A PR expert I follow, Lulu Cheng, in the survey, hated it.

5:10Her take was that it seems like a wasted opportunity because it forfeits brand equity that you had without replacing it with anything better. And then also she just said, it's so generic. MSNOW could be an app, a charity, or a cloud storage product. Initially, I thought it was a rebrand for MS1 Drive. So from the naming perspective alone, A lot of people were kind of taking it out behind the woodshed. And then design people hated it as well. I know this is a podcast, but I encourage you to look up the logo. I was going through the design subreddit and someone in the discussion wrote, I wouldn't trust a news source with this aesthetic.

5:46You can tell how little they care about the company by their lack of personality and originality in the design. Too cheap for an artist means they'll skimp on the content too. So these decisions reverberate through the entire news organization you're trying to build. When you kind of roll out a design that feels half-hearted, that feels half-baked, then a lot of people are – that leads to a lack of trust in the news that you're trying to convey. So just fascinating to see how everyone immediately jumped on this and said this was not a good redesign. Well, how did we get here? Back in November, Comcast said it would spin off a bunch of NBC Universal cable channels in a$7 billion deal.

6:26It's getting rid of MSNBC, MSNOW, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E, and more. That is going to be combined into a new company called Versand. It's going to keep NBC, Bravo, and Peacock streaming service under the NBC Universal banner. The idea is to shed those cable networks that are hemorrhaging money so that Comcast can hopefully achieve a higher valuation on the public markets as investors. You know, look to its streaming platforms for growth rather than those albatrosses like the cable networks like MSNBC. So that MSNBC and CNBC, all those other cable networks are now under a new company. I don't know if they had a choice but to rebrand.

7:06Perhaps they could have done it a lot better than they did. But the NBCUniversal guys were like, we're keeping the peacock. We're keeping the NBC stuff. You guys have to change your name because there's been a lot of confusion. Now that you're a separate company, we can't have you stealing our brand anymore. Yeah, I totally understand why they did it. And NBC keeping the iconic peacock symbol was a smart decision because that is what you associate with the brand writ large. So of course the spun out channels were going to have to fend for themselves. But again, why would you back yourself into another acronym that you don't need to?

7:40Like MS initially comes from Microsoft, but MSNBC hasn't been associated with Microsoft since 2012. Why keep that? If you're going to do a rebrand, go the entire way. And this faux acronym, it doesn't make any sense. My source for news opinion in the world, like you didn't need to have an acronym. Just a fun fact from NBC lore as well. NBC has always loved a half-baked acronym because CNBC, which is their financial news channel, technically stands for Consumer News and Business Channel. But in reality, it actually stood for this joint partner venture between Cablevision and NBC. So they just, again, made another half-baked acronym.

8:20And now they're doing it once more with MSNOW. So you can take the acronym out of NBCUniversal, but you can't take the acronym out of Versand. Good news for Jim Cramer fans. If you like CNBC, it's not going to have to change its name like MSNBC. They think there's a distinct enough newsroom operations process going on between CNBC and NBC News that they're allowing CNBC to take their name. But yeah, MSNBC is going to have to hire a ton of journalists now because they relied so much on NBC News for various reporting and infrastructure and things like that. So now it is in the wild being left to its own under a new name.

8:57Soho House is a private membership club that just got even more private. After a turbulent four-year run in the public markets, it's going off-market in a$2.7 billion deal led by a New York hotel chain and an investor group including Ashton Kutcher. Soho House is actually based in London, not the New York City neighborhood, and helped popularize the new era of exclusive clubs where people spend thousands of dollars a year to eat, drink, and rub elbows with people from similar financial standings. But it struggled with life as a public company, losing money for the majority of its existence. Its stock peaked at around$15 a share after its IPO, but has since lost about 50 % of its value.

9:37Part of the issue is the inherent tension between Soho House's core offering and life as a public company. Shareholders demand growth, which means you have to open up new clubs, which inevitably dilutes the brand. It now has 48 locations worldwide, up from 33 in 2021, with more than 270 ,000 members as of June 30th. Neil, this new deal sees one of the largest hotel operators in the U.S., MCR Hotels, pay$9 a share for Soho House, an 18 % premium over where the stock closed on Friday. Can it stage a turnaround now that it's away from the scrutiny of life as a public company? You think so, because when you're not a public company, you don't have to report quarterly earnings.

10:19And Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway has been on this crusade for decades, saying that when you have to report quarterly earnings to investors, it creates a lot of noise within your financials. Sometimes you have good quarters, sometimes you have bad quarters. And when you're trying to turn around a company like we're seeing Starbucks do or a couple of the Boeing, a couple of these other public companies, you report some really bad earnings as you try to do some maneuvering to, you know, improve the financial health of your company. It's kind of what Soho House is doing right now. and if you do it under the guise of the private markets, it's a lot easier to do than having to stand up there on a conference call with analysts each quarter and say, yeah, our turnaround is going okay, but we're also hemorrhaging money at the moment as we're implementing our strategy.

11:05So implementing a turnaround is a much easier thing to do when you're a private company and it seems that's what Soho House is trying to do. It just never quite was a great fit for the public markets because again, you are an exclusive membership club. Your entire alert is the exclusivity but when you are a public company, you have to grow. So it grew to 48 clubs around the world. It also expanded to some cities that some people were maybe scratching their heads at a little bit. I mean, no offense to Nashville, but it's not necessarily the place that you think a Soho club would necessarily operate.

11:37It went to Ibiza, Sao Paulo, Mexico City. These are big global cities, but Soho House's vibe was London, New York for a long time. So the fact that memberships now swell to over 270 ,000, do you really feel that exclusive if you're one of 270 ,000? At the time of its IPO, it was still 119 ,000. So this is a very popular brand, and they almost suffered from their own success in a certain sense. So that is why maybe it is a much better fit for the private. Yeah, I was reminded of the Yogi Bear quote. He was asked about a popular restaurant. He said, nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. but Toby, I would not try to enter Nashville anytime soon.

12:18I know, sorry, sorry. All right, moving on. This has probably happened to you at some point. You're browsing the internet looking for possible certifications or credentials that could give your career a boost. You find one that looks interesting, maybe from LinkedIn or Coursera or a university, but you think to yourself, is this worth it? And the answer is probably not. A study out this summer investigated more than 23 ,000 credentials being offered and found that the vast majority of them don't help recipients advance their careers or secure a notable raise. The research conducted by the Burning Glass Institute and the American Enterprise Institute discovered that just one in eight non-degree credentials delivered a non-trivial pay gain within a year of completion.

12:58The Wall Street Journal used the example of the Project Management Graduate Certificate from Harvard Extension School. This certification costs nearly$14 ,000 and takes an average of a year and a half to finish online. But people who paid all that money and spent all that time generally did not get a pay bump compared to similar workers who didn't take the course. And the difference in career advancement between the certificate holders and the non-holders was a measly 3.7 percentage points. The certification industry has ballooned in recent years to the point where there are now more than 1 million credentials being offered across the country, a number that tripled from 2018 to 2022.

13:35But do your research before signing up for one. Yeah, I can see why people do this. Why do you get a certificate in general? You want to get more money, you want to get promoted, or you want to learn a new skill so you can change jobs. So I'm sure a lot of you listening at home have taken or have seen some sort of credentialed or non-degree credential floating around on the internet. But it is the study likened it to when you buy a car from Mercedes, you know what you're going to get for the most part. It's going to have a consistent level of quality. When you go online to buy a course, you have no idea if it's actually going to lead to those outcomes that you want.

14:09So there are some good ones that they called out, but the problem is that there are so many different options. I mean, it's just it exploded as an industry recently. So when you have quality varying as widely as it is, even within industries, you might think that, hey, if I want to do a data science course, most data science courses probably are going to teach you similar things and lead to similar outcomes. Not the case at all. The top 10 % of data science credentials actually did grant graduates an average income boost of$5 ,500 a year. But the bottom 10 % saw no new earnings income at all. So even within provider, even within the actual industry that you are operating in, there is a wide swath of quality.

14:53Yeah, it does seem like there is a pretty good, you know, top of the order here, but a very bad and long bottom of the order for credentials. Workers who received one of the top 2000 performing credentials earned about$5 ,000 extra a year compared to their similar workers who did not take these credentials. So the people who did this survey, the Burning Glass Institute, American Enterprise Institute, actually created an online portal where they graded different credentials. And they called it something like a nutrition facts label for particular certification courses. So if you want to search that, go online.

15:34And before you do that, you can maybe see what the outcomes were for the various credentials before you take a dive in. I thought with the top of the order thing, you had another Yogi Berra quote for me there. No Yogi Berra quote for this one? There probably is one. I don't know it off the top of my head. All right, let's take a quick break. And up next, we have Toby's Trends. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. I'm a person who really appreciates simplicity. And when it comes to credit card rewards, the simpler, the better. That's one of the many reasons I have an Apple Card. The rewards are super straightforward.

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17:18That's sbscommerce.com slash morningbrew. Welcome back to another edition of Toby's Trends, the segment where I take a deep dive into the business world to emerge with a trend you can use to impress your ex should you happen to run into them at the farmer's market. And today's trend is that brands are creating social media first sitcom shows. Roomies is a scripted series told in short two minute vignettes that follows a young transplant who moves from Ohio to New York City. It's got the production quality of a TV show, but the length and vibe of a TikTok. And it's been resonating. The Roomies account has racked up over 7 million views and over 140 ,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok with the comments loving every minute of it.

18:02Okay, wait, is this like a TV show but on TikTok, remarks one? I cannot believe these are free episodes because of the production reads another. But outside the Hollywood vibe of the show lies an even more surprising secret. It's produced by the financial startup Built. Built lets you pay your rent with a credit card that grants you rewards at local businesses. But the only way you'd know they were behind the production quality TV show you're watching on TikTok is a brief mention in the Roomies account bio. Eventually, Bilt does plan to loop in some of their corporate sponsors into the characters' lives, but for now, they're content with staying in the background.

18:38It's extremely intentional, Bilt's senior director of content, Cyrus Ferguson, told Rachel Carton in her Lincoln Bio newsletter. We don't want branding to get in the way of storytelling. It's about earning attention and curiosity rather than demanding it. Neil, watching a TikTok that's actually a TV show, that's actually an ad, a lot of layers to this. It's Toby Transception. My thought when I heard about this was, okay, good for you that you created a TV show, like very impressive. But are you actually getting anything from it, especially if you don't have any of the built branding associated with it?

19:10That's probably why it's popular because people don't know that a credit card company is behind it. But are you actually acquiring new users from this? I understand that this is a very top of funnel marketing campaign where you're just creating awareness and you're generating eyeballs until you can eventually sell them something. But I wonder ultimately if the ROI is there for that other brands might want to copy. And then we talked about Toby Transception. Another trend that is mind-blowing to me is that people watch TV shows on TikTok. Yes. Have you not seen this coming across your algorithm?

19:42No, I don't watch TV on TikTok. It actually is a very interesting way of just playing into how the algorithm works. Because if you like the first episode, your algorithm will take note and then serve you the second episode. by then you're kind of invested in the plot and you might one get served subsequent episodes but you might actually go and seek it out at that point so a lot of the comments are like oh this episode took so long to drop and i'm saying episode with quotes around it because they literally are two minutes it's a very you know almost documentary style way of filming but it is fascinating that bill was like hey we could obviously put paid ad spend behind something like this and force it in front of people or we could just let the algorithm do its thing if we made a good product, then they will get served the subsequent episode.

20:23So fascinating use case of just letting the algorithm do its thing to serve up TV show. But also brands have been embracing this sort of social content for a long time now. I mean, if you go back to Walmart and P &G, Procter & Gamble back in 2010, they created a movie called Secrets of the Mountain that was broadcasted on NBC. They tried to highlight some of the values that they thought were important to their company's generosity, honesty, togetherness, but then they also ran ads for both companies during commercial break. So this is not the first time that a brand has said, hey, what if we just created content and then just slipped in like a Trojan horse of an ad?

21:02This has been happening for literally decades at this point. Now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Up first, Air Canada flight attendants agreed to end their strike that led to thousands of canceled flights this weekend. They reached a tentative agreement this morning with the airline after a marathon nine-hour negotiating session after the union defied a government work order to return to work. Details are still emerging on this. This is literally breaking news, so we will keep you all updated as we learn more. Yeah, there were two demands that the union had wanted from Air Canada.

21:34One was broader wage increases. They had been offered 38 % increase over four years. They said that wasn't enough, so we'll see what that number actually amounted to. And the other was they wanted to get paid while the airplane was on the ground and they were still doing work known as boarding pay. There's been a big push across the industry for flight attendants to get paid for the time when passengers are boarding and deplaning. So for anyone who's been stranded in a remote Canadian province or who wants to go to one for vacation or could go anywhere else in the world on Air Canada, you know, this is great news.

22:09Ozempic is about to get a whole lot cheaper for some Americans. Novo Nordis said it's slashing the price of its diabetes shot for cash paying patients to$499 a month, about half of the list price in the U.S. The price cut comes after the company faces intense political pressure to lower costs for Ozempic and its weight loss cousin, Wegovi. At the same time, the move is intended to make Ozempic more competitive with all the knockoffs that have sprung up when the drug was in a shortage. To be sure, Ozempic is covered by most insurance plans to treat diabetes, unlike Wiggovi. Still, execs said the price cut would make it more accessible to those who don't have coverage or were using less regulated copycats.

22:47Novo's head of U.S. operations, Dave Moore, said in a statement, we believe that if even a single patient feels the need to turn to potentially unsafe and unapproved knockoff alternatives, that's one too many. It's fascinating to see Ozempic cutting prices while one of its main rivals, Eli Lilly, is doing the opposite. Eli Lilly just hiked the price of its own GLP-1 medication by 170 % in the UK. That has come as President Trump has putting pressure on U.S. pharma companies to lower U.S. prices and jack them up in Europe. So you are seeing Ozempic doing the opposite while Eli Lilly is raising prices.

23:22And then potentially the real winner that almost slipped under the radar is this telemedicine platform, GoodRx. Its stock jumped almost 40 % on the news because Novo Nordisk is offering this discounted Ozempic on their platform. So one loser, again, is hims and hers who used to have this partnership with Novo Nordisk to do a distribution deal with them. That was short-lived. It kind of imploded back in June. And now it's seeing almost what it missed out on, seeing GoodRx's stock jump like it did. In the courtyard of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stands a sculpture that contains a secret no one has discovered in the 35 years it's been there.

24:03This fall, the artwork's mystery will finally be revealed to the highest bidder. In November, the artist Jim Sanborn will auction off the coded message contained within Cryptos, a sculpture he made for the CIA in 1990. The sculpture has four copper panels engraved with letters, which guard a secret message that the best cryptographers in the world have not been able to solve despite their best efforts. Well, of the four panels, three have been decoded, but the fourth, known as K4, has not been cracked, and it's that hidden message that Sanborn is going to sell in a few months. When asked why he's putting it to auction, Sanborn said he's simply tired of responding to the tens of thousands of emails he gets from people who think they've solved the puzzle.