[00:00:00] Phillip: It's event season. You can't escape. It's a vortex, constantly being sucked in at the intersection of commerce and events and culture.

[00:00:12] Brian: Events are culture.

[00:00:14] Phillip: It's so true. Like, I feel you could do an entire podcast just on event hopping.

[00:00:21] Brian: Oh, I have a whole... I mean, I don't wanna give it away, but I've got a whole thing on conferences that I wanna run someday. You know? Maybe I should just give it away. I'm gonna write a sitcom. I'm gonna write a sitcom about conferences and expos, and it's gonna be the best sitcom ever. It's so good.

[00:00:40] Phillip: I'm so proud of you for not just vague posting about it because of the... what is it? The Gary Vee maxim. He says you could just tell everyone 99.9% of all your secrets. Or you could tell everyone all your secrets because 99.9% of people are too lazy to ever even try to rip them off.

[00:00:59] Brian: That's true. I mean, or too busy. I think between being too busy and being too lazy, I doubt anyone's gonna take me up on writing this. I believe I have comedy gold, and I have been to enough of these expos and conferences to write something that is, like, generationally relevant and funny.

[00:01:20] Phillip: It's The Office, but for trade show events. I mean, who wouldn't want to watch that and experience that trauma over and over again?

[00:01:29] Brian: I mean, people watch Superstore. They watched... that's, I mean, a paper office. A paper office.

[00:01:36] Phillip: Oh, I guarantee that's not getting renewed for a second season. Grocery shopping is a universal experience.

[00:01:43] Brian: It... no. Well, Superstore was about Best Buy. But yeah.

[00:01:46] Phillip: Oh, is that what it was?

[00:01:48] Brian: I don't know. Yeah. A dying big box industry.

[00:01:53] Phillip: It's so successful that I watched it and I knew everything about it.

[00:01:56] Brian: I knew a lot of people that love Superstore, and besides, actually, more people have been to conferences and expos than you realize. Every industry has them. That's part of the fun with this. They're in all kinds of cities and places. You bump into all kinds of friends and weirdos along the way. You eat and drink the things that you both love and hate. I mean, there's actually a lot more universality. Universe... universal... what would it be?

[00:02:29] Phillip: Yeah. Universality.

[00:02:30] Brian: Yes. Let's go...

[00:02:31] Phillip: With that.

[00:02:32] Brian: Yes. Okay. There's a lot of people that go to conferences.

[00:02:36] Phillip: If people have stuck around now for two minutes while we complain about things, we are gonna talk about, I think, a really interesting event. I hallway tracked it last year, but actually, we attended it this year as a media partner. We're gonna talk about POSSIBLE today.

[00:02:52] Brian: Yes.

[00:02:52] Phillip: We're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about the art of possibilities at POSSIBLE. POSSIBLE is a marketing conference. I wouldn't say it's new. It's been around for a few years now, but it's gained so much traction. And I would say it's my big take... I'll give you my big take pretty soon here, but it's trying to give... it's trying to be Ad Week. It's trying to be Advertising Week. But I mean...

[00:03:22] Brian: "Trying to be" is probably the wrong way to put it.

[00:03:26] Phillip: Yeah. I think it's trying to grow to that scale, but they're doing it in Miami Beach, and I find that to be very convenient for me, for where I live. So...

[00:03:38] Brian: It's so funny. I told family members that I was going to POSSIBLE, and they were like, it's funny... what about probable or unlikely? But it was probably a great show, I would say.

[00:03:58] Phillip: That's funny. So, two things really quick. It happens at the end of April, and it happens in Miami Beach. And so you get a little bit of the beach side of Cannes because, like, they take out the beach, and they activate on the beach. Right? You can do meetups on the beach, and then they have beach-adjacent houses and content. It's just like you would see at Cannes where you could go to the TikTok or the Snap activation. Meta has a thing going on. You've got all the poolside stuff, and then you can go out to the beach, and you can see what's going on.

[00:04:41] Brian: It's expansive.

[00:04:42] Phillip: Kick your shoes off. And it's between the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc. It is quite expansive. And in the same way that you might go to, say, like, an Advertising Week, which we covered last year as media partner... we were there walking around. The amount of sessions that are spread across the expansive venue and various tracks, they're very... it's very diverse. Programming is very diverse. And if you are in marketing, you can guess what the kind of content is going to be. Although I think that they are aiming much more in this sort of... it's a Hyve-owned event. It's very much aimed in that very celebrity-centric, CEO, CMO-on-the-stage-centric. They spent, obviously, a good deal of money to attract a lot of top tier talent and top tier executives to come out. And so today, we have producer Sarah. Sarah, Sarah Willett, welcome.

[00:05:45] Sarah: Hello. Thank you. Thank you. I am always here. I am just not always...

[00:05:50] Phillip: That's true. You're here...

[00:05:52] Brian: But you're not always here.

[00:05:53] Sarah: So nice to be here.

[00:05:54] Phillip: And you were at the show. We'll have you talk a little bit about your experience, you know, covering the show. And we're gonna, I guess, relay what all three of our experiences were before we get there. We're gonna be in a little bit of the wind down on some summer events. There's a couple things in the hopper. We're gonna be at THE LEAD. So if you're at the LEAD Summit on the twentieth and twenty first of May, go check out futurecommerce.com/events. We have lots of ways for you to get involved. We have a couple invite... application-based, I should say, application-based salon dinners that we're going to be putting on during THE LEAD. We would love to see you at THE LEAD. We're gonna be hosting a couple of panel talks during THE LEAD and activating in various ways and around. So it's all gonna be available. Best place to find that is at futurecommerce.com/events. Brands, retailers, Future Commerce Plus subscribers are all first priority when we're putting on our salons, and so we'd love to have you go join up and apply to join the salons. futurecommerce.com/events.

[00:07:08] Phillip: And if you are a member of Future Commerce Plus, we just dropped our newest member brief. It was a very long-form insiders deep dive on the policy briefing of the halo effect of the new economy, centered around a policy conference that happened a couple weeks ago that Semafor put on, and we unpack that in long form. I feel like we did a little bit of coverage on the podcast here just a couple weeks ago. But that kind of content is available to you as well as first priority at things like our salon dinners and so much more. All of that, all of your benefits can be found over at futurecommerce.com/plus. Go find out what those benefits are because we'd love for you to take advantage of those. And then lastly, we'll talk a little bit more about our book and some other things coming up, and we did activate our book at POSSIBLE. We had our own book event at POSSIBLE, and so we'll talk a little bit about that. But, Brian, you have not been down to POSSIBLE before.

[00:08:16] Brian: Yeah. It was buzzing. It was buzzing.

[00:08:18] Phillip: Start with the general, like, your general take. You'd not been to Advertising Week. You'd not been to POSSIBLE before. Give me a little bit of the sense of the differences. Draw some contrast between this and, say, a retailer-centric event, like a retail expo or retail trade show event.

[00:08:36] Brian: Yeah. I mean, it feels like a lot of the retail trade shows are a lot more old school, which is funny because, you know, they've been updated quite a bit over the... they were even more old school, say, ten years ago. It was really old school. And so what I think is clear is, like, I can see why Hyve acquired this. It was absolutely an experience in terms of the activations and just the way that it was laid out. I feel like the traditional, like, booth expo thing is deemphasized. It's there, but it's just done in such a more, like, organic way, and activations were more important than, like, a traditional booth. And so I think that, you know, there's still sessions and content and typical things, but it just felt like the way that sponsors were integrated felt a little bit more seamless rather than sort of like thrown out into the corner of a Vegas-style convention center hall or like the Javits. And so I think in that way, it felt really fun. It felt more fun. It's definitely more for a show. Let me tell you, that show was loud. Everywhere you went, it was just very, very noisy. It was literally buzzing. And, you know, some of it had to do with acoustics, some of it had to do with the fact that there were a lot of people there talking about a lot of things and getting around. There were helicopters flying by the beach with billboards on them. Like, the noise levels... it just gave it a... it felt like the show was a little bit alive. And, I mean, it was clear. I don't think I've ever waited so long for a car to come from the valet before in my life.

[00:10:40] Phillip: That's the thing that you're gonna spend time talking about.

[00:10:43] Brian: No. I'm just saying it was busy. It was busy. And this also compounded with the fact that it was also F1 that week, and, like, you know, it just felt like Miami was on fire. Everyone was doing everything all the time. Maybe that's just how Miami feels all the time though. I mean, I'm not in Miami a lot, but, man, it just felt like the city was buzzing.

[00:11:11] Phillip: It's so true.

[00:11:14] Brian: So, yeah, I'd say overall impressions are I like the format. I like more integrated experiences. I like feeling like this show is alive and that people are having fun. You know, I think there's still, like, some sense from vendors that, like, there's a lot of vendors there, versus...

[00:11:36] Phillip: Yeah. I mean, it's an advertising and marketing conference. I feel like that's...

[00:11:41] Brian: Yeah.

[00:11:41] Phillip: Right? You know what it's not like? It is not like ShopTalk where you have an expo that is hundreds and hundreds of...

[00:11:49] Brian: Right.

[00:11:50] Phillip: Vendors in a gigantic...

[00:11:52] Brian: Convention center. Area. Yeah.

[00:11:54] Phillip: You do not have that. Right? It is spread out in a way where you have maybe the Walmart sort of recharge lounge, and you might have, like, the Viral Nation social beach. And to your point about, like, the activations are very much activations. You stop by and grab a coconut drink.

[00:12:15] Brian: A coconut or a juice or a cocktail. Plenty of alcohol flowing.

[00:12:20] Phillip: Oh, for sure. And I saw a brand... I'm trying to pull up my pictures now. There were other activations like, what are those, the jewelry that you get welded on, sort of a thing.

[00:12:35] Brian: Yep. Like... Karen...

[00:12:36] Phillip: Sarah, did...

[00:12:36] Brian: You get... was it? Yeah.

[00:12:37] Phillip: Did you get those...

[00:12:37] Phillip: ...those? No, one of those pieces of jewelry?

[00:12:39] Sarah: The permanent jewelry? No. I'm scared. I wanna do permanent jewelry. I never wear jewelry.

[00:12:44] Phillip: You don't like to commit. Oh, yeah. I forgot that you have a thing about the jewelry. It was an interesting... you know, there's multiple places for you to go to experience all the vendors, and it does require you to do a lot of exploration, which I feel like is such a breath of fresh air as opposed to being inside of a room in Vegas that's being pumped full of oxygen, which I know you've talked about sort of endlessly.

[00:13:13] Brian: Did you say exploration?

[00:13:16] Phillip: Wow. Wow. But if you were to go out to, like, down by poolside and you were to explore, you have, like, Pinterest, or Cadent, Acxiom, or Nielsen, and they all have their, like, little pop ups. Right? And Contentful's giving away, like, crazy swag. There's people walking around with... you know, I saw one vendor giving away, like, the giant vacation sunscreen to everybody, and then people are turning around. They're, like, gonna use it right there, right by the pool. And, you know, you've got just the level of activation because of the nature of the location and its applicability to, hey, you can probably spin this into a little bit of a vacation for yourself. It seems to be in stark contrast to, say, an ecommerce or retail industry trade event. And in that way, it's very exciting to be looking at the adjacencies. I know we talk about the adjacencies a lot internally at Future Commerce. We probably don't talk about it enough in the media context, like in the content we create, but it takes a plurality of disciplines to make commerce work. And I think those are better represented at a show like this because you have advertising, brand, design, marketing, and those are all being activated together. And so many different solutions for them. To your point, Brian, I was at a Novartis session, and it was Gail Horwood, who's the CMO of Novartis. And she was talking about the integration of AI in the pharmaceutical industry, and you have to... they're doing all the traditional marketing things.

[00:15:16] Phillip: I mean, they have a partnership with the NFL, and you've got a bit of a line to walk. You know, Novartis doesn't have an over-the-counter consumer product division anymore, so that's highly regulated pharma business. Right? But they are doing quite a bit with marketing with AI, for instance. But where does this conversation happen? It's happening in one of the vendor halls, in the round, with couches and sort of lounges all around a circular stage. And all of the vendor booths around them are all dark because there's a spotlight on them in the middle. And during the sessions, there's no transactional content going on. Like, nobody is going to the vendors to speak to them. They're all clued into the content that's happening on stage. And I was just thinking to myself about how that would never happen at a... in sort of an expo type situation where it would happen naturally because people would be in sessions. They wouldn't be in the vendor hall. But the vendor hall and the sessions are one and the same here. And I felt like that was just such a really interesting way to incorporate the commerce of the business and the content. Colocating it together. And that could be a space constraint, but I felt like it was really interesting and refreshing. I've seen plenty...

[00:16:50] Brian: Of people...

[00:16:52] Phillip: Do content in the vendor hall. Don't get me wrong. Right? But the level of the content... it usually comes off as an afterthought. This was well produced, highly engaging, and I felt like it lends more people to happen upon it and engage in that content. Yeah. So that's a pretty novel format.

[00:17:17] Brian: Agree. Agree. I feel like the format, it got me excited. To your point about constraints, like, sometimes constraints breed creativity, and, like, they force things that maybe it would be easy to split apart without the constraint together, and that actually can be good. And you look at, you know, different ways of integrating things. They did add an additional hotel this year, which I think was great. The conference was large enough to have both of them. No problem. In fact, I feel like it was bursting the seams. I don't know if they're gonna be able to run that same setup next year because it felt busy.

[00:18:05] Phillip: So, Sarah, you got a good deal of content. I'd love to dive into some of that. What was impactful for you? What was something that stood out for you, and was there, you know, maybe a storyline? Maybe we could tease out a storyline. But what's something that just off the top of your head was one of the more impactful sessions?

[00:18:25] Sarah: Yeah. I mean, first, I'll say what you were saying earlier about just the, like, expansiveness of the conference. I think the first thing that took me by surprise was just the range of sessions. You know, POSSIBLE is a marketing conference, but I think my biggest takeaway is that everything is marketing because they were talking about everything. I think that was really cool to see as a first time POSSIBLE goer. Like, just the scope and the scale of the event was so impressive to me. Yeah. I attended a few really interesting sessions. I think my favorite session was led by four members of EMARKETER. This was called No Safe Channels: The Strategic Reset of the Digital Shopping Journey. And, of course, this is very Future Commerce, so we were especially interested in this panel. They kinda opened with some forecasting about just the digital ad market in the US. They noted that the ad market's expected to reach over 400,000,000,000 this year, with retail media, social, and search sectors dominating. They got into a lot of really interesting data. Their slide deck was just so full of really eye-opening pieces of data. They anticipate that AI will cannibalize other media, but noted that right now, the average amount of time spent per user in an AI platform daily is only around twenty three minutes a day. So to me, that doesn't feel like we're quite at risk for AI to totally cannibalize other media. And then, of course, they got into, like, you know, how are we optimizing for AI being used as a primary search platform? The big takeaway there was it's optimized for expediting purchase very naturally, so AI is flattening that funnel. Big buzzword during the session was compression. Compression of the customer journey was said probably 10 times.

[00:20:28] Phillip: I feel like that's gonna be the big takeaway and probably a big thematic. We heard collapse of the funnel for many years, that the funnel collapsed and people purchase, right, in the... there's the inspiration and then the transaction are within mere moments of each other. So the final collapse... now we see compression.

[00:20:52] Sarah: Mhmm.

[00:20:53] Brian: The question is, isn't it middle out?

[00:20:56] Phillip: That's funny, Brian. That's for free for people who get the reference. I find it interesting. You know, EMARKETER definitely relies on its own insights and research. What were some of the data points, or did you snap any pictures? What was anything that stood out to you that they were touting?

[00:21:23] Sarah: Yeah. I think one of the more impactful slides kind of highlighted how AI has reset the volume of creative assets needed to break through in social media campaigns. You know, I don't recall, like, the time difference here, but pre-AI integration on Pinterest, for example, it was recommended to drop two pieces of content to break through on the feed. Now it's recommended to drop 10 pieces of content on Pinterest if you want that content to break through on someone's feed. Similarly, for Meta, pre-Andromeda, the recommended number of content pieces for a campaign to break through was about three. Now it's about 50 pieces of content needed to, yeah, ensure some amount of reach and engagement.

[00:22:12] Phillip: Is that why we're not breaking through? I feel like we just dropped three...

[00:22:15] Brian: Or four, and...

[00:22:15] Phillip: We're like, let's move on.

[00:22:17] Sarah: Yeah. I mean, they get into, like, there's this quality over quantity debate that came up a lot in, like, curation of campaigns, but AI is really forcing quantity to overtake that and for that to win. So that was definitely a big subject point throughout the combo.

[00:22:36] Brian: I am really curious to see if that trend plays out. Like, is it playing out right now because our platforms are set up for that and kind of always were? And actually, AI just sort of, like, forces us to play to the platform's rules and play the way we could've or should've? Or is that because that's the way that people want to engage? I don't think that's the case. I don't know. I've recently seen some podcasts that I like move from weekly to less frequent, and... true... the odds of me listening are actually going down, I think, which is weird. It's weird. So there's probably a sweet spot on frequency or in volume.

[00:23:27] Phillip: I mean, that's a moving target. Right? So when they're looking at the data, it's obviously looking in the rearview mirror a little bit on what's worked, what's working. In future predictor, I feel like the volume of output is reflective of nonhuman creative. I don't know that humans are making 50 pieces of content to publish.

[00:23:57] Brian: Right.

[00:23:58] Phillip: Right? I feel like it has to be AI assisted. I mean, for whatever it's worth, we just got news this week that Claude now is integrated with the entirety of the Adobe Suite. So that's an interesting turn of events. I can't wait to see embossing and drop shadows on literally everything now. Thank you, Photoshop and Claude. I, for one, am looking forward to what... like, a Lightroom filter I can just apply to everything? I don't have to open up Photoshop or Lightroom anymore. That's...

[00:24:34] Brian: We're gonna bring back the phrase "make it pop"? Is that gonna happen?

[00:24:37] Phillip: Make it pop, Claude.

[00:24:40] Brian: I wanna make it pop. It's a prompt.

[00:24:42] Phillip: I mean, if we can get it to edit videos and sound, can it integrate with Adobe Audition? That's what I need. Hey, Claude, use Adobe Audition and mix this and also take out all of my filler words. Make no mistakes.

[00:24:58] Brian: It will happen. That's going to happen.

[00:25:01] Phillip: Yeah. We're close.

[00:25:02] Brian: Gosh. Does that mean that, like, everyone's gonna sound... we're gonna get rid of all verbal tics. People are gonna all sound the same.

[00:25:10] Phillip: We've already went through that because Descript has a one-click button that does that for you, and it sounds weird and unnatural. And so people stopped doing that. I think that ship sailed.

[00:25:23] Brian: Speaking coaches have trained you all your lives to drop your ums, but it turns out they were wrong.

[00:25:29] Phillip: That's how you know you're human, is by adding in all of the filler words. That's right. Future Commerce. Human since 2016.

[00:25:38] Brian: You can tell from all the ums.

[00:25:42] Phillip: There's a pod slop article I dropped into our... into The Census channel. I don't know if you guys saw this. It's, like, literally today. It says podcasting has an AI problem. It was a Bloomberg article. The title was the audio industry is grappling... you love that word, Brian... grappling with the rise of pod slop, which just rolls off of the palate in such a pleasant way. Pod slop. In this article, they suggest that there is a podcast company called Inception Point, who is now at 10,000 active shows. And at the time of the interview for this particular piece that was just published, they said they'd made more than 2,500 of them in the last three weeks. At that point, the team had published 877 new shows over the previous forty eight hours. And they're not the only ones. In the past nine days or so, 10,871 new podcast feeds have been created.

[00:26:46] Brian: Flood the zone.

[00:26:47] Phillip: The 4,243, or 39%, may have been AI generated according to the podcast index, which is an open source platform that tracks the ecosystem. Pod slop. I think social slop is real. And you only have to open LinkedIn for, like, three point one milliseconds to know that that's true. And so I really believe the EMARKETER stats on the 50-plus pieces of content to break through because 49 of those will never be seen because of the amount of slop that's in all the feeds that's hogging up everything.

[00:27:23] Sarah: You know, this kind of brings us to, I think, one of the most impactful things that they said during the session, which was that people will not become comfortable with AI until it's indistinguishable, meaning they won't know when they become comfortable with AI, but they will eventually. And I thought that that was just an interesting thing to end the session with. It kind of was said in, like, a "don't worry, guys. Soon, soon they won't know any better," and we won't be able to distinguish slop from regular content, and I am feeling that already, I think. You know? I really don't think we're that far away. And, gosh, would love to see just a mega stat of how much of the content on our feeds right now is AI impacted or AI generated entirely.

[00:28:19] Phillip: And you don't even know it. Take... uh, there was, oh, what was it? There was a coffee, like an iced coffee mix, one of those bags. You talk about slop. Everything comes in those, like, envelopes now, those standing envelope bags.

[00:28:39] Sarah: Yeah. Like a cup of...

[00:28:39] Phillip: CPG podcast, I know exactly what the name of that thing is. You know what I'm talking about.

[00:28:45] Brian: Yeah.

[00:28:48] Phillip: And so they were bragging about how this one ad of theirs was printing. I love how everybody is just brags that everything prints. We're printing money. Isn't that supposed to be, like, forgery? I feel like that's about in the vein here. So they posted this video of this, like, piece of UGC of this influencer who has... "this is my favorite new iced coffee," and she holds up her iced coffee drink, and she's, like, mixing it like this, you know, in the screen. And she's... the only tell is a brief freeze frame that people are taking in on Twitter that she has six fingers. But it's like, it's a point one second of the whole video. Otherwise, the package is perfect. She is speaking perfectly. She looks pretty perfect. And the really creepy subtext of all of this... and we'll get back to POSSIBLE. I'm sure everybody from POSSIBLE that is listening to this podcast loves this discourse. The really creepy subtext was they said, oh, and by the way, for those of you creating AI ads, ads generated with virtual influencers convert 20% higher when you show the woman's armpits. And I was like, you know what? I kinda just hate it here. I'm like, I hate it. I hate life. That's gotta go. I hate it.

[00:30:30] Brian: We economy.

[00:30:32] Phillip: It's... we have enough data to know that now. I'm just saying it's Creepsville. It is an unnatural pose to mix your iced coffee above your head, and it's like, why is she doing that? And you know exactly why now. Yeah. Closes the sale. Anyway...

[00:30:53] Brian: I'm speechless.

[00:30:54] Sarah: Yeah. Really grossed out. Thank you.

[00:30:56] Phillip: There you go. Why is that not on the stage at POSSIBLE?

[00:31:00] Sarah: I didn't hear anybody mention armpits.

[00:31:03] Phillip: Terry Crews and his Cadillac F1 that he's... he said nothing. Nary a word was spoken about an armpit.

[00:31:11] Brian: What other, like...

[00:31:12] Phillip: There was a pit stop. They talked about pit stops, not armpits.

[00:31:15] Brian: Eventually, we're just gonna start to analyze every, like, thing that's shown. So it's gonna be, like, down to, like, specific gestures. Like, it's just gonna get to this point where we're, like...

[00:31:25] Phillip: That...

[00:31:25] Brian: Converts that. All in our hands. And now I've... I just flashed my armpit at the camera. We're up there now.

[00:31:32] Phillip: No. It's a bare arm. It's a bare armpit. You're...

[00:31:34] Brian: Sick. Oh, you have to go bare? Okay. I gotta go...

[00:31:37] Phillip: I'm telling you right now that if it was a male armpit, it's gonna convert lower.

[00:31:42] Brian: You don't know that. What are you talking...

[00:31:44] Phillip: The comments were pretty... the comments were pretty brutal. We get back on track. Comments were brutal. They were like, you don't even wanna know what happens when you show the influencer's feet. Like, you have to turn off comments.

[00:31:54] Brian: Oh my gosh.

[00:31:56] Phillip: Alright. So let's get back on track.

[00:31:58] Brian: Just the pinky toe. Okay.

[00:32:00] Phillip: Alright, Brian. We're venturing into After Dark. I feel like we should go deeper. We should go deeper in After Dark. Who knew? How's that for a segue? You like that?

[00:32:13] Brian: I like it. You should have sung it, though.

[00:32:17] Phillip: Do do. William White, who's the... it's funny. William White over at Walmart has a dual title. He's the senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

[00:32:36] Brian: That's pretty cool.

[00:32:38] Phillip: I don't know enough about corporate America to understand why there's two things here. But I want to know. I feel like I'd...

[00:32:49] Brian: Probably orgs that roll up to him.

[00:32:50] Phillip: That's what it... I understand.

[00:32:51] Brian: I'm sure. I'm sure.

[00:32:53] Phillip: Yeah. Okay. I'm sure that there's a reason, but anyway... yeah, I had a wonderful conversation. I was very intrigued because the Who Knew campaign, for instance, was something that I feel like we were sort of hot and cold on all year. If it's the Grinch, I'm a little cold on it. To be honest with you. Right?

[00:33:20] Brian: Were we? I don't remember what we said.

[00:33:22] Phillip: I was not... I don't know that I was totally down with the Who-ville activation.

[00:33:28] Brian: All I know is that Walton Goggins is in a lot of those commercials, and everybody loves Walton Goggins.

[00:33:34] Phillip: Yeah. That's Sir Walton Goggins. Do you know?

[00:33:36] Brian: Is it... did he... no. It's not him.

[00:33:37] Phillip: It's not him. No. I'm just... I'm not saying...

[00:33:39] Brian: You had me. I didn't know. No.

[00:33:42] Phillip: He was on stage with Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, who's from Emory University. One of the greatest interviewers I've seen with an executive probably ever. So I just thought that that was fantastic. A couple top level things. The team over at Walmart leverages AI in 73% of their marketing investments right now.

[00:34:14] Brian: Wow.

[00:34:15] Phillip: That's a very specific number.

[00:34:16] Brian: Yeah. That's... I mean, that's... they very much calculate. Did you... point two seven four.

[00:34:21] Phillip: Yeah. They are calculating it to the percentage. And I think that that's a really interesting data point to be talking about. It's like, okay. About three quarters of our marketing investments are being undergirded by AI. At a time when they are... I believe they're still, if not the number one employer in the United States, they're in the top two. There is just, I feel like, a difficulty in being able to talk easily about how you use AI when you have so many people that you care for in your organization. And I was really impressed about the way that he approaches it because he says being AI first doesn't mean people last. Yeah. Which could easily come off as a platitude.

[00:35:27] Brian: Did we talk in the last episode about how someone at the Semafor conference said... who was it, Phillip?

[00:35:34] Phillip: The CEO of Allstate.

[00:35:35] Brian: Oh, it's easy to replace people with AI. That's the easy part.

[00:35:40] Phillip: Yeah. Tom Wilson...

[00:35:41] Brian: Yeah.

[00:35:42] Phillip: At the Semafor conference said that, you know...

[00:35:46] Phillip: It's easy to eliminate jobs with AI.

[00:35:50] Brian: Yeah.

[00:35:50] Phillip: The hard part is finding ways to basically...

[00:35:57] Brian: Empower people.

[00:35:58] Phillip: Empower people through AI, get them to be more productive, not to eliminate their jobs. And I think he was thinking about it in a pragmatic way, and he wasn't saying, like, oh, look at all these jobs we're gonna get rid of. So, Sarah, you have that data point?

[00:36:15] Sarah: Yeah. They're number one. Walmart is number one US employer... I think private US employer, with 1,600,000 US associates. So definitely in the top two.

[00:36:26] Phillip: They're up there. I would venture to say that of the 1,600,000, there's some in there that are not fans of AI. So I'm hazarding a guess. And then of that 1,600,000, there's probably people in there that are not fans of Walton Goggins. I'm gonna say that too.

[00:36:46] Brian: Most of them probably are. Oh, let's be...

[00:36:49] Sarah: Honest. Not a chance.

[00:36:51] Phillip: No. Everybody's a fan of Walton Goggins. I don't know. I'm still on the fence. The campaign, though, one of the things that they really covered, I think, in detail in the talk was just sort of the why. Because I think the why is often lost on, like, why execute a campaign like Who Knew? Because you see a celebrity in the activation, and you often think that, well, there's just, like, a tagline. Right? And part of the, like, long form, if you look at the Walton Goggins piece, it's like, oh, you can find that at Walmart. Right? And the Who Knew of it all is very expansive. Right? But they're trying to show you that, like, this ain't your mama's Walmart. There's such a breadth and depth of selection and choice for people at every...

[00:37:53] Brian: Luxury is...

[00:37:54] Phillip: Available now. Right. And they're showing you that. Right? Yeah. Who knew that that was at Walmart? Like, who knew that you could get this or get this need met? Or who knew that you could get it that fast?

[00:38:05] Brian: Right.

[00:38:05] Phillip: That's another part of it. So it's about delivering on the unknowns and delivering on the unrealized shift of the capabilities of what Walmart can deliver on that you may be leveraging other brands or other services for. And especially things like Walmart Plus, which I think other people look at other membership services for. And I find that that's a... you know, it's not just a celebrity campaign. It's...

[00:38:39] Brian: You know?

[00:38:40] Phillip: The intentionality behind it is obvious on the surface, but you really do have to play it out basically over a year, longer, over many, many different types of activations with the consistent voice like, like Mr. Goggins, in order to get the point across.

[00:38:58] Brian: Agree. And you know what's super interesting about all of this is the song that they picked. No. No. This is actually brilliant. The chorus, or, like, the lead-in to the "who knew" that... yeah, it's actually "who are you?" Yes. Which is, like, such a... like, I think, like, a... oh, such a smart, like, lyrical sort of message to have in the background because everybody knows that song. And so they're all sort of singing along and they're adding the "who knew" component. You know, this actually gets back to a piece that I wrote, a series of pieces, a two-part series called The Existential Brand. And part two of that series, which I wrote back in 2020 for insiders, I literally said, there's a direct line back to brands and our evolving identities. Look no further than the elephant in the room, Walmart. Walmart had long cemented its position as a downmarket brick and mortar giant that sold cheap stuff, paid unlivable wages, and generally made a mess of towns and communities that it entered. Then Amazon crashed into Walmart's happily dominant existence, dot dot dot. I basically do a whole thing about how Walmart is actually an example of a brand that is able... a company, one of the largest companies in the world, that is actually able to, you know, examine why it exists, who it is as a company, literally reflected in this campaign now five, six years later where they're actually openly saying, we are somebody different. Who are you? And I went on to say, like, if you can't question who you are as a brand, if you don't have the ability to do that organizationally, then... and you can't think about why you might exist, then maybe you shouldn't exist.

[00:41:02] Phillip: I remember you said maybe you shouldn't exist.

[00:41:04] Brian: Yeah.

[00:41:05] Phillip: I've always felt like that was, uh, provocative. You're not a provocateur, but that was a provocative thing to say. We often focus on the... I mean, this is the marketing conversation that he was having, but you have to go back to his, like, his actual talk, Brian. But yeah, you can't make any of these sort of claims. You can't talk about who are you. You can't talk about, like, we have half a million items in the app if you don't have the supply chain and the technology, the marketplace, to back it up. Like, ops, as our friend Kris Gösser says... ops fulfills the promise that marketing makes. Right?

[00:41:50] Brian: A 100%.

[00:41:51] Phillip: And so... I did like what he said. Last thing I'll say on Walmart, and we can get into maybe a quick fire of some of the other things. Marketing's job is framed as changing beliefs and behaviors is what he said. I don't know that that's the way that many people have viewed the job of marketing, which is creating awareness of a brand.

[00:42:19] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:42:19] Phillip: And if you look at probably one of the most, I'd say, one of the most frequented businesses on planet Earth and, you know, core to human behavior. What is it? 90% of people in the United States live within 10 miles of Walmart. I think looking at it through the changing beliefs and behaviors is much closer to the Future Commerce thesis than the creating brand awareness.

[00:42:48] Brian: Totally.

[00:42:48] Phillip: And so I think that's really interesting. Great session.

[00:42:55] Brian: Love it.

[00:42:56] Phillip: Great interviewer. Gotta give it to... I'm gonna learn something from Omar Rodríguez-Vilá. What else? Sarah, what else did you have in your sessions?

[00:43:07] Sarah: Yeah. There was a session with, I think, two folks from PepsiCo. It was Kate Brady, Paul Mascali, and then we had Josh McCoy from NewGen and Nico Norena, who... I don't know if you guys know the Succulent Bite channel. So this session was really interesting. This was all about influencer marketing. The title of it was The Creator Collab Economy: How Pepsi and Creators Are Rewriting Culture-First Marketing. Major takeaways from this were essentially giving creators the freedom to do what they do best. Something that I thought was really interesting, we spent maybe half of the session talking about hacking the algorithm and how hard it is for brands to keep up with ever-changing, constantly shifting algorithmic... the game there and learning and relearning and relearning the rules. Phillip, there was something that you said a while ago, I think just on a team call, but you had made some comment that stuck with me about, like, one day brands are gonna hire somebody whose full time job is just to track the algo and, yeah, kind of guide decisions based on what's performing and what's not, which is different than, I think, just tracking metrics because every platform's algorithm is different. So this session really emphasized the importance of handing, yes, creative capabilities over to your influencer, to your creator, but trusting them to hack the algorithm that is benefiting them. They already know what's performing and what's not. Brands don't have to do that work themselves. They can just trust their creators to perform. They kind of, as a case study for that too, Pepsi was talking about their flavor swap campaign. So they brought in Madison Beer on that. She did, like, a, like, a I think a Cheetos flavor. Dude Perfect got Ruffles. IShowSpeed got Doritos. I think 210,000,000 impressions on that flavor swap campaign. So that was kinda interesting to break down those numbers too.

[00:45:12] Phillip: That's bananas.

[00:45:13] Brian: It's wild.

[00:45:13] Phillip: Yeah. The amount of creator activations, I won't throw anyone under the bus, but there is the sense sometimes about talking about the way they're activating with micro creators, and then you have a tendency to only talk about the big things you're doing. And I do find that from time to time, the tactical things that work are the mundane. And everybody does them, and most everybody knows how to do them. And they're boring because you don't even know how... you don't even know what's going on because you probably just pay an agency to do it. And it's pretty run of the mill stuff, and it's... but the stuff that's exciting and closer to the office of the CMO and what you spend a lot of time working on is how you're executing on a very, very large creator activation in the millions, tens of millions of followers, how you're activating on a very large out-of-home media buy or a very large multi-country campaign. I think that those sorts of, like, global media spends are the things that they want to talk about, but the things that people tend to want to get more detail on and fidelity on are the things that are more tactical in nature. And I think that's where the gap often sits. But people don't turn out to these sessions when it's the operator speaking. It's gotta...

[00:46:50] Brian: Be the...

[00:46:51] Phillip: Leaders. Right. Yeah. I mean...

[00:46:53] Brian: And also blocking and tackling is usually stuff that's been covered before. Like, didn't... blocking and tackling, it was covered in content heavily when it was emerging, and now it's, like, just part of the mix, and so... totally. Yeah. You can find that content online. And I think that's something that actually, like, a good conference does is that it doesn't just regurgitate content you can find anywhere online, which is tough because you can find just about anything online.

[00:47:28] Phillip: Is there any other standout moments? And I think we talked a little bit about my big thesis.

[00:47:35] Brian: Yeah.

[00:47:35] Phillip: Any other standout moments before we get there?

[00:47:37] Brian: I think we're... oh, go ahead, Sarah.

[00:47:39] Phillip: Do it.

[00:47:39] Sarah: I have a big one. I was three feet away from Terry Crews, and that made my week. That's my final standout moment. Terry Crews is massive. He's huge.

[00:47:50] Phillip: Both as a celebrity and as a human.

[00:47:53] Sarah: Yeah. And as a human. I genuinely... one of my favorite celebs, though. Like, I think he's a very... respectfully, the greatest. He made a Brooklyn Nine-Nine reference. He talked about his thirty plus year marriage. I just adore him. But, yeah, he walked right by me. It was pretty cool.

[00:48:07] Phillip: I think he's the greatest too.

[00:48:10] Brian: He's the best. I love him in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, so that's the best reference. And also Tide commercials.

[00:48:17] Phillip: Oh, right. I mean, he's been... I personally preferred him in Idiocracy. But...

[00:48:23] Brian: Yes. That's right.

[00:48:25] Phillip: He had a cameo in Malibu's Most Wanted, but, you know, how could I possibly pick from the veritable smorgasbord of Terry Crews appearances?

[00:48:38] Brian: We actually included Terry Crews in this episode specifically because we found that 69% of people prefer watching podcasts that mention Terry Crews.

[00:48:51] Phillip: That's crazy. Alright. So here's my big takeaway. I think that the actual main event of this show rivals the size and scale of Advertising Week in New York. And I believe that that happens because Advertising Week has been around for a long time. People don't go to Advertising Week for the actual content of Advertising Week as much as they go to Advertising Week to make deals. And the halo of events that happens around Advertising Week with agencies and media buyers and all of the businesses that activate at their headquarters and take out space around New York City during the week of Advertising Week is the event. The city is the event. Right? Lots of things are going on at Advertising Week. So while I think that POSSIBLE may not be aiming to necessarily challenge Cannes, maybe... I mean, I don't know what they're planning on, but there's definitely a beach component here. It's definitely in the same window. You're talking six weeks ahead of Cannes, but nobody's... I mean, they have an opportunity. I keep hearing people say that Cannes is on the cultural decline, but people go to Cannes and they make deals. Right? Yeah. And you go to Advertising Week, and I think people are making deals. Right? And people go to Advertising Week, and they make... they publish media.

[00:50:24] Phillip: And I think that those are industry events. Right? Those are industry events. You look at Cannes, and there's a buy-in at the city level. And the city is bought into making that happen. And when you go to Miami Beach for an event like POSSIBLE, especially where it's located at the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, you are there and you're only there. And for this thing to take it to the next level, there's a couple things that I think can make that happen and that are positioned very well.

[00:51:00] Brian: Make it possible. There you go.

[00:51:02] Phillip: Thank you, Brian. That could make that possible. One that's working in its favor is just the growth of South Florida as a viable region. You're seeing a lot of transplants of just large industry, and you're seeing a lot of tech, deep tech founders. And, I mean, not for nothing, a bunch of billionaires. There's a ton of adjacent conferences that are happening around the same time. F1 happens the same week. Emerge Americas was just two weeks ago. So there's a lot of relevancy that I think is happening in the city. But this is... let's be clear. This is not a city level activation yet. And even putting on halo events around this particular... like, the POSSIBLE event itself looks to be challenging for anyone that's not activating literally inside of the event venue.

[00:52:00] Phillip: If you're not activating there by poolside or inside of one of the hotel lobby bars, getting people off-site is nigh impossible. And this is my big takeaway, my big so-what thesis. For something to become culturally relevant, okay, you might have a successful event that has a tremendous amount of money, and you're gonna grow it year after year after year. For it to have cultural relevance that grows outside of that boundary, where people are able to come year after year and create deals and the city is involved and there's industry around it that looks at it as, like, a thriving part of a growing industry... for you to displace the others in the ecosystem that have the cultural relevance and dominance, you can't have all of the corporate capture. You have to figure out how to, whether that's a geographic thing or whether that's a partnership enablement thing... like, the way that it's structured right now is really advantageous for the event, and it's not advantageous for partners and businesses and ecosystems that are local to Miami to come and activate and get the advantage of that event happening in the city. And until that happens, I feel like people will come to this event and be like, wow.

[00:53:24] Phillip: It was a great event. But you have to close business at the event. You have to come and say, I'm closing deals at the event. You can have a good time at the event. You can take off a week around the event and make a vacation of it. But for it to be impactful, you have to close business. And I think that's what creates a culture around a show like this that makes people say, you know what? I'm gonna redirect dollars. I'm gonna... I'm not gonna go to Cannes this year. I'm gonna go to POSSIBLE next year. And that will shift the industry. And that's where I think that people could look at, I'm gonna redirect all of my dollars to, like, a Hyve-owned events property where my team goes to POSSIBLE. They go to Manifest. They go to ShopTalk, and I look at them for everything that I do. And I do think that that is an incredible strategy that Hyve has to pull off, but only the POSSIBLE show, in my opinion, has really the ability to pull this off because Vegas... there's nothing going on in Vegas. Right? But there's lots of things going on in Miami.

[00:54:30] Brian: A 100%.

[00:54:31] Phillip: Yeah. So that's my 2¢. I'm writing about it today in the editorial on the newsletter, and I think that it is an opportunity. It's not a critique. I think it's an opportunity for Hyve to really open up that partnership angle and say, how do we get city of Miami involved? How do we get other businesses involved? Not just corporate capture, all of the opportunity to the business... the opportunity of the event itself, but make it viable for the whole city to prosper. So that's it.

[00:54:59] Brian: That's good. Yeah. It's good. I like it. That's such a strong thesis for any event, I really think. Like, the connection to the local environment and what it means for that location. Like, whether it's a small city, like Sundance sort of did that initially. Oh, yeah. I think that's... yeah.

[00:55:24] Phillip: Locals hated Sundance.

[00:55:28] Brian: That I can see. Yep. Yep. Maybe that was part of it.

[00:55:34] Phillip: Wholeheartedly recommend. I think it's a great show. I think that's gonna be tremendously successful. I think people are gonna come back year after year after year. So we'll see you back there, I'm sure...

[00:55:46] Brian: Next year. Yeah. Definitely.

[00:55:47] Phillip: I will be there.

[00:55:48] Brian: Oh, before we duck out, I have an idea. We'll see if this works. Hold on. Hold on one second. One sec.

[00:55:55] Phillip: I have no idea what's about to happen.

[00:55:56] Sarah: Brian just fully drops off.

[00:56:03] Phillip: Oh my gosh. What?

[00:56:05] Brian: There we go. Say hi.

[00:56:08] Phillip: Oh my gosh. What is this?

[00:56:10] Brian: It's a little silky chick.

[00:56:12] Phillip: Oh my gosh.

[00:56:17] Brian: Adorable. Right? I bet you that does better than armpits.

[00:56:20] Phillip: That's... alright. Well, a silky chick? Yeah. Where do we mention silky chicks?

[00:56:28] Brian: Well, because we mentioned armpits and what they do to... I mean, I think you just... people are just gonna start doing things for engagement, like pull little silky chicks out of nowhere.

[00:56:37] Phillip: Okay. Alright. That's a little rabbit in a hat at the end here.

[00:56:40] Brian: Yep.

[00:56:41] Phillip: Alright. Well, thanks for checking out this episode of Future Commerce. Find more episodes of this podcast. Thank you, Brian. More episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com.