Railey Clark [00:00:04] You're listening to the latest Rad cast news update. Here's Ryan and Railey. 

Ryan Alford [00:00:10] Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Rad Cast News. It's Friday, March 12th, 2021, and we're brought to you, as always, live in the Rad cast studios in the beautiful Greenville, South Carolina here, at the home of Radical, one of the South's fastest-growing digital agencies and the place we call home. Welcome to the show, as always. My host, Railey Clark. 

Railey Clark [00:00:36]  Co-host, I'll give myself some credit. You are the host of the broadcast. 

Ryan Alford [00:00:42] We're hosting here, you're the hostess. 

Railey Clark [00:00:49] Obviously I'm over here with a huge game. But it's a good week and it's almost St. Patrick's Day. 

Ryan Alford [00:00:59] It is almost NCAA bracket tournament time. I felt like I needed a special voice for that. 

Railey Clark [00:01:06] We can see where our priorities are. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:08] That comes from the old Mike and Mike in the morning. If anyone is listening, we listen to Mike and Mike in the morning. I miss that show. Mike Golic and Mike something else. They did a sheet of integrity like where you fill the bracket, your sheet. So NCAA bracket time. I'm excited. I never watch basketball. I just like the basketball tournament. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:37] I love basketball in general. But it is the NCAA tournament time. 

Railey Clark [00:01:41] How do you know where you're going? 

Ryan Alford [00:01:43] I totally just made it up, especially now not watching that many games. I know ACC basketball, being a Clemson fan, and watching a handful of games here and there. I catch up on a few games like I watched earlier today in the ACC tournaments. But it's good.  

Railey Clark [00:02:02] It's been warm though. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:04] Yes it is. Warming up here in Vegas. 

Railey Clark [00:02:06] It's been feeling good. It's good for my soul. It's good for the soul. The good sunshine.

 Ryan Alford [00:02:11] I don't like the Seventy, Thirty, Seventy, Forty-eight. Sixty-five. Twenty-two. 

Railey Clark [00:02:18] When will it start just staying at seventy. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:22] Three weeks. We're not far though. Spring is here though. It's been a good week at radical. We've been busy as we always are. Do we ever say we're not busy? Oh! We are busy this week. Yes, we were.

Railey Clark [00:02:41] Yes, always. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:44]. Cue Busy. We could just tee it up on the talk track on our new soundboard if we get one. hit the part where we say we're busy. 

Railey Clark [00:02:54] Yeah exactly. It's coming through the video. You'll see it eventually. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:01] Yes, we are busy. It's been a good week and I hope everyone enjoyed Tuesday's episode release. 

Railey Clark [00:03:10] That was an awesome episode. And we'll have another one coming out next Tuesday. This is a really cool group, too. They are a transportation application software company based out of Toronto, Canada, and really cool software. It's going to start trickling into the U.S. It hasn't already. It's beginning to. So that's going to be a cool process. And you'll like that episode. Innovation. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:36] So this week we had Noah Sims and next week we have Hopp n Tech guys from Canada. Cool Guys, good concept, green concept using existing infrastructure. I love it. And it was a very good episode and I think you'll enjoy it. Definitely, a business sees an episode about scaling and business. And funny enough, Noah messaged me right before we came here to record. I love Noah. Come on, our favorite people. He's off to another adventure and we're talking with him about coming to one of our Gevo Hussle events. If you're in the Greenville area, there will be announcements soon about our April Gevo Hussle event. This is a networking collaboration community where we bring together the best, the brightest, the coolest, the movers and shakers, the moneymakers of Greenville to get together and network and have a good time, talk about topics, and events. It's a learning session while meeting people. And we lob in a few cocktails and we call it Gevo Hussle. 

Railey Clark [00:04:51] I'm excited about it. It'll be my first one. 

Ryan Alford [00:05:01] I will be out on the porch. I have a huge porch area. Even with the covid numbers shrinking, we will still be as socially distant and responsible as we can be. But luckily, our good friend Noah will probably be here. More details to be released, but be marking and looking at your calendars for late April. If you're in the Greenville area if you're not in the Riverland and you just want to make a trip to meet some hell of a fine, good people. It would be a good time to leave. 

Railey Clark [00:05:30] Good time to do that. And also in other news this week, Monday was International Women's Day. And just acknowledging everything that women are doing in the workforce or just in general about life, so do you, women that are listening to our podcast, we love you, appreciate you, and especially this week and especially this month. So it's awesome. Woman to woman. We got this, but it was really cool to see if you haven't seen this news. It's definitely interesting. Bumbles CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is the youngest female self-made billionaire after taking the company public. It's a super cool thing, super exciting and I just love seeing that innovation come. She co-founded Tinder and then eventually came to Bumble and created this amazing space. So that's just really cool and props to her and awesome to highlight that. 

Ryan Alford [00:06:23] Absolutely. I see these things and it's like it's so far out of my periphery. I'm not a woman, obviously, but you've come so far. I just try to work and hang around and be with and hire the best people no matter what. But when you reflect back and you look back at it hasn't always been this way. It makes you appreciate what has happened and what's changed. And we appreciate our women. 

Railey Clark [00:06:59] It's good to acknowledge and just support everyone. So it's just nice to be able to have that space. But in the space of just being supportive and feeling springy and everything, I'm going to queue up our wine time.  

Railey Clark [00:07:15] It's a spring day. Friends, good food, chilling obviously, covid responsible distance still. What kind of wine are you going for? It's more of a party atmosphere, but springy. 

Ryan Alford [00:07:37] This is one that I thought about saving for summer. I was thinking I knew it was, but it went too much in line because it has that summer spring feel. Actually being a guy that's drunk wine for 20 plus years, it opened my eyes a couple of years ago to this variety. And because I've always been more red, 80 percent red, 20 percent other, I've talked about before, typically had tasted types of wines. But this one opened my eyes. This is actually a wine that Gary V started. It's called Empathy Wines. He's since sold it to a broader market. It got bought by one of the bigger players, but he did sell it. But Empathy wines Rose`. 

Ryan Alford [00:08:35] We only hear Rose` all day. I've been there myself. I think a few Rose`. I get on here and I talk about wine and my friends think I'm like this connoisseur and I am not like Mr. Textbook Knowledge wine person. I like wine, I buy wine, I save wine, I drink a lot of it. And I've had the pleasure and benefit of knowing people in it, so I've learned what I've learned. But I'm not a connoisseur officially. I'm not a sommelier, I just know what I like and what I taste. And this is the first rosé that I had. It was in the summer of like seventeen, eighteen when it first came out, whatever year that was. I'm not an avid everyday person like Gary Viðga.  Some of his stuff just wears me out a little bit. But I do respect what he's done in the marketing and business world. I respect the hell lot of it. And I try the wine. He's a good salesman. And I'm like, Rose`, I've been wanting to get into something else. So I did it. It's Chardonnay, supposedly Chardonnay, the grapes are left on a little bit longer, the red grapes, and thus it gives it the color instead of being white. For all lighter-colored wine, the grape cover stays on just a little bit longer. So it makes it that red color. I had it, ordered it, damn. It was the first rosé that I had that wasn't too dry. Chardonnay just drives the hell out of my mouth. It's supposed to be cold and wet and it's a white wine. Chardonnay just sucks it out of my life. And so I'm going to try this. He talked about it and it was super smooth, didn't really dry your mouth, had that classic kind of rosé, a little bit of the white in the red kind of flavor, but more towards white, just really fresh, not fruity, but really drinkable, really like dangerously drinkable. I think I drank two bottles that day with a couple of people between the three of us though. 

Ryan Alford [00:11:08] My wife and I, had some friends over and we had four bottles and I think three of them were gone by the time the night was over. It was really easy to drink. One thing that makes it easier than standard red wine is, it's cooler. We kept it chilled. And so I don't like this goes down easier, but really smooth, really kind of turned me on to Razib and trying different ones, but I still kind of come back to it. it is a really made, really well made, and definitely a good spring-ish summer party wine, affordable. Fifteen, twenty bucks maybe. In bulk, it can be bought for less, but somewhere around there, which for a really good rose` is a good price. So totally approachable at the value point. And as much as it annoyed me a little bit, just being like Garrity's thing, that's because I don't hate them. I'm going to be that guy ordering Garvey’s wine. But damn, it was good he wasn't bullshitting. 

Railey Clark [00:12:07] That’s good. 

Ryan Alford [00:12:08] My hats off to Gary and made some money selling that whole operation, but really good rosé. And definitely, when I would recommend for, anyone looking for a good spring party wine.

Railey Clark [00:12:22] So it is empathy. 

Ryan Alford [00:12:25] Empathy wines. 

Ryan Alford [00:12:31] Here's Railey with the news. Here is the Rad Cast news. 

Railey Clark [00:12:38] Our weekly news, marketing, and advertising headlines, you're not going to want to miss our first one. This is a superfine. Smirnoff is partnering with SideBarre in an effort to bring more. It's this thing we've seen over and over again in recent news, this cross-industry collaboration, partnering together, bringing a different kind of experience, joule marketing experience. And I think this is really cool. So essentially, they have four dates that they'll be doing this class, and then they'll be doing a cocktail-making session afterward with Smirnoff. And the first one was last week. But there are three more that you still have an opportunity to hit March twenty-third and March twenty-seven. So all the details are on Smirnoff Dotcom, but 21 plus, obviously. 

Ryan Alford [00:13:30] So a couple of things here. Interesting play. If you follow fitness and you follow anything, everything's moved online. It's coaching and training online. So SideBarre is primarily online with bar classes and stuff. I don't know if you have a bar at home, I've never been. I'm a nimble six five two sixty myself. The bar has never been my thing. But having seen the classes a few years ago, I envision myself balancing and holding my leg up and not doing so well. But nonetheless, the notion of this sometimes we have these fitness discussions and I'm like, I can get into that. You really brought it on the news segment and like it is a cool brand play, a lot of angles here. I like the integration, but that bar stuff does not sound interesting. Have you been to a bar class? 

Railey Clark [00:14:35] Honestly. No, I did not. 

Ryan Alford [00:14:40] It is based on what dance? there are certain dances that the bars 

Railey Clark [00:14:45] I can tell you, I'm a younger girl. Zumba

Railey Clark [00:14:50] I think it's interesting because I like how it's bringing together just working on your personal self, your health, and your wellness, but you can also have a little fun afterward. And I like the mixing part. I mean, now you don't want to know how to make a nice sauce. 

Ryan Alford [00:15:07] That's become all the rage. A lot of the clients that we work with are looking for ways to have events and premiums for the clients. Sending people the cocktail mix in the mail, the bar, there's a name for this that I'm not remembering, like the bar in a box. That's been all the rage for ways to know, how do you want people to come to watch your event but you need to give them a break in between listening to boring speakers. Here, make your cocktail while you listen to Jim. You'll want to drink two of them. 

Railey Clark [00:15:48] Right, but I also think it's cool. They have different speakers in different introductory sessions for this, but they have different mentors coming into this space. 

Ryan Alford [00:16:01] They make it really interesting. It's if you drink the five drinks before the bar. It records yourself before and after during the Smirnoff or High Bar. A good topic. It looks fun. Definitely. I'm curious though. I do want to check it out because if I'm also doing it in the comfort of my own home, no one has to watch me jump.  

Railey Clark [00:16:29] But the next topic I'm very excited about because we're bringing back avocados from Mexico.  

Ryan Alford [00:16:41] Today's podcast was brought to you by avocados from Mexico. 

Railey Clark [00:16:45] Dude calling us from Mexico sponsor. No, I'm just kidding. 

Ryan Alford [00:16:49] I think we're always hungry. We're putting together our news list.  

Railey Clark [00:16:53] I eat an avocado a day if not two or three. 

Ryan Alford [00:16:58] They've stuck on to the list at least four times in the last two months. 

Railey Clark [00:17:02] I might be a little biased. Anyways, you get your wine, I get my avocados. And you're even going to love this too because they have their own merchandise embedded in this.

Ryan Alford [00:17:17] I went to the website. I like it. 

Railey Clark [00:17:19] It's so cool. So basically it's this whole integrated experience and they create content and they give you content based on how you're interacting with a website. This is the future. Right. You've been talking about this.

 Ryan Alford [00:17:32] Yeah. You have to log in. This is all the rage personalized web experience is based on, both your behavioral side, using your data in a good way to navigate your journey away because, historically, websites are very static experiences. You're clicking on this. You're doing that. And it doesn't change from user to user. And with avocados from Mexico, they're bringing in both A.R. and personalization making it really cool. They've got videos, I couldn't believe the amount of content that they've put on the site, the quality of the content that was so on, the hell of some avocados.  

Railey Clark [00:18:15] It’s because of me. 

Ryan Alford [00:18:16] You've been stalking them. 

Ryan Alford [00:18:22] I love the website. Very cool. Very dynamic. I didn't get a chance to completely personalize the journey, which I'm going to do. 

Railey Clark [00:18:31] I'm going to do it too. 

Ryan Alford [00:18:32] It was fascinating. Just the plethora of content and the overall experience. You could just tell they've got a really great team behind this and it's well thought out. Who knows how many angles you can take the avocados. It felt like many little soap operas and stuff like old stories like I have a great content team and all look just beautifully shot. 

Railey Clark [00:19:03] I know loyalty programs for avocados. 

Ryan Alford [00:19:09] One thing I want to know is avocados when you go to the store, I've noticed the markings. Sometimes you see avocados from Mexico, but then it was the cost of avocados. I could bring from some of the generic grocery stores. Have you had one? Is there a difference between avocados or they're all from Mexico but the brand. 

Railey Clark [00:19:33] I can't taste it. I don't notice the difference 

Ryan Alford [00:19:37] I need to do an avocado taste test for Mexico. 

Railey Clark [00:19:47] I think it's fun. It's interesting, the engagement, it's so simple. It's avocados, but it's like it's bigger than that because it's also just playing into the trends in the notion that you can make anything personalized and you can make your avocado experience as pretty as you want. So I just think it's cool. 

Railey Clark [00:20:07] Our next topic is Instagram and this just tells you the effects of things happening. My phone rang. We are busy. It’s a marketing agency. What can we say?

Ryan Alford [00:20:22] You have to admire whoever is able to make it ring. The silence was on and it still rang. Agency here, you never know, they're going to call no matter what. They've figured out how to turn my silence off, while calling, 

Railey Clark [00:20:42] Our next topic is Instagram. This just tells you the powerhouse that clubhouse and audio experiences are becoming, just engaging in this group live notion. Instagram is doing something very similar. Instagram live rooms up to three people. But you can double up on the broadcast. You can essentially bring in a whole other group and have this really nice podcast. Really cool. What are your thoughts about this? 

Ryan Alford [00:21:11] It's cool. It's playing off of what you see with the clubhouse and others. You've been requesting this lot because one's life has gotten huge and it's always been like a singular experience or one or two people, and now up to four people. It really opens the gate for what you can do, the types of shows and content you could produce because you can have people, with covid everything else, you get people remote and all these people want to do and share with more people. It's controlled because you've got people in different locations. It's not the same as a clubhouse where everybody can get in and you can get the same number of this audio-only. This is definitely a different kind of experience because you've got video and play. It's interesting. I'm going to go on a little bit of a SideBarre. So this all felt very familiar when Clubhouse was launched and I couldn't remember why, but there was an app and I was an early adopter. This was like in 2014, 2015 called “BLAB”. It went for about two years. It took off like hotcakes, the way the clubhouse did. I knew how it all felt familiar, but Blab was video, the same exact concept as clubhouse, but with video. So you would start a room and you could put as many people on the stage as video. And then people could watch and come on and you could advance them onto the stage in the same way, but it was all video. This is exactly what a clubhouse is. I used it back in the day, actually, to produce. I Drive on Demand podcast. We had a hot car. It was all about cars. And I had a show on Blab and we sometimes forget about that. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:02] Anyway, which struck me like someone going to start that app. But I think some of the wonders of the clubhouse is the audio-only. More people feel like they can get involved or not worry about what they look like. They can write it from the car or from wherever.  

Railey Clark [00:23:18] You can essentially be brushing your teeth and just be in the room and then we need to talk once again second. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:23] I think it opens up different show possibilities for Instagram. It adds more layers to the live aspect of the platform versus just yourself. I think you're going to see good engagement from it. It'll be interesting the concepts, the kind of fallout from it. I stole this from a guy that was like a blog article that I read, so I didn't come up with this and I don't remember his name. So he's not getting any credit. But I'm going to at least acknowledge that I didn't come up with it. This notion of setting a stage versus creating a hallway. So it's still kind of a stage because you have a show that you set up. You go live with three people on the stage, whereas a hallway is where dialog happens naturally and that’s what clubhouse was in the beginning. Now it's becoming more of a stage,  just like YouTube is the stage and Facebook is a stage and IG TV is a stage because you put the content there, whether it's live or not, and hallways are where more natural conversation happens. It's going to be interesting finding the dynamic of hallways versus stages. And this is another stage having the interaction that comes with more people because what happens is if you have one person live versus four people live, you bring in that much more audience in that much more interest. And so it'll be interesting the type of engagement that you see within that and how that content gets used and distributed. And I don't know, there's a lot of legs there, but it strikes me as interesting to me because l like real-world applications we first saw. We should do this. I have a couple of guests on and we should do a Rad Cast episode or engage with other people to do these kinds of things. And it does allow you that real-time opportunity to get engagement where someone can trip on to you in the middle of their Instagram scroll or feed versus having to intentionally find you like the podcast. You've got to be shopping for podcasts to find out exactly, someone referrers.  Whereas this in the live structure can be stumbled upon a bit, which just changes the nature of the opportunity for engagement and getting real-time feedback.

Railey Clark [00:25:55] But I think it'll be interesting to follow this. So we'll obviously be following it here. And then our last topic for today, which this is such a cool thing into, this is not new news. It was in development for a couple of months. Pepsi has created a sleep aid kind of relaxation de-stressor drink Driftwell and a really cool product. Really pretty product, by the way. 

Railey Clark [00:26:27] I definitely will be covering it up here, but I like the concept and this goes into this bigger notion of generation GenZ and millennials are going to social media and streaming more to unwind. And this has become a statistic that more people in the recovery space have been noticing. That's why a lot of people have been targeting more towards millennials when you're having these kinds of relaxation notions. And this just further proves that's clearly been doing well. I know you have a lot of thoughts on this, so I will let you just jump in. 

Ryan Alford [00:27:00] it's funny how these things come all at once, these trends that you're seeing. Not that this is brand new by any means, but what we're seeing we had, ad or excuse me, William Ed from Groupon, whose fitness bands that I wear, track recovery to Callon selling a million dollars and Cheat's a month and new fabrics with fabrics that help you recover. And recovery is a gigantic business now. People have realized the other side of diet exercise is the recovery aspect. And it's not just jumping in the bed, going to sleep. How do we use technology and all these advancements that we have for recovery as well? Pepsi's been smart. They fast-tracked this. With this drink, it's got a couple of Maeno assets of different things that help you unwind. 

Railey Clark [00:27:59] BlackBerry Lavender flavor. 

Ryan Alford [00:28:01] There we go. BlackBerry Lavender. The packaging is really cool. They're playing into that trend. And the reality is, there is way too much screen time and people are getting into the devices and spending too much time. And with covid people losing track of time because day and night, it's become one. If you're working from home and it doesn't do what you need to do. I am sure sleep cycles are completely off, especially in areas that have been locked down longer than others in South Carolina. I've been fortunate to not have the extension of some of those lockdowns. In other places, they haven't been as fortunate. I think that's thrown things off. Pepsi's really smart to play on this trend of recovery and this trend of utilizing technology, supplements, and others to assist in that unwinding process. You're just going to see more and more as this opportunity in the market explodes in the recovery space. And we will be helping tell the story because I do believe it is a huge part of the process for people to live well. You're going to see us talk about it and bring on different people. We're working on a group think tank edition of broadcast in the recovery area and perhaps even bigger things to know. It's smart by Pepsi. On the other hand, it's kind of a detour for them. They've got such a lifestyle brand that's a little bit all in your face. This is the softer side of it. But I think it's smart for them. And I think if marketed properly, this product can do well, just keep it away from the energy. 

Railey Clark [00:29:58] You're not going to let this go. That is our news for today. 

Ryan Alford [00:30:06] Yes. We appreciate everyone listening along or watching along on IG TV, YouTube, etc. You can search for the Rad cast just about anywhere now. And we are number one on the list. All you got to do in your search bar, the Rad Cast. You will come up with our YouTube page, our website, and all the latest on the Rad Cast. So you know where to find us and you know where to find me @Ryanalford on Instagram and @the.rad.cast as well on Instagram. And we really appreciate you for listening to our weekly news segment where we bring you the latest, the greatest, the newest marketing and advertising. We'll see you next time. 

Yo! Guys. What's up, Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. But do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the Rad cast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We really appreciate it. And give us a review at Apple or Spotify. It was solid. Tell more people, leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me to check with you, to get your business kicking ass and you want radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at eight six four seven two nine three six eight zero. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. Eight six four seven two nine thirty-six eighty. We'll see you next time.