Ryan Alford [00:00:00] You are listening to the latest Radcast News Update and here's Ryan Alford and Riley Clarke. What's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It is our weekly news update for the week of September.

I know you got some news to get to, but first, let's start recap a little bit. Today, we're in the middle of our e-commerce series, which has been going really well. Congratulations on the guests. We've had some really good guests. Do you want to recap some of those people? 

Riley Clarke [00:01:01] I would love to. So the Future of Digital Commerce Series, we are four episodes and we start out with Robbie Fitzwater. He gave us some really good insight in the beginning, teeing off some big trends that are coming up holiday wise. Then we had Sean Whalen, the CEO and founder of Lions Not Sheep. I know you loved that one. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:21] I love Sean and I love the brand. And so it was, a guilty pleasure. And, someone that I follow; don't agree with everything politically, but I agree a ton with his approach to life and really admire how he's turned things around and he lives as true. So you can't fault him for that. 

Riley Clarke [00:01:40] You have to respect that. We had another guest that came out on Tuesday, that episode with Jordan Schindler, the CEO and founder of Nufabrx, a revolutionary technology. It's going to be awesome to keep following up with that. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:57] It had every part of radical exactly radical growth for him with his business. But the products are amazing. Like, I can wear a shirt and get rid of my back pain! I mean, I know that there's been like these patches and things. The thought that a full garment in certain areas can absorb and release those medicines for lack of better words, the opportunities are endless. But it was just really cool to talk to him about it. 

Riley Clarke [00:02:26] I agree, the part about the military eventual equipment, that's going to be a very interesting thing. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:33] I see it now. This is like bionic men. I was actually thinking about this and you're not going to do this. I'm going to assume you don't because I was thinking the bionic man when I grew up was Lee Majors. I think it was an awesome eighty show. My name is starting in the late 70s when I was a baby, but I think it was the mid-80s. The Bionic Man, Lee Majors. Anyway, he could run super fast. He was bionic. Like in his super cheesy super over the top. But all I can think about, he was talking about the military. I'm like, these guys are going to have clothes on that release some endorphins that turn them into animals. 

Riley Clarke [00:03:09] I'm about to put on something when I go to work out, like my dad, my sore legs. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:14] But think about it, you'd probably be like caffeine. I'm going to put my caffeine shirt on and have some energy on the drink and I mean, hey, elsewhere. 

Riley Clarke [00:03:20] I love it. Jordan, our next guest that'll come out on Tuesday at noon, is Sanjay Jenkins. He's the director of Buff City Soap and is not. I, first of all, love the concept of first taking care of your skin. I'm very skin conscious. So that product, I'm very excited for

Ryan Alford [00:03:41] Me and my wife, Nicole,  are scent people. We have candles. She's definitely me. She's got candles everywhere. I actually have a card that I didn't finish because I got busy doing something else, but I'm definitely ordering some of that soap. So, Sanjay, if you're listening, please do help. 

Riley Clarke [00:04:10] And then I'm very excited for another guest we have lined up the following week, Kalilah Wright. She's the CEO and founder of Medicine a Bottle wrote a revolutionary way of just wearing your message on a T-shirt, another clothing company. 

Ryan Alford [00:04:29] Really cool. I actually was thinking about this before you found her. I was not aware of this brand or Kalilah. And I was like, everybody's got a T-shirt company now. How are people differentiating? Everybody's writing these cool sayings. And then, sure enough, you send this on like that is different, that is cool.

Riley Clarke [00:04:47] And then we use a bottle. 

Ryan Alford [00:04:49] I love that reusable bottle. Just the message felt fresh to say. It was like I felt like I'd seen every t-shirt message in. These are actually 

Riley Clarke [00:05:02] Actually I've never seen these,

Ryan Alford [00:05:03] They probably have a writing team at this point, we're going to find that out next week. 

Riley Clarke [00:05:11] Let's get to the heart in the news here. So we'll start out. Cameron Diaz founded Avaline Wines, co-founded with Katherine Power. They started out to do Clean Wines and then they are launching a new red wine that is coming out next month. They started their white wines in July 2020, and now they're having a red wine launch. But I like the idea, this being a clean concept. No added anything else?  Super clean. What are your thoughts about her investing in that? 

Ryan Alford [00:05:45] I think it's cool. Like I'm a wine guy. I collect wine. I know wine. Austin Hope, we've had one for our episodes, known for the fastest growing wineries in the world and in California. But there's a lot of celebrities getting into alcohol now. You get The Rock doing tequila. You got it Ryan Reynolds doing Gin and so now wine makes sense. And I like seeing celebrities transition into business and different things. So it's cool seeing them use their celebrity in their platform. Just clean wines. I'm assuming that's probably some lack of sulphites. I don't know everything about the wine, but I think it's great. But how it will differentiate in the market. It comes down to taste and getting the word out. So be interesting where it lands and all of those things that having her name attached to it helps a lot. I'm always a little cynical with celebrity drinks until I driving myself. But I imagine there are people are figuring out now in what I call the aware society because of social media and reviews and everything else, you can't really have a shit product anymore and get away with it if you put your name behind it. There's such a feedback loop that's out there that I think most of these guys are doing their homework. And it sounds like Cameron Diaz is that I respect her. I've always thought she was cool and had her shit together. 

Riley Clarke [00:07:19] Yes. I definitely think there's a point about having your following. You have accountability whether you want it or not. Your fans are going to. I actually did not like this, but I'm a red wine girl, so I'm very excited about next month. I'm going to be looking for that for sure. 

Ryan Alford [00:07:33] It's also because to follow where it goes, maybe we'll do a follow-up and have a glass or something. 

Riley Clarke [00:07:42] Radicals is getting it right. I love this next one. I'm a big environmental person, so this one was awesome to me. Bamboo-based toilet paper investors are so many celebrities. Mark Cuban, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jr., the CEO of Uber. I mean, they're all getting behind this. But what do you think about the price of it? It originally started as B2B. Now they're starting to get into B2C, but 28 dollars for a 24 patrol pack?

Ryan Alford [00:08:16] This came across my Twitter feed. You brought it up in our news records and I saw it on my Twitter feed and start racking my brain. I saw the 24 rolls for twenty bucks. I was going and now we share a lot of the commodities. But my wife does buy the toilet paper or some of the more grocery things. It felt expensive at first, I was like using my Costco brand and I'm like, how much do we pay for that giant bag of toilet paper? But it seems a little pricey, seems a little gimmicky. The more I read and studied and what I've heard about Bamboo the sometimes it takes more Bamboo than wood. How much wood do we need? What does it take to process all that wood, all that bamboo, so it feels a little gimmicky, but big names behind it will be interesting. And then that price point got me. Does that seem high? 

Riley Clarke [00:09:30] It seemed a little high to me, but at the same time, I'm the kind of person where I think bamboo is a little bit more renewable than just regular wood in the sense I think it takes less time to grow bamboo than it does to grow and deforestation services 

Ryan Alford [00:09:47] Having grown up in South Carolina. And a quick detour here, because we had bamboo, will get on your nerves. When you don't want it, the other stuff will grow. But as things are now, we would chop that stuff down and get it everywhere, just like it was like my grandmother's house. We go over there for whatever reason. She had a bamboo farm. We would have started a toiler paper company.

But, it is a nuisance if you don't want it right. Because it starts it just never goes away. So it obviously grows quicker. I can vouch for that because we would knock that stuff down. I swear, like three months later it would be 20-foot tall bamboo shoots.

Riley Clarke [00:11:02] The third topic for today is Walmart investing in TikTok, which I think is very interesting for a lot of reasons. Obviously, just with everything that's going on with President Trump's initiative in creating TikTok global, I like that Oracle and Walmart might be teaming up in this endeavor. 20 percent ownership is what they will both be sharing into TikTok global. But as a response to competing with Amazon's e-commerce, this is Walmart's goal. How do you feel about it; does that make sense? 

Ryan Alford [00:11:42] Here's where it makes sense. Walmart has a historical brand. I feel like its demographic is older traditionally, that's changed with them getting a better app experience. And, yes, they've definitely changed this perspective. So I don't want to say that it's still this way. This gets them in front of the youth. The younger audience gets their brand in front of them. It makes them more relevant. It gets them in front of technology. And look, they're trying to innovate Amazon. So Amazon's been at the forefront of innovation as far as shopping goes. And this is a play for Walmart to leverage. And you say, well, how does that leverage you if you don't think that the ad platform on TikTok isn't going to get shut down? The ad platform is going to be billions upon billions of dollars that are going to be spent on marketing to be filling in. You're going to have these natural opportunities for e-commerce, no different than what you see on Instagram shopping. Yes, TikTok is a different platform from the video, but they're still in the same vein. It's content and how you link content shopping. 

So Walmart sees this as a play younger, a younger demographic. They get a direct way to have app integration directly with their products. So it makes sense to me. TikTok has been a release and entertainment segment for people and especially among covid-19 is perfect timing for how they've grown. Obviously, video content is here to stay. It would be interesting to see if I had my crystal ball like three years from now TikTok is, I think you're going to see an evolution of it, and I think Walmart could probably help it. I think both of these companies could help each other. I think TikTok can make Walmart hipper and cooler, given the natural outlet for selling drugs within the app. I think Walmart can bring your level of practicality in leadership and branding to TikTok. I agree. And I think you're going to see a maturing of TikTok in some way, not because you're not going to have fun and do dances and all that. That'll still be there. But I think you might see come to the middle, which helps TikTok in the long term. 

Riley Clarke [00:14:19] That was the only thing that for me when I was just initially reading it, I was like, I could see it from a branding standpoint at making sense. But the other business side of it, I was like, I'm going to let Ryan take over this. Like, this doesn't make sense to me. 

Ryan Alford [00:14:33] I just didn't know it makes sense. The Oracle factor will be interesting to how that relationship, the marriage of all this comes together. I can understand it from where each entity technology comes in. But how all this gets sliced and diced will be interesting.

Riley Clarke [00:14:56] Similarly, I'll let you take this one as well because this one male chip is bringing A.I. into the small business market. But I'm not totally understanding what this is going to mean for small and medium-sized businesses. 

Ryan Alford [00:15:10] Here's what it's going to mean. A lot of people use male champions, For using it now it's getting better. I don't want to talk down the MailChimp, but it's really more in the e-com play in the funnel for shoppers, some of the automation of what natural steps should be for customers and then automating it. These they're behind point-blank, especially in e-com. They are late to the game. They've integrated, they canceled their integration with Shopify or Shopify canceled them. There's a lot of email platforms that are growing in the e-commerce space, especially with integration with Shopify, which is more of these platforms unless you get into Shopify plus. And so these are features that are already really present in those platforms. They're not really packaging necessarily as a high and automatic, but it does do like recommendations based on your behavior, triggers and flows, all of those things which Privy, Klaviyo and others have been doing for years or months. And so this is a little bit of a catch up for me, for MailChimp. Don't get me wrong, there are some cool features here, and MailChimp is definitely more of a household name. So, again, this is like Walmart adding TikTok. Walmart's got such a huge scale. MailChimp has a huge scale because they're already there. But a lot of these guys that are coming into e-commerce are in small business, may not have even heard of or may not have heard of Privy because they don't have the brand power to catch it. But this is kind of catch up for me. And  I will get it if we use it with certain clients, we use it for some of our email campaigns. So we'll get in and play around and see that maybe it'll supersede some of the tools I just named. But that's some of the news to me. I think the mainstream that uses, MailChimp and wasn’t aware of other ways to do these types of automation's, especially with e-commerce. And I do think beyond e-commerce, they are bringing this flow in these funnels, for lack of a better word, to your existing like, because now there are certainly certain things that are automated within MailChimp, but a lot of it those triggers weren't as automated as they needed to be. And this is bringing more of that automation to even non-e-commerce campaigns. So I get a newsletter and I read it and I do these things and maybe I click on something that's in there. Well, that should trigger a follow-up email 10 days later about something else. I got you. And that's where Melton's been a little behind, I think. And so this is good. But let's see if it actually supersedes some of the tools that are already out there that will jazz up your e-commerce. 

Riley Clarke [00:18:09] I got you. There's really only one other thing to point out. Instagram Reels - 30 seconds?

Ryan Alford [00:18:18]  I'm excited. We did one like a month ago and we've got to do better. We're going to do more. We're doing a lot of content, but we're probably behind on the rules. But if you want 15 to 30 they're trying to catch up with TikTok on the real-time video and the editing and the fun and the entertainment. This is an entertainment play for it. For Instagram. Oh, for sure. I mean all social media has that aspect to it. But TikTok owning the entertainment space, I think, right now true entertainment. Yes, there's some knowledge and things that I'm here for. But, Instagram's in this including the stuff that I do. I mean, it's in that influencer space of sharing knowledge and sharing insights and motivation and the pictures that I've taken and the things that I've done and take more in that entertainment space where everyone's an entertainer and everyone's entertaining. I think this is Instagram's play for more of that space. And in times like now, I think we all need a little more entertainment. But I do think it's good. I think it will increase engagement. It should make it easier to edit. You do 10-second clips and can edit them,

Riley Clarke [00:19:34] ...or break down however you really need to for whatever story you're trying to tell. I think it's cool. Anything else you have? 

Ryan Alford [00:20:07] I think that's all we got. Appreciate everyone for long, as always at theRadcast.com and at the.rad.cast on Instagram. And we'll see you next week. 

Riley Clarke [00:20:19] Have a great weekend.