You're listening to the latest broadcast news update. Here's Ryan and Riley.

Ryan Alford [00:00:10] Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It's our weekly marketing and advertising news here on Friday, May 14th, Twenty twenty-one, and I'm joined as normal by my lovely co-host, Riley Clark. What's up? 

Riley Clarke [00:00:27] Hey, it's Friday. It's one of those days. 

Ryan Alford [00:00:31] It's just May 14th be with you. 

Riley Clarke [00:00:35] We're two days off, but that's OK.  I was really upset because I'm a Star Wars person. And so I was upset. I didn't even really get to see it. But I did go out for a margarita the next day, my brother and I, we did get Margarita 

Ryan Alford [00:00:48]  I’ll have a margarita tonight just to celebrate a couple of days. I had one on Cinco. But May the fourth kind of missed me. But I said that out loud and now I think of today's date I'm like, I missed the 4th. 

Riley Clarke [00:01:01] We can just celebrate it ten days later. It's all the same. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:03]  May the 14th be with you wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are. Welcome to the show. 

Riley Clarke [00:01:09]  How's your week been though.? 

Ryan Alford [00:01:10] It's been good. Lots of new business and I know I say that every week. But it's true. We have a lot of proposals and  I'm either building a proposal or talking to a client or a new potential client or working on new clients. We've got a lot of exciting things going on. And it's been a good month. It's getting to be boat season, and I'm excited about getting the old boat ready. And we have been on it the last couple of weekends and we wound down some of the soccer things. We're ending a few sports, and picking up new ones. The boys have started to swim as their swim team has begun.  

Riley Clarke [00:01:53]  I miss those days. I miss summer lake swimming. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:59] Yeah, they are enjoying it. It's been a little bit of a cold spell in Greenville South Carolina and it was freezing yesterday. And, here we are warming up for the weekend, luckily. But I'm ready for some 80s. 

Riley Clarke [00:02:14] I'm looking forward to that, too. But we have some big news as far as some Radcast stuff. So our episode this week was with Noah Simms, who's he? He's been on the podcast before. But this was just a nice conversation, just all about authenticity and your social media presence and how that can be translated in ways you can leverage that. But also about community, because he was down here for GVL Hustle and that event will be recurring. You'll be seeing more of those here in Greenville if you're in the area. But that was a really good episode that was out this Tuesday. And the next week's episode is with a lady, a brilliant PR lady. Her name is Gloria Chao, and she has created this Three-step PR method to hack your PR. And on the day that the episode releases, which is May 18th, is the day she's having this really big master class and it's free. So we'll be putting all the information out for you to sign up that way, but go check her out in the meantime, if that's something you're curious about learning. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:19] Hey, people, in all seriousness, PR is more important than it's ever been in your marketing mix. Gloria gives a lot of amazing advice. Her CPR method is the bomb. And so, again, no matter where you are as a brand if you're listening, or you run a big agency or corporation or whatever it is. You need to be upon your PR game. Some good tips on the podcast and you could pick out her master class if you have a small business you need it even more, so pay attention to a personal brand or whatever. This is how you get your name out there for earned media. The difference between earned and paid is people generally. And I would say they do but generally speaking, it's more authentic. You know, when someone else is running an article about you and you get it pitched is a story versus paid advertising where and don't get me wrong, they both work. They're both parts of your marketing mix. But it's really valuable in today's world of being real and being informational versus sell, sell, sell, sell. Huge, huge insights from Gloria. So take a listen next week and go check out Gloria's master class. 

Riley Clarke [00:04:31] Oh, yeah it's super cool. And the other thing we've been doing on the Radcast recently is just there's been a lot of headlines as far as just things that have been happening in the industry. And I feel like there's been so much happening and opinions need to be said about them. And that's more so concerning, like NFTs, cookieless marketing, and then the hybrid that's going to be coming around and I guess with the virtual event marketing. I'm going to let you just go. 

Ryan Alford [00:04:55] Well, NFTs are interesting in the space of both podcasts and everything else, if you have been paying attention to Gary V and some of the bigger influencers and entrepreneurs and all that stuff. They're all about this stuff. And it's certainly here it's going to play into some of the topics we get in the news segment with roadblocks and a few other things in the metaverse that is our digital lives. I call this our digital lives. Instead of non-fungible tokens, we're going to call them digital assets. I think of assets, your financial assets, your borrowing Ks and your tangible assets. These are digital assets also known as NFTs and it's certainly more complex than that. I'm just dumbing it down for all of us that need dumbing down, including myself. But it's essentially creating and putting digital value around both online and offline things, which I'll get to. But, you know, at its simplest form, OK, I created digital drawing, graphic design, and I put a value on that. And you use and create this software to then transact that value. And again, I'm simplifying. So someone's out there going, what's you use the hex code and the zeros and ones and you do it through the betoken metaverse. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. All right. You geek out over there and we're trying to make this real. And so you're going to see the growth of this and I think companies need to have an NFT strategy in mind, they need to be learning about this, exploring it, seeing what this means to their customer, seeing what products or services they offer that needs to have a lens for this. And  I've got some investments in some NFTs and so I'm certainly dabbling myself. But you're just going to see more and more of this. Even though it's not new anymore, I'm digesting this.  If you're still in the clubhouse, then you're cool. But like I said, we'll see where it goes and I'm not saying it's a fad. I'm more with this in all seriousness, kind of building my point of view and what it means for clients in marketing and all those things. It certainly has a role and it certainly is growing. But I'm building my expertise and knowledge around this before I make too much about it. All I will say is it is here to stay because my kids put a lot of value in digital things and they are building their social credibility digitally and their social work no matter how I feel about some of that stuff as I shared before. It is no different than; I'm a car guy. I love cars, but these guys put less value on the tangible real-world stuff and are more in that metaverse, and all of this kind of falls a little bit in that it's all related. So we'll see. But with cookieless, here's the deal; You need to be collecting first-party data. How do you do that? You need to have email collection forms and you need to be having transparent and real conversations with your customers so they want to give you that data, because when cookieless gets here, it's going to be vitally important that you're dealing and have first-party data on prospective customers, etc. You need to do that through straight-up ways and there are ways to do that. Just call Radical and we will help you. That is the only commercial of the day. Virtual events? Look, we're getting back to this place where people are getting comfortable, thank God. Places are dwindling, thank God. You are going to see this hybrid approach continue to evolve with virtual events and live events where a lot of people still want to stay home. Is this more efficient? I think with efficiency, maybe we'll save some trees and some gas and all that stuff for people flying as much unnecessarily. You're going to see these hybrid approaches and I just want to be a hologram. I want to be a digitally hologrammed speaker at a conference. I'm going to be in the Radcast studio and I'm going to be a hologram into the FedEx event that I was supposed to speak about. 

Riley Clarke [00:09:33] Speaking of Star Wars, this is literally how they can meet.  You just put your little thing out there and then you just pop up. And that's where we're going to have to go. 

Ryan Alford [00:09:44] There is a lot of stuff coming. We've been talking about these things. It's important that you can keep up with it and you know where to keep up with it right here on the Radcast. Now, let's get to Riley and the news. 

Riley Clarke [00:10:01] All right, so our news updates this week and we're going to hit these super quickly today because this is just this is what's going on. So this is a hyper version of the news because there are a lot of topics to hit here. So first of all, there is this new show on Netflix called Waffles and Mochi.  I've watched a couple of episodes of this because the concept was interesting to me and even though this is a kid's show I took things away from it.  So essentially,  this is an interesting collaboration because Wal-Mart and Netflix are coming together and trying to emphasize more ways for kids to have better resources on what healthy foods are, how to make healthier foods and why that is important. So cool collaboration concept and cool partnership from Wal-Mart and Netflix. 

Ryan Alford [00:11:00] Yes. And look, I don't know every single detail of this collaboration, but here's what I like, big brands and big companies come together with a lot of pull and a lot of clouts, they can impact people positively. We have an obesity problem in America. We have an issue with the education of our children on food, especially underprivileged children, they are hungry, quite frankly and the options available to them are inexpensive processed food and that is bad for you.  Other foods and healthy stuff are typically less attainable. And so I think it's got to be a question of attainability and  Wal-Mart can do this with the power of their supercenters and their stores and their affordability, combined with Netflix delivering the content to educate. So it's a great tandem. I love seeing this positive stuff that comes from a corporation with great power. Look, these companies have benefited tremendously and have been successful, yes, in their regard, but because of America and because of all of the people that buy their products, that buy their services, and so with great size comes great responsibility. And, I commend them for stepping up and taking on what needs to be addressed.   

Riley Clarke [00:12:22]  Our second topic is QR codes. OK, besides getting into the obvious of how this has been leveraging your loyalty and boosting sales, what can small businesses do to take this vantage point? I mean, we've seen Burger King, McDonald's, Starbucks, and everyone's been using this. How can you scale this down? 

Ryan Alford [00:12:42] Two things. One, at lunch today, right before we were recording this episode, I had cheese with my sandwich and on the bag at the back was a QR code as big as my fist about a contest and I say this more is the example of the proliferation and how this stuff gets. QR codes came out all the rage eight years ago, seven years ago, whenever it was when they hit heavy and they didn't take off because people were kind of annoyed. The smartphones weren't made as readily available, we had to download like three apps to get to it. And the experiences weren't right. Now it's built into the iPhone. Built into the camera. You Just show it so that it's an easier experience and then stuff like covid and not touching and all these variables come together and so now QR codes are having their day. And if you're a small business, this is a great way. The easiest example is menus for a restaurant, again, get rid of paper. We don't get to go back. We don't have to go back to that paper. Yeah, like don't need to go back just because covid goes away.  Let's be more efficient and it looks cleaner.  If you are running sales, have one on your board. If you have a retail shop with any kind of foot traffic you need to have a QR code that goes to your e-commerce store directly. You need to think about the ways and ease with which you share it. I love seeing business cards and all but  QR codes again. It's a really easy way to leverage something that is now mainstream and has the opportunity to give more information with that direct code to get to your website, to get to your experience and e-commerce. 

Riley Clarke [00:14:36]  I think that's a great Segway because ROBLOX has been popping off as a media business in a lot of ways. It's not just about the gaming community anymore. It's so much more than that. And we've been seeing their numbers astronomically go up like insane. Even the amount of time people are spending on ROBLOX has  passed YouTube and twit 

Ryan Alford [00:14:57] I think I’ll get a QR code tattooed on my arm. I was just thinking how else could you use it? I know it jumped on ROBLOX and we'll finish on that. But I'm like, do a QR code and make it look cool or if it would it work anyway? So dm me if you know. You know somebody has it, I wonder if it works. I’m kidding. Oh, here we go. The chip in the arm is a QR code anyway. ROBLOX kids love it. It's all they play over half the time that they own their video games. And look, you're going to see the stocks not necessarily showing you now but I think it's kind of an up and down in its early stages, but tons of growth. It is the kids' metaverse, all the skins, all the games. And it's more than that because every time I watch my kids; you know back in the day, we played the same three video games all the time. But now I'll go watch them and I won't know what they're playing because these creators create such different games on ROBLOX. One minute they're playing some virtual football game that's kind of not football. Then they're like in the temple hitting people with a hammer on the head and then they are in cars. These creators are creating these virtual games and they change dynamically every week. It seems like they're playing something different. So I think that plays to just the overall… 

Riley Clarke [00:16:22] Interaction of attention to it.  

Ryan Alford [00:16:24] Exactly. And so you see skins and money. And again, they're putting their value in this stuff. And I think you're going to see and I wonder what the adult ROBLOX is going to be, or maybe it just is ROBLOX. 

Riley Clarke [00:16:35]  I mean, you're seeing it now, I forget the percentage exactly. But it's leaning more towards thirteen years and older now. So you're seeing this is not just a kid game, you're seeing teens and young and middle-aged Gen Zs,  and even some millennials even on ROBLOX now.

Ryan Alford [00:16:51] And I think the insight here is just the dynamic nature of these game platforms. The static to play the same game over and over again is not, I think, going away, but you're seeing just that game change and a creator network that leverages that. And all the technology and the chips and the speeds are enabling this because the graphics are still amazing. It'll be interesting to follow, but I have some ROBLOX stock. I think it's going to grow and there's a stock tip and your news of the week. 

Riley Clarke [00:17:35] Got it all here from the Radcast. 

Ryan Alford [00:17:36] Yes, yes, yes, yes we did. But I hope everyone enjoyed it. Today is Kennett's news segment and to keep up with this at the.rad.cast. on Instagram and all of our content at theradcast.com, follow me at Ryan Alford.  We will see you next time on the Radcast.