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

Ryan Alford [00:00:11] Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It's our marketing and advertising weekly news segment on Friday, May 21st, 2021. Wherever, however, whenever you are, we wish you a good day. I'm joined as always by my lovely co-host, Riley Clark. Hello. Good to have you. It's a sad day on the Radcast. Yes, we must admit we're going to go right at it and to put you right on it. Riley's leaving us for greener pastures.  So today is Riley’s last news segment. As we said, we were talking pre-episode and I was like, it's your last episode and she is like, I can come on. I'm like, yeah, bring her on as the celebrity news guest. 

Riley Clarke [00:01:10]. Something like that. This has been such a fun experience for all of us. And, we get to build a lot of good conversations because of the listeners. I am very appreciative of the listeners and everything like that. You all have seriously helped our podcast take off, it has exploded and I am thankful to have been a part of it. I'll be back. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:36] Exactly. We'll give that one a bell. 

Riley Clarke [00:01:42] Good bell. 

Ryan Alford [00:01:44]  We've appreciated it and Riley has done a lot. She's been the hostess with the mostess and the producer with the I've got no rhyming word. It’s been great and we're very appreciative. We're sad to see you go and we know you'll do wonders and do us a favor and be a guest every now and then. Well, we'll log in and we may fumble around in it because we won't have you here helping us so we'll be bumbling through it. 

Riley Clarke [00:02:11] Daniel will be taking over a lot of the stuff, which will be super cool and Josh will be doing news segments with you. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:17]  Josh and a roundtable of guests will probably get a lot of people from the agency just to get different perspectives. But Josh Hill, our digital media manager here at Radical, will assist as we try to carry the torch. Things have been good around the agency otherwise. We have implemented a lot of new things and we have been helping clients fight the good fight for making radical content and pushing the envelope with all the work we're doing. So it's been good there. And we're getting into summertime.  It must be in the 90s around here. We're getting into that summer heat. 

Riley Clarke [00:03:01] Actually, we do have some other news to talk about, too. So one really good friend of yours, Marvin Evatt, is a country music artist and he just released a music video today that we produced and edited, directed, did the whole shebang for him at Radical and essentially it was me, you, and Nick. This is what I love about this. You're going to watch the video and think a full-on production crew did this when in reality it was the three of us at the shoot. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:35] I mean, we have thousands and hundreds of thousand dollars of equipment here and we shoot content all the time. So we had a three-day, three-man, and a woman video shoot at the lake with Marvin Evatt for his song-Boat drunk. It's going to be what we hope is the breakout summer hit. At least then who cares how big? But we think it has legs. We might be a little biased. 

Riley Clarke [00:04:00] I think it does. Yes, we may be a little biased, but this is a song that you're going to want to hear even if you're near a pool.  You will want it in your head and you are going to want to be playing it and just vibing with your friends. And I think this is going to take that home, especially with the year that everyone's been having with covid. I think this is a much-needed fun song. 

Ryan Alford [00:04:26] It's a fun song. And I mean, it's a cross between, say, Kenny Chesney, Jimmy Buffett, and Zac Brown Band. It has some of those vibes of all those things and it is laid back. You know, we're in this era of overproduced and over-serious songs. I think it can cut through with being a little more lighthearted and feels like the right time and right place. Marvin has that deep baritone and I think people are going to enjoy it.  I know we released the music video yesterday and it has gotten five thousand views already on Facebook and it's popping off without any paid media behind it.  

Riley Clarke [00:05:05] Yeah, exactly. So it's going to be super exciting. 

Ryan Alford [00:05:08]. So on all of the music platforms, you can search for Marvin Evatt, E-V-A-T-T and the name of the song is Boat Drunk from his newest album, Soul of a Pirate. So give that a listen and I think you'll enjoy it for some great country tunes. But we'll get right to the news. Here's Riley.

 Riley Clarke [00:05:33] Our news update, my last news update to give for the week, we have some really fun topics and our first one that I love for a lot of reasons because I'm just a big Dunkin Donuts person. We all know this but Dunkin Donuts is in collaboration with Backdrop, which is paint. I don't know if they're a distribution or if they're like Sherman Williams or something like that. But essentially, this company Backdrop and Dunkin Donuts are collaborating for Dunkin's a color palette to be in paint. This is so much fun and so cool. I love this concept and it just makes me want to get out and go buy it online because you can only buy it through the backdrop. It's through their e-commerce store, which I'm sure you're going to want to talk about as well. And it's thirty-nine dollars a can. So super cool halleluja. 

Ryan Alford [00:06:25] We're not going to be able to do this with a straight face. We're adding to all kinds of dynamics there. So you just be ready for old school 30 years ago, talk radio and I just love it. Who does not like some icing-colored paint? This harkens back to my days living in New York when there was Dunkin Donuts. They have been around forever on every corner in New York City. And so I guess I knew they weren’t healthy, but I got on this kick eating and drinking but it was more eating because of the calorie count, a large Dunkin Donuts, extra. Oh, there's nothing better on a cold New York day than an extra Dunkin Donuts coffee. Starbucks go eat your heart out. I like some Dunkin Donuts coffee with pink strawberry icing donuts? Pinked strawberry icing. And all I need is a  painkiller. Are you kidding me? This has got things and bells and everything is written all over it. I will say this was interesting from a brand play as you get permission as a brand when you have a lighthearted brand, you're selling donuts and you're doing things. You kind of get permission. This is no different than say BMW if you wanted to come out with some headphones. BMW comes out with some cool headphones because I'm sure you think of the ultimate driving experience. You think of all those things. For Dunkin, this makes sense. You've got all these beautiful colors on your donuts. You've got all the brand has thought of as colorful you have. You think of a million flavors of donuts. So, hey, let's make some paint the color of this. I think this is cool. I think it's fun. I have no idea if it will sell a million, but something tells me it will do well. Just say for the right places and there's just a vibrancy to their colors in the sprinkles. And it's just a lot of fun, I think. I think brands venture into places that make sense and this makes sense to me, at least in my brain  I connected the dots to it. 

Riley Clarke [00:08:42] It does make sense for me, too. And I think the other thing, is I imagine this brand play was for more of their millennial targeting of Gen-Zs audience as well. That's kind of getting into this DIY space. It's also approaching this maximalism culture that I think is being seen a lot through interior design spaces. And these kinds of colors are not simple, they are bold colors, they're here for high energy. And so I think this is bringing into play all the things that are happening culturally and just from the interior design trending style stuff. And I think this hits for a lot of the funness that is coming after covid and everything else has changed your life. 

Ryan Alford [00:09:33] So that's how I feel about it. 

Riley Clarke [00:09:35] I agree and I'm on the same page. So that was our first topic. Our next topic is big.  If you needed something to buy online, for me my first place has always been Amazon. Do you feel like that's fair for you? 

Ryan Alford [00:09:56] Especially in the last 10 years. I turned 44 this week and we had a birthday this week too and that's to be part of the news.   I think I have been using  Amazon for 12 years or seven years. But yes I think of Amazon first of all. 

Riley Clarke [00:10:27] The thing is, I guess Google has started to maybe notice this and is trying to completely change that dynamic. They are wanting to establish themselves as the bigger e-commerce giant and so they're essentially changing. My understanding from this article is that they're changing their strategy to become the e-commerce hub. 

Ryan Alford [00:10:49] And so here's the deal. Google owns Seventy-five percent, and the percentages change daily, of overall searches searching for anything. Amazon's become the location for shopping and shopping search and product searches. And Google doesn't like that. Why would they like it? They want to dominate the world. But in all seriousness, they are trying to pull that back. They have all this data from all these searches happening and so they say they are making e-commerce more interesting, which I support. Parts of e-commerce are very boring and very stale. And I think it lacks a level of dynamic and that there are a lot of ways to go. There's a long room to go, and it still only accounts for 15 percent of all sales, even with covid. So a lot of bandwidth here to improve the experience. But Google is using the power of all this data, aggregating all of the products that are sold. And they can bring this together because they have the power. Again, they get 75 percent of all searches. They have the power to aggregate across the entire Internet, whereas Amazon only has the products that they sell and their third-party distributors. So Google is making a play for their shopping tab, so if you pay attention at all, you've probably seen this. You Google a product, you'll see that the shopping tab at the top is playing a lot more priority in your viewing search than before. And you're seeing this product for sale, but they're going to take it to another level by giving you more specifics across all the places where it is for sale. The average cost, the total, the aggregation of the reviews to improve this and to make it more dynamic visually from a UI perspective. They have all the data in the world from across the entire Internet. So you're going to see this battle play out for sure. It may not feel like a battle for everyday consumers, but it's happening behind the scenes. Google is just not going to go down lightly with letting Amazon take over search volume, because that is the crux of their business, with all of the ads that they run. You're going to see a lot of different plays as it relates to e-commerce, the way you shop, the way that products are put together. I call it the discovery process. Search is a discovery. But it's self-discovery and you're going to start to see more aggregated and curated discovery put together for you as e-commerce goes. So more to come on that. 

Riley Clarke [00:13:32] I think what we'll be seeing and I think this kind of even goes into our next topic too, as far as some of the more ad tech kind of stuff. But Walgreen's is moving into a different realm as well and I don't know how much of it is related, but I think what we are seeing is a lot of this brand trying to evolve in the digital space for what they feel might work for their brand specifically. I think Walgreen is trying to move into this share. So this is our next topic, by the way, sorry for the lack of transition there. But essentially, Walgreens is trying to boost their impressions by advancing TV shares. This is advanced TV, but they're increasing their shares and you can speak a little bit better on this. But essentially,  their overall goal is to boost impressions. 

Ryan Alford [00:14:27] It is because, and I will even back up for a minute because, and this isn't the new news part of it. In December, Walgreens launched their own ad platform where, because again, backing up again, they have a hundred million people in their loyalty program. There is a lot of data there. You know what those hundred million people are buying. You have their emails and their phone numbers. You have all this data probably making everyone creeped out for a second, thinking about how much data we give away. But just know that we give a lot of data. First, party data is very powerful, especially with cookies going away and different things. Walgreens, they built their own ad platform where they aggregated places where they have in-store their own networks with the email app website. So they have those. But they also layered in where you could use that data on other platforms, other ad buying platforms, Facebook, Pinterest, all of those things. They're now venturing into connected TV, like Riley mentioned, getting more impressions and expanding the reach of that data through connected TV and other places. What does that mean? This means, for example, I'm a media planner and I want to buy media and I'm selling a product that someone also buys regularly, face cream, it's a female or male shopper that buys a lot of face cream, a lot of a certain brand of X, Y or Z, and I can pull that audience of people that buy that. Let's say I sell something that would be very relevant to that product as well. So that you're showing that group of the audience a product that they're likely to want because of other behaviors they have done. And Walgreens is at the center of connecting all of that data. It makes sense for certain brands. The jury's still out for how well those things correlate. In theory, behavioral targeting is certainly something we do and believe in. But the power of that data, the power of first-party data, knowing how the correlation goes, because some of these loyalty programs people sign up for and you don't know how invested they are, how likely they shop, but at the same time, if they're showing behaviors and you've got real-time shopping metrics, in theory, that correlation should be just as good as anything else. So we'll see. But they've layered on this connected TV and more video to their ad buying platforms and that's where you can utilize their data. You have these behemoth companies, Walgreens, Walmart, Amazon, and they're sitting on this pile of data and now it's a way for them to monetize. They're selling products. They get squeezed on margins and all those things and the power of data is real and this is another way for them to leverage it. But it'll be interesting to see how well it works. 

Riley Clarke [00:17:34] What kind of brands do you see benefiting from this? 

Ryan Alford [00:17:42]  I'll say this without focusing on it. You can find the top 20 products that are sold at Walgreens, that data is out there. Theirs most frequently bought products. If you sell something related to one of those top 20 most frequently bought products, you probably want to target that audience with yours. And so if your brand is one of those and I can probably guess them. Most of the market is toilet paper, shampoo, probably pain medicine, cosmetics, prescription drugs, and over-the-counter drugs. I do not know this for certain, but I bet you that prescription drugs are part of their loyalty programs. If I'm on a statin, a heart medication, I bet you some behaviors will show that I'm probably interested in some other things related to that too, like obesity or weight loss or things that might signal they are overweight. Again, correlate from there. And so, again, having that data is powerful because you have shopping dynamics that show your prevalence to something, which means you probably fall in a certain category with which you can then target around 

Riley Clarke [00:19:03]  It makes total sense. I love it. I'm a Walgreens person, so this is going to be cool. You're going to take all my data, but I get it. Our last topic for today and I think this one is so fun and felt very fitting for Trolley as a brand. So Trolley has a new campaign entitled No. One Is Just One Flavor. Sometimes even if you take this on whatever type of lens,  styles can change from day today. Sometimes you feel like you're in tech wear for me. Sometimes you feel like you're sporty,  it just depends. But I think this goes to that notion of, you describing what you want, what you're in the mood for because they have a plethora of flavors to choose from and you're not going to be complaining about any of them. They have this video that's out with Dua LIPA. I always say her name wrong, so I apologize if I just butchered that again. I think she's become a huge phenomenon and that's just awesome, all the props to her and her brand and what she's been doing with her music. But the video is super cool. If you haven't gotten a chance to look at it, do that. Otherwise, it'll be in the episode. But it is super cool and I love the concept and love the collaboration. 

Ryan Alford [00:20:32] There are a lot of layers to this. I mean, celebrity endorsement meets product advancement meets brand growth and shit, and let's throw in some influencer marketing. The numbers were pretty staggering what they were paying for all this. And they must be selling a hell of a lot of seltzers. But I got to say, sidebar, how many different fucking seltzer's can you have at one store? For me, Michelob Ultra is the beer of choice, especially as I’m trying to keep my girlish figure lakeside, but I go to the store and there's no one flavor,  there are five thousand four hundred and thirty-two flavors of Seltzer. How do you even make a choice? 

Riley Clarke [00:21:27] That's what I'm saying, there are so many. OK, I'm a huge seltzer person because I don't know if it's just college, but beer is just hard, you know?. 

Ryan Alford [00:21:44] This is you and Beer? 

Riley Clarke [00:21:46] Yeah, pretty much all right. I have been leaning more towards Trolley lately than White claw and I  still think Corona lime seltzer's the best lime seltzer in the game. You know, I understand that may be a polarizing opinion, but I'm OK with that brand and  I will die on that hill. Corona's Seltzer's, corona lime seltzer's I think are better than Bud 

Ryan Alford [00:22:16] I like bud light Lime or Bud Light Orange. Bud Light I think I put on 10 pounds at the lake last night with Bud Light Orange. It's not a seltzer but man it’s tasty. 

Riley Clarke [00:22:25] I haven't had that but when we filmed Marvin's video and we all had to get beverages we did get some Trolleys and that peach one is so good. Do you remember that pretty one? 

Ryan Alford [00:22:44] Seltzers, teas, lemonades  If I'm going to have one I can't do the nonsweet stuff,  I must have a little bit of stevia or whatever the hell the artificial sweetener that's supposed to be natural, I don't believe any of this is natural. How many millions? What was one hundred million dollars on this campaign or something? I don't know. It was a number that was huge. But Trolley and these guys and white claw and everything else, you know, it's like it’s the Year of the Seltzer. 

Riley Clarke [00:23:24] Oh, yeah. It's going to be a good summer. It's all I'm saying. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:27] Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. For sure. Oh, yeah, um, any other news thing? 

Riley Clarke [00:23:35] That's I think that’s it for us. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:36]   We appreciate Riley Clarke. She's been wonderful on the show and we'll put all the ways to stay in close contact with her and appreciate everything you've done. 

Riley Clarke [00:23:46] Yeah, same. It's been awesome. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:48] Cool, guys. Well, you know where to find us. We're at the Radcast.com at the.Rad.cast on Instagram I am at Ryan Alford on all the platforms. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.