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[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting Show. I'm Brian Morrissey.

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I know everyone needs a break from politics, but I think this election is worth some more, if possible, dispassionate exploration, particularly because it seems to me a harbinger for the media business.

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I mean, Trump is a creature of media. His particular brand of disruption comes conveniently or inconveniently alongside a slew of existential threats to the news industry.

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In particular, I mean, there's the fact that the election pointed to a loss of influence among the general populace.

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This week, I talk about the way forward for the news industry with Mark Penn, the CEO of Stagwell Group, and a former advisor to Bill Clinton.

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Mark goes into the message of the election, why brands still think it's unsafe to advertise on news, and what news brands themselves can learn from successful political campaigns. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

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[upbeat music] Mark, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really glad we get to do this. Thank you for having me.

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Okay, so we gotta start with the election because we're just coming off it, and I think, you know, we're gonna be talking about, you know, building a sustainable news industry, but I think this is kind of the context that we need to talk about it in.

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First thing I, I wanted to get, what, what is your... We're now, like, a week out, and I think everyone immediately has sort of their narrative before all the data comes in, and data is still coming in.

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But this, a week out, what's your, what's your narrative about the election and why Trump won? Well, I, I thought Trump was gonna win. I said so in the Wall Street Journal, and he, and he did.

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And I think he won for some very simple reasons, which people did not think President Biden did a good job. His job rating was, you know, forty or forty-two percent, below that which could get reelected.

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And Vice President Harris, despite the fact that she tried to push off separately, you know, as something different, as a new way forward, ultimately, I think, said that she wasn't gonna do anything differently.

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And I think the election was, on the one level, as simple as that. On anoth- on another level, I mean, Trump did prove indefatigable. He did survive [chuckles] from being- Literally, yeah...

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in- indicted, you know, fined, shot at, punched, you know, by the media virtually every day, and, and came out with a more enthusiastic base that really wanted to vote.

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But I think underlying the everybody's wanting to vote was the sense that the Biden administration hadn't done a good job. And I think people always think...

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And, and, and I think that the, the biggest mistake of the, of the Harris campaign really was to believe that substance didn't matter, that, that you could avoid saying what you were, what you really believed in, and instead have celebrity endorsements

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a- as an... and, you know, use podcast. Uh, kind of this, this very much, uh, an identity-based politics, but also a soft politics in which politics wasn't even politics. It was entertainment.

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And from that perspective, that went against everything that I've ever written about the way voters act, and consequently, that view was affirmed. [chuckles] Yeah. But do you think...

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D- does it speak to a, a shift in the sort of America rightward, obviously?

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I mean, is this, like, a consequential election like Reagan in, in, in '80, or is it a lot of these executional factors that, you know, came together and...

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Look, globally, populism is, is, is very, uh, potent, and if you look at the incumbents in every single country I, I can think of, at least in, in the West, you know, the incumbents have done quite poorly.

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The sort of more progressive side, I think America is a center-right country ultimately, but I don't know if you have a different opinion of it, but progressive sides have not done as well in most of these countries.

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Or does it speak to where the United States is right now and, and the political system that it is moving into a different phase?

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Well, for about the last fifty years, America is about twenty-four, twenty-five percent liberal [chuckles] and about equal numbers of moderates and conservatives, which equal about seventy-five percent of the electorate.

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And so what I say about this election is the seventy-five percent was sick and tired of being governed by the twenty-five percent. And you know what?

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If it turns out that the, the other twenty-five percent runs this administration, the other seventy-five percent [chuckles] will be sick and tired of being run by the twenty-five percent.

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You know, this country's ideological perspective has not changed, and I, and I went back and... to what it looked like when I graduated college. It has not changed, which is unfortunately fifty years ago.

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[chuckles] Hasn't changed, right? It almost the same, within two points, right? And, and so we are older now. I mean, we- this is the oldest the, the country's ever been. We are richer. We are living longer.

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We are somewhat more diverse. But the ideological makeup of the country is that, and people thought that this administration, Biden/Harris administration, was too, was too far to the left.

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And had they done a good job, low inflation, happy folks. Look, number one, a good job trumps everything, and a bad job is pretty difficult to, to resell and repackage to the country.

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And I think you can put this in the context of very complex, you know, very complex shifts.

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To the extent there was a shift, she got most voters above a hundred thousand, and she got most voters below thirty thousand dollars.He got everybody in between, majorities of those people in between.

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That means he took the working and middle classes. She took the elites, people far removed from grocery prices, and people who live more on, you know, for whom government subsidies are critically important.

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For the working and middle classes who felt squeezed by inflation, who felt that they would lose their jobs in Michigan or in Pennsylvania, or who felt that immigration was causing wages to be suppressed to the working class and create crime.

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These are very simple, straightforward issues and, and Trump ran on them, right? Yeah. So is it still the economy, stupid? Because I think a lot of focus went on to identity politics, and it's clearly part of it.

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I mean, this is a broad term, right? But I think-- I don't know if you saw that the most effective, you know, ad was the "She's for they/them," you know, "He's for you." But that speaks to it.

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I know I saw it in Florida a lot, and I was very surprised because I was like, "I didn't think this place was competitive," but there was a lot of money going around, I guess, in these, in these campaigns.

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But how do you see that? 'Cause I, I just wanna, like, get into the, what it- Well, but, but I call it slightly differently because it's not just the economy writ large, it's middle-class economics. Okay.

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So for a very long time, the middle class had been seeing interest rates low, so housing was, was getting more affordable. Gasoline low, so transportation was more, was more affordable, right?

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Food prices, dollar menus, ninety-nine cents, you know. You could pay anything from white truffles to ninety-nine cents at McDonald's, right? And all of a sudden, those things disappeared.

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Hou-housing mortgage rates were, were, you know, double or triple. Gasoline was maybe fifty percent more expensive. The food prices went through the roof. These are the elements of middle-class life.

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That's why the middle class and the working class...

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And, and when Latinos switched, it wasn't because they were Latinos, it was because they were working-class voters, and they said, "You know, screw this identity stuff," right? Right.

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You know, "I need to be able to go to the grocery store and the gas station, get a house." Yeah.

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So was this a referendum on the relevance of the, the fill-in-the-blank mainstream n-news industry legacy package, however you wanna describe it? I think we know w-what we're talking about.

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We're talking about network news programs, we're talking about also even cable news, we're talking about newspapers, et cetera.

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Because a lot of the things that were being focused on in the news coverage of this election did not seem to be deciding factors in a lot of the choices made.

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I know you can sort of break it down and, and choose instances, but at least do you see in the data that there is a relevance problem? 'Cause we'll get to the trust issue, but I think that's downstream of relevance.

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You gotta be relevant, right? And if the issues that you're focused on are not what the electorate is necessarily focused on, I, I just think any business has to look at, like, their product.

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But what do you see in the data? Well, I, I think, I think they do.

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I mean, you know, I, I was coming into this pod- the, you know, I was coming to this podcast and I was listening to, shall we say, Fox News, and they were saying, "Look, we did spend a lot of time on the border 'cause we thought it was important."

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And a lot of the rest of the news media, until the very end, basically ignored the border problem while people were really tuning in to long lines of people just filtering in to the country, essentially unvetted.

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So I think that issue got, you know, past the, the media. It wasn't really scrutinized the, the way that it should have been.

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And, and so, but when I look at-- Look, this was a referendum on, let's call it elite progressivism, and the media, in the view of many people, was an extension of that elite progressivism.

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They ignored the middle-class issues. They covered all the issues that were consistent with the, the Biden elite progressive agenda as the most important issues.

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And when we look at polling, Democrats are very happy with the media [chuckles] and Republicans are not, okay? So when you have all these negative... So I always say that, look, you have to be-- It's, it's very simple.

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If you wanna be liked by eighty percent of the people, you know, you wanna be a top, you wanna be the military, you wanna have a top image, you wanna be Amazon, Democrats and Republicans have to like you.

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And the minute that you do something that is clearly perceived as partisan, half the country likes you and half the country doesn't like you. Right. And depending on what you do, it will be one half or the other, right?

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But unless you can steer a course in the middle, the middle is the only way you can get to eighty percent.

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So the media is perceived, is perceived, the mainstream media is perceived as more pro-Democratic and anti-Republican. Consequently, it has positive ratings among Democrats and very negative ratings among Republicans.

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Yeah.

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And even, like, I mean, I was looking at this poll of, you know, about where people get their news between Biden supporters and Trump supporters, and, like, seventy percent of Biden supporters, newspapers, twenty-one percent of Trump.

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National network news, fifty-five percent of Democrats, thirty-five percent of Republicans. Websites is a little bit, you know, e- more even, fifty...

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forty-nine percent for Biden and, uh, thirty-nine percent for Republicans. But we're seeing this split, right? And then when you get down to YouTube, it's fifty-five percent Republicans and thirty-nine percent Democrats.

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Some people are calling it the podcast election. Obviously, Trump, I think, I like the term manosphere, just I like to say it. But, you know, Trump went on a lot of podcasts, Theo Von, obviously Joe Rogan at the end.

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And I think a lot of times in the news industry, this is something I had been talking about with someone recently, it's when you think about Joe Rogan could be more-- is probably more influential than most mainstream legacy news operations.

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I- or are you seeing something different or is that overblown?Well, I do think the election was, was decided, if you look at, like, when people decided, I think it was over by then.

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So I think that neither the Joe Rogan, Rogan podcast nor the silly, the stupid Puerto Rican joke were what tipped this election.

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I do think it's true that the podcasts have enormous reach, interest, and audiences, and have to be considered a major media at this point. I hope there'll be 3 million tuning into this one.

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So, you know, it's a major media- I'm getting, I'm getting there, Mark. We're... [laughs] I think it's a ma- it's, it's, it's a major media now. Let's say it's, it's a channel that people, people...

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What is it that people spend time doing, right?

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And there's, there's no question, unless it's all bots, which I don't think it is, that, that people are devoting a lot of time to listening to podcasts of interest to them.

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And so, so it, it is a major communications medium of importance. Yeah. But like I, I was looking at... And it's not exact comparisons, right? But like where people were going on election night, right?

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And look, again, it's not exact, but there's actually more people going to YouTube than there were to, you know, the, the broadcast and, and cable channels, right?

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And if you look down the streams, it's, it's the, it's the major news broadcasters, and then there's Patrick Bet-David, okay? And anyone who doesn't know the Patrick Bet-David, he's an incredibly popular podcaster.

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He used to be an insurance salesman. He does like motivational talks, economic... It's a totally different... He goes down a conspiratorial path sometimes. It's completely different, you know, medium.

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I'm just wondering like, is this relevance sort of shifting? 'Cause we're seeing this move across, I'm sure you see it like between institutions and individuals.

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There's a lot of trust is leaking out from institutions across the board.

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So I think when news media gets beat up, yeah, but like every institution it seems is a little bit back on its heels, and you're seeing a lot more trust being placed in individuals and, and individuals are accruing a lot of influence.

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Y- yes and no. I mean, look, what was the source of all information about how the race was going? It really was the Associated Press. So- Sure...

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let's not forget the Associated Press and maybe the CBS and Fox News decis- decision desks, which every now and then were different from the AP by, by an hour, maybe half hour, right?

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So we have to realize that there is the kind of the, the end point of communication, and then there's kind of the origin of where a lot of our information comes from.

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The raw material is still being produced by, by mainstream news organizations, 100%. 'Cause the podca- But the influence is downstream of that, right? Right.

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The podcaster doesn't have the organization for all that, so the podcaster is most likely repeating stuff that he's, he or she has gotten from- Right...

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an organization that had five journalists or massive counters or data scientists. Yeah. It's a better business model, [laughs] I think. Yeah. [laughs] It could be.

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It could be a better because they're g- they have the last mile, right? So... But, but I, again, I, I go back to, look, first there was network television, and then we, we watched the networks.

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Then there was cable TV, and then we could watch CNN and then Fox News. And now there's network, cable, and, and let's call it streaming, right? So...

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And I don't know, in the future, maybe there'll be, you know, telepathic communication is the next medium.

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[laughs] But, but, but, but the, the dials here, rather than w- we all thought, "Well, cable TV is over, so what's gonna happen?" Right? But- Yeah...

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but, but well, cable TV has been basically replaced with a new cable TV, right, which, which we'll call, you know, the, the podcast sphere, you know, throughout, uh, uh, and all of its- Yeah.

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YouTube, YouTube podcasting to me like replaces cable TV, and it's kinda like talk radio. I think it has some elements of that, and w- I can remember back in the talk radio in the '90s, right?

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Like, it was always saying, "Why..." We didn't say progressives then. I guess we saw- said liberals. You know, "Why can't liberals have their own, their own talk radio stars? Why is it Rush Limbaugh?" Et cetera.

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These, these mediums, these media seem more in line with more right thinking than, than liberals.

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Well, you know, R- Rachel Maddow was, is basically a left-wing, you know, she's basically a left-wing podcaster, like on, you know- Yeah, yeah... 4, right? Just far less popular than, than anyone on Fox News.

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[laughs] Well, but, you know, she could be more popular. I mean, she was for a while during the, during the height of the Russia conspiracy, she was everything. Yeah. Yeah. I think people have more choice.

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You know, there's what I call the paradox of choice. Yeah. I don't think I've, I've told you this one, which is like, okay, you have a restaurant, and the restaurant serves chicken and fish.

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So you come into that same restaurant every day, and, you know, "I don't care. Give me chicken, give me fish." Doesn't matter. Okay, so now we add steak and sushi, okay?

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And hmm, well, some people like sushi, but they really like sushi, right? And then some people love steak, and again, they really love steak.

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And then they come in every day, they order steak, and then the sushi people, every day they order sushi. Then what happens is the sushi people kind of, they start criticizing the steak people.

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"Well, you know, we don't have all that fat. They're gonna kill you with all that fat."

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[laughs] So they start attacking the s- and the steak people, "Well, you know, you could really die from the bacteria in sushi," right?

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And so everyone gets more and more dug into their choices now that they have more choice because it's no longer just, you know, fish or chicken, right?

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It's got these choices that people really like and get dug into, and that's the par- and then they stop making choices, right? They just come back and repeat.

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And so now you think MSNBC and Fox News, and now you understand or, or the Joe Rogan podcast, and now you understand kind of how this works, that more choice actually results in people finding something that they're really happy with, and then they stick with that for a long time.And then that balkanizes, right, the, the news and information.

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Yeah. So I wonder though, you- Stagwell did a, a poll, a, you know, an Harris poll after the election, and it was getting into the distrust, right?

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And, and, you know, brought up kinda, I guess, not a total shock, but that a lot of it stems from... And this is what people say, right? They say they don't want opinion mixed with news.

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I mean, I know I hear it all the time from family members. They say, "I just want the news. I don't want this slant. I don't want this opinion."

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And then my parents go and they turn on Fox News [chuckles] and, and it's like, okay, I'm not really sure.

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It might be just a little bit different, but, you know, it's the old saying, it's t- show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, right?

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The market seems to me, the information, I call it the information space, it is rewarding, right? Having a very sharp point of view.

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And I think, you know, in 2016, after Trump was elected, he, uh, he said it and he was very correct, he was very good for the news business because a lot of people sold subscriptions on the back of joining the resistance in many way, shape, and form.

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And now there can be a lot of arguments about that, but I am pretty sure that's how people perceived it.

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And then I think we saw in this election, only some people went in that direction, but they're-- it's working still. So how...

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That's always a conundrum to me because I think we say we want, uh, a lot of people say they want unbiased news, but then as you know, people often act differently than what they say.

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Well, and that's why it's kind of steak and sushi. When they find steak- Yeah... when they find something that really pleases their, their opinion taste buds, right, they, they tend to stick with it, right?

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And for a long time. And, and I think that's, that's a lot of the phenomenon you're seeing.

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I think number one, you know, we have a, the Future of News Initiative, and the number one point that we're making is, hey, if advertisers shy away from advertising on news, news will not be able to support itself, and journalism will continue to decline because it will not be monetized the way sports and entertainment is.

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And I think within that, news has to do its job to kind of earn people.

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And, and yes, there's a certain group, but, you know, even if you look at the, uh, at the, the viewership numbers of these, you know, two, three, four million a night on Fox News, there's plenty of other potential consumers out there for, for products that, that, that they believe in.

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And I think what we got back in the poll, they just want them to label it correctly.

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They don't mind watching opinion, and they don't mind watching new- you know, reading or watching news, they just want the people to do one or the other to, to put a stamp on their forehead or, you know- Yeah...

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on the screen that lets you know, hey, this is an opinion show. And I think Hannity's always up front. He says, "Look, this is an opinion show." He's like, "I'm not, I'm not doing a news show here."

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Whereas, whereas Dana Perino and, and, and Hammer, they're doing a news show, right? They're not doing an opinion show. And, and I think- Right...

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I think there's, uh, there, there's-- the public just wants that distinction to be clear. And, and what they're saying is they, is that they want the news. And again, I'll go back to Democrats are happy.

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Republicans are the ones who are complaining, and some independents. But doesn't that say, I mean, like, I guess what I'm...

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In getting to a sustainable models, right, it seems to me the incentives are to play to your base more than anything.

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And if the base for news is more on the progressive side of the spectrum, and we see this with The New York Times, like all of a sudden there's a lot of people on the left side who are, are complaining about New York Times, like their headlines were, uh, you know, wording of a few headlines were gonna change the vote because they want their team to win, right?

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And they do not want necessarily to, you know, see that other, quote unquote, "side." So I just... It's, it's a conundrum to me because all the incentives to me line up with being more ideological.

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But I guess I'm saying I don't think all the incentives are, because if you want... If, if a lot of this too is also the economics of television, right? So- Yeah...

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so if you go back to the economics of television, there used to be three networks, and on those three networks, the Seinfeld show, the jokes had to appeal to like twenty percent.

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Then suddenly you had cable, and you only needed two percent to be economically viable, so then suddenly you had Breaking Bad and all sorts of like shows that would never play.

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So, so in terms of the economics here, if you can make it with four or five percent, then yes, then you just dig into an intense group.

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If you really wanna be broad scale and get twenty percent of the country watching you, you're gonna have to be trusted, and you're going to have to appeal to Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. And- Mm-hmm...

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you can make money both ways. The bigger money is in the person who is successful, and I think the, the networks had it all. They saw this competition.

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They thought the ideological competition was better, and I think they have to kind of figure out, figure out how they can best position themselves for the future. Right.

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Because I think they're under, you know, they're under, they're under some pressure that way, and they've been, and they've been called out, you know? Mm-hmm. So let's talk about advertising in news, right?

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I mean, Stagwell did studies, you know, showing... And look, this is one of those things where the data is gonna show that advertising on news content does not hurt your brand. It doesn't hurt purchase intent.

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And at the same time, and, and when you're talking with CMOs, they're gonna say, "Absolutely, we believe in a, in journalism," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Three, three, four, five levels down, they're blocking the news sites.

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They don't want anything to do with the, the d- the quote unquote, "divisiveness," particularly when it comes to politics, and politics and news are very intertwined. And again, I go back to incentives.

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What are the incentives for advertisers? 'Cause they're not in soc- the social work business. They're not in like shaping society no matter what happened in twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-one.

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They're into growing their businesses.What are the incentives for them when they don't really believe that it's necessary? Like, I think about the YouTube, quote-unquote, "boycotts" that happened. Guess what?

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Those never went, those never went anywhere because advertising on YouTube works, okay? And if it was critical to the businesses of advertisers to be on news content, they would do it. That's my belief.

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Am I wrong on that? I think that a lot of advertisers are just making a mistake. I was at Microsoft. They had a two billion dollar budget. Mm-hmm.

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I found out that they had stripped news out and they were just doing sports and entertainment, and I put twenty percent of the budget on news, and the news sites were the best performing sites. So the...

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I- if people are making rational economic decisions, and based on our studies that show that people don't hold brands responsible for the story around the brand, that they understand it's a news story and a news site, and, and consequently the ads perform just as well, and this brand safety thing has been way overblown, then, then they will do tests and they- Yeah...

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will advertise. You know, and if you're a product that involves information consumption, then people who read news are information consumers, and it turns out twenty-five percent of the people check...

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of, of our country, uh, and ten percent uniquely check news and without s- not sports and entertainment like four or five times a day. And- Yeah... you wanna get to those consumers.

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They're, they're better educated, better income, they're better everything. They're maybe older, that's true. Yeah. So what... Shouldn't the market correct this problem?

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If there's, if there's an opportunity in the market, usually capitalism wins.

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My money is usually on, on the, the forces of capitalism to, to fill the void because if there's an arbitrage opportunity, it's, it's gonna be taken. And if there's a lot of opportunity on news sites, like, what...

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'Cause I feel like a lot of times it, it's, like, you need to support news, right? And I, a little bit sometimes I'm kinda like, "Mm, I don't know if I really..."

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You know, because the way you really get sustainable, you know, spending on news, investment if you will, is this is gonna drive your business forward versus democracy dies in darkness.

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No, I, I, I agree with that totally, but I do think that many people and many new- many advertisers and advertising media buyers are like, they're just stripping it out, saying, "Oh, well, you know," Yeah "...

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brand safety," like, "Don't do it." You know? I don't think they've done the tests. I don't... You know? Look, Mr. Pillow seems to be doing just fine. [chuckles] Yeah, he's moving a lot of pillows.

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Look, it, it's an older, richer, more educated audience, and if you have products, you know... So if I'm selling to college students, news probably is not gonna be the first choice.

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But if I'm selling to an older, richer, better educated audience and my products are in line with that, like a car, you know, then, then more likely than not, I should be on news. Yeah. Right?

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And, and if I'm not, I'm really passing up what's probably some good buys in, in media. Yeah. So let's talk about brand safety for a little bit, 'cause you, you mentioned it, right?

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And I go back to, again, to t- 2016, and there's always these unintended consequences that happen, because I can remember, you know, getting...

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I was the editor of Digiday at the time, and, you know, we were like, "Oh, who's running ads on Breitbart and all these, you know, VDARE and, and white nationalist site?"

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Because after the 2016 election, it was, it was a shock to a lot of people, and there was a lot of fingers really being pointed out there that this couldn't be real, right? It was Russia. No, it was Cambridge Analytica.

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No, it was Facebook. No, it was... And all these things, right? And I think brand safety really sprung out of trying to demonetize, if you will, a lot of sites that were viewed as, I don't know, like, what...

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You know, they were called misinformation at the time, fake news, et cetera. And I don't mean the Macedonian sites, I mean Breitbart, right?

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And then the problem is that, that got set loose, and that ended up coming back and being used, I think, under the guise of brand safety against all of news. You know, it wasn't...

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It didn't stop at Info Wars and Breitbart because, one, it's very easy, I think, to take that and it just, it spread into basically an entire category unintendedly.

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That's my sort of- Well, that's the problem with censorship. Once you give somebody a censor's pen, they, they just don't sit there. They keep, they keep broadening their remit. Yeah.

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And I think, I think that's what happened. I think some people said, "Well, well, uh, well, you know, should you advertise on Info Wars?" Okay, well, you know, fair enough question, are you really responsible for it?

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But okay. But that spread to, you know, the NBC Nightly News. You know, it spread, it, it spread to anything that has the word Hamas in it.

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It, it, it really kind of, you know, became a mini industry in which the censors were, were, you know, getting a good piece of change for s- for, for protecting your brand, right?

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And I guess for- So would you think brand safety is, like, a sort of a version of, of censorship? 'Cause I always- Yeah. You know, look- Yeah... freedom, I, I don't know if freedom...

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I, I joked sometimes that, you know, I didn't think the, the little known fifth freedom was the freedom of monetization. But, you know, I think it gets, like... I don't know. Like, if...

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You know, look, GARM became very controversial, uh, that's the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, right?

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And it was used by a lot of people on the right to say that there's a cabal, a conspiracy, and there's been lots of hearings over this, and it's actually cast a pall, I, I think, over the industry. I was talking with

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a, a, a company that didn't wanna do anything around sustainable news because they were scared that Jim Jeffords might view it as, like, some kind of, you know, conspiracy against conservative voices.

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Yeah, and that's why, look, I think, I think GARM, you know, lasted about a day after Elon Musk sued GARM.Right? And, and so, you know, I, I think it's exactly this kind of expansion of, you know...

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Look, I don't think Boeing ads should appear in a story about plane crashes.

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So I-- Look, I think there are some brand safety issues, but they're really relatively small and rare, and that's what our, that's what our study shows, and this whole organization, quote, "set up" became boycotter.

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It became a, bec- it had the power to choose, you know, who lives and who dies in the media world based on who could get advertising and who couldn't from a, from a suite of advertisers, and that is the censor's power.

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Yeah. And that I think is being broken up by Elon Musk. So final thing is, you gave a talk at the ANA, and you, you compared basically marketing campaigns to, to political campaigns.

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There's a lot of similarities, and I think there's growing similarities.

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Turn that around and, and give me the sort of same analysis before how, you know, media organization, news organizations in particular, can go about building sustainable media businesses. Sure.

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I think, I think using kind of the same framework that I used in the ANA talk, you know, that there were five key elements of, of kind of building a campaign, and the first is, uh, having a, a, a theme anybody could remember, whether it's Make America Great Again, democracy dies in darkness, all the news that's fit to print.

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You gotta have one that, that coins where, where you're going and what you're, what you're doing. Then I think you need a bio that tells your story and, and your values. You know, maybe you were...

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You-- maybe you come from the days of Gutenberg and the printing press, or maybe you come from, you know, Watergate and the investigative reporting.

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But, but people, uh, feel m- feel much more comfortable with a brand where they know where they came from, right? And 'cause it tells you what their, their values are. Then you have to have a target, right?

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You have to decide, are you-- do you just want, you know, people on the left or the right, or are you really going for kind of a mainstream audience?

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And then you have to have what, what would be in a political campaign issues, but it could be, could be a particular feature.

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Like, we're gonna be the best in sports, or we're gonna be the best, you know, we're gonna have, like, ten of the greatest political analysts, or we're gonna have the most accurate poll.

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You gotta have some issues or features that really serve to distinguish your brand. And then last but not least, you have to differentiate yourself from the competitors.

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Oh, those left and right-wing rags, aren't you done with all that, right?

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So, and if you can put together those five elements, you know, in a political campaign, in a marketing campaign, or in a campaign for your, for your new publication, I think at least from a branding point of view, you have a, you have a chance of being successful.

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All right. Mark, thank you so much. Really appreciate you taking the time today. All right. Thank you. [upbeat music]