When, where, how did that happen?

So Reddit for a long time was seen by marketers as a kind of not very important social media channel compared to the likes of meta platforms and TikTok.

And everything that's changed lately has been because of AI, sorry to say.

Basically, LLMs scrape the internet, as we all know, and they get citations from different publishers.

And Reddit has become a very important publisher for these chatbots.

And basically now marketers are hoping that they can kind of gain that system a little bit and make sure their brands appear in those citations.

tell me about these things called full service reddit agencies is that just are we it's more marketing spin right

Exactly.

Yeah

... platforms and TikTok, and, uh, everything that's changed lately has been because of AI, sorry to say.

Basically, LLMs scrape the internet, as we all know, and they get citations from different publishers, and Reddit has become a very important publisher for these chatbots.

And basically, now marketers are hoping that they can kind of game that system a little bit and make sure their brands appear in those citations.

Right, right

... 15 years ago.

[laughs] Now we have Reddit agencies.

Some of them are genuinely like, "It's really hard to put your marketing on Reddit because moderators will take it down.

Can you break this down? Can you explain what hit the wire this morning?

Sure.

So Publicis Sports, which, you know, in the last kind of year or so has really been making moves, buying up companies.

There's obviously a lot more investment from the holding company level into the sports space at Publicis.

They have announced a new they don't want to call it a division and they certainly don't want to call it an agency because.

the talent space agency does mean something else but a new kind of business a new offering which is all about nil name image likeness in the college sports um system also you know nil also goes down into the high school sports system in some cases so it's uh basically a good time to capitalize on this right now it's been about five years since the NCAA allowed for college athletes to make some money from what they do, playing sports.

And brands have absolutely loved it.

Yeah, I was going to, my question would be like, what is Publicis coming in to do with Travis Kelsey? Like, what are they trying to fix with NIL right now? What's wrong with it? What are some of those inconsistencies? Were you able to stumble upon that in your research?

Katie, set this up.

So FIFA, for the World Cup, basically told, uh, all stadium sponsors of existing stadiums in the US that they had to get rid of their branding unless they were a sponsor of FIFA.

So this is all to do with the millions, the billions of dollars, I should say, that goes into FIFA marketing rights.

So basically, FIFA doesn't want, uh, a Levi's or a MetLife to get lots of airtime when it hasn't given them any money, uh, while the World Cup is going on.

Uh, but what happened was the coverup, the physical coverups of these logos at stadiums, some were, you know, not done perhaps in the most effective way, and that sort of became a bit of a joke, uh, that a lot of these brands ran with, um, and created huge marketing campaigns that ended up getting them more attention than they would've got had then, if they had their logos not even being covered up in the first place.

[laughs] What, what did they do here?

Levi's, I think, is, is the most egregious example of this.

So, and also it's worth pointing out that these brands had nothing to do with how their signs were covered up.

WSJ reporter Paul Berger joins our Katie Dayton to discuss this burgeoning love affair.

So Paul, you cover logistics and spend a lot of your time talking to truckers.

When it was announced that Tesla would be getting into their field, what was the initial reaction among the profession?

The battery electric trucks are, or they say are too expensive, don't go far enough between charging, and take too long to charge.

And how is rolling out a truck compared to rolling out a car for Tesla? What are some of the additional obstacles that they need to think about when providing vehicles for a profession rather than drivers?

Yes.

... to care so much.

(laughs) Um, I don't think I would be writing or emailing brands, but this generation does, and, uh, they just seem to connect with them on a level that is, is being different to what's come before them.

You know? They really connect their identities to the brands that they purchase and interact with, and therefore they have more of a, sort of, parasocial relationship with them.

You know? And because they've come up in a world where they can very, very easily get in contact with these companies-

Also, Gen Zers are just starting these companies themselves, as you said.

Yeah.

And I think it's a really smart way for them to cut through.

Who are they? Who runs them? And what do they actually do?

It's quite a breadth of different kinds of companies.

Some of them are very focused on research, and some of them are pretty much really plugged into the zeitgeist, following these trends.

And some of them are coming out of, like, very well-established marketing companies.

And then we've got the likes of talent agencies like UTA.

They're buying up these smaller Gen Z-focused agencies.

So they're all quite small for now.

And how is Gen Z responding so far? Do they have a different relationship to brands?