Oscar Campaigns & TheRealReal
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I'm Yasmin Gagne. I'm Josh Christensen. And this is Most Innovative Companies.

On today's episode, Ali Carrieri on the anatomy of an Oscars campaign. It's a really intimate way, I think, to see how these relationships work and how the directors work and how the performers work. The Real Reels' Rati Sahilovek on the company's turnaround. But what we found kind of post-COVID was some of the items that we were taking from the consigner was unprofitable. And of course, keeping tabs.

And then she just hasn't learned how to use her mixed belt yet because, again, she's eight. But first, here's the download. The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation.

The European Union is fining Apple $1.8 billion for an antitrust violation. The fine is due to claims that the company failed to inform users of other music streaming options like Spotify, which makes me, I find it ridiculous. What's Spotify? I get it's about you need to inform people, but like who doesn't know that there's other streaming music options?

I'm not on Apple's side here, I'm saying, but I'm just saying. Josh is team big tech. Yeah, I'm a big Tim Cook fan, big Tim Apple fan. Anyways, this is just the latest in a line of high-profile fines handed out by the EU. Google and Meta have also been fined for breaking antitrust policies in the online classified ad space. Bitcoin is back, baby. Yes, it is. I don't think it ever went away. I'm a vintage fan.

Every time we record, I proclaim something so lame is back. Yep, I know. I script it for you and I do it for a reason. On Monday evening, the cryptocurrency your most problematic male friend is obsessed with rose to about $67,000.

This is just shy of this almost $69,000 record from 2021. Bitcoin has gained 50% this year after the SEC approved several Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, like BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust in January. If you didn't understand that last sentence...

I only vaguely know what it means. This has been another bad week for tech, unfortunately. Sony Interactive Entertainment cut 900 jobs, Bumble laid off 350 people, and Expedia laid off 1,500 people. In total, there have been 45,000 and counting tech layoffs in 2024 alone.

And more likely to follow because Apple's reportedly planning on ending its electrical vehicle project, which involves about 2,000 employees. Welcome, tech friends, to our lives as journalists. Yeah, tech sounding like media right now.

Robotic startup FIGR announced a collaboration with OpenAI last Thursday. These freaks want to fuse AI into the bodies of FIGR's silver-plated human-like robots. Have you seen pictures of these robots, Yas? Yes, dude.

Did we learn nothing from iRobot? My main reference for all technology. Honestly, I need to rewatch iRobot now just to understand what we're dealing with. This is our latest segment that we're calling, hey, this shouldn't be a thing, news. On the same day that the collaboration was revealed, Figures said that it had received $675 million in VC funding from a terrible group of people that includes Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Intel, and NVIDIA.

The end goal here is to ship humanoid robots around the world. Figure CEO Brett Adcock told the AP last year, quote, If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there's a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids. Billions, maybe. Jobs like making statements for Brett Adcock because that was a big old jumble of nonsense. Tell me, chat, GPT did not write that statement.

Anyways, let's close this out. Finally, do you ever wonder what happened to all those cable and satellite television networks you used to watch before Netflix took over? Yeah, I miss Cribs every day. Well, it's still there. You can watch Cribs because most of these networks are just running reruns to fractions of the audience they used to garner. So like MTV, for example, they get only 256,000 primetime views. And a decade ago, they had about

807,000 primetime views. So these zombie networks, this isn't necessarily like new news, but it's just an update on the trend that's happening with the switch to streaming platforms. But MTV is still there. Yeah, I'm going to tune in to watch some more ridiculousness. Well, anyway, that's the news you need to know today. So Josh, what is

Is your last or latest fashion purchase? Latest and greatest. I'm wearing it as we speak. Like, I most recently bought... I kind of like...

these new kind of like work style over shirts yeah i like them too it looks good on you yeah thank you it's drapey and you know the french say the looser the fit the sexier the feel at least according to david on uh schitt's creek in that one episode but i like it yeah this is my latest thing and i got the same exact shirt in three different colors because that's what you do what about you

I could not be more proud of this. I actually walked around the office and showed people and no one gave a shit. So lame. So I am a real, real coupon ninja. I saw a Tom Ford dress from 2012 and I recognized it as the black version of the white dress that Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the 2012 Oscars.

Google it. Buy Tom Ford. Google it. Google it and you'll know. It's worth it. It's a great dress. It's a great dress. So it's a black dress and it has a detachable floor length black cape, which is sick. It's so nice. You better wear that to South by Southwest this weekend.

Anyway, it was listed on the RealReal for like $495 and through some store credit that I got by selling random shit plus like some coupon chicanery that I did, I got it for $30 and I could not be more proud of this. That's a great use of the word chicanery. Yeah, some coupon chicanery. That's a great purchase though. It's a great purchase. I am very proud of it. I don't know when I'm going to wear it.

I think hopefully if I have like, I was thinking if I have an ex who gets married and I go to his wedding, I could wear the black dress and black cape. Nice. Knowing your track record, you're not going to get invited to those weddings. I'm never getting invited to an ex-boyfriend's wedding. Are you kidding me? That's okay. Consider it though. Sam, Alex, whatever.

That's terrific. The great thing about the story I just told is it actually brings together the two topics we are talking about on this podcast. Later on, we have an interview with the president of The RealReal about the company's turnaround plans. But first, here we have Allie Carrieri. She's an account director at Civic Entertainment Group, which is a company that puts together entertainment campaigns. And she explained to us how Oscar campaigns actually work.

So, Allie, we hear about Oscar campaigns all the time. Like it's awards season right now. You see people on the red carpet. Bradley Cooper is out there explaining that he wasn't sure if he loved his daughter or not in a weird bid to win an Oscar, possibly. But what actually is an Oscar campaign? Like what does it involve in broad terms?

What we're seeing right now, this is a sliver of what an Oscars campaign is. Oscars campaigns start well before the film even comes out. It's a big cross stream of press, strategy, marketing, publicists trying to create a narrative around a film, starting with when does the film come out?

What festivals are we sending the film to? How are we positioning the film based on when it's being released or how we're cutting the trailer or who's involved and how we're positioning different names on the posters? So it's a process that really starts very early on. You hear Oscar buzz is a term that gets thrown out a lot. Oscar buzz is often happening before the film comes out.

So there's really four things that are happening simultaneously. There's the campaign for the film being released. That's getting people to the theaters, getting people on streaming. How are you getting people to come see your movie? There is the wider award season campaign. So that's the Golden Globes. It's the Critics' Choice Awards.

You've got the guild campaigns. So you're going for these really, really, really niche specific tracks. You're talking cinematographers, you're talking to directors, you're talking to costume designers. Then you have the Academy Awards, which is kind of the culmination of all of these different campaigns that people are running, teeing up to this one night where you can try to predict, you can do your best, but it comes down to a voting body of very diverse individuals.

individuals. I mean, just to talk about the Oscars, for example, because like, I think a lot of people don't even know how they're decided. Like who are members of the Academy?

The Academy is unlike a guild. It's not a professional organization. It is a body of filmmakers from different categories, everything from publicists down to sound designers, everything in between. They're invited to be members of the Academy. Whoa, shots fired at the sound professional. All the way down? No, I didn't mean all the way down. Okay, okay, I see. We'll rephrase that. I see. We'll rephrase that.

Listen, sound design, we don't have time to get into it. Don't ask me at a cocktail party the difference between sound design and sound editing because you will never be able to leave the conversation. But I would be the one over and I'd be like, right? Yes. Yes. Right? And, you know, now it's one award at the Academy Awards. And why is that? It's two different things. Sorry, we've got the cat. Okay.

Our sound designer and mixer on this podcast, Nick Torres, worked in TV and film for a long time before moving to podcasts. For, I mean, reasons I'm sure you're aware of. The more you love your work, the more likely you'll be exploited. He's going to be like listening and mixing this. And this is like, yes, we're going to boost up Ali's signal now and really carve it out. Yeah.

So the Academy is made up of a lot of different branches. It's invitation only. So individuals are invited to join the Academy. Previous nominees and winners are invited to join the Academy, as well as other members of the industry who are, you know, making advancements or who are recognizable or who are contributing significantly in lots of different ways. The categories that we see in the Academy Awards are part of it, but there are also branches for

for casting directors. There are studio executives. So you're getting a really wide swath of individuals who are contributing to the voting process. And it's also pretty international. Oscar So White was a few years ago now. And since then, the Academy has made a really concerted effort to diversify their membership, not just on...

on race, gender, identity, and ethnicity, but also in a national sense to make sure that they're really tapping a wide perspective for nominations and for voting. You know, something that we had talked about previously is the fact that the modern Oscar campaign is a relatively new phenomenon. Like in the 70s or the 80s, it wasn't necessarily a whole thing. Tell me how it started.

So there are these kind of stories from, you know, the 50s and the 60s, this early golden age of Hollywood, where you hear these kind of grand stories about the Oscars campaign and the glamour that goes into it.

Earlier in the days of the Academy Awards, campaigning was a little bit simple. It was a lot simpler. It was less of a media fair, partly because there weren't these channels that we're working with now of social media and fashion and red carpet to really drive lots of different ways we're telling the story of a campaign. We can really look at the 90s, I think, as the time when the modern Oscar campaign took off.

Shakespeare in Love is kind of always the one that people point to as you see a campaign in action. There's a real push and a real story getting Gwyneth Paltrow up there, getting Shakespeare in Love to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. These kind of big over-the-top tactics of the full-page ads in the newspapers and the stunts and these big things that really show, I would say, an aggressive kind of campaigning.

We've dialed that down a lot. I think just in general, there's a little bit less of that. We're starting to see a lot more creativity into how we're doing these big storytelling moments. So folks aren't really running these big full-page ads anymore because are the voters and are the viewers reading newspapers? They're spending more time online. It's sad. I know. It always makes me think of Melissa Leo and The Fighter. This is another one that's kind of Oscar campaign lore. She just bought...

these huge full-page ads. Oh, that's awesome. It's her, for the fighter, for Best Pornographer, she's in a gown and it just says, Consider. That's the ad. She bought it and paid for it herself. It's Melissa Leo in formal wear and it says, Consider. And she...

She won. She took matters into her own hands. Yeah, she deserves that. Yeah, I mean, it's a great performance and a great film, but she was like, I'm going to do this. I'm paying my own money and I'm running this campaign and I'm going to put these out there. Well, it's kind of like how... And I say this, like, I interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis around this time. She would just show up to interviews and be like...

I really want an Oscar. And it totally worked. Like she won. There's so many different ways. Like just as we have got social media and things, there's so many different avenues now for how campaigns are showing up. You got, you start on the red carpet at the festivals. So we have some films that come out in May and,

And over the summer that have to sustain their campaigns all the way through when voting begins, which is late February. I think voting was the 22nd through the 27th of February this year. That's a long time. That's almost a year for some of these films.

Some of them came out over the summer and then there was the strike. So there was a part of, you know, campaigning that's getting your actors on the red carpet. That wasn't something these films were able to do in this kind of three month period of time. So when you have folks going to interviews and when there's opportunities for people to get magazine covers and magazine interviews, I think we're seeing much more this year, but also in the past, there's a lot of amplification of direct conversation with stars, with names, with

One of my favorite things always is the W Magazine where they have the director's photo. Oh, actors, yeah. I love actors on actors. I love all those roundtables. Yeah, you're right, the directors. Yeah, the great performances issues. And it's a really intimate way, I think, to see how these relationships work and how the directors work and how the performers work.

I think, again, it's amplified by social media. It's amplified by these interviews and these soundbites that we're seeing. You mentioned Bradley Cooper. We're starting to see that come across on social. Stepping away from these huge full-page ads and these big, big, big things, we're starting to see how can we connect one-on-one with the story of the film, with the story of the performers, with the story...

of the story of the campaign. That's another big one that we can talk about. What do you mean by that? What is the story of the campaign? I'm thinking a lot about, you know, last year there was Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser and Kiki Kwan about these investments in their careers.

These are people who have been in the industry for years, who have bodies of work or who maybe haven't worked as much as they should and being recognized not just for their performance in this film, but their contribution to entertainment, to Hollywood, to cinema on a much broader scale. And so...

But it's taking this one specific thing, we're working towards getting an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and turning it into a larger conversation, a larger story about this individual and their journey through award season. Fashion has also played, I think, such a really interesting conversation point in this of the red carpet journey of some stars, what their outfits are telling, who are they wearing, how are they telling stories.

telling story through who they're wearing and what they're wearing and to what ceremony. Give me an example of a star who's managed that really well. Oh my gosh. I'm trying to think of someone not from this year because I have a person from this year. Yeah, well, Margot Robbie, I think has done a great job, but I feel like you can't talk about that. Yeah, Margot Robbie has, I think, a smart strategic move

of reinforcing the Barbie story, having Barbie wear Barbie outfits, recreations of Barbie dresses. I know everyone is speculating who, which Barbie will she be at the Oscars red carpet? You're seeing Lily Gladstone wearing Indigenous designers on the red carpet in her clothing and her accessories. Yeah, Bradley Cooper definitely tried to come out in a full tuxedo. They were like, Brad, it's too much. You've gone too far. Yeah.

I'm loving what Coleman Domingo has been wearing on the red carpet. Every single appearance. I'm floored. It's like, I love to see it. I love it. I still haven't seen his movie. Rustin. Have you, Josh? I've not seen Rustin. I did see him in the musical remake, uh,

or the movie version of the musical, uh, the color purple, which he was terrific in. It didn't translate super well into a movie, but the performances were great. I love Coleman Domingo. I've seen everything he's done. Uh, my wife runs a theater company as well, where they did a workshop reading of one of his plays that he wrote. That was a terrific play. So, um,

My wife's met Coleman Domingo on a number of occasions and is friendly with him. But yeah, he's wonderful. And this was before he like, just before he really blew up and he is everywhere now. These days, so I go to screenings when I can. And these days I notice that the screenings

are full of TikTokers. Like, they'll be TikTokers near the snacks, or they'll be, like, talking about the movie right after they see it. Like, how do they fit into all this? Talking about the rise of TikTok and influencers, I think it parallels really well to the overall rise of them across different channels. Not just in entertainment, but their influence in restaurants and in sports. Fashion. Fashion, all these other things. Fashion.

Back in early days of TMZ, early days of MTV, it was a shock to see some of those figures on the red carpet and lifestyle magazines and not typical entertainment. That's interesting. Yeah. So I think it was probably, why is TMZ on the red carpet? It's like, why is Perez Hilton on the red carpet? And it's a sign that these strategists and the consultants and the agencies and the publicists who work on these campaigns, because there's a lot of different people.

It's the studio, but they bring on strategists and consultants and agencies. And so there's a bunch of teams. Some focus on very specific things. Some focus on, you know, we are focusing on the composers and the music. And some have a much broader overall look at how the campaign is shaping out and how things are being actualized and executed. So on a strategic front, seeing, all right, well, there's a direct conversation that TikTokers and influencers have with their viewers.

And how do we get that immediate one-to-one communication out there so that we're taking advantage of this channel? And I don't think it's a replacement for traditional journalism. I don't think you can compare it to traditional journalism. They're very, very different things. They're totally different. I don't know. Put us out of our misery. The news media has had a good run.

All the more important to have you all in the red carpet, I got to say. But there's this precedent for it of, you know, adapting to getting what is the new ways of communication? What are the new ways of telling a story? The new channels for telling a story? Mommy bloggers weren't taken seriously. And now mommy bloggers rule the world. Yeah. Wait, do they? Oh, no.

You must have very different Twitter feeds. You're probably not seeing the ladies who make bread. My TikTok feed is full of mom influencers. Tradwives. Josh loves Tradwives. You heard it here. What?

I don't know completely what that even means. It's like the Mormon housewives, traditional wives. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about now. Yeah, I do see a lot of that. And I was also at, I was at Titanic the other night.

which for listeners, if you don't know, is an off-Broadway play. That's very successful. I'm just going deep into like theater nerd. Off-Broadway play. It's a, it's a spoof of Titanic that's narrated and, uh, narrated by fake Celine Dion. Uh,

And there's this one section that's really funny. You should absolutely see it. We have to go. It's so good. It's one of my favorite things I've seen this year, honestly. I'll go see it. It's so good. I would see it again, absolutely. But anyways, there's this whole improvised section where the Celine Dion character is like, I was really drunk because the whole thing is like Celine Dion was on the boat.

That's what she's saying and that she's telling the story from her perspective. And she was like, I was shit face this night. So I'm going to improv this section and goes through this whole improv thing. And at one point she went into this thing, basically making fun of trad wives on TikTok on there in an improvised section. So that's been in my head. It was very funny.

That's really good. But so yeah, that may I mean, what you're saying about influencers makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like from what you're saying, studios hire everyone like studios are running this campaign. So studios are the ones who bring on all the different teams to execute and strategize their campaigns.

Often they have in-house teams. So they're in-house PR, in-house marketing, in-house communications who work with these different agencies and strategists and organizations and publicists to build out what these campaigns are. Because there's a lot of moving pieces. I mean, if you're thinking about when is October or November a more strategic release date and then thinking, well, we've got the PGA Awards coming

in these coming weeks, but we also need to think about this dinner we're doing for the Cinematography Guild. Like, there's a lot of different things that are happening. Yeah. And again, that taps into, like, super, super niche, going all the way to getting butts in seats. This is maybe a dumb question, but I have to ask it. No such thing. Well, let's wait till we hear the question first.

What does winning Oscars get studios? I'm thinking about like an A24, which I was recently reading that Bloomberg piece about them and how it's won a ton of awards, but also just like really needs to make money. You know, like what does winning an Oscar get you beyond prestige? Yeah, you know, I think that's a really interesting question. And I'm not entirely sure it's been quantified yet. It's certainly prestigious. And there are a lot of

pros and cons that come with winning an Academy Award. I think there's this kind of curse and lore of like young actors or actresses who win Academy Awards very early on in their career. And how does that put them on a different trajectory, whether for success or for not success, depending on... Yeah, listen, Adrienne Brody won that Oscar and then immediately tried to smoke weed live on SNL. Yeah. Didn't work. Yeah.

He wasn't invited back. Well, then there's people who win Oscars and they don't work for a really long time, or they have kind of failed project after failed project. I don't necessarily know if there's a one-to-one with a studio winning an award and having increased revenue or box office numbers overall. I think there is a trend that we can see of...

Actors or performers or directors or artists who are on the rise, getting recognition that helps them in their career. If you're labeled as Academy Award winner, Yasmin, that's a pretty good thing to have, I think, on your resume. I don't necessarily, I can't say if it makes you more money. I can't say how it helps with your box office sales, but it definitely is prestigious. Josh, do we think if I got an Academy Award, they'd promote me at work? Oh.

Um, it depends on what your article output is that year. I'm just saying.

There you go. That's the one-to-one. Yeah, there we go. That's basically how it works. Now, I want to talk about, you know, there are some movies that we all talk about, and I think it's fine to say this, answer this how you will, but like, look, Crash won an Academy Award. We can all agree. I don't know if you can, Ali, on air, but like Crash is an insane movie to win an Academy Award. I did watch it when I was like nine when it came out, and I was like, Oh, yeah, me too. This movie solved racism. That's crazy.

crazy. I watched it again. I have not seen it since the first time I watched it, which was when it came out. It was like, we probably got it at Blockbuster or something. Yeah. Like the whole family sat and watched Crash. And the definition of like an Oscar movie, I think has really changed in the last, I don't

I don't know, maybe 10 years. A lot of it I think is now, you know, there are 10 Best Picture nominees instead of five. So it really opens up the window. And that's how you can see some, you know, these smaller studio, more independent films going up toe to toe with blockbusters. And also letting in films that are maybe more technically ambitious or more spectacle versus some that are kind of these quiet, you know, traditional Oscar performances.

I love award season. I thought you were about to say I love Crash and I was like...

I'm coming out as a true-sitter. My opinion about Crash is neither here nor there. But I do love award season, and I get to be involved with it through my job, but I also get to do it on my other things that I do outside of my day-to-day job. I get to do a lot of things around award season, which is, you know, it's very fun. And I genuinely like tracking everything and seeing what's going to happen. The best part about it is people can predict...

pundits can make their guesses, folks can say what they think are going to win, but at the end of the day, it's a surprise, and there are always surprises, and we never know. One kind of quirk about how the Academy Awards work is that branches will nominate for their own branch. So the sound designers are nominating for sound.

The editors nominate for editors. Everyone can vote. So editors are voting for actors and actors are voting on cinematography. That's so funny because like in what world do like best supporting actors know anything about sound editing? One would hope that some of them do. One would hope that some of them do. I don't know. The way Nicole Kidman whispers into a microphone, I don't think she does. Yeah.

I don't know if she's won an award for best supporting actor, but she's definitely around there. Her sound designers then know how to mix that sound really well then. So she probably knows. Not on Big Little Lies they don't. You know, it is interesting. I think that's one of those things you can't predict. And even when I go in being like, this one, it's got to be this. It has to be this. There have been a few times in the past few years where I was shocked.

shocked. Like, yeah, could not have told you that that was going to happen. And I think that's because the idea of an Oscars film of an Oscar bait has totally 180, you know, biopics are a huge thing. And so there's, I think jury's still out on does a biopic win you an Oscar or does it say, well, so-and-so won for playing a musician already. So we can't give this person one for playing a musician. That makes a lot of sense. And it's funny. I do.

I do think... Now, I'm going to ask this. You're going to have to figure out how to answer it. But...

You know, I mentioned Bradley Cooper at the beginning of the episode. He just this week has managed to give an interview about the fact that he wasn't sure if he loved his daughter that much. And also a clip resurfaced of him saying he really missed Leonard Bernstein and crying, even though he'd never met Leonard Bernstein. And I guess what I'm asking here is we don't need to talk about him specifically, but is there such a thing as wanting an Oscar too much? You know what I mean?

Like, how does that affect your campaign? I'll answer for you. Yes, it's that. It's that. Oh, God. He drives me insane. I'm sorry. I'm going to get dragged on our comments for this. Are you going to get dragged? I don't know. I don't know any Bradley Cooper stans. They're out there. They're out there. Yeah. They're out there.

My wife may or may not be one of them. Really? And we may or may not have had multiple fights about Bradley Cooper. She's going to listen to this and be like, I need to... She doesn't listen to the podcast. I've been seeing that pop up because my... We'll talk about this when we get to the game. My Twitter, my X timeline has been out of control with like three very specific things lately. But the fourth thing is the Bradley Cooper interviews.

if I wanted to win an Oscar personally, I would really want to win an Oscar. Yeah. So everyone who wants to win, I think really wants to win. I think it's safe to assume that if people want to win an Oscar, they want to win. The Bradley Cooper stuff really is reminding me of Anne Hathaway with Les Mis. Oh,

Oh, great point. And she really wanted to win for Les Mis, and she was very vocal about it. She was not pretending that she wasn't interested in winning an Oscar, and she was very vocal about it in her interviews, in her appearances. And she got a lot of blowback. She got a lot of pushback. She got a lot of flack. And it turned into that period of time where people didn't like Anne Hathaway, never me.

I've always been team Anne. I love her. With Bradley Cooper, what I think we're seeing is him and opportunities for people to connect with

reporters, with TikTokers and with, you know, interviewers, it's like a direct interaction then with viewers. So we're not really seeing this, the sheen and behind. It's not mediated. Yeah. And there are, there are strategies, there are talking points, there are all of these things that go into the campaign. A lot of it though. And he just forgot all of them.

I don't know. He's the same. I mean, I went to theater school before I went to J school. I know exactly who this person is. He's just this particular AT like acting track major who is, it's Jeremy strong falls into kind of the same, uh,

standpoint who's just insufferable like they're just this particular type of like straight white male actor who just hates everything oh sure yeah but this isn't about your problematic traits this is about Bradley Cooper's

I'm versing on defamation, I think. At some point with this, I just really don't like Bradley Cooper. I'm sure he loves his daughter, though. Yeah. I'm going to bail out of this.

I think the quote was taken out of context. What context makes that okay? I'm kidding. It's still a crazy thing to say. Stellan Skarsgård was just on the red carpet for Dune. Someone asked him a question and he was like, it's a really long answer and you want the short TikTok answer. You want the quick answer that fits into a soundbite and I can't give that to you. And the woman said, you can just say no if you don't want to answer. And he went, no.

And that's another thing. It's like, how are you prepping for soundbites? You know, again, in social media age where it's tweets or, you know, posts on X and TikTok videos and snippets on Instagram. How do you narrow down that into like a soundbite? And it's a big thing that needs to be taken into consideration.

I love Stellan Skarsgård, though. Ever since New York Magazine did a, I think it was Vulture, did an oral history of Mamma Mia that talked about the fact that Stellan Skarsgård was just a horrible dancer. And every time the camera came on, he'd like forget all the moves. He was just, Vanity Fair just did an interview with him and he talks about that. He's like, I was hired to be in a musical and I can't sing and dance and I really tried my best.

They asked him, they were like, would you be in a Mamma Mia 4 or whatever? I guess I think there's three of them. Or would you be in a Mamma Mia 3? There are only two. There are only two. Would you be in a Mamma Mia 3? And he said, I will be there in an urn. You just saw.

We just saw they all had so much fun making that movie. Like, if I had a time machine, I'd like to stop by. So something that I've noticed is also that ahead of the Oscars, there's just so many events. You know, you'll have like, I don't know, Oppenheimer brunch, but probably not a real event. But, um...

Come to Oppenheimer Brunch. It's like the antithesis of a drag brunch. It's just... It's like basically a funeral. Yeah. There are so many events going on. Or when I went to see Killers of the Flower Moon, they had the costumes on display at the AMC on the Upper West Side. How does that play into everything? So just as people are spending a lot of time online, people are desperate to go out and do things.

I think the return to theaters, you know, with Barbie Oppenheimer mania showed how people are excited, not just about movies, but to be around other people who like movies. So events have always been a really, really, really big part of award season. That's going all the way back to the very beginning. And there are brunches and dinners.

and screenings and panels and Q&As. And that's with talent and directors and stars and also with artisans. They can be as intimate, again, as a conversation with the costume designer all the way to a screening and a panel. And so you mentioned Killers of the Flower Moon, how they had a costume display in theaters at the AMC. Variety covered an immersive exhibit

So it had costumes, it had sets, it had props, it had behind the scenes footage. It was people really getting into the world and experiencing the film from a lot of different layers that are a little bit, you can't experience something like that

every day. That's not something, you know, and on every day people get the opportunity to really go into film and it was open to the public. And so it wasn't just for voters. It also was for recognizing the film and getting the film out there because you have to sustain, you know, the kind of the fourth campaign is the public opinion campaign.

Everybody's posting, everybody's tweeting, everybody's talking. They're not voting, those folks, but they're getting exposure to the film. So they're going to convince voters, basically, to... Well, you're having a conversation with people and you're saying, you know, all right, what did you see? I saw this. It was so amazing. Or did you see, I went to the Killers of the Flower Moon costume display and they had these hats and I went to see a panel with this film and they had, I went to Oppenheimer brunch. Yeah.

And so people have these conversations and they're posting about the films and that kind of continues all the way through. You know, the third thing on my Twitter timeline now is the Willy Wonka experience that happened in Glasgow. My favorite. I mean, it just...

Oh, so funny.

So costume displays are always a big one. Hollywood Reporter covered, they had a virtual version of that. And it was a similar thing in-depth look, but all virtual. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Rathi Sahilovek, president of The RealReal, about the company's turnaround plans. Luxury consignment platform The RealReal has struggled to prove to investors that it can actually be a profitable company. But last week, the company announced that it actually had its first profitable quarter.

Here, President Rati Sahilovec explains how the company turned things around. We started out by talking about how a garment moves through the RealReal system and basically how the company was losing money at each step of the process. Rati, I think the best way to start all this, maybe for you to take us through the journey of a consignment and talk about the ways in which you were losing money at each step. And then we're going to go back and talk about the changes you've made. You

Yeah, sure. So let's go back. Yeah, zoom out for a second. When a seller consigns their goods and what that looks like and how we kind of think about that consignment process, we have a few different channels that you can consign with us. You can drop off at a store. You can work with a luxury sales manager and they can come to your house and pick up the goods. Yeah.

You can do a FaceTime and do something virtually. You can put something in a box and send it directly to us. All of the channels work really well for us. And the consigner likes the convenience factor and it's super sticky. And most consigners consign in more than one way. But what we found kind of post-COVID was some of the items that we were taking from the consigner was unprofitable.

So when we looked at the unit economics by item, we looked at it by item and then we looked at it by consigner and by consignment, we found that some of the goods we were losing money on, to be honest with you. And it came down to price point. It came down to category sometimes.

items under a certain price point, let's say $50 when they sold, we do authenticate. We do take possession. We authenticate every item. We photograph every item. We have a call center that takes care of the thousands of contacts we get every day. We're processing a million items or a million items are going through our ecosystem every month, unique SKUs.

And that does take work. So what we did was we kind of zoomed out. We said, where do we need to kind of change the way we're thinking about our business? We did look at our commission structure. And so what we did was we took more on some of these items that were lower value. So items under $50 or items under $100.

So just so I understand, you know, I want to talk about an example, right? So if I came in with a sweater from a brand that The RealReal sells or takes in, but I

is not, you know, on the higher end of things. So I came in with, you know, a sweater from Maj or something and it was put up for sale on the site for $100. What would I have gotten previously and what would I get now when it sells? Sure. Yeah. So it depends on the listing price. So items under $100, let's say it was put on for $95. I think that's where you're going. It

What was there, you would have gotten 30 to 40 percent and now you're getting closer to 20 percent of that item. And what we're finding is based on all of our awareness and our elasticity of our service is that consignors are less price sensitive in the items in the lower value in that tier. They're more, you know, looking at the pricing to mid value and high value.

So what we were able to do was give the consigner more money on the high value. And that's really important to understand because I don't think, you know, we did hear the education around that I think is really important. Now you're earning more in that mid to high value, but less in the lower value tiers. Got it. So, you know, a high value item might be a Chanel jacket. What would I have gotten previously? What would I get? Say if it was put on the site for, you know, $1,500. Yeah.

If you were put on the site for $1,500, it depends on your price tier. So it's a little more complicated than that. What I mean by that is it depends on your loyalty status. So if you're VIP, you would earn five to 10 points more based on that. So it's really the more you sell, the more you earn.

So you changed it to basically reward people who sell a lot and sell a lot of high value items. And just high value items in general, right? And mid value as well. So really just focused on items over the $100 threshold. And by doing that, it changed our unit economics.

And now our unit economics now work. So now all the items and all the consignments across every price tier is now profitable. Another thing that, from what I understand, you changed about the assortment on the site was that during COVID especially, some retailers were actually offloading inventory onto the RealReal. Now that's not the case as much anymore. I mean...

Tell me about that. Yeah. So we always had the business. It was a vendor business and we've always had that. And that's more of a B2B play. What we did that was very specific. So it was always a certain, it's a very small chunk of our business. I always say it's like filler product. Most of our product comes from the consignor's home. And so what we did during COVID and that kind of got us in trouble, to be honest with you, was we went out and we bought

Yeah, just an example.

The problem was that it was always filler products for us. It's not always as unique as the product that we get from our consignors. So we're really doubling down on our core business. It's all about our core business and that product that comes directly from the seller and really listening to see what they need to make their experience more frictionless. So yes, during COVID, we couldn't get into people's homes. So we went out and we bought that product.

Again, it doesn't sell through as fast. The margins are much lower. We make much less money and we were losing money on that product. So that goes back to mix. So we changed the commission structure and then we changed the mix of our products, that being one of them. We got way too deep into kids, which is like, you know, a $20, $30 price point that doesn't make sense for us.

And we refocused the kids category. We took home and art. There's people that do that better than us. We don't need to do that. And things break. It was a big task for our operations. And so we had to kind of come back on that too.

Something that Coral, John Coral, who is the CEO of the company, told me was that in the past, the RealReal took in a lot of inventory and you were storing it in warehouses. Now you started to open a business where using dropshipping, you're able to work with certain vendors and not hold that inventory. Yeah, and this is super early days. Like we're testing and learning this year. Does this work for us?

Does this make sense? Can we aggregate? When I think of this product, though, I think about opening other channels and opening huge markets around watches, really sticking to our differentiator, which is unique product, not getting back into the B2B vendor play. It more is the aggregator of watches, the aggregator's

So it might be like a specialty vintage watch retailer rather than Rolex itself. That's right. A consignment shop, aggregators of product. And can they upload directly, making sure that it looks just like our site so you as a consumer, you won't be able to notice the difference between where that product is coming from.

And then that person will go ahead and send the product directly to the consumer. So that helps us because you don't have all the costs of inbound. But again, it's super early days. We don't, we're not baking in very much upside to the plan based on this. This is one of those things that focus on our core business, 70%, 30%. Is there...

something else there? Is there another channel that we need to explore? Is there international? Is there dropship? Is there data monetization? You know, what can this other 30% look like? Something else that caught my eye in earnings and in talking to Coral is the fact that you all have changed the process by which you photograph the order in which, you know, you photograph an item and then price it, authenticate it, put it on the site. And it sounds

like you're using some AI or machine learning to help there. Yeah, so we're super excited about that. We've been working on that for many years, but really have made some huge strides over the last, I'd say, 18 months, 12 to 18 months. And

And most of our handbags will be authenticated via AI because we've got 13 years of data. And because we are one of the only resellers that takes possession, we actually have 13 years of hard data and attribution on a pixel level of these handbags.

So we're able to really understand. It's something called vision. We're able to see if an item is real or fake based on that. And then it goes through different channels. Does it go through a high-risk authenticator? Is it a low-risk authenticator? Where was this item purchased? What was the origin? Who's the consigner? What's their email?

Are they repeat or new? So all of that is based on AI and is really powered. The algorithm is all powered. And really that one unique item, we can tell which direction it needs to go. And the idea is that we are automating most of that upfront work.

So right now, think about many years ago when we first started. You think of an authenticator. They're sitting there. The item's coming through. You're typing the designer. You're typing the condition. You're typing the color. You're typing the measurements, the materials, the sizing. It takes a long time.

Pricing, all of that. Now you get an item, you take a picture of it. Most of all of what I just said gets automated based on the picture and one picture of the tag and it goes straight to put away.

authentication now is more and more automated. We used to have 30% of our inventory is fine jewelry and watches, and we have to authenticate that, right? And you think of a tennis bracelet, and it's got many diamonds on it, and you have to count the melee on each stone. That used to take hours, and now it takes seconds based on a new technology that we patent with the University of Arizona. Now we put it through a machine. It tells you right away. There's a lot of hardware that we've created to make...

our process is much more efficient. And now instead of hiring a GIA or a certified gemologist, which we still need to oversee everything because it's all art and science,

Now I can hire a technician to process these items much more quickly. Do you ever see yourself selling that kind of technology or patent to other firms? Like, could that be a side business for The Real Oriel? That's definitely been a conversation and we're, you know, always opportunistic with things like that. But I would say not our focus at this time is...

It's really about kind of empowering us to kind of be the best, you know, at this. And we're so far ahead in so many ways. We always get asked, you know, well, can other people do it? First of all, that's great. It's great for resale, great for the environment. There's lots of room for resale, but also the way we can process millions of items. Again, unique SKUs and the hardware and software that we've built.

to be able to process that through our ecosystem. Think about it, like a million items to like another one person and how that gets to them, you know, is no easy feat and kind of took us 13 years to build. The other thing, and I'll say this, I'll speak from personal experience for a second. I recently, I resold some stuff, so I had store credit and then I played an insane coupon game on The RealReal and got a $500 Tom Ford dress for $30. Nice. So,

Which you may do not go back into my account and try and figure out how this happened because I plan on repeating that. But you have changed the way you reward loyal customers or offer them coupons at least. It seems like the marketing funnel is a little different. It's just a much more personalized approach. We are getting smarter about the ROI, the return on investment for every dollar that we spend in marketing.

A lot of this is driven out of, again, our more personalized approach and especially in the promotional environment. We know more around when you come to the site, how you come to the site by a few different clicks, if you're intending to buy or not,

when we need to give you the promotion, how we need to give it to you, and just kind of more options there, right? Versus like a blanket 20% off to everyone. That's really been a game changer in a lot of ways, but we don't just do it on the buyer side. We do it on the seller side as well. So I guess just to give some examples to our listeners, it would be like instead of offering 20% off to every customer through the site,

you might offer one consumer, if you spend more than $200, you'll get 30% off your purchase. Or free shipping or, you know, I know that you're really into this Chanel jacket and maybe you only need $30 to move it and we'll kind of target you differently for sure. And then for sellers, it's like if you can sign more than X amount of items, you may get some store credit in your account or something like that. Is that sort of how it works?

That's exactly right. And we know if a consigner is incentivized by store credit versus cash versus a loyalty program. So pieces like that. I mean, I feel like we've covered a lot as far as smaller changes to the company, but there are a few more that I wanted to talk about a little bit, which is I know when I spoke to Coral a while ago, he was talking about something that seemingly every platform has done over the past few years, which is add ads to platforms.

your offerings. Tell me about progress on that and how you thought about or how you think about whether that would sort of dilute the luxury aspect of the, you know, shopping experience. To be totally honest with you, when we did ads on site, we were at a different place in the company, right? We didn't know if the unit economics was going to work or not. What does that look like? We had to test different things.

And ads on site, you know, it's not very lucrative. We're not finding it work for our platform. And there may be a version that does and we'll continue to test because that's what we do here. And then maybe there's something around propensity data or data monetization, maybe a more sophisticated way we can do it. And we'll continue to test just like we're testing dropship, but we're

finding that the ads on the site is not as lucrative as we would like it to be. It's all a numbers game, right? Like if the conversion increases or declines and so much comes in around ads on site, it would make sense. And sometimes it doesn't make sense as we test to new things. So we're kind of in that phase. We're trying to figure out

Does the math work or not? And I think we're finding that the math's not quite working. So we're going to kind of figure out other ways to get there. I think the more important thing is, like I keep saying this, but our core business now works and is very lucrative. And so we're really focused on that. And we're really excited to see these growth numbers come back to life and really around profitable growth.

I can't share too much, but I shared on earnings. Q1 is quite healthy and we're kind of going back to that growth type of business versus these side projects and really kind of focused on our core. Totally. And I'll be honest with you. I am a crazy real, real shopper. Like it's absolutely in my personal interest for this company to keep doing well. But I have been

impressed. You know, when I first heard of this plan, I was like, I don't know if this is going to work in a short amount of time. And you all have managed to become cash flow positive for a quarter within six months. What are some of the other sort of business either expansion or changes that you've made, you know, that maybe we haven't covered?

So it's a year, it's been 12 to 18 months. When we made the commission change, it was 22. It was October of 2022. We had to keep tweaking it and it didn't quite work at first. And so now you're seeing, and we always said you would see it in the back half of 2023. And we said that to investors. We said that to analysts. It was really important to me. Yeah.

And the reason why is because we weren't going to go backwards and change our inventory. This is everything go forward. So it was going to take time for all of our inventory to get onto this new commission structure, right? But as far as like what we're doing go forward, you know, now it's back to growth. It's back to profitability, continuing to kind of optimizing our business. We're launching programs and testing programs where...

around the affiliate and referral program for supply. We're a supply-constrained business, right? We kind of had an incubator in Q4 around some of these programs. The ones that are working, we're going to start systematizing this year. We're looking at other channels, like I said, going bigger in some of these higher value categories.

marketing and sales are working really well together. I always, we always joke that everything old is new again, because how we started was it was a certain profile out in the field that knew how to clientele that weren't as transactional. And we're going back to that kind of relationship based selling. And we're going back to that clienteling in the field. That is a huge differentiator for us. These people with the relationships out in the field are

that are bringing in millions of dollars of product every year. So kind of, again, doubling down in some of these core growth strategies and continuing to optimize our operations, listening to our consumer and marketing spend. So you had a big debt overhang that was coming due in 2024. Tell me about how you figured that out, how you sort of refinanced it and made it less of an urgent burden on the business.

That's really exciting for us. And it was a huge win for us. There were a lot of people out there that said that we wouldn't be able to refinance. We were less concerned about it going into it because we knew that there was a path to refinance the debt. But we're very happy it buys us more time to execute against this vision that we just talked about and getting back to growth and doubling down on our core business and really showing that this thing can be a real success

sustainable company. When I think about sustainability, I think about profitability too for our shareholders, for our consumers, and for our employees. It's really nice to have that time to kind of execute on this vision. You know, when you have 13 years worth of consumer data, I can totally see how it optimizes things on the site. Do you use it for anything else? Do you give it to third parties? Do you use it for forecasting? What does that look like?

Yeah, we do use it for forecasting internally, but we are not sharing any of the data. And that goes back to our other conversation about ads and revenue and, you know, do we monetize our data in the future? And that's a conversation, but that is not something we're focused on right now.

And no, we don't do that. We really are focused on our luxury resale report. I'm sure you've seen that. Yes. The consumer price index. We'd love to be able to show our consigner how much they can earn real time, like a Kelly Blue Book for pricing. So really give them that pricing transparency before they send the product to us.

internal uses is what we're focused on right now. What cracks me up about that luxury resale report is I've read it for the past two years and I'm like, oh, guess I should buy more Birkins. Like I have the money to do that. You know, it's like...

I know. It is always really funny. You're like, who are buying all these Birkins? I know. You're like, okay, great. Well, what is the last thing you consigned and what is the last great purchase you've made on the site? Oh, man. So, okay. I bought a Miu Miu shoulder bag.

it's like pink and white striped that I just love and I wear it all the time and it's really random, but it's awesome. I, it's just, yeah. I mean, I, no one knows what to think when I'm like carrying it around, but I love it. And, um, what did I consign? Oh, you know what I consigned last was the, um, Totem quilted jacket. I loved it. And I went back and forth on it and it was

It sat in my consign pile for actually months. And then I finally gave it up. I wanted one so bad for a long time. But even at resale, it's just so much money. And I feel like the issue is that it was the jacket of this year. So like next year, it's going to feel old. But you were right to consign it right now. It's all about timing, right? Exactly. I always try and game the system with my $70 sweaters, which is just...

I'm totally looking back at your coupon, figuring out what happened there. I walked around the office and told a bunch of people who did not give a shit. I was like, guys, do you understand what I did? Anyway.

Thanks. Yeah. Thank you so much for chatting us through all this. I mean, it's a business that I obviously love. It's cool to be able to talk about a company's turnaround strategy in real time and to see it working. Yeah, I know. I feel like it was a once in a lifetime kind of career moment for sure. And it was, it feels so good to be able to do this for the employees and for the consumer and all of that. So we always talk about you at the office. We're like, is that, yeah, it's on the phone. Who's that? Yeah.

You're just like a part of the team. Thanks, Rathi.

Okay, we are back with Allie and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, a trend, or a piece of pop culture we're following right now. And Allie, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? I'm keeping tabs on two stories that have merged into one story. And it is the disappearance of Kate Middleton. Oh, thank you for bringing this up. And the Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow. Okay.

Because I've seen on my timeline, Kate Middleton is working at the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow.

Kate Middleton has not been photographed since Christmas. No one has seen her. There's been kind of ambiguous statements from Kensington Palace about she's recovering from surgery and she's fine and don't worry about it. And naturally people are suspicious of that because where has she been? She was like out and about two days after she had one of her kids. So where could she be? Simultaneously, there was a

Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow that had like beautiful renders and it was all AI. Like it looked gorgeous and people bought $45 and bought tickets and showed up and it was like Target props and...

like a lady in a wig and it continues to delight. There's a character called the unknown who lives in the walls and hides behind mirrors and he scares children and I just need to know everything about the Willy Wonka experience. They've interviewed the actor who plays Willy Wonka. The script has leaked and like professionally I'm fascinated about it because it's one of those things where you're like oh my gosh like this

someone put on this event and it's what is happening here my brain can't begin to process how this could have happened but then it's also like ai like people looked at this they saw the poster and the renderings is beautiful all the words are gibberish it's like carty tons and spassel sweat treats like complete gibberish people paid money to go see this

No one knows where Kate Middleton is, so she must be at the Willy Wonka. She's trapped. She's playing the unknown, the Willy Wonka Glasgow experience. And now that that's closed, maybe she'll come back. I love that. So...

Yeah, it's been a wild 48 hours on the internet. I feel like we're not going to be able to come up with any better. But Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? That's a good keeping tabs. Did you see the guy who wore an Apple Vision Pro at his wedding? Yes. That was going to be my keeping tabs. That's so good. It's so good. Apparently, I just read a Mashable article about it. Apparently, he didn't wear it during the ceremony, but he popped those on afterwards. But the picture at the top

the article is just terrific it's just this poor this poor woman looking like she looks so unhappy she looks so unhappy and this dude just was like a

a smile doing the mansplaining hand gesture that i think the thing is so you know that's the only way i can explain it with an apple vision pro on and it just looks so 2024 i think this is one of the images of 2024 also within utah so there's this beautiful mountain range in the back he's like i don't want to see it i don't want to see the fake version it's my favorite thing ever

Yaz, what about you? What's your keeping tabs? So I am keeping tabs on an eight-year-old girl who recently sang the national anthem at a Pacers game. And her name is Kinsley Murray. She looked amazing. She sounded... Listen, people are talking about her voice. She's eight years old. And it's a hard song to sing. And acapella, nonetheless. This is me, former...

Joshua Christensen, the singer coming out. The relativity between her notes within a phrase was fine. It's going from phrase to phrase. She changed keys, which adults do that who sing the national anthem all the time, like that are like trained professional singers. And then she just hasn't learned how to use her mix belt yet. Because again, she's eight, but she's going to be a good singer someday. I guarantee it. And she's a star. And listen, listen.

You can't learn that kind of charisma. No, you can't teach that. She's great. I'm big, number one fan of Kinsley Murray. Big fan of Kinsley Murray. Anyway, that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Ali, thank you so much for joining us. Oh my gosh, thanks for having me.

Our show is produced by Oscar winners Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mix and sound design by Oscar nominee Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen, People's Choice Awards number one viewer. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.