Perplexity CEO slams Google
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I'm Yasmin Gagne. I'm Josh Christensen. And this is Most Innovative Companies. ♪

On today's episode, Fast Company executive editor Amy Farley... Kind of was exactly what you wanted that ChatGPT wasn't giving you, which is an absolute ability to not hallucinate. Fast Company senior staff writer Jeff Beer... People did not like this ad. People were very angry. People had lots of feelings. And, as always, keeping tabs. Trump's over here being like, Hannibal Lecter was a great man. Gone too soon. But first, here's the download. ♪

The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation. Remember when a bunch of people got sick from eating daily harvest? Sure do. I think that stuff's now available in Target. Probably. I think. Is it? Isn't it actually? I think so. Yeah. Okay. It's probably one of some of the food that's being reduced in price. Yeah.

I don't know why that got me off guard so much. Well, two years after almost 500 people were sickened from consuming Tara flour and daily harvest French lentil and leek crumbles, the FDA has ruled that the ingredient is not safe to eat and is now illegal to use. The FDA is really on it, huh? Yeah, they're really on top of it. Two years later, they're like, meh.

Don't eat this. Food safety experts hope that this ruling will prompt the FDA to take a closer look into chemicals and ingredients used by food manufacturers. So everyone who's getting sick from certain chemicals can look forward to justice in two to five years. Yeah.

And if you're interested in that news, we actually did an episode about this a while back. You can go back and listen to it. Yeah, scroll back in our feed. In other food news, Target announced on Monday that it will actually lower prices on about 5,000 popular items as food prices continue to soar. Those items include paper towels, fruit, vegetables, and diapers.

Items from Target's brand Good & Gather will also be affected. Hell yeah. I'm going to stock up on my Good & Gather trail mix. Oh my God. The way I buy Good & Gather like bags of popcorn and just eat them with a spoon at my desk is crazy. Yeah. I love a Good & Gather. Mm-hmm.

Next, Scarlett Johansson has finally spoken out about the resemblance between the voice of the new chat GPT assistant Sky and her voice in the 2013 movie Her, where she played an AI chatbot. Of course, we talked about this last week in the newscast.

Johansson claims that Sam Altman had previously reached out about hiring her to voice the system and she had declined. Apparently it was two times and that's just what we know of. He seemed pretty thirsty to get Scarlett Johansson. You know when you have a crush on someone so you invent any excuse to hang out with them?

This absolutely has that vibe. Do you want to do our problem sets together? Yeah, just trying to game your way into a group project assignment in high school. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we've all been there. OpenAI denies any intentional resemblance and says they have paused the use of the voice. Sure, Jan.

Over the weekend, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a measure that would set a minimum wage of $1.28 per mile and $0.31 per minute for gig drivers, replacing the higher minimum that provoked Uber and Lyft to threaten to leave the state. You can actually go back and listen to our conversation with Lyft CEO David Risher to learn more about this whole issue. The ride-hailing companies announced on Tuesday that they would stay in Minnesota, concluding months of fighting between them and state legislatures. But

the nationwide legal battle over gig drivers is far from over. California's top state court will actually consider a labor union's challenge to a ballot measure known as Prop 22 that allows services like Uber and Lyft to classify drivers in the state as independent contractors rather than as employees entitled to the minimum wage, overtime pay, and other protections. Godspeed, guys. You definitely deserve overtime pay, protections, and minimum wage. And it's kind of insane when you phrase it like that to say no.

But yeah, it's it would seem insane. But then again, this is where we are. Mm hmm.

Microsoft unveiled a new AI-powered PC, which comes just days after Google unveiled its most powerful AI system to date, and OpenAI debuted ChatGPT 4.0. My God, the amount of AIs in that sentence. So many AIs. I mean, really. Do you think when Sam Altman introduces himself, he says he puts the I in AI? I would do that. Yeah, I would do that. Yeah.

Microsoft claims the new PC named Copilot will be 58% faster than the MacBook Air M3 and will incorporate the latest OpenAI GPT model. Copilot features will include Recall, a reminder functionality, which, spoiler alert, I don't want any part of. The functionality can pull up

anything you've accessed before, whether that's something you forgot to pin on Pinterest or an older chat where you were discussing something with a friend, for example. Nightmare. Don't want that. Yeah, absolutely terrible. You know how sometimes you'll like, at the end of a day, I always do this in the shower, which is super lame, but if you've had an argument with someone, you'll like relive that argument. Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah. That's why I don't sleep most nights. Yeah, but I don't want actual evidence.

No, I don't. I don't want that. I don't want AI resurfacing my drafts. I don't want that. The potential for AI integration into PCs and laptops has reinvigorated analysts' and investors' interest after a slowdown over the past several years, with analysis from Gartner estimating that shipments of the AI-focused PC will double this year. And that's the news you need to know today.

So Josh, is there a company you would like to call out publicly? Well, at risk of losing our jobs, I guess, for things, I'm going to call out Pringles. I've felt this way for a long time. I have large hands. I cannot fit my hand to get Pringles out of the can.

When it's below like four chips. Incredible problem. It's so annoying. And then they have commercials about it now of like people getting their hands stuck in it, which I think is funny and like an interesting turn for them. But just like make a different ergonomic size container for your Pringles. It's so annoying. I hate it so much. What about you? Do you want to call out a company and get fired? Well,

Well, so I want to preface this by saying I am generally... I generally approve of Universal Pictures. I think Donna Langley is great. I interviewed Liz Jenkins, who's the chief business officer. I think she's great, too. I am also, as our listeners may know, a huge Minions fan. I'm obsessed with them. Obsessingly huge Minions fan. I'm actually going to the premiere of the new Minions movie. That's amazing. But I'll say this. Why did they make Wicked a two-parter and...

in the trailer, they don't make it clear that it's only part one. No, they need to be clear that it's just part one, which means that part one is going to end with defying gravity, which is, which is cool. Which is cool. But then that means like most of the best songs are not going to be an act two. Yeah. Unless they're reprising some things, but it's like, you don't get the wizard and I, you don't get to find gravity. You don't get popular. Um,

Like you miss a lot of like the big songs. Like you're going to have to like roll with no good deed goes unpunished and for good. And enjoy it. Great, great cast. The trailer looks good. I'm just saying two parts. You're asking me to pay for two cinema tickets. That's a lot.

So we're going to turn and talk about some serious stuff now. We're back to AI, Fast Company's favorite topic. By now, we're used to talking to AI chatbots, and we're used to Googling something to find an answer. Last week, though, Google launched a new feature that combines the two called AI overviews. Unfortunately, a lot of people on the internet had a lot of bad things to say about it.

The feature, which, yes, people are trying to turn off at the moment, is designed to actually reduce the number of searches users make. But the idea of combining a chatbot, a search tool, and an encyclopedia has actually been championed and refined by a two-year-old startup called Perplexity. The ambitious startup...

which calls itself an answer engine. Think like Ask Jeeves, but actually useful. It has been funded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA. The stakes are high here. If Perplexity can pull off its mission, the company could become, according to some, a Google killer. Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas spoke at our Most Innovative Companies Summit last week, and he actually had some choice words about Google's new features and the future of his own company. We spoke to executive editor Amy Farley to unpack what he said.

Hi, Amy. Hi, Yas. Hi, Josh. So let's get into it. I think last time, what was the last time we had you on the podcast? I guess MIC Trends, although we had your daughter on. That's right. More recently. My legendary influencer. You're here to talk about something a little less fun than being a teen at Sephora. So let's talk a little bit about Perplexity AI. The company describes itself as an answer engine.

What does that actually mean? Right. So perplexity offers a new way to search for information online. Basically, what you do is you pose it a question.

as you would a chatbot, and it returns this really concise, written-through answer. It's not super long. Often it has bullet points that addresses your question, and the information that it's pulling is sourced from across the web, but crucially, it only looks at information from trusted sources, and it offers hyperlinks and sort of footnotes to all of those sources, so you really can get a sense of where the information is coming from.

Basically what it does is... This sounds like an Axios newsletter. That's exactly right. Yes, I'd never thought of it that way. That's exactly right. I use it in Privileged City a lot when I'm going to meet with somebody to sort of prep and I think of it as my Tony Hale, just kind of like whispering all the important information in my ear. But it combines, what's cool about it is it combines the traditional capabilities of a large language model and the traditional capabilities of a search engine and puts them together and you have this sort of new way to search the web for information.

It sort of doesn't, you know how Google has these sort of blue links that are the most trusted. Here you don't need to search anything. It just comes up with a block of text, right? It comes up with a block of text. It does have the hyperlinks, which is its version of the links. I interviewed founder Arvind Srinivas last week at Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Gala, and he described perplexity as if ChatGPT and Wikipedia came together and had a baby.

And I think that's totally true. He said, except that the data comes from the whole of the web. And I think that's true, but I think of it more as something that's landing right squarely in between Google, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT. So let's talk a little about Arvind. Tell me about him and his background.

So he's really interesting. He has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, a bachelor's and a master's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, which, Yaz, you said is like MIT? Yeah, it's like the MIT of India. And then he spent time at Google and DeepMind. And then he was crucially a year at OpenAI. He left to co-found Perplexity in August 2022. That's four months before the launch of ChatGPT, for those of you who are keeping score at home.

I wonder if he saw any money from it. Probably, I bet he had some stock. He said he didn't know when he left that what OpenAI was going to release would be a hit. He said, Dolly, they were like, yeah, it's cool. But he really did not see that there was going to be this sea change coming in November 2022 when they launched ChatGPT. But he and his co-founders in the meantime had been circling around this idea of this answer engine. And it's interesting because Perplexity came out

a month later in December, 2022. And what it delivered really is different from ChatGPT and kind of was exactly what you wanted that ChatGPT wasn't giving you, which is like concision and an absolute ability to not hallucinate and to cite its sources. So that's where it landed in kind of the ChatGPT pantheon. He really sees his company as up against the big tech giants, which it is,

And he's very outspoken about that. We'll go into that in a little bit. But as we teased up front, Arvind made some waves at this year's Most Innovative Companies Gala. And let's get into what he actually said. Sure. So I interviewed him on stage. We put perplexity on our list of the top 50 companies. And

And this interview was scheduled weeks ago and we were all ready to go. But that week of the interview, Google really started, it had been sort of playing around with its version of an answer engine, offering these sort of automated written through answers at the top of the search bar. But they really dialed it up last week when they unveiled what they're calling AI overviews. So I asked him about that. I asked him if he felt pressure from that. And you can hear what he says.

So I know that media loves hyperbole sometimes and we have, not us personally, but some have called you the Google killer. Just this week, Google has now been really rolling out its AI generated answers, which was basically its response to what you're doing. Can you explain how you feel about that? And also, what differentiates Perplexity's approach to these answers from what Google is doing right now?

Yeah, so just to clarify, basically Google is rolling out AI overviews. And last year they called that a search generative experience or SGE. I'm pretty sure next year they'll call it another name. That's exactly how we had Hangouts and we had Meets and we had Chat and we had like Allo, Duo, just like a bunch of messaging apps. When you exactly don't know what you're supposed to do, you keep changing it.

So that's what Google does. But a more direct answer to in terms of product is that Google doesn't have any incentive to always give you AI overviews for every query. Pretty sure even after those who have tried SGE, even if you type something like shoes or like handbag, you're going to get the shopping UI with like, you know, hundreds of ads screaming at you to buy them.

And that's how they make money. So there's no incentive to spend more for those queries and give you an aggregated summary of what people are saying about different shoes so that you exactly know what you're supposed to buy versus just asking you to click on all of them and read them and buy, like, you know, waste time. That's exactly how they make money. And

Users, when they go to a product, they kind of expect something to happen. Today, I actually saw something where there are a bunch of people complaining on Google that they don't like the AI overviews and they want to be able to turn it off.

So mentally, when somebody uses a search bar, they expect instant rendering of the 10 blue links. When that changes to streaming and something else is appearing all of a sudden, and it doesn't always appear, it sometimes appears, and you're not exactly sure what's going to happen when you type in a query on Google anymore, it actually makes the product worse.

So on the other hand, in perplexity, you know exactly what's gonna happen. You always know that you're gonna get an answer. You always know that you're gonna get sources. You know that it's not meant to be like an instant navigator of the web, but you also know why you're coming to perplexity. You're not coming to perplexity to immediately get to like r/WallStreetBets. You just type it in your search bar on Google.

But you come to perplexity if you just want to know a summary of what are people on WallStreetBets subreddit talking about the recent surge in the GameStop stock, right? So that's like...

That's sort of like a user intent optimization that Google fails to achieve. They try to do all of it at once. Also, people don't like it when it's a cluttered UI. When you go to someone's house, you like it if it's clean, well-maintained, everything is pick and span, right? Versus there's laundry baskets laying around, some clothes here and there.

Dish is not done. So that's how it looks like when you have an SGE answer. There's, like, ads. There's, like, panels. There's, like, links. There's all sorts of things in, like, one single UI. It's pretty complicated. Google's messy laundry. Dirty laundry doesn't sound very nice. Well, none of it sounds very nice about Google. It was not very nice. But I think...

I think what he's making is a very valid point, which is if you go into Google right now and you get one of these AI overviews, there's a lot happening on that page, right? You've got like the AI overview and then there's a link to a page where maybe that AI overview helped inform. Then there's like the sponsor links and then there's other links and there's all the tabs and there's just a whole lot of sort of stuff competing for your attention. That's what he's talking about. That's the messy laundry he's referring to.

You know, Google has these very, these competing imperatives. They want to make sure that you use Google and that you're getting information that you like from Google, which may be an AI overview. But Google also has an advertising model and they need you to not actually get the information that you want right away because they need to insert all these other links that maybe you'll click on and other people will get traffic. And, you know, that helps Google keep that business model of advertising churning, right? Right.

Perplexity, it is the David to Google's Goliath. And so it is at a disadvantage. But its advantage is that right now it doesn't have any advertiser or even revenue really expectation. So what it can do is focus exclusively on delivering the content that addresses the user's wishes and desires. So that's what he's talking about. Right now, perplexity is 100% focused on creating the best product possible for users.

Users is the key word. Whereas Google is trying to navigate between creating a great product for both users and advertisers. And those are at odds. And how does perplexity actually work? Okay. Um,

I'm putting on my little like PhD hat here, which I don't actually have. So we're going to keep it very high level. But basically it uses a combination of third party, large language models. It uses GPT-4. It uses a model from Anthropic. It uses limistrols. It has all of these different models. And.

And it also has its own LLM that it's working on and it's developing. And it has web callers that return results that are highly relevant and fastidiously cited to you. It has kind of this overlay on top of these LLMs, which help it discern what information is relevant to you.

Another cool thing that it does, and this is sort of focused on user intent, is that it offers you follow-up questions. It will sort of infer, because he says, you know, chat GPT, man, you have to be a prompt engineer. Like they literally, you have to be a prompt engineer to get the right answer out of it. And he's saying that you shouldn't have to work that hard. So you ask a question and then we'll offer you all of these very smart follow-up questions that may move you closer to the information that you are actually seeking. Yeah.

So that's in a nutshell how it works without actually getting too deep in the weeds. Perplexity, I mean, it's crazy to say this, but it's only two years old and the Answer Engine only launched 18 months ago. How popular is it and how much money is this company raised? It is super young. It has 15 to 20 million monthly active users. That is as much information as I was able to extract from Aravind. Didn't he say they were aiming for 100 million by the end of the year? That's...

you know, I think that is an ambitious goal for them to have. Yeah. But, you know, they want to grow really quickly. The company just raised $62 million or $63 million. So that brought its total fundraising to $165 million and it's now valued at more than $1 billion. But there are rumors. Those are soft bank numbers. But,

There are rumors, literally that round just closed. And now there are rumors that it is, this is from TechCrunch, that it's now seeking another $250 million at a valuation between $2 to $3 billion.

Arvind says they need this money because they need to spend a lot right now to grow the product, to keep sort of building on this momentum that they have after only 18 months. And the people that are backing this company are pretty big. There's Daniel Gross, who's the former head of AI at Y Combinator. There's also Y Combinator CEO, Gary Tan. Jeff Bezos has invested. I mean, these are people that are seeing a lot of potential in this company. And I think

Everybody in this space sees a lot of potential, if not necessarily in perplexity, in this answer engine interface as a way to search for information online. And-

How does Perplexity actually make money? Good question. So there's a free product and then there's a pro product. And the free product is sort of like one basic search. The pro product will pull from different LLMs, from a whole slew of LLMs, and lets you save your searches and you can search anonymously and there's all these other additional things. Right now, it is currently making an annualized revenue rate of between $1,000

$15 to $20 million with that pro product. Arvind is now releasing a perplexity for enterprise product, which has like special sort of security features for larger organizations to use perplexity. So he definitely sees growth and a lot of revenue potential over there. And I think one day, I mean, it's inevitable advertising will have to sort of take root here for them to really live up to these valuations. And I think that's a big question. Now companies are like, here's how we target your 10-year-olds. Yeah.

And my 11-year-old is like, come at me. She was like, targeted, targeted. If it smells like Sol de Janeiro, you can target her. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how perplexity wrestles, and this could be years away, but how they really wrestle with integrating ads. I mean, listen, like...

We can say that Amazon is a very user-focused company and they've also, like, that interface is a health game of, like, sponsor and all that sort of stuff, but still maintain a real focus on the user at the end. So I'm not saying that we're going to end up with, like, an Amazon-like interface for performance.

Plexiglas, but you know, it'll be interesting. Whether it's for Plexiglas or Google AI, it seems like this kind of answer engine way of answering queries is not going away anytime soon. What does that mean for content producers and media organizations that rely on a business model of eyeballs coming to their sites? You know, let's caveat this with I am a journalist. Like, yeah, I feel like this is existential. It is existential. This

Anybody who is not just publishers like us, but anybody who is creating content online, like, um,

you have to rethink sort of what the purpose of that content is when an answer engine can scrape that information and restate it and offer a link, you know, to get you to your site. But, you know, Arvind said, and he has said that only 10% of users actually click those links and go through. He also says those users have a high intent, you know, so if you are a hotel, you know, and your information is being scraped up by perplexity and then there's a link there, like,

There's a high intent person who may book with you on the other side of it. I don't know exactly what that means for publishers though. And for a whole lot of content producers, it's fascinating. This company is only 18 months old and there's already SEO specialists out there that are trying to advise clients on how to figure out how to get to the top of the story.

sources that are highly cited by perplexity so that they can get that traffic. So already people are trying to rethink sort of how traffic works when you have an answer engine that's really offering the information and just the links rather than you have to get to the links to find the information. Has Fast Company figured that out? I'm not the

I'm not the person you need to ask about that, but I don't think there is a publisher out there that is not thinking this through. So this all actually came up during an answer he was giving in the context of how content makers can exist in

When an answer engine, whether it be his or Google's, is siphoning off traffic from them. Our goal is not to create like, you know, a billion dollar winner takes it all. We take every market share we can and all the revenue we can just to convince you that we're giving you traffic and like,

That's the sort of model that Google created. I think we are happy creating a less market cap, lower margin business as long as we are profitable and successful and make sure that the whole internet wins. Because perplexity would be useless if people were not able to create new content on the web because we cite them.

and only interesting content makes the answers also interesting. - I mean, he's right. They are going to have to figure this out because if they take all of our traffic or other people's traffic, there's no revenue for us to create the quality content. They aren't able to provide good answers. So they are only as good as the ecosystem that currently exists online is good.

That said, Perplexity has a kind of great podcast where they like round up news around business and technology and use voices from the synthetic voice company, Eleven Labs, to like read the news. So messed up. They send me a newsletter of, you know, content of business stories and sort of the business tech space.

And the newsletter is great. It has the sites, you know, the citations to the sources, but that is all AI driven. That's not a human that's sitting there writing that newsletter. That is AI driven. And, you know, it is, I am in awe of it. And also it chills me to the bone. Well, listeners be assured, AI could not be this stupid. You will not be able to, you will not be able to recreate this podcast. Is anyone trying to like opt out of, or can publishers opt out of this?

It's a really good question, Josh. Like, not us, but publishers are suing, obviously, OpenAI and other large language model makers for use of their content. But what they're doing is scraping the web. So it's different. They're not, like, training their model on our data. It does open a lot of questions. And I certainly am an editor and not in the position to have to negotiate the answers to those questions. Yeah.

You know, there are no jobs in journalism, but not a week goes by that I don't get a creepy message on LinkedIn from one of our listeners. Guys, you got to cool it. And number two, a message asking me if I want to be someone who trains large language models. Yes. Which is so depressing because you're like, imagine having this job where you're basically training something to replace you.

Fortunately, that's none of our jobs. I mean, I have friends that work in travel. I came from the world of travel media. And like, that's a real, a real thing that's happening. You know, people are creating information and it's being used to train chatbots that can offer that information back. But they all tell me the chatbots are not even close to mastering what a real travel writer can do. Yeah.

It's true. Listen, I have mad respect for travel. I feel like travel influencers were actually the bigger existential threat. They were. But knowing where the good were. I mean, like a restaurant can change, you know, in three weeks, two months. It can go from being great to bad. You know, the scene can change. And like somebody who was on the ground knows that. I'm sorry, the LLM, like it doesn't know that. It doesn't know that. Yet. It doesn't know that yet. Yeah.

You know, you talked a little bit about Arvind wanting to go toe-to-toe with like a Google. Do you think Perplexity could be an alternative to tech giants out there? Because it seems like the kind of company that they would want to acquire. I think he sees that it is very important for him to keep this company independent and to stand as an alternate to these big tech giants, whether that is, you

you know, Google or Microsoft because we haven't brought up Microsoft yet, but this is definitely something that Bing is doing as well, right? So I think he really thinks it's important that perplexities stand independently. And also, you know, as you said in that answer, he wants to create less of a market cap, lower margin business, just wants to be profitable. That's a really lovely ambition. And, you know, I think that's great. But also like Jeff Bezos. Jeff's not looking for a low margin business.

Those investors and the valuations that he may be getting for this company do spell maybe a different future for it. But I'm very interested to see how Perplexity grows up. I'll be definitely watching it for the next year. We're going to take a quick break, followed by our monthly Brands That Matter segment with senior staff editor Jeff Beer.

All right. Now we're back with our monthly Brands That Matter segment starring Fast Company senior staff editor Jeff Beer. Hey, Jeff. Welcome back to the show. I'm here in person. Yeah. I know. Welcome to New York out of Nova Scotia. Wonderful. It's Prince Edward Island. Oh, thank you, Josh. What's the difference? Just a real American attitude there. No, genuinely, what's the difference? I do not know.

Well, one's an island. One's not. They're both maritime provinces. Full on their own. What's the difference between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Josh? Um, uh, close. There's really no difference. I was trying to come up with a difference in my head, but there really isn't a difference. Let's talk about brands. Yeah, let's talk about brands. Speaking of that...

What brands are we talking about today? Well, what I wanted to bring up today, thanks for having me on once again, guys. We're working on a theme song. We got to get a Jeff Beer theme. Get on that, Nick. Beer. Beer. Last week, in case I know you guys heard of this, but in case not everybody heard, Apple came out with a new ad for the iPad Pro. And...

You know, it was a very stylish ad. And on the surface, to me, it looked like, you know, pretty basic, high concept, beautifully shot spot where they took a lot of creative tools like musical instruments, art supplies, you know, stuff like that. Emoji face stress ball where the eyes popped out. Yes, and put them in a, like a fashion mannequin that you would design clothes on. They arranged it all very stylishly in a industrial crusher.

And then they ceremoniously crushed it all. Nice. Ending in the last thing when the crusher rollback opened up, it was miraculously an iPad Pro. And all of this was set to the tunes of Sonny and Cher's All I Ever Need Is You.

I actually didn't. You know what? I watched the video on silent. I did not realize that was the song they chose. Wow. So only the just your own thoughts. Yeah. Your own thoughts of hatred. I imagine it was like, you know, Riot of Valkyries. Right. You know. Okay. All right. Yeah. Something classical. Sure. That's classical. It's Dakota, indeed. Well, so on the surface, again, in a cultural vacuum. Yeah.

Fine, I guess. The ad is fine. Sure. You can see it. You can almost see it as it's happening, this in a meeting. I get the concept. Yes, of course. Isn't that the Steve Jobs thing? Like in the bad movie about Steve Jobs, he was like, Lisa, all these songs will end up on this device.

Called Lisa. This is exactly where I think this ad comes from, which is the thousand songs in your pocket, which was the iPod tagline or close to it. Or when they released the iPhone, it was famously a phone, a something else. And it was like the three things that you can do. And he kept going, a phone, a this, a that. And then it all was one product. Yes.

people did not like this ad. This is the point. No, people had feelings about it. Lots of feelings. I will say when I first saw it, I was like, wow, I feel kind of upset. But I also definitely know I'm overreacting and like I haven't had lunch yet. And then I spoke to a bunch of people, like saw a reaction even on our slacks and people were like, fuck this ad. Yeah, people were really... When I first saw it, I was like, yeah, I actually thought it was a bit not really that great. It was okay. Yeah.

I got the crushing part because it actually reminded me, there's a couple of old ads. I wrote about this and I referenced these ads, but there was years ago, oh God, I'm going to get this wrong. Even though I think this was meant to be like a, look, we took all the things, we actually put it in a crusher. This isn't whatever. But did they do that?

Yeah, I think so. Because they got the eyes popping out. Oh, at the end. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that was shot. But they... How many pianos had to die on the making of this ad? That made me sad. I was like, that's a perfectly good piano. That's true. People actually ask that. I know. Really? How many takes? How many takes? How many of these things did you have to destroy? I get it. I get it. But mostly it was around the context of...

you know, our conversations around AI, the conversations around just technology in general and the role in creative industries and how that impacts the workforce in the creative industries. And so when you're, and to me, maybe the biggest mistake or miscalculation here was, yeah, do I think everyday people gave a shit about seeing a piano crush? Not really. No. Not really. Even though the subtext of like crushing and it's kind of negative.

whatever. They probably don't care. They scroll to the next thing. But, and this is important for a lot of brands, you talk about your most vocal, your most diehard fans, you should know who they are and kind of what they care about. Not that you're always catering to them, but you have to be mindful. Yeah. And I feel like for Apple, it's like,

the creative industries are like, that's where the Apple fandom, the hardcore really reside. And to do something that they see as kind of a middle finger, even though it wasn't intended that way, I mean, yeah, tone deaf. And so, yeah, they came out less than 48 hours later. They came out and

that they had missed the mark. Which is, in terms of, like, non-apology apologies, is kind of up there. I mean, really, it's like... We missed the mark is, like, a fine... They're not, like, sorry some people were upset. Yes. Yeah, that's true. That is true. But, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Like, it was just kind of tone-deaf to the moment because I just think it was a lot of projected anger and upset feelings

People, particularly in media, like it was like who have the platforms then write about these things. And we love getting upset about stuff. We love getting upset about stuff. But we're seeing massive layoffs in our industries, mostly at the hand of, you know, like AI and digital ads going on. So I think it was really like projected anger on to

Apple because we have no other place to put it. If I'm going to play armchair psychologist of the media industry writ large, it was a little unfair to Apple at some point. My biggest problem with the ad is that the punchline was like, look how thin it is. I was like, who the fuck cares? So I want to stick with brand apologies a little bit. Yes.

Let's talk about some of the best and worst ones you've seen. Oh, boy. Well, I will... I want to point out one more before we jump to that. Yeah, yeah. Because there was another one this week. It wasn't... Oh, yeah. Bumble. Which...

And so for those who don't know, Bumble, they kind of had a rebrand. I think it came out last month. Yeah, recently. They got a new CEO in. Yep. Company's in trouble. This is like a big. It's a big rebrand, big messaging, and it was very bold. And it wasn't really a big piece of work, but like all outdoor ads can become global ads when someone takes a picture and posts it online. Yeah.

and start talking about it. And there were billboards in... I was about to say ads there. There were some billboards in L.A. that said something like,

About celibacy. Like, celibacy is overrated, basically, right? Oh. I'm serious. The image looks like it was taken from an old Virgin mobile ad. Yeah. It's just like someone being like, yeah. Oh, it just... So stoked. A vow of celibacy is not the answer. There you go. That's it. Okay, that's the end. It's not even like funny or interesting. Exactly. It's just like... Well, it's like, get out there, man. That's...

Take your clothes off, make some bad decisions on Bumble. So the point is a few people posted about it. The most I could see was about 22,000 likes or views on a TikTok video.

But I guess obviously the momentum, people are covering it, people are saying. And so clearly it struck a nerve with a, again, similar to the Apple thing, like people, your hardcore users, the people who are most passionate about your brand, they're like, they're telling the brand this missed the mark. Yeah. Credit to Bumble, but they pretty much right away said they were,

Well, you can't take a billboard down in two seconds like it's like a YouTube video, but they were not. You can if you want it bad enough. I guess. I guess. And you have explosives. Yeah, exactly. And then they posted this yesterday to Instagram. They first sentenced to our beloved Bumble community. We made a mistake.

Our ads referencing celibacy were an attempt to lean into a community frustrated by modern dating. And instead of bringing joy and humor, we unintentionally did the opposite. Anyway, it goes on about some of the points that some of the critics made acknowledging this stuff. And then they...

went on to say what they're doing about it. They're removing the ads from the marketing campaign. They're making a donation to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. And thanking the community for letting them know. I mean, there's not much else you can do. This is the right way to do it. You have to acknowledge it, fix it, and say what you're going to do next. And I think that both brands kind of had a...

Got a bit of a surprise. And I think that's one thing a lot of brands have to sort of brace for, whether it could be a vocal minority, it could be just media coverage in general. But like acting fast is the way to go. It also feels like we all read so much into everything. Yes. And you have to judge that like sort of with the flexibility. Like you can't, your marketing team, your agency, your CMO, you can't know everything.

You can do the best that you can in terms of cultural awareness of the work. But then when that feedback comes back, that's when you've got to figure out

How do we react to this? And to do it quickly, I think, is the key because that's just more news cycle BS. What's an example of a brand that did it poorly? And then one of my favorite non-apologies. Okay. One of my favorite non-apologies from a brand is the insurance company Nationwide had a Super Bowl ad in 2015 where, just Google it, everybody. Just Google Nationwide dead kid ad and you're going to find it. Oh, my God. I remember this. So it's kind of like a sixth sense situation where the kid's dead.

Like the kid who's in the ad, you find out at the end of the ad that he was dead the whole time. I couldn't grow up.

Because I died from an accident. People did not like this. Sorry, I know I'm laughing, but it's like, it was so dark. Yeah, I remember that. And in the context of the Super Bowl, there was so much humor. You got like, I can't remember if this is the same year, but you kind of got like a Mountain Dew puppy monkey baby situation on one side and like some celebrity pitching whatever on the other. And then you got like the super downer. I mean, just a real downer in the middle of the game. Yeah.

But Nationwide was like, nope, that's the message, guys. Sorry you didn't like it. It's like, you're an insurance company. It's just these ads that go super dark in a way. It's just like,

GM, just make, just get a celebrity to do a voiceover, like real power and just driving on the road. Just do a normal thing. I'm going to push back on that because I would hate that brands stop pushing the envelope a little bit, trying to take risks because, Josh, there's so many ads, car ads that are like, power.

Oh, it's the Buick. It's the Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I drive a Buick. First of all, it's Lincoln. Okay, actually, good point. That it's not memorable. When he's like rolling the booger in his finger and the bull is staring at him in the road, that's great stuff. Yeah, I like those. Buick.

It's not viewing. It's so good. No, well, I guess you are right because I think there are advertisements where they do push the boundaries of like good taste sometimes, but it leads to something really fun. Like I think of like High Endurance for a while was like really known for like this sort of absurdist alt comedy takes on stuff. And it was fun. Yeah.

or even like on maybe not the best ad in the world and certainly earnest, but like the Oatly ad. Was it Oatly? It was that one oat milk ad where the founder just like played a song in a field and get in. And it's just like, I don't know if it was a good ad, but I remember it. Right. Yeah. So we talked about the WNBA a little bit last week, but, um,

Tell us a little bit about the sort of ads and sponsorship around that league. Yeah, there's a lot of cool brand stuff happening around women's basketball. The momentum of the college final four. Obviously, Kaitlyn Clark's a big name. Everybody knows, even if you don't know anything about basketball. One thing that was interesting that when she was, it was either just before she was drafted or as she was drafted, she signed a multi-year contract.

big-time contract with Nike that included a signature shoe. And when that happened, fans were happy, but also fans of Asia Wilson, who is a two-time MVP, two-time champion, plays for the Las Vegas Aces, were kind of like, hey, she's been at Nike for years. She's actually accomplished stuff in this league.

wears her shoe. And in an interesting move, Nike did not really say anything in a way that was definitive one way or the other. Fast forward a couple weeks, and they announced that actually, Asia Wilson does have a shoe. We've been working on it for a year.

And this is a signature collection. She came, she showed up. It was an exhibition game between the Aces and Puerto Rico. Just like an old Jordan with like Asia Wilson's name labeled on it. I understand the skepticism. So she showed up at this game, Aces against Puerto Rican women's national team, I believe. But she was wearing a hoodie that said, of course, I have a shoe.com.

That's great. Which I thought was funny. But all of this was super good. It should have been like two days after or the day after the Caleb and Clark deal was announced.

Asia Wilson told me herself and talked about the process of working with designers and how everything had to be just right and la, la, la. But it doesn't come out until next year. Jeff, the reason they took so long to do their weird, of course, I have a shoe announcement, is because they did not have a shoe. No comment. No comment. No, I just think whether they did or not. Yeah.

We have a lot of conversation around women's basketball, specific women, female athletes that deserve the attention that both brands and this media cycle we're talking about never paid their mind to before. I think it was as recent as maybe 2018, I think.

I'll have to fact check that, but there was a study where it was like 5% of media coverage, sports media coverage was women's sports total, not just women's basketball total. So now we've got the athletes, much like how NBA athletes are part of pop culture that creates momentum and fuels popularity of the league, storylines, all that stuff. We're starting to see that with women's basketball, which is really cool. Asia Wilson also in a, in a, in a bit of a,

In between the time that the Caitlin Clark deal was announced and the Nike Asia Wilson announcement came, Gatorade sort of ran up the middle and was like, Asia Wilson's a new signature athlete, y'all. Get it, Gatorade. Powerade's like, shit. Yeah.

Gatorade also just had a really nice, cool spot with Caitlin Clark. So Gatorade's doing a lot. Nike's doing a lot. State Farm's been in it for more than a minute in terms of pumping up women's basketball. Subway? Did you just say that? Nope. State Farm? State Farm. State Farm? State Farm?

No, Subway has ads with Steph Curry, and I think Sue Bird's been in them before, I think. Oh, cool. No, well, yeah, there's more ads, and I think that the marketing around... I could be wrong. Eat fresh, Josh. Eat fresh. Sounds like the WNBA season is really heating up. What are some of the other things we should be keeping our eye on? Hey, well, a brand that we have talked about quite a bit at Fast Company in various ways, Elf Beauty, launched something this week that...

It's interesting because it's not really, do I call it an ad campaign? I don't know. It is. Yeah. But it's also, and I subscribe to this and they obviously subscribe to it, but this is definitely in the realm of everything your company does is a brand move. So let me just tell you what it is. Yeah. Before I start pontificating about it. So they put out a spot and a study for people to check out called part of their ongoing Change the Board game. Yeah.

You'll get the pun in a minute. But they report that out of more than 4,200 publicly traded companies in the U.S., something like, what is it? What's the number here? 4,200. There are 566 men named Richard, Rick, or Dick. 566. That is almost double the amount of Hispanic women total that are on Facebook.

the boards of publicly traded companies in the U.S. There are 806 black women and 774 Asian women. So they barely outnumber anyone named...

Dick. Too many dicks. So, yeah, so many dicks is the name of this spot. It's also funny, Gap's CEO is named Richard Dixon. Does he count for two or one? It's the double. Dick Dixon. But is he on the board, though? I don't know, man. Yeah, yeah. Only four, only one, oh, sorry, one of four companies in the U.S. can make the claim that they have, like Elf, two-thirds women and one-third diverse corporate board.

So they're trying to use like a word that makes everyone laugh, present company included, to make a point about corporate boards, which is probably one of the drier topics, even though it's important. Yeah. When you talk about brands and creative work and getting people's attention. I think the stats are interesting, though. They...

credit the makeup of their board with driving, I think they said they had 20 consecutive quarters of net sales growth, 1500% stock growth in the past five years. So obviously, they've been doing a lot of good work on the product and traditional marketing advertising side. Yeah.

They really do credit the makeup of their corporate board with some of the success. So part of this initiative is, you know, there's billboards around New York online, and they're inviting other companies to get in touch to find out how they can help diversify their board. Now,

Is that really? I mean, to me, it's kind of like... Yeah, it doesn't sound like... It's consistent with their brand. I mean, their CMO, Corey Marchisotto, has said that in articles. Oh, we interviewed her on our podcast. Yes. I'm surprised. I'll have to go back and listen if she didn't mention it because she, on panels at the Innovation Festival and elsewhere, is always sure to mention this as part of...

the overall success of the company, not just cool stuff on TikTok, but also the kind of backbone of the company is what supports all that work, which I think is really interesting. And

As interesting as trying to make like a public-facing campaign around this issue, which, yeah, I think is cool. It'll be interesting to see if there's actually any take-up on it. And at the very worst case, they make just more public how they are as a company. And I think that for a certain –

segment of consumer. And that makes a difference when they're, I don't know, picking out their makeup. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I was talking to somebody for another article about sort of all these certifications that beauty companies have like clean at Sephora, black owned at Sephora. And they were saying younger consumers really respond to those designations. But to me, like, I don't know. Well, here's the thing is the product has to be all things being equal. The product actually has to be super good. Yeah. It also like,

I can't figure out exactly how to describe this, but it feels very like right after we elected Trump. It feels very like I love women, you know, and you're just like, it's OK. Like, like, I agree with you. As I remove my pink knitted hat. No, I think it's like the sort of like low hanging fruit allyship conversation of things where. Like if you were a B2B SaaS company and your board was mostly women, I'd be like.

That's really interesting. Yeah. As a beauty company, is it really a huge stretch to have your. I get it. That's true. But then I guess I don't know what are who are. Yeah. But then again, like, you know, I mean, regardless, though, it's even on the board of L'Oreal. I don't know. I'd have to check. But there was a huge kind of a huge movement around makeup where it really was kind of like a walled garden.

And there was makeup brands and then there was non-white makeup brands because like traditional brands weren't making palettes. Like it was about a bias. So I think it does. But this is not about, I mean, I suppose they have stats on race, but this is literally just about white dudes. Which, listen, anyone who's named Richard and goes by Dick should not be on a corporate board. It's just about choices in life. It's about judgment. That's offensive, Josh.

And it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, trend, or piece of pop culture we're following right now. And Jeff, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? Well, it's maybe not something that's like immediate, but it's out there. And it's something I've been sort of seeing pieces of here and there. And it's all coming together where I'm not sure what this is. But do you know how like all of a sudden over the last...

however many years, it's just become a thing where like almost every comedian has a podcast. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we're all there. That's the baseline. Yeah. Now I'm wondering if for people in comedy that booze is the new thing.

Oh, because they're all launching booze brands? Now, of course, now I want to separate. This is a sub-genre of the celebrity booze, which is not new, which is nothing to really... Everyone's got a tequila, great. But I just find it interesting that in the last, like...

even in the last just year, I've noticed four that have come out, but there's more out there. So, uh, Bert Kreischer and Tom Segura launched Poroso's vodka. Uh, Jim Gaffigan's been doing the rounds for his father time bourbon. Oh, I love Jim Gaffigan. I do too. Dax Shepard and his, and his friends disagree, uh, launched a non-alcoholic beer called Ted Seeger's. Uh,

Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton, I'm not sure how old this is, but has Four Walls whiskey. Kevin Hart has his Gran Caramino tequila, tequila of course. Oh, the other one that's ads have been popping up. Sorry, Ricky Gervais, Dutch Barn vodka. Random. Yep. That's so weird. So,

I'm wondering why, but then I got to thinking, like, much like the podcast feed into the live show feed into the podcast, like that sort of flywheel, I wonder if because of the whole celebrity booze thing

trend, whatever you want to call it these days. Comedians are actually, because of this podcast thing and because of just their constant public appearance or social engagement, are actually maybe among the best positioned to be doing this. Because they have a really close relationship. 100%. Yeah, sorry. With their audience. Yeah.

It's like they're always in your ear telling you jokes. Yeah, it's about niche community with all of those things. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? So I'm keeping tabs on the fact that we're going to actually have presidential debates this year after all, which I don't know if I'm keeping tabs on this as a good thing or just a, oh, goddammit, are we doing this again sort of thing. It's like getting more real at this point. So Trump and Biden agreed as of...

Today, when we're recording this, that they're going to do, I think, two, at least one with CNN coming up. The jury's still out on whether RFK Jr. is going to show up and or his brain worm. So this is happening again. And we're going to have to live with those cultural moments of those two on stage debating and the both sides ism of when Trump is just an absolute lunatic. And then there's some time where Biden like.

I don't know, stutters or like misspeaks a certain name and everyone's going to be like, see, they're both out of touch and lame. And Trump's over here being like Hannibal Lecter was a great man. That was so funny. Great man gone too soon. Who are you?

Who are you referring to? The fictional characters? The actors playing it? What are you talking about? Did you actually say that? Yeah. Yeah. Yaz, what are you keeping tabs on? I put together an extremely Canadian keeping tabs for Jeff because Jeff's our guest. I'm touched. So recently, we're recording this a little early, so it was yesterday. Alice Munro passed away. She's one of my favorite writers. Sucks. Sucks.

And somebody unearthed a bunch of tweets that Norm MacDonald made about her. Because apparently he was a very big fan of Alice Munro. And he was really upset when Brett Easton Ellis...

her talent. Oh, boy. So they've resurfaced. They're from 2013. She's got, there's one that I really liked because it is a business journalism related tweet. Alice Munro is to literature what Lee Iacocca is to automaking. Brett Easton Ellis is to literature what Lee Iacocca is to literature. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Amazing. That's fantastic. A lot of Canadians have gone too soon. RIP Alice Munro. RIP Alice Munro. RIP Norm MacDonald. Oh. And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mix and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week. Beer.