Jonathan Snow, an orthodontist turned e-commerce entrepreneur, shares his path from building an affiliate marketing platform to launching and scaling multiple Shopify brands. He discusses the growth of his agency and the exciting opportunities in social commerce. The conversation focuses on building lists of affiliates for brands and the tools and strategies to do so. The main topics discussed include using affiliate marketplaces, open collab, and paying influencers to become affiliates. The conversation also touches on the importance of activating existing customers as affiliates and the use of AI in influencer marketing. The conversation concludes with a discussion on YouTube ads and the types of brands that can benefit from the agency's services.
Timestamps:1. Introduction and Discussion on TikTok's Impact** (00:00 - 00:57)2. E-Commerce Live Segment Introduction** (01:05 - 02:01)3. Jon Snow’s Career Journey from Military to E-Commerce** (02:07 - 05:09)4. Scaling Businesses and Transitioning Roles** (05:09 - 07:01)5. Pivoting During the COVID-19 Pandemic** (07:06 - 10:43)6. Current Focus and Future in E-Commerce** (10:49 - 13:25)7. The Role of Social Commerce and Its Tools** (13:25 - 17:18)8. Advice on Building Affiliate Networks and Leveraging Customer Bases** (17:23 - 20:11)9. Role and Future of Agencies in the Evolving Market** (20:37 - 23:49)10.Final Thoughts on Content Manipulation and Social Media Platforms** (23:56 - 30:01)
Takeaways- Jonathan's experience in orthodontics and affiliate marketing paved the way for his success in e-commerce.- Both Corey and Jonathan emphasize the importance of social commerce and its potential for organic growth and guaranteed acquisition costs.- Affiliate marketing and customer retention strategies are crucial for long-term success in e-commerce. There are various ways for brands to build lists of affiliates, including using affiliate marketplaces and open collab.- Paying influencers to become affiliates can be an effective strategy, starting with a small upfront payment and then transitioning to commission-based compensation.- Activating existing customers as affiliates can be a valuable approach, leveraging their loyalty and familiarity with the brand.- AI has the potential to enhance influencer marketing by generating multiple iterations of influencer content and optimizing messaging.- YouTube ads are not currently a primary focus for the agency, as performance and measurement on the platform are less favorable compared to other channels.- The agency specializes in working with eight or nine-figure e-commerce brands that are looking to unlock new growth opportunities.- The conversation also touches on the potential bankruptcy of Foxtrot and the future of TikTok, with the consensus being that TikTok is unlikely to vanish and will likely undergo divestiture.- The agency's founder has started a newsletter that provides industry updates and insights.- The conversation ends with a discussion on the manipulation of algorithms and the need to hold all platforms to the same standard.
Transcript:
0:00
this is a slippery slope if Tik Tok truly does change as we know it and it
0:05
doesn't exist to the over 100 million Americans that are super passionate about being users of Tik Tok like I
0:12
don't know it feels anti-American to to be able to take such a big entity and just totally bankrupt it essentially
0:20
that's up to them they just need to sell it they could have done that along time ago right we've done we've done
0:25
divesture with other foreign owned companies before it's not a big deal manipulating any form of algorithm to
0:33
favor your own agenda is extremely destructive but we saw the same things on Facebook we saw the same things on
0:39
Twitter right during the elections I mean how much manipulation of content was there and like I I'm totally against
0:45
that but then I think we have to hold meta and I think Twitter's been much better now since Elon took it over but
0:51
like we have to hold those other platforms to the same standard
0:57
[Applause] [Music]
2. E-Commerce Live Segment Introduction.)
1:05
we are on with another episode of e-commerce live we're here today with Dr Jon Snow yes I said doct JN has a heck
1:12
of a background it's absolutely crazy you were in the military you also were an
1:18
orthodontist then you were Chief Innovation officer then you jumped to
1:23
the president at the snow agency so you've done six million different things where I think one of these things would
1:29
be a crazy career and you've done seven of them really really excited to have you on your background is so diverse as
1:36
always we have Corey former distilled now Voyage CEO and then you got me
1:43
former founder of Cam skins and now director of marketing at life recover Cory do you want to take it off and jump
1:49
into John's background we can take our time here because you have quite the background but we would love to hear
1:54
your your path and your story start as early as you like but it's I think that's people can learn a lot from
2:01
others histories absolutely yeah first of all thanks for having me appreciate it so yeah well we could throw it back
3. Jon Snow’s Career Journey from Military to E-Commerce.)
2:07
to 2013 um where I first got started in in e-commerce and the world of digital I
2:13
was actually a dentist in the Air Force I was stationed in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana not near New Orleans
2:20
Northwest Louisiana sheveport literally in the middle of nowhere it's where Texas meets Louisiana Arkansas and
2:27
Oklahoma so deep south nothing to do after work didn't know anyone I'm from
2:32
New Jersey born and raised the days would start at 7:00 a.m. days would end at 300 p.m. I was treating patients all
2:38
day on an Air Force Base and then I got home every day with nothing to do and my brother Dan he was building large
2:46
Instagram Pages back in the day is 2013 so rap is the largest page that he
2:51
actually you know is known for over 30 million followers across all the different platforms but he was building
2:57
many different pages and different niches so so he had comedy Pages meme Pages hip hop reggae video gaming pages
3:05
but he had this idea he noticed that all these you know there were a lot of influencers out there athletes
3:11
celebrities Publishers other Pages like his that had massive followings but they
3:16
weren't monetizing their Pages some of these pages had millions of followers they weren't running any affiliate offers or any type of ads or anything
3:23
like that so he had the idea he brought it to me he's like hey here's what I've noticed you want to help me build an
3:28
affiliate marketing platform leveraging you know influencer pages and another large social pages and I said that
3:34
sounds like a great idea I knew nothing about social barely even used Instagram myself back in the day but saw the
3:40
opportunity we launched that platform drove nine figures and revenue within two years of launching it and we saw how
3:47
much money we were making brands that were running offers through our platform
3:52
and we essentially ended up working with nearly every Instagram influencer you could think of and because everything
3:58
was UTM UTM link based we knew exactly how much every influencer page was worth
4:03
essentially so it was obviously a strong Arbitrage opportunity back when that was reliable yeah so like I remember I was
4:10
actually buying $100 posts from cardi B every single day because every single post was driving 10,000 Plus in revenue
4:17
and there was a large window there I would say at least two years where influencers and honestly Brands didn't
4:23
know how much every page was worth and we just had access to this whole you know influencer affiliate kind of
4:28
industry that was just building I wish I knew you back then we we definitely missed the boat on that kind of with 20
4:35
jeans and distilled and kind of did you know mostly paid to Media keep in mind I
4:40
was doing all this kind of on the side during my three years in the Air Force and then two years into it we're like
4:47
why don't we start launching our own Brands leveraging our Network okay so we launched our first Shopify brand you
4:52
know classic like I was fulfilling orders out of my garage in Louisiana then we got deep into paid media and
4:58
email marketing do des and Dev the Shopify app ecosystem so that first brand we launched seven figures in
5:04
Revenue within the first few months profitably started with a credit card all from our influencer Network and we
4. Scaling Businesses and Transitioning Roles.)
5:09
launched a second brand and a third brand and a fourth brand and started I remember I took Facebook blueprint over
5:14
the weekend you know on Memorial Day Weekend locked myself in launching ads the next day everything was you know
5:21
going incredible we were able to scale even higher our third brand we drove eight figures in Revenue within the first year profitably second year it was
5:28
doing 35 million in revenue and so we ended up launching a brand almost every quarter and built our own team now you
5:36
know we built a a team and a fulfillment center in New Jersey I'm managing a team remotely from Louisiana and you know we
5:42
had uh nine brands at our Peak everything was done in-house we're fulfilling thousands of orders of day
5:48
got kicked out of like eight different offices and warehouses you know the offices that we turned into warehouses
5:55
and everything like that because we outgrew everything honestly I finished up my three years in the Air Force and I went back to New York City and started a
6:01
three-year orthodontic residency program despite all of this success that we were seeing because I was like oh this is a
6:07
flash in the pen this could go away who knows you know this is such a fast evolving industry I'm not ready to give
6:13
up my career as as a dentist let alone a dental specialist which is what I went to dental school for I you know I wanted
6:19
to be an orthodontist so started a three-year Residency program in New York City you know got my place in New Jersey
6:25
I had three-hour round trip commutes from New Jersey to Brooklyn to go to my hospital to you know to work at for
6:31
three years during that time I used that as my time to manage my team was even buying media everything like that and
6:38
all of our Brands were you know just scaling and developed the reputation and Brands started approaching us to see if
6:44
we could run their marketing so that's how the agency was born so now we have all these Brands um we actually started
6:50
selling a few of them because it it became a lot to manage internally so we sold a few of Our Brands we started
6:55
taking on a few clients I'm still an orthodontic resident and we officially launched the agency in September 2019
7:01
which is the last year of my residency fast forward to March 2020 I put in an
5. Pivoting During the COVID-19 Pandemic.)
7:06
offer to buy an orthodontic practice in New York City and we know it happened in March 2020 stupid I was going to keep
7:13
going deeper and deeper and buy a practice to juggle with an agency and all these Brands and I pulled out of
7:18
that deal obviously because we know what happened with Co everything shut down you couldn't treat patients as an
7:24
orthodontist it was all elective treatment so you had to shut down for literally months in New York and during
7:30
that time focused on the agency first time I focused on Ecom 100% of my time by the time things opened back up a few
7:36
months later the agency was like triple in size our client base was Triple in size and I had that pause Moment Like do
7:42
I want to get back into dentistry and like actually like make a bigger commitment and buy a practice and run another business simultaneously why did
7:49
you want to be an orthodontist when I was in Middle School I had braces and I just saw the impact so the impact I had
7:55
on me and I saw the car that my orthodonist was driving and I was like you know good career um it seems like
8:01
the guy doesn't do much he just comes in tells his assistants what to do and he's just you know the brains behind it and
8:07
uh you make an impact on on people like I remember you know back then if you have you know crooked teeth a bad smile
8:13
your your confidence is obviously hit right so I I remember you know eighth grade ninth grade whenever I got the
8:19
braces off just like how much more confidence it brought me naturally and I thought it was really impactful thing to do you know on an everyday basis and
8:26
make a good career are you sure that's not because the braces bring your confidence down so much that by the time you get it could be it's like a re it's
8:32
like a slingshot effect I had braces a couple times I didn't have good experience with Orthodontics they ripped out my teeth which I hear they would
8:39
never do now no they do anyone that tells you they wouldn't they're a liar
8:44
okay well you know now I have an expert here so anyways yeah no but there are dentists like that like oh we don't
8:49
extract any teeth you don't need to do that that's like old school mind of thought but it's not it's like it's absolutely crucial order to straighten
8:56
teeth safely made me feel a little better yeah you wanted something with more meaning maybe out of your career
9:03
and this feels too commercial I was passionate in Orthodontics don't get me wrong but then
9:09
when you get into entrepreneurship and scaling Brands and scaling clients like that doesn't even feel like work I had
9:16
more passion it felt like a video game you know who but you just kept going back to working really hard to keep that
9:24
path in you know the medical space and just interesting because it's so much fun right to be in Commerce yeah and I
9:32
you know when you dedicate your entire life like literally to go to dental school you need look top of your class
9:37
in high school top of your class in college just to get in acee Dental admissions the amount of things you have
9:43
to accomplish and then become an orthodontist and you to be top five in your dental school class need to get over a 90% on your boards like so you do
9:50
all that you sacrifice all that never joined a frat in college you know finished College in three years studied
9:56
247 just giving that up especially once you're like one of a few Specialists well you learned how to do
10:02
hard things you're not giving away that ability to just beat Everyone by doing better at really really hard things in
10:08
competitive Fields right and if you can do it there you can do it anywhere so March 2020 kind of triggered uh me to
10:16
introspect and and spend more time fulltime on the agency and and e-commerce and by the time things open
10:23
back up it just didn't make sense like I said to to go back passion is higher and
10:28
the up side financially was higher uh you know building scaling Brands building brands for other businesses and
10:35
so yeah it didn't feel like working I just stepped away from demastry never treated another patient after I finished up my residency moved down to Miami and
10:43
uh the rest is history what do you focused on now yeah I mean I'm still at the agency we actually sold the agency a
6. Current Focus and Future in E-Commerce.)
10:49
little over a year ago but I'm still full-time Avenue Z acquired us so the CEO of Avenue Z did agencies on the on
10:56
the biggest scale you could do it sold his first Agency for close to half a billion dollars about 10 or 15 years ago
11:02
then he sold another nine figureure agency after that so being able to learn from him partner up with him to uh kind
11:08
of take the agency into the next leg of growth was very appealing so yeah that's why I'm still on full-time I intend to
11:15
be here till you know the very end I still love e-commerce don't want to leave this industry very much still
11:21
passionate about it so in a great spot right now any new channels or strategies
11:27
that are exciting you or that you see on in the coming in the future yeah the
11:32
most exciting thing is social commerce as a whole right now what social commerce is is where the impression and
11:38
the conversion all happen within a social media platform so like Tik Tok shop is the most famous form of social
11:45
commerce and the best performing that I've seen so you see Affiliates you know promote a product they tag the product
11:52
in the video and then you could check out in Tik Tok in the app without having to go to a Brand's website and social
11:59
Comm Merce has kind of turned the digital marketing and e-commerce game upside down right now because you see
12:05
Brands I mean the biggest issue with with e-commerce and honestly digital
12:10
marketing over the past few years has been volatile customer acquisition costs
12:15
higher competition cpms are going up cost to acquire new customers is going
12:21
up and you need especially if you're a brand that's just launching you need to essentially burn tens of thousands of
12:27
dollars to essentially even find a break even point and even that would be a success if you found success and you're
12:34
profitable on the first order within the first year I think that's a success for most brands today the way that social
12:41
commerce works is that you don't even need paid media dollars to scale a brand
12:46
to millions in Revenue profitably you could be profitable day one through organic posts that tag the product the
12:53
virality on Tik Tok you see Brands you know organic posts getting millions of views then Affiliates as well that you
12:59
can incentivize with just commission without even having to pay them upfront so if you start amassing an affiliate
13:06
army people that will post for 30% commission 20% commission whatever you're comfortable with that's a
13:12
guaranteed acquisition cost right there if you're offering 20% commission don't have to pay them UPF front that's a 5x
13:18
Roi good luck launching an ad that'll get you 5x right off the bat right and so you'll scale that unlimited so it's
7. The Role of Social Commerce and Its Tools.)
13:25
like how many people can we convince to give 20% commission to to post our products daily monthly weekly whatever
13:32
it is and start building that that's free Impressions it's guaranteed acquisition cost and then once that
13:38
starts working you have a few Affiliates that are performing well you have a few organic posts that are performing well
13:43
then you turn on the M the paid media and you you can Juice It Up with spark codes and you're like all right I'll
13:48
I'll start spending a thousand dollar a day Behind These creatives that are already working that we didn't even have to risk upfront money to essentially
13:55
produce and then you take those pieces of the creative you get the usage rights in a different method Tik Tok tells you
14:01
you can't have usage rights for your affiliate content outside of Tik Tok but we have ways of of doing that and still
14:07
having that Bosher you request usage rights now you run it on your paid media on meta throw it on your YouTube shorts
14:13
post it organically on Instagram reels and now you have this creative ecosystem where it's you know very low barrier to
14:20
entry and high upside because once things start working you you juice it up with paid media so I've been spending
14:26
all my time in 2024 really building out what affiliate acquisition affiliate
14:32
retention looks like it's very much the same strategies as customer acquisition and customer retention right you want to
14:38
acquire a customer you want to acquire an affiliate to get you that product and get get a sale in but then it's what
14:45
good is it if you acquire a customer if they don't come back and and purchase again right through email or through SMS
14:51
because if your LTV is low then you're always looking for that next customer very much like an affiliate you might have a thousand great Affiliates that
14:58
got you that first purchase but they never post it again so like how do you reactivate those Affiliates and retain
15:03
them and incentivize them to keep posting and keep generating new sales down the road what's the uh best way for
15:10
Brands to build those lists of Affiliates or is that where agencies come in are there tools that are good
15:18
for Discovery the lowest hanging fruit Tik Tok shops affiliate Marketplace you go on you there's Target collabs which
15:24
means you can send invites to Affiliates and you can sort people by the the that they're in if they like pushing Wellness
15:31
or beauty or apparel you could filter everything within the affiliate Marketplace you can send invites to the
15:37
people that that match your demographic um you can even see how much your AFF these Affiliates have generated historically on Tik Tok shop for other
15:44
brands so you know you know who's just going to request a free sample and like never post and who's going to request a
15:51
free sample and actually generate you substantial Revenue it's all transparent does meta have an equivalent no meta
15:57
used to have an affiliate Marketplace they shut it down two years ago So Meta has a Creator Marketplace not affiliate
16:04
they they facilitate you paying for the post and wh listing access but you can't incentivize them with commission but
16:11
that is changing soon because the rumbling arears that that as relaunching affiliate by the end of this year
16:17
obviously because Tik Tok gave them the Playbook and you know meta didn't have to do a ton with R&D you know investment
16:24
during a year where uh profitability is such a concern Tik Tok did all R&D for them and now they're just cloning it
16:30
classic meta move yep you were mentioning open collab I think yeah open
16:36
collab um so taret collab and then open collab through the affiliate Marketplace is the same thing except Affiliates can
16:43
apply to work with your brand they request a free sample you send them the product they could put it in their
16:48
showcase they tag the products in the video and now you know they can generate commission that's actually the best way
16:53
to do it further down the road is the more traction you gain on Tik Tok shops like the more Revenue that you generate
17:00
the more reviews and products sold it's all transparent the more Affiliates are going to want to work with your brand because they know that your products are
17:07
already selling that means they're going to make money and their effort is going to be paid off essentially so the goal
17:13
is to generate more and more open collab invite requests from creators over time
17:18
outside of that there's also the route that we go is we'll pay influencers to
8. Advice on Building Affiliate Networks and Leveraging Customer Bases.)
17:23
become our Tik Tok shop Affiliates so we'll give them a small upfront payment require them to you request a sample
17:29
through the Tik Tok shop affiliate Marketplace and then they have to tag part of our brief is that they have to
17:35
tag the product in our Tik Tok Shop to uh you know as part of the deal the hope is over time a lot of these influencers
17:42
that we paid to become Affiliates we can then convince them to become Affiliates only where we're like all right instead
17:48
of a $100 plus 10% commission we'll give you nothing up front but we'll give you 30% commission and the hope is there is
17:57
that those influencers you know we can activate like maybe half of them to then just build start building that affiliate
18:02
Army where we don't have to risk upfront money it's just pay on performance so that's the other side of things and then
18:09
I think the most forgotten component is for these brands that have huge customer
18:14
base they have you know 100,000 emails or even 20,000 emails of customers that are active and the more you have your
18:21
first-party data you know like who's subscribe to the product who has reordered so you have to activate your existing customers people that have the
18:27
product in hand that you don't necessarily need to send out more samples to they already have it right
18:33
and you incentivize them hey we'll give you 30% Commission on if you post about
18:38
the products you already have and and tag us is there a tool for like what we do like with lead enrichment on the B2B
18:45
SAS side to enrich your customers to understand their find their social profiles and influence feels like
18:51
there's an opportunity there is it something for Brands to use yeah I mean like the best way honestly the best
18:57
Communication channel is emailing SMS all you have to do is like look at your customer segments people you know
19:03
whatever you think is a great affiliate and prioritize like hey which segment of our customer base do we want to go after
19:09
build a funnel for these Affiliates so we'll send out an email hey make money with the products you already have
19:15
essentially like something like that maybe even put a few case studies of like hey here are some three of our own
19:21
customers that have made x amount of dollars as as Affiliates you can be just like them essentially and so you you
19:27
show them kind of like that lead magnet that'll get them interested and making money next thing you know you have all
19:33
these customers that are tagging you in your products and I like to use reunel it's a software pretty new software
19:40
where it'll aggregate any post that any influencer customer any anything that
19:46
has tagged your brand in it so if you're Nike if as long as you were tagged at Nike in the post in the caption it'll
19:52
sync that creative from Tik Tok Instagram Facebook Instagram stories into this nice Dash board and you can
20:00
then request usage rights from those people you can enroll them into a campaign and integrate with clavio and
20:05
tell them to you know become a Tik Tok shop affiliate and now you have this nice dashboard where you're just seeing
20:11
all the posts like compound month over month here's how many Impressions that we've been tagged in organically here's
20:18
how like the engagement rate here's our top Affiliates based on follower count or engagement rate you can kind of look
20:23
at the metrics however you want and uh yeah the goal is to just keep building this program month over month and it
20:31
serves as this like Snowball Effect biggest Tik Tok shops right now are just scaling affiliate this way is this the
9. Role and Future of Agencies in the Evolving Market.)
20:37
main focus of your agency is social commerce or still paid as well we're a
20:42
performance marketing agency in general so wherever we're seeing opportunities to perform we will start building this
20:49
is the newest Big focus of ours the biggest Focus I would say of for a new
20:54
service since SMS like three four years ago we were very very early in SMS and
21:00
then it was push notifications like through T card and everything like that that was like another little jolt that
21:05
we had but this is as big if not bigger of an opportunity I think for us to focus on since SMS paid social paid
21:13
media still our biggest Focus overall it's where obviously our the biggest pocket of our clients are but this is a
21:19
mandatory like because paid social is so heavily reliant on influencer and
21:24
affiliate content like with we we've been doing influencer marketing for clients for paid social for such a long
21:30
time since day one because we knew ugc was always the best performing so social commerce is very much the same if we
21:36
don't live and build and and become experts at social commerce then we're not going to be able to do our jobs as
21:42
like the best paid media team what's your thoughts on YouTube ads I use
21:47
YouTube religiously as a user but in terms of AD performance it's buying
21:53
direct YouTube instead of like just the way that we get a YouTube exposure right now is through performance Max we don't
21:59
have like YouTube specific campaigns unless we're really trying to scale horizontally it's performance cpms like
22:05
are just so undesirable on YouTube relative to Facebook Tik Tok and Google
22:11
YouTube is like that distant fourth so we don't really craft YouTube specific campaigns for the most part right now
22:17
just because performance simply isn't there and I think measurement is also pretty unclear there's a lot of view
22:23
through attribution to think through so it's it's kind of like a distant fourth focus of bars in terms of paid media
22:30
what type of brands should reach out to you guys if they're looking for help
22:35
yeah I mean our ideal client profile is like eight or nine figure uh e-commerce
22:41
brand right now that has kind of hit a l in terms of like new customer
22:46
attribution or revenue and they don't know kind of like where to go next they're kind of stuck those are usually
22:52
the easiest opportunities for us to come in they have budget you know they're already doing substantial Revenue they
22:58
know what works what doesn't work and they don't know where to turn next for that next lever to pull for you know
23:05
unlock of growth so that's where we come in we'll go through everything we audit everything we identify a ton of
23:11
different tactics that they haven't yet tried that we know work well and those are easy low hanging fruit winds that we
23:17
can pull out right out the gate you know if they're not going to pay us to run their influencer they need an internal team or some other you know agency or
23:24
Source where they're sourcing ugc for us and they're focusing on the organic Chann they're taking our recommendations
23:30
we find that brands that come to us and kind of are put up resistance to what we know will work those are often
23:36
relationships that are not as successful as the ones that take our recommendations so brands that will
23:43
partner with us as like a growth partner as opposed to agency vendor relationship that's another quality I would say it's
23:49
important anything in the AI space that's exciting you or that you see coming in the future that's going to be
10.Final Thoughts on Content Manipulation and Social Media Platforms.)
23:56
interesting for brands or agencies yeah I mean AI so far has been like more of a a market research tool like writing copy
24:03
for emails blogs whatever it may be and then you know it gives you 90% of of
24:08
what you need to get it across the Finish Line after you a human will go in and optimize it I would say generative
24:14
AI in the influencer space is really interesting so being able to take the likeness of an influencer or even an
24:21
affiliate and iterating a hundred different versions of what they said or even you know swapping out like you know
24:27
one market angle or one pain point or a hook for another I would say that would open up unlock a bottleneck that
24:33
currently exists which is you know influencers want to shoot a few different styles of content but it's hard they have to re-edit it they have
24:40
to go back and shoot it and if it's on a different day then they have to do hair and makeup again or whatever it may be or find the space the location that they
24:47
need it again it's like a high level of effort to shoot a few different things for influencers by introducing AI into
24:55
this and like making it seemless they shoot one piece of content AI can give you all the iterations you want I think
25:00
that's a win-win for the influencer and the brand anything else you think would be because I know you do a lot of
25:07
podcasts but maybe something you haven't been asked about you want to share with people that you think would be useful or
25:13
valuable or I started a newsletter a couple months ago and see a lot of newsletters out there they just regurgitate news that everyone else is
25:20
regurgitating but there's no real analysis or thought on how it's going to translate or impact the industry so I
25:26
try to inject as much opinion unbiased opinion is possible so go subscribe to
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my newsletter in the snow stay up to date on the industry Trends and topics and I think that's subscribing to
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newsletters in general is the best way to consume information and stay up to dat so there's no better way to just
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have insights and a fresh perspective hit your inbox weekly so so I know we don't have much time we just let's do
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hot takes real quick on Tik Tok potential shutdown most likely divesture
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assuming they're not insane yeah sign it's being signed into law but there's a big difference between this bill being
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passed and signed into law and Tik Tok changing as we know it I think the focus needs to shift to is Tik Tock gonna just
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vanish Into Thin Air is Tik Tok as we know it today going to be any different a year from now five years from now 10
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years from now in my opinion the answer is no when you have a hundred billion dollar company the chances of that just
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Vanishing Into Thin Air are very minimal keep in mind like Tik Tok doeses divest
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or bite dance divest from Tik Tok then Tik Tok is going to be the same as we know it right if Tik Tok contests or
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bite Dan contest this in court for years and years and years and there's no real resolution Tik Tok will still be Tik Tok
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as we know it the only way that Tik Tok certainly goes away is if it does not divest and essentially is banned you
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know after a long drawn out legal contest as eventually banned from App Stores in the US it would be completely
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irrational for them not to sell I mean now they're talking about not selling the algorithm just the user base yeah
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it's it's a there there's I think there's just two too many negative things would have to align consider the
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financial interests that would be lost for this to totally go to zero I mean it's in my opinion it's impossible
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there's no way like eventually they might be saying yeah they're not going to divest or maybe they're just extremely confident that they're going
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to win the legal battle which is very possible I think there's going to be a lot of pressure just from the public I
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mean this is a slippery slope if Tik Tok truly does change as we know it and it
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doesn't exist to the over 100 million Americans that are super passionate about being users of Tik Tok like it
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feels anti-American to to be able to take such a big entity and just totally
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bankrupt it essentially that's up to them they just need to sell it they could have done that a long time ago
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right we've done we've done divesture with other foreign owned companies before it's not a big deal if you're if
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you're an International Company going to Market in the US and you're going to invest a ton of money effort resources
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in this country only for you to have uncertainty if this is going to happen to your company I think it's going to be
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a huge deterrent WhatsApp was just banned in last week in China they've how much money has Madea invested but that's
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China this is America but this is a Chinese CCP controlled company so you're letting a foreign government basically
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do things that they don't allow I think there's like a retribution angled like protect your own national interests that
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I think is at stake here but there's already been a ton of discussions around
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how this needs to all data needs to be kept locally in the US it has to be State side but they're not that's that's
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what Congress saw in those reports is that that was like it's such it's just basically they're just lying
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they're absolutely manipulating the minds of young people here with content
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that is driven by what they want people to see they ban Americans who post
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things that they don't want people to see about ugers or uh you know whatever tan Square so I think it's like just
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kind of clear just sell it and get the hell out of our country I totally I totally agree that manipulating any form
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of algorithm to favor your own agenda is extremely destructive but we saw the
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same things on Facebook we saw the same things on Twitter right during the elections I mean how much manipulation
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of content was there and like I I'm totally against that but then I think we have to hold meta and I think Twitter's
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been much better now since Elon took it over but like we have to hold those other platforms to the same standard like I don't know what the Met algorithm
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looks like right now but I could tell you that especially with politics you know the election heating up very
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shortly we're going to have manipulation of of information again John coming in
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so hot and I love it this is amazing thank you for the time today that was really great conversation hopefully can
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have you back in the future and keep us updated with what's going on and how we can help for sure it was a pleasure
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being on thanks for having me
