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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:25]
B
This podcast is brought to you by adstrated. Adstra's leading identity resolution network enables precise targeting, scalable activation, and richer customer understanding. Whether you're looking for person based accuracy or massive scale, only adstra has the transparency to give you both. Learn more@adstradata.com that's AD S T R A data.com.
- [00:57]
C
Hey everyone. I'm Joanna Gerber, associate editor at AdExchanger, and I am delighted to be guest hosting this episode of AdExchanger Talks. I'm even more excited to share that my guest today is none other than Leela Brillson, CMO of the Onion. Leela and I are going to dig into the Onion's role as a publisher that functions in a lot of ways more like a brand. We're going to talk about what that means for both the way it monetizes and how it markets itself. Plus Leila's hot takes about AI and the Washington Post. But before we get into that, make sure to save the date for Convergent TV World, which is taking place on March 5th and 6th at the Times center in New York City. Convergent TV World is the new name for our CTV Connect event. We'll bring together the worlds of linear TV streaming, CTV gaming, retail media and digital out of home to help you tackle the challenges of measurement, attribution and cross screen storytelling. Podcast listeners get 10% off of their ticket if they use the code pod tab 10 pod and then the number 10. Get your ticket today and see you there. And without further ado, let's get started. Hello Leela and welcome to AdExchanger Talks.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. Joanna. I am glad to be here and.
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C
We are glad to talk to you again. As I was telling you, we had a lot of fun interviewing you or I, it was just me had a lot of fun interviewing you for a Q and A a couple months back. And yeah, just excited to hear more of what you have to say about kind of the Onion and marketing in general at a pretty crazy time for publishers.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's a. It's a wild time. Just, just when we think things can't get more absurd, we wake up and a whole new thing has happened.
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C
So I'm going to start off with a question that I know Allison, when she hosts this podcast, likes to ask her guests, which is not marketing related, but what is something about you that a Lot of people are, you know, are industry. Industry listeners. Wouldn't necessarily know about you.
- [02:48]
A
Oh, gosh. Something about me. Well, I came. I come from editorial right before I was in marketing. I. I always thought I was going to be an editorial and editorial first and, and writing and lifestyle reporting, entertainment reporting, and then I was swooped over to the marketing side. But I very much approach things from the perspective of an editor and. And somebody who was constantly being marketed to. Especially as a lifestyle editor. I spent a long time at Refinery 29 back in the early 2010s when it was like a very big burgeoning publication. So a lot of people don't know that about me. They think that I have an mba, which I do not. And the more you hear me speak, the more you understand that I do not.
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C
It's gotta be a compliment for people to think you have an MBA or like a vaguely pretentious insult, one of the two.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Well, I. I'll. I'll take both.
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C
Um, and my other fun introductory question is, what is your favorite culinary use of an onion? What's your favorite way to eat onion?
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A
Okay, so here's something that you might. You're even ready for this about the onion. Is that the onion. There is a. No, like, no exceptions, absolutely impermeable refusal to use onion puns. Anything about, like the dahlias. Anything about any. Any sort of. Now I'm totally forgetting what. What the onion. Onion is like a type of.
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C
Oh, alien. No.
- [04:32]
A
Any sort of alien puns or references. I myself, you know, I like an onion ring. I do think, though, unlike the publication and the brand that I manage, I think an onion is. Is a great croutement as opposed to a leading. It's a good. It's a good co star as opposed to a leading man. Right? Like, it's a support. The support. The Onion is not.
- [05:07]
C
Oh, you think the Onion is a leading man. So. Okay, that leads me well into next part of our conversation. So, obviously, the Onion is a news publication in a very, very unconventional sense. So as somebody who works for a parody publication, but obviously in doing so, you guys have to be very, very up to date on what's going on in the real world and everything that's happening so that you can kind of riff on it and spoof on it. Where do you personally get your Daily News that you kind of build off of.
- [05:36]
A
Oh, gosh, where do I get my Daily News? Our CEO, Ben Collins, generally, he is. He's a former NBC reporter. And like, I'll wake up and just hear my phone being like, beep, beep, beep, beep. And it just, you know, Ben will be like, I can't. Like, here's what's happened today. Actually, in all seriousness, having someone who is adjacent to the news world is very helpful in terms of consuming news. But I get it where everyone else does, which is via. Via social media and sometimes in really, really fuzzy, poorly made macros.
- [06:19]
C
Yeah, it's a universal experience. And definitely working in advertising and in marketing and in journalism, I very much feel like I get way more news consumption now than I did before I worked here. So it is definitely easier to stay up to date on it when you are responsible for a segment of it.
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A
Absolutely, absolutely. Before you.
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C
Oh, no, go ahead.
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A
Sorry.
- [06:41]
C
I was gonna say before you were at the Onion, it looks like you were head of social at Bumble, which is not similar to the Onion in my experience with both. And before that you were at TikTok. I was curious what was, I guess consistent between those roles and what kind of propelled you towards the Onion and how that experience has been a unique one, which I'm sure it's been.
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A
So ultimately both of those roles were like, kind of had of social positions and they were interfacing with. Interfacing with large communities with brands that have a lot of associations attached to them. Bumble very much has a very distinctive brand that gives you a feeling that means something. If you know what Bumble is, you immediately think of like, like something happy, yellow and like, oh, that's just the, the app where women, only women. Women make the first move. TikTok also was, you know, what is it, what is it like managing a social account for a social platform? Oh, it's like an incredibly huge challenge because you have to think a lot about the roles of platforms and the roles of your platform and how does your platform show up on other platforms. And, and so I think both of those were. Were very community forward, dealt with a lot of very tricky brand conversations about things that, that, you know, the, that I'm trying to say this in the brand. A lot of things that both of those brands don't really want to talk about or discuss or lead are very much parts of their identity, whether they, they want it to be or not. And so what do you mean by that? You know, you have the conception that TikTok is a, an app where, you know, kids get misinformation. And TikTok in itself, like the time I was there was during the, the Ukraine when the Ukraine Russia war was on the, the front page of all of our new news. And, and even there's just like, there's just no way as a brand to interface with that while also trying to, to raise awareness and build trust with your, your consumer. And then additionally, Bumble has very much a reputation of being like, you know, the female forward dating app, for better or for worse. It's a little bit like, you know, like, you get a lot of, like, there were, there was a lot of embracing and rejecting of like the kind of hashtag girlboss vibe that Bumble very much cultivates. And so both of those things are very much parts of those brands, those brand identities and challenges to marketing them and our challenges to talking about them on global platforms. But both of those brands immediately evoked something in someone, which is why I joined both of them.
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C
And how has working at the Onion kind of been different from that? Because something like Russia, Ukraine is obviously not something TikTok wants to be alongside. But the Onion does the opposite of shying away from all of those, you know, kind of intense, what people say are not desirable advertising moments. And the Onion really seizes on those and makes those into the crux of its publication. So what's that been like for you?
- [10:27]
A
Oh my gosh, it's just like leaning into all of my worst habits and like, is there, is there a hornet's nest we can kick? Like, is that, you know, are we able to, I was like, how, how throttled will we be by this platform? No, I think that one of the important things also to note is that I, I was a part of a group that took over the Onion. So that's how I became, that's how I, I joined here. I, I, I didn't set out to work at the Onion. I set out basically to help remove the Onion from the, from the world of private equity and move it into a place of independent media. And once, you know, and that changes, that definitely changes the equation a little bit for a job like this because I do think at this moment we have, there's a little bit more of a purposeful, there is more of a purpose to what the Onion can do, which is we talk about this internally all the time, which is like providing elements of catharsis, saying things that you know to be real but are absolutely not true and, and showing up in unexpected places. And like that last one is really a lot of my job is, you know, how do you continue to present a 40 year old, a 40 year old company that for the last 30 years has been Receiving the same commentary of like, well, the news is so crazy. Isn't the Onion gonna go out of.
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C
Business.
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A
Kind of conversation, like receiving that criticism over and over again. How do you continue to like, show up in places, not feel un. Unusual and unexpected and create those moments of like, you know, iconic shorthand that the Onion has done?
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C
And what are some of those unexpected places you guys are trying to show up in? And on the same note is that who are you trying to reach kind of on a day to day basis?
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A
Well, the places that we're trying to show up in, you know, we did. We relaunched at the dnc, Right. Which was like a very, I think that was like a very much a. That was a purposeful message this summer. We, you know, we showed up outside of Broadview. We've been doing wild postings and wheat pastings around the country after the election. And then, you know, I think I spoke with you right after we released.
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C
A movie, which was not something.
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A
Yeah. Which was not something I was expecting to do, but like, you know, that was. We had a movie and might as well create those pipelines that directly intersect and interact with our audience. So those are just examples, though.
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C
And just in case the Onion launching a movie wasn't shocking enough for our listeners who don't know, do you want to, do you want to tell them the title of that movie and maybe the crux of it.
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A
It's called Jeffrey. It's called Jeffrey Epstein Bad Pedophile. And it is a, you know, a Onion documentary series. Sorry, sorry. An Onion documentary on the real. The real story behind the Epstein. The Epstein murder suicide. But he definitely, you know, it like very much leaned into a lot of the lore and mythology around Epstein and happens to be more relevant than ever. We were really worried in the middle of fall last year that it would like, like, do people even care about this story anymore? And I, I mean, we've done lots, Lots of, Lots of news has broken between now and then, but I think Epstein is still capturing the rage and attention of so many folks, which, you know, the. And you asked who we're trying to reach. The Onion doesn't have demos. I can tell you who our demos gravitate towards.
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B
Right.
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A
We have, we certainly have a. People who grew up with the Onion, people who have these like, tactile memories of their first Onion is very much a, like our core audience and that makes up our membership. But, you know, we see, you know, I have, you know, I, I have a Gen Z babysitter who was like, the Onion. I don't really know what the Onion is. And I was like, oh, here it is on. On Instagram. And she's like, oh, the Onion. Like, we send it to each other all the time. Like, I didn't really know that you were a publication. And I was like, yeah, no, that totally makes sense. That. That this. This younger generation, like. Like between the ages of like, 12 and 21 I are very much consuming the Onion, but doing it in a. In a, Like, a mummified format, right? Like, like, unsure. Unsure. I mean, they're already so suspicious of the media anyway, but, like, already unsure of whether or not this is real.
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C
So.
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A
Yeah, so we've. We've. We find that, you know, we keep trying. We've all. We always hope to get, like, a younger audience and a young, younger demographic, and it just happens naturally. It happens because our. Our content is naturally extremely social.
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C
It really is. It's not the kind of thing you want to read by yourself. It's the kind of thing you want to read and immediately text somebody the headline and be like, did you see this?
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A
Yeah, and. And. And the amount of like. And we see. I. We see this all the time. People love to screenshot our Instagram and. And then, like, cut out our branding and then just repost it. It's like, you know what? Honestly, if. If I. If we were more of a traditional publication, that would bum me out. But, like, it's still just getting the branding out there. It's still getting our. Our style of humor out there. I get, you know, it's her bonus.
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C
So because you guys are a publisher, but also kind of functioning, as you're saying, as a brand, as something trying to develop your. How much of your role as CMO is about making the Onion itself, you know, people. People aware of the Onion itself versus trying to monetize for the Onion by, you know, getting partnerships and advertisers and things like that on board.
- [17:16]
A
So I think this is the most interesting question that I currently face, because I do not spend. I spend 10% of my time thinking about partners for the Onion because we just do not want to play an advertising game. We. And. And we have a rabid enough fan base and we have a audience that believes in us and a brand that resonates enough that we have been able to translate the Onion into a membership that is directly supported by our. By our readers. Um, and you get copy, you. You get a. A bunch. You know, we send you surprises all the time. You are, you know, you. You become a part of this like mailing club that we've created. And so to answer your question, I spend a lot of time talking, thinking about how to get more people into that club. And that's a big thing that for 2026, 2025 was us kind of like proving, can we do this? Will people pay for essentially a 24 page newspaper? And the answer is yes. Yes, they will. Especially.
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C
It's funny enough.
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A
It's funny. And they feel like they're getting something and they love posting it on social media and it's like a real artifact of the moment. But we want to keep growing that. We want to keep growing what that membership means. We want to keep hitting, you know, different people. We have a lot of space to go. I will not rest until we have more subscribers than the Washington Post. And I will tell you here, it's going to happen. I'm going to make it happen.
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C
All right. We have it on record.
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A
Yeah, you have it on record. We're going to change your word for the Post. We do want to be the paper of record, But we have. So that is a large portion of my job. Making sure that Onion feels is the membership is getting into the eyes and the hands of the people around. And then another part of my job is making sure that the brand still means something to people. Doing the Epstein. Theatrical run, doing having an appearance at Broadview. These are things that continue to keep us in the news cycle. Trying to buy infowars, like these are all, you know, continuing that obviously generates affinity that then turns into a loyal member. But then I think I've also explained to you that the. So after just saying that we want so much of the Onion to be in the hand, you know, to be supported by the people who have proven that they love us. We do also, you know, we cannot, we do not run on vibes alone. So I, we did start essentially an in house strategic comedy agency that, you know, takes some of the stuff that we've learned and some of the stuff that our writers have learned and the rigor and thoughtfulness and sheer like voluminous output of our writers and put that into an agency package. And now instead of us generating headlines about the news, we're generating headlines about a brand or a, you know, TV show or an entertainment franchise.
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C
So within that agency, are those brands working with you to have kind of Onion esque marketing themselves or are you making headlines about these brands?
- [21:18]
A
They are Onion esque marketing. This agency is entirely white label. We, we do not, you know, are. We call it, It's America's finest. As the Onion is America's finest news source, this is America's finest agency. And this essentially, you know, takes. It's like you want, you want the skill of an. Of Onion writers and the experience of like actual agency professionals without a crazy overhead, you know, you. It's a great opportunity to partner with a really unusual agency that has a really unusual process. And because of that, we have a really unusual client base and it's been great and that on top. And furthermore, it has been embraced by the staff, um, because it's a revenue stream that is very Onion directed and very Onion. Onion esque. Without encroaching on what the Onion is at all.
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C
Who are most of the clients? Like what, what sorts of brands want to market themselves like that?
- [22:26]
A
We have, we've worked with, I will say almost every single streamer except for two. I can, I can definitely, I. I can. I can definitely say. I don't know. I don't know where my NDA is with, with some of them. But you, you. We've done promotions for very well known TV shows and some pretty big movies. We worked with Patagonia for their Black Friday activation. We have a ETF client that is their, their, their whole point is it's an ETF that monitors congressional trades and like, points out the fact that Congress members are trading on insider knob knowledge. Yeah, yeah. Very relevant and very, very interesting. They're. They're a client of ours. We worked with Godzilla, Toho and Godzilla. Gosh, there's there. We. And we did a great. We end. We closed out the year supporting NBC Universal's the Paper relaunch because we got. We got to write them a fake newspaper. Right? But it did, once again, like, it didn't. We didn't have. We were able to. Because of our positioning, we were able to build out some Onion. Some Onion activities and some Onion activations, but we did not. But it was mostly, you know, it was us just writing for them. And so those are the types of clients we have. A few more that I'm not. That I cannot say. I think those are all the ones that we've gone public with, though.
- [24:26]
C
Well, speaking of a variety of advertisers, this probably seems like a good time to pause so that we can have our own advertisers talk for a minute. So we will be back in just a moment.
- [24:49]
B
Hello, I'm Sarah Sluice, editorial director of Ad Exchanger, and I have with me here Rick Irwin, CEO of adstra. Hi, Rick.
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D
Hi, Sarah. Great to see you.
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B
So in a market dominated by very large identity providers, how do you see adstra disrupting this space?
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D
Well, really simply, we set out and every day we do the things that the bigger players in the industry either cannot do or will not do. And when I say cannot do, it's because we have technology that we architected from day one that allows brands and their partners to do things that they can't do with the larger partners, like manage all of their identity resolution in their cloud environment rather than in the provider's environment. And then we do things that that larger players perhaps can do but won't do because it might threaten their business model that they've very successfully built up over time. A good example of that is challenger brands often need the ability to scale their business using identity solutions. And volume based pricing methods like CPM really don't allow for scale because they tend to charge commensurate prices as the client grows. And so we work with clients oftentimes to provide them subscription based pricing that's flat and level and they can plan around that for a year or 18 months or two years at a time. Those are two examples of how we disrupt.
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B
So more flexibility in terms of pricing and in how you use the identity product.
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D
Exactly.
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B
Let's talk a bit about transparency and drill into that. Ad exchanger listeners tend to love transparency. And where do you stand on that issue?
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D
Well, we think the two values that matter most in identity are transparency and control. One goes with the other in both directions. Transparency allows the brand to actually see how identity resolution is being performed because it can be adjusted to be more precise or less precise and depending on the appropriate customer use case. And so we give our clients the ability to see how matches are made and then control rides along with it. They can change the level of precision for the use case that they are pursuing that particular day. So if they're pursuing an awareness campaign, they might actually want a little bit less precise identity resolution because they want to cast a wide net and reach a lot of customers. And in an application where they're offering best customers a special promotion, they would be more interested in having a very, very precise match so that they don't offer a best customer promotion to someone who perhaps accidentally isn't the best customer. So transparency and control are both extremely important.
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B
Okay. The opposite of a black box is what you get with adstra and talk about identity. It's such a broad term in the industry now, it can mean a lot of different things. How do you think people should be thinking about identity and how is identity sometimes misunderstood?
- [28:06]
D
Well, the biggest thing I would. If I could wave a magic wand, I would love for people to understand the real and important difference between identity graphs and identity resolution platforms. Astra is an identity resolution platform. And. And every identity resolution platform produces a graph, which is a snapshot. I use an example. I use a metaphor of a movie. What's your favorite movie? Can I ask you your favorite movie, Sarah?
- [28:31]
B
Right now I'm feeling Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.
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D
Okay, Working Girl. So imagine if you were a production assistant or a camera person on the making of that movie, when that movie was being shot, and you made a scrapbook of everything that happened during the movie shoot. You'd have this big scrapbook, and page by page, it would. It would sort of tell a story, but it's not the same as watching the movie. And that's the difference between an identity graph, which is like a scrapbook, it's just a point in time, and an identity resolution platform, which is actually like a motion picture in that it is running matches perpetually all the time, updating to make sure that the association of one form of identity to another is accurate. And that requires software, hence why it's a platform. And a graph can just be a bucket of data, but an identity resolution platform is actually a working, breathing piece of machinery, if you will, that performs the work of identity 24 7.
- [29:34]
B
I love that distinction of identity resolution and identity graph. It feels like an ad expl. Planner article. I'll file that away. Thank you, Rick, for educating us on identity and for supporting our podcast.
- [29:48]
D
Great to be with you, Sarah.
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C
All right, we are so back, as the kids say. So one thing I was really curious about, about the Onion specifically is how much do you think that the Onion is attempting to kind of provide people with new information and new news versus kind of shift their perspective on something they were already loosely aware of, like a news event.
- [30:28]
A
That is a great question. That is also very much an editorial question. Right? Like, and I coming to this as.
- [30:36]
C
An editor, being like, oh, I want to know how the writers work, right?
- [30:39]
A
And. And I. And I cannot pretend to answer for them. They are extremely principled and thoughtful about their approach to. To the way that they talk about whatever is gracing our websites that day, I don't want to say the news of the day, because the Onion understands ultimately that, I mean, out of world, out of. Out from. From the thousand foot view, you know, we aren't news. And. And I don't think it's necessarily our job to report And I don't. And I would say, you know, the. The editors continually try to go after things that feel. As I said, they feel true and shift. So, I mean, I guess it's more of the latter. I guess they're. They're. They're certainly more interested in. In. I. I don't think they try to shift perceptions. Like, ultimately. Ultimately, they try to do funny. Funny, like. And so I don't think I. I, as much as, you know, as much as the world, like, might think that we sit down with, like, a very political agenda, I don't think, you know, I. They sit down with a human perspective, and then can they. Can they use that human perspective to. To pull out and distill the absurdities of daily life?
- [32:15]
C
And then this kind of goes back to what you were saying about people being like, oh, is the Onion going to go into business? Because, you know, real news is so crazy. I do not. I mean, personally, I like the Onion a lot. I think I can tell the difference most of the time between a real headline and an Onion headline. But when you guys market yourselves and you're posting on social or, you know, wherever you're sharing yourselves, how intentional are you about making it clear that it is a parody publication? And how much are you just kind of letting people fend for themselves and saying if they don't get this as a joke, that's on them?
- [32:44]
A
We absolutely are not a parody in voice. We are not a parody association. We do not take charity labels. We do not. I mean, you. You want to are. I don't think I have ever looked at our Instagram inboxes. We do not. We do not engage with any comments. We do not disabuse people of any notion. We are the most important news website in the world. And if you are, do not understand that. We're very sorry that, you know, it's a skill issue.
- [33:27]
C
You tell them. All right. You heard it here as well.
- [33:31]
A
Yeah.
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C
Everything that you read on the Onion should be taken 100% seriously.
- [33:35]
A
Seriously. And. And we are. We are global cabal who, you know, it has reporters in every city in every nation.
- [33:48]
C
It's true. I actually see multiple Onion reporters in my way to work every single day on Wall Street.
- [33:52]
A
You should.
- [33:54]
C
Do you have a personal favorite Onion headline? The RFK junior Handing Out Ape Glands to Trick or treaters really tickled me last time we spoke, but I don't know if there's anything more recent that's been exciting.
- [34:04]
A
You okay? The one I always say I have, I'm in front of my computer so I can pull it up because it's a. A long one. There's. There's so many there. I really like nation vise for approval from cool dog. This. Okay, this is probably. This is probably the one I laugh at the most, which is misbuttoned coat makes perfectly sane woman look like a raving lunatic. The one I think about the most.
- [34:42]
C
We've all been her.
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A
We've all been her. If you are just interested in some of our best headlines, I would encourage you to go to theonion.com and look at our newswire, which is our. Our headline ticker of just some bangers that, that, you know, I will. I sometimes forget that we have them and we'll just be like in a meeting, just like quietly, like, like reading. Reading these and just like cackling because I think that some of them are really great, I have to say. And I know that the writers also have a deep affinity for our two word headlines. I think. Actually, I think my favorite headline is apology screamed. Yeah.
- [35:30]
C
Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Not to turn this jovial tone upside down, but before we're out of time, I would love to talk about one of your favorite subjects that I know you have lots of opinions on, which is artificial intelligence.
- [35:46]
A
Ooh.
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C
So, okay, I'll start with some of the more objective questions I have about it, which is that obviously publishers are having a rough time of it right now. Google AI overviews. Terrible for publishers. Are you guys safer from that because you're kind of less of a standard traditional news source? Or is your traffic also being affected by AI overviews and chatbot searches?
- [36:15]
A
The short answer is, yeah, we're protected from it. Full stop. AI cannot. It cannot, does not get satire. In fact, if anything, AI has sometimes a boon because it will read the Onion as fact and then present us, use us as a. As a source.
- [36:38]
C
I have seen that happen once or twice. I remember that.
- [36:40]
A
Yeah, AI overviews are. I mean, I mean, it's really. I mean, this is, I guess, you know, this is not because of the fact that we're protected from it. You know, famous last words. We don't, you know, we. I, I don't have a strongly formed opinion here, but this is just a new example of like SEO or SEM, right? Like these things. This is a new kind of game. We all need to. Needed to learn how to write, you know, 12 sentences for SEO. Now we need to, like, deal with whatever the shitty AI is scraping our data. I think that the Sign of AI, of AI search results is just like continuing to flatten discourse in a really stupid way.
- [37:42]
C
Say more, please.
- [37:44]
A
You know, like the nuance that is, that comes into a search of, you know, what's going on in Venezuela is, Is now just being, you know, we're receiving like this very generalized perspective from a bunch of different sources that are all being treated equally. And I think that, you know, it's just. I think that it's, you know, it's not helpful for people who have a very specific question they want answered.
- [38:23]
C
Right. Because, I mean, this might be a bit of an overstatement, but there's no such thing as true objectivity. You can't weigh everything completely equally without taking into consideration where those sources are getting their information from, what that bias is. So by taking bias out of the equation, you might just be reintroducing new bias, right?
- [38:38]
A
Exactly. You are reintroducing new bias.
- [38:42]
C
Yeah.
- [38:43]
A
And we find out again and again.
- [38:46]
C
What do you think about, I guess for publishers that are suffering more from this, a lot of them have kind of said, if you can't beat them, join them. And a lot of them are introducing chatbots into their own websites. A lot of news sites are doing this. So you can now, you know, search kind of immediate queries about what's going on in the world. You are making a face of such. Discuss. Mike is wrong.
- [39:08]
A
How's that working out for. Once again, this is going to be the podcast, like Onion, CMO slams, Washington Post. How's that working out for the Washington Post? You know, like, how's that working out for any, any, any editorial arm that is embracing AI? We just saw, like, their, Their, their AI generated podcast sound crazy. And they're, they're a.
- [39:38]
C
This one. Which sounds extremely sane.
- [39:40]
A
No, I mean, they, they.
- [39:41]
C
I'm teasing. I'm teasing.
- [39:43]
A
No, I mean it. And leaked and no one liked it. And the thing is, is that like the ultimate, the ultimate gag for me is this. No one likes consuming AI generated content. We don't like it.
- [40:00]
C
This is true.
- [40:02]
A
It may be easier. You might have a, like, you might be able to have like a cute otter playing with your logo and throwing it into the water or something, but no one really wants. No one likes seeing that. And I think that ultimately it may be easier when you have a question, a quick question you want answered. If you're looking up, like, how many quarts is in a gallon. If you're trying to find an easy answer to what feels like a complex question, that is a. I think you can find a very easy AI solution for that. But I don't think that that's why people follow things or consume things. People like opinions, you know, even, even in the news space, people like feeling like they're being spoken to by an expert. Absolutely. And ultimately you might read an AI summary of something, but like, it just, it, it just feels embarrassing.
- [41:19]
C
So I guess there's no need to ask if the Onion is using AI in any sort of way, because it seems like that is pretty counterintuitive to every single, I mean, generative AI.
- [41:31]
A
No way. But like, like what?
- [41:33]
C
Machine learning on the back end?
- [41:35]
A
Yeah, machine learning on the back end, sure. Like, I, I mean, we use, we use products, you know, like we use Sprout Social, which, you know, uses machine learning to make predictive suggestions. But when it comes to creativity and output, when it comes to any sort of editorial or marketing creative, we are not using AI. We have no reason to use AI. The only time we've ever used AI is simply because our image services, our image, our image rights service, mislabeled an image. And so we are very much intentionally bucking that trend.
- [42:20]
C
Honestly. Glad to hear it. Yeah, put me on the record saying it. As somebody who covers AI on a daily basis, it's nice to kind of see the flip side of the coin and it's staunch disagreement.
- [42:31]
A
It's just. Well, and I think there is something to be used. There is something useful about things like a ChatGPT or Claude when it comes to doing what I call like a three dimensional search, which is like a, like search with many inputs, where you do need that kind of like generalization of knowledge. What is the, what is the easiest way for me to write, write a Python script or something. But when it comes to creativity and planning, marketing strategy, understanding your audiences, understanding what your brand is talking about, your brand, depicting your brand, no one is excited about what AI does ultimately.
- [43:16]
C
Right. And also nobody gets your brand on a visceral level the way that hopefully a CMO would.
- [43:22]
A
Right. And I, and I think it's really important to note that like AI could be very helpful in accruing data across spaces that might, that might inform a strategy. But you cannot build a strategy using AI because AI does not take swings, it does not understand nuances, it does not find those, like hidden insights that make marketing important. And when things are made with AI like, it's what, it's what has made LinkedIn like nigh unusable. You know, you just, everything, everything sounds the same and it's Just when you feel like you're dealing with the output of AI, you feel like a real sense of cringe, man. And I will go on the record and say that I just saw everyone's releasing those. The new Marvel endgame trailers are kind of coming out, being peppered out. And so people are putting them doing like, there's matchups of like, I don't know, Spider man. And. And I found one that got like millions of views of like, Tony Stark killing, killing Spider man. And. And I started to watch it and I had to turn it off because it made me so embarrassed. Like, I felt a deep sense of shame and I don't know why.
- [44:54]
C
Interesting. The secondhand embarrassment created from AI generation. No, I know we don't have much time, so that can be something we'll just be thinking about. But now that creative generation with AI is becoming so kind of standardized, I'm really intrigued to see what consumer pushback is going to look like and if it's going to look different for companies that are using higher level versions of it versus lower level versions of it, if it's going to turn into class wars of the brands for the brands that only have the money to be using kind of shitty AI. So a lot to consider, but I'm glad the Onion is still going to be taking big swings and, yeah, usually missing, in my opinion.
- [45:32]
A
Well, I appreciate that and I will, I, I will get you on record saying that. And I do have to note that, you know, good marketing doesn't cost a lot of money ultimately. And I think, I do think that we might see a class war of the brands, but I want to note that, like, you know, good marketing doesn't cost a lot of money. I'm sorry, great marketing doesn't cost a lot of money. Good marketing does.
- [46:04]
C
Great marketing costs a lot of mind.
- [46:06]
A
Yeah, exactly. And I think that ultimately we're going to see the, you know, AI can do one kind of weird, and it's like the unintentional kind of weird.
- [46:21]
D
Yeah.
- [46:21]
C
I miss the days when Giving Everybody like 17 fingers.
- [46:24]
A
Yeah. But now it's just like, like a maniac. Like mania in the eyes.
- [46:32]
C
Yes.
- [46:34]
A
Anyway, so with that, you know, you know where I stand firmly.
- [46:41]
C
I do. We all do. And yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was fantastic to talk to you as always.
- [46:48]
A
Thank you so much, Joanna. Yep. Good luck with everything and subscribe to the Onion.
- [46:57]
C
All right.
- [47:10]
B
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