B (2:42)

Morning Brew, including yourself.

C (2:44)

Yes, fantastic decision, I should add. But what is something you look for when putting out a job opening?

B (2:49)

Well, on my end, variety is the spice of life. I want to see as many different qualified people as possible, so I know I'm making the best decision. And that's why LinkedIn is a lifesaver. So many great candidates sitting there to peruse.

C (3:01)

It's that same variety that makes it such a great marketing platform too. It's got over 10 million C Suite execs and over 130 million decision makers, aka the people you need for your business on their platform and you can target by job title, industry, company and more.

B (3:16)

Most importantly, LinkedIn ads can help you stop wasting money, time and resources on mistargeting something that 71% of B2B ads suffer from. Just like it can link you with the right candidate for a job opening, it can link you with the right audience for your brand.

C (3:30)

So check out LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. So you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com/me. That's LinkedIn.com/mbd. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn.

B (3:43)

Ads HBO execs are breathing a sigh of relief because for the first time in months, there's a new media rebrand for everyone to make fun of. Yesterday, MSNBC said it will be changing its name to Ms. Now, which stands for My Source News Opinion World. The reason is that NBC Universal is spinning off most of its cable networks, including MSNBC sorry, Ms. Now. And wants to avoid confusion between MSNBC and NBC News. As part of the rebrand, MSNBC will also drop the iconic peacock logo that appears on many NBC properties. The change is sure to ruffle some feathers. Peacocks included the CEO of the company that will oversee Ms. Now, Mark Lazarus, assured employees back in January that the MSNBC name would not change as part of the spinoff. Now he's backtracking, saying the rebrand quote gives us the opportunity to to chart our own path forward, create distinct brand identities and establish an independent news organization. Lazarus said that despite the new name, the brand's commitment to its audience will not change. Reading between the lines, Expect more of the left leaning commentary MSNBC has been associated with since it came onto the scene in 1996. Looking ahead, as MSNBC morphs into Ms. Now and leaves its parent company, it'll have to build up much of the news infrastructure that it had previously relied on NBC News for the network has been hiring for 100 new positions to stand up its own newsroom independent of NBC News.

C (5:07)

Neal Everyone did not like this. It was roasted up and down the Internet. A PR expert I follow Lulu Cheng. Ms. Survey hated it. Her take was that it seems like a wasted opportunity because it forfeits brand equity that you had without replacing it with anything better. And then also she just said it's so generic. Ms. Now could be an app, a charity, or a cloud storage product. Initially, I thought it was a reband for Ms. One Drive. So from the naming perspective alone, a lot of people were kind of taking it out behind the woodshed. And then design people hated it as well. I know this is a podcast, but I encourage you to look up the logo. I was going through the design subreddit and someone in the discussion wrote, I wouldn't trust a news source with this esthetic. You can tell how little they care about the company by their lack of personality and originality in the design. Too cheap for an artist means they'll skimp on the content, too. So these, these decisions reverberate through the entire news organization you're trying to build. When you kind of roll out a design that feels half hearted, that feels half baked, then a lot of people are. That leads to a lack of trust in the, in the news that you're trying to convey. So just fascinating to see how everyone immediately jumped on this and said this was not a good redesign.

B (6:23)

Well, how did we get here? Back in November, Comcast said it would spin off a bunch of NBC Universal cable channels in a $7 billion deal. It getting rid of MSNBC, Ms. Now CNBC, USA, oxygen, E& more. That is going to be combined into a new company called Versand. It's going to keep NBC, Bravo, and Peacock streaming service under the NBC Universal banner. The idea is to shed those cable networks that are hemorrhaging money so that Comcast can hopefully achieve a higher valuation on the public markets as investors, you know, look to its streaming platforms for growth rather than those albatrosses like the cable networks like msnbc, so that msnbc, cnbc, all those other cable networks are now under a new company. I don't know if they had a choice but to rebrand. Perhaps they could have done it a lot better than they did, but the NBC Universal guys were like, we're keeping the peacock. We're keeping the NBC stuff. You guys have to change your name because there's been a lot of confusion now that You're a separate company, you know, we can't have you stealing our brand anymore.

C (7:27)

Yeah, I totally understand why they did it. And NBC keeping the iconic peacock symbol was a smart decision because that is what you associate with the brand writ large. So of course the spun out channels were going to have to, you know, fend for themselves. But again, why would you back yourself into another acronym that you don't need to like? Ms. Initially comes from Microsoft, but MSNBC hasn't been associated with Microsoft since 2012. Why keep that if you're going to do a rebrand? Go the entire way. And this faux acronym, it doesn't make any sense. My source for news opinion in the world, like you didn't need to have an acronym. Just a fun fact from NBC. Laura as well. NBC has always loved a half baked acronym because cnbc, which is their financial news channel, technically stands for consumer news and business channel, but in reality it actually stood for this joint partner venture between Cablevision and NBC. So they just again made another half baked acronym and now they're doing it once more with Ms. Now. So you can take the acronym out of NBC Universal, but you can't take the acronym out of Versant.

B (8:34)

Good news for Jim Cramer fans though. If you like cnbc, it's not going to have to change its name like msnbc. They think there is a distinct enough newsroom operations process going on between CNBC and NBC News that they're allowing CNBC to, to take their name. But yeah, MSNBC is going to have to hire a ton of journalists now because they relied so much on NBC News for various reporting and infrastructure and things like that. So now it is in the wild, being left to its own under a new name.

C (9:03)

Soho House is a private membership club that just got even more private after a turbulent four year run in the public markets. It's going off market in a $2.7 billion deal led by a New York hotel chain and an investor group including Ashton Kutcher. Soho House is actually based in London, not the New York City neighborhood, and helped popularize the new era of exclusive clubs where people spend thousands of dollars a year to eat, drink and rub elbows with people from similar financial standings. But it struggled with life as a public company, losing money for the majority of its existence. Its stock peaked at around $15 a share after its IPO, but has since lost about 50% of its value. Part of the issue is the inherent tension between Soho House's core offering and life as a public company. Shareholders demand growth, which means you have to open up new clubs, which inevitably dilutes the brand and now has 48 locations worldwide, up from 33 in 2021, with more than 270,000 members as of June 30. Neal this new deal sees one of the largest hotel operators in the U.S. mCR hotels pay $9 a share for Soho House, an 18% premium over where the stock closed on Friday. Can it stage a turnaround now that it's away from the scrutiny of life as a public company?

B (10:19)

You think so? Because when you're not a public company, you don't have to report quarterly earnings. And Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway has been on this crusade for decades, saying that when you have to report quarterly earnings to investors, it creates a lot of noise within your financials. Sometimes you have good quarters, sometimes you have bad quarters. And when you're trying to turn around a company like we are seeing Starbucks do, or a couple of the Boeing couple of these other public companies, you report some really bad earnings as you try to do some maneuvering to, you know, improve the financial health of your company. It's kind of what Soho House is doing right now. And if you do it under the guise of the private markets, it's a lot easier to do than having to stand up there on a conference call with analysts each quarter and say, yeah, our turnaround is going okay, but we're also hemorrhaging money at the moment as we're implementing our strategy. So implementing a turnaround is a much easier thing to do when you're a private company. And seems that's what Soho House is trying to do.

C (11:18)

It just never quite was a great fit for the public markets because again, you are an exclusive membership club. Your entire alert is the exclusivity. But when you are a public company, you have to grow. So it grew to 48 clubs around the world. It also expand to some cities that some people were maybe scratching their heads at a little bit. I mean, no offense to Nashville, but it's not necessarily the place that you think a Soho club would necessarily operate. It went to Ibiza, Sao Paulo, Mexico City. These are, you know, big global cities. But, you know, Soho Houses Vibe was London, New York for a long time. So the fact that memberships now Swell to over 270,000, do you really feel that exclusive if you're one of 270,000? At the time of its IPO, it was still 119,000. So this is a very popular brand. And like they almost suffered from their own success in a certain sex in a certain sense. So that is why maybe it is a much better fit for the private.

B (12:15)

Yeah, I was reminded of the Yogi Bear quote. He was asked about a popular restaurant. He said, nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. But Toby, I would not try to enter Nashville anytime soon.

C (12:24)

I know. Sorry. Sorry.

B (12:25)

All right, moving on. This has probably happened to you at some point. You're browsing the Internet looking for possible certifications or credentials that could give your career boost. You find one that looks interesting, maybe from LinkedIn or Coursera or a university. But you think to yourself, is this worth it? And the answer is probably not. A study out this summer investigated more than 23,000 credentials being offered and found that the vast majority of them don't help recipients advance their careers or secure a notable raise. The research conducted by the Burning Glass Institute and the American Enterprise Institute discovered that just one in eight non degree credentials delivered a non trivial pay gain within a year of completion. The Wall Street Journal use the example of the Project Management Graduate certificate from Harvard Extension School. This certification costs nearly $14,000 and takes an average of a year and a half to finish online. But people who paid all that money and spent all that time generally did not get a pay bump compared to similar workers who didn't take the course. And the difference in career advancement between the certificate holders and the non holders was a measly 3.7 percentage points. The certification industry has ballooned in recent years to the point now more than 1 million credentials being offered across the country, a number that tripled from 2018 to 2022. But do your research before signing up for one.

C (13:43)

Yeah, I can see why people do this. Why do you get a certificate in general? You want to get more money, you want to get promoted, or you want to, you know, learn a new skill so you can change jobs. So I'm sure a lot of you listening at home have taken or have seen some sort of credentialed or non degree credential floating around on the Internet. But it is. The study likened it to when you buy a car from Mercedes, you know what you're going to get. For the most part, it's going to have a consistent level of quality. When you go online to buy a course, you have no idea if it's actually going to lead to those outcomes that you want. So there are some good ones that they called out. But the problem is that there are so many different options. I mean, it's just it exploded as an industry recently. So when you have quality varying as widely as it is even within industries. You might think that, hey, if I want to do a data science course, most data science courses probably are going to teach you similar things and lead to similar outcomes. Not the case at all. The top 10% of data science credentials actually did grant graduates an average income boost of $5,500 a year. But the bottom 10% saw no new earnings income at all. So even within provider, even within the actual industry that you are operating in, there is a wide swath of of quality.

B (14:59)

Yeah, it does seem a pretty good, you know, top of the order here, but a very bad and long bottom of the order for credentials. Workers who received one of the top 2,000 performing credentials earned about $5,000 extra a year compared to their their similar workers who did not take these credentials. So the people who did this survey, the Burning Glass Institute, American Enterprise Institute, actually created an online portal where they graded different credentials and they called it something like a nutrition facts label for particular certification courses. So if you want to search that, go online and before you do that, you can maybe see what the outcomes were for the various credentials before you take a dive in.

C (15:46)

I thought with the top of the order thing you had another Yogi Berra quote for me there no Yogi Berry quote for this one.

B (15:52)

There probably is one. I don't know it off the top of my head.

C (15:54)

All right, let's take a quick break. And up next we have Toby's Trends. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. I'm a person who really appreciates simplicity and when it comes to credit card rewards, the simpler the better. That's one of the many reasons I have an Apple Card. The rewards are super straightforward. I earn up to 3% daily cash back on my everyday purchases. There are no points to calculate, no limits or deadlines. Plus it's super easy to access my card and make payments from the Wallet app of my iPhone. If that sounds like the kind of simplicity you want in a credit card, apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Brands terms and.

B (16:36)

More@Applecard.Com Just like you have regular visits at the doctor, your company's supply chain needs checkups too.

C (16:43)

Thankfully, it takes less than a minute to do it with supply chain health Vitals Checkup from SPS Commerce. It's a free, non intimidating way to understand your current position and access practical steps for improvement.

B (16:55)

SPS Commerce created this checkup to give you a way to benchmark your supply chain against industry standards and identify your biggest opportunities for growth.

C (17:03)

You don't even have to carve out a full minute to get a fast, efficient assessment of your supply chain's current health and receive a personalized guide with practical recommendations for improvement.

B (17:13)

From there, SPS Commerce can work alongside you and your suppliers to ensure everyone is equipped to meet shared goals.

C (17:19)

Head to SBS commerce.com Morning Brew to get your supply chain checkup. That's SBS commerce.com Morning Brew welcome back to another edition of Toby's Trends, the segment where I take a deep dive into the business world to emerge with a trend you can use to impress your ex should you happen to run into them at the farmer's market. And today's trend is that brands are creating social media First Sitcom Shows Roomies is a scripted series told in short two minute vignettes that follows a young transplant who moves from Ohio to New York City. It's got the production quality of a TV show, but the length and vibe of a Tik Tok. And it's been resonating. The Roomies account has racked up over 7 million views and over 140,000 followers across Instagram and Tik Tok, with the comments loving every minute of it. Okay, wait, is this like a TV show but on TikTok? Remarks 1 I cannot believe these are free episodes because of the production, reads another. But outside the Hollywood vibe of the show lies an even more surprising secret. It's produced by the financial startup Bilt. Bilt lets you pay your rent with a credit card that grants you rewards at local businesses, but the only way you know they were behind the production quality TV show you're watching on Tik Tok is a brief mention in the Roomies account Bio. Eventually, Bilt does plan to loop in some of their corporate sponsors into the characters lives, but for now they're content with staying in the background. It's extremely intentional built, senior Director of Content Cyrus Ferguson told Rachel Carton in her link in Bio newsletter. We don't want branding to get in the way of storytelling. It's about earning attention and curiosity rather than demanding it. Neal watching a TikTok that's actually a TV show, that's actually an ad. A lot of layers to this.

B (19:04)

It's Toby Transception. My thought when I heard about this was okay, good for you that you created a TV show. Like very impressive, but are you actually getting anything from it? Especially if you don't have any of the built branding associated with it. That's probably why it's popular because people don't know that a credit card company is behind it. But are you actually acquiring new users from this? I understand that this is a very top of funnel marketing campaign where you're just creating awareness and you're generating eyeballs until you can eventually sell them something. But I wonder ultimately if the ROI is there for that. Other brands might want a copy. And then we talked about Toby Transception. Another trend that is mind blowing to me is that people watch TV shows on TikTok.

C (19:45)

Yes. Have you not seen this coming?

B (19:47)

I don't watch them. TikTok.

C (19:49)

It actually is a very interesting way of just playing into how the algorithm works because if you like the first episode, your algorithm will take note and then serve you the second episode. By then you're kind of invested in the plot and you might one get served subsequent episodes, but you might actually go and seek it out at that point. So a lot of the comments are like, oh, this episode took so long to drop. And I'm saying episode with quotes around it because they literally are two minutes. It's a very, you know, almost documentary style way of filming. But it is fascinating that Bill was like, hey, we could obviously put paid ad spend behind something like this and force it in front of people or we could just let the algorithm do its thing. If we made a good product then they will get served the subsequent episode. So fascinating use case of just letting the algorithm do its thing to to serve up TV show. But also brands have been embracing this sort of social content for a long time now. I mean if you go back to Walmart and P and G, Procter and Gamble back in 2010 they created a movie called Secrets of the Mountain that was broadcasted on NBC. They tried to highlight some of the values that they thought were important to their company's generosity, honesty to togetherness. But then they also ran ads for both companies during commercial break. So this is not the first time that a brand has said, hey, what if we just created content and then just slipped in like a Trojan horse of an ad. This has been happening for literally decades at this point. Now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Up first, Air Canada flight attendants agreed to end their strike that led to thousands of canceled flights this weekend. They reached a tentative agreement this morning with the airline after a marathon nine hour negotiating session after the union defied a government work order to return to work. Details are still emerging on this. This is literally breaking news. So we will keep you all updated as we learn more.

B (21:37)

Yeah, there were two demands that the union had wanted from Air Canada. One was broader wage increases. They had been offered 38% increase over four years. They said that wasn't enough, so we'll see what that number actually amounted to. And the other was they wanted to get paid while the airplane was on the ground and they were still doing work, known as boarding pay. There's been a big push across the industry for flight attendants to get paid for the time when passengers are boarding and deep planing. So for anyone who's been stranded in a remote Canadian province or who wants to go to one for vacation or go anywhere else in the world on Air Canada, you know this is great news. Ozempic is about to get a whole lot cheaper for some Americans. Novo Nordisk said it's slashing the price of its diabetes shot for cash, paying patients to $499 a month, about half of the list price in the US the price cut comes after the company faces intense political pressure to lower costs for Ozempic and its weight loss cousin Wegovy. At the same time, the move is intended to make Ozempic more competitive with all the knockoffs that have sprung up when the drug was in a shortage. To be sure, Ozempic is covered by most insurance plans to treat diabetes, unlike Wegovy. Still, execs said the price cut would make it more accessible to those who don't have coverage or we're using less regulated copycats, novo's head of US Operations, Dave Moore, said in a statement. We believe that if even a single patient feels the need to turn to potentially unsafe and unapproved knockoff alternatives, that's one too many.

C (23:04)

It's fascinating to see Ozempic cutting prices while one of its main rivals, Eli Lilly, is doing the opposite. Eli Lilly just hiked the price of its own GLP1 medication by 170% in the UK that has come as President Trump has putting pressure on US Pharma companies to lower US Prices and jack them up in Europe. So you are seeing Ozempic doing the opposite while Eli Lilly is raising prices. And then potentially the real winner was that almost slipped under the radar. Is this telemedicine platform good Rx? Its Stock jumped almost 40% on the news because Novo Nordisk is is offering this discounted Ozempic on their platform. So one loser again is Hims and hers who used to have this partnership with Novo Nordisk to do a distribution deal with them that was short lived. It kind of imploded back in June and now it's seeing almost what it missed out on. Seeing good RX's stock jump like it did.

B (24:00)

In the courtyard of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stands a sculpture that contains a secret no one has discovered in the 35 years it's been there. This fall, the artworks mystery will finally be revealed to the highest bidder. In November, the artist Jim Sanborn will auction off the coded message contained within Kryptos, a sculpture he made for the CIA in 1990. The sculpture has four copper panels engraved with letters which guard a secret message that the best cryptographers in the world have not been able to solve despite their best efforts. Well, of the four panels, three have been decoded, but the fourth, known as K4, has not been cracked. And it's that hidden message that Sanborn is going to sell in a few months. When asked why he's putting it to auction, Sanborn said he's simply tired of responding to the tens of thousands of emails he gets from people who think they've solved the puzzle. There are only so many ways you can say you're wrong. Try again, Toby. Number one, had no idea this existed. Though it makes sense that a coded sculpture would be in Langley. Number two, this is an incredibly high stakes auction. The person who buys it will have immense power.

C (25:04)

They will have immense power. And I'm curious to see where the secret ends up, because you could, anyone could buy this. I mean, the. The asking price is going to be in the 300 to $500,000 range and could grow even higher. So. But a lot of people say that maybe someone from the crypto industry would be involved and it could just be some, you know, wise arse bitcoin billionaire who snaps it up and puts the code out for everyone to see. Or it could be someone that, you know, cherishes the secret. You don't know. The thing that this reminds me of is when the Wu Tang Clan offered up one of their unreleased albums for auction, and Martin Shkreli, the, you know, pharma boy, pharma bro, billionaire, bought it and made copies of it and posted it online and kind of just undermined the entire thing that Wu Tang Clan was going for. That could easily happen in an auction like this. If someone were to post the answer to cryptos, I would be very interested in it because this has this panel for. It has stumped people for literally decades at this point. So I'm very curious to see whose hands this ends up in. Finally, every year, the Cambridge Dictionary updates its contents to include words that they think will have staying power. And this year, words that made the cut that will grace the pages of dictionaries for years to come. Skibidi, Tradwife, and Delulu, among others. The language of origin of all those words is, of course tik tok. Skibidi refers to the skibidi toilet meme that began on YouTube and features heads just kind of swirling up out of toilets. Cambridge Dictionary defines it as a word that can have different meanings, such as cool or bad, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke. An example of its use is what the Skibidi are you doing? Tradwife refers to a traditionally conservative view of marriage that celebrates a wife that looks after their home, husbands and children, and often posts about it online. And Dulu is short for delusional, which is probably how a lot of you are feeling if you are above the age of 16 right now. Neal Cambridge thinks these all have staying power, so please use them all in a sentence for us.

B (27:08)

It's true. If you don't like these words and you want them to go away, then you would be wrong according to Cambridge Dictionary because they only add words that they quote, think have staying power that these they believe that these are not a passing craze. The origin of Delulu I thought was pretty interesting. It emerged more than 10 years ago as an insult directed to K pop followers fans to, you know, cast doubt that they would date their idols, which I didn't know that that was the particular origin of Delulu. And a few other work related words I want to call out that are being added to the dictionary are ones you've probably used work wife, work spouse and mouse jiggler.

C (27:46)

I can't wait until some of these are added to the Scrabble dictionary and you can bust out Skibidi. That's actually a pretty high scoring word right there. But I don't think that Cambridge, you know, is the same as the actual Scrabble Dictionary. So might you might have to do some massaging with your opponents if you want to bust one of those out.

B (28:03)

That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. Excited to see so many of you at Trivia A Night tonight. If you have any thoughts or feedback on today's show, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morning Broadcom. Toby what is today's password clue?

C (28:18)

Today's clue is the password begins with a title that a person could have remember. Yesterday's clue was the password is a two word movie title and today's clue is the password begins with a title that a person could have. If you think you know the answer, you can submit it by going to to the link in the show description or by heading to our Instagram at Daily Show. We will also post it there.

B (28:41)

Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair Makeup is waiting in line at Disney World Sans Kids. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

C (28:55)

Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.