Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:01:12 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar
[00:01:12] S1: Your annual gourd. [00:01:13] S0: My annual gourd, very important. I bought a pumpkin too early, and it rotted before I could even carve it. So I don't know. We're sitting here the day... Two... Day before Thanksgiving or two days. I have to decide if I wanna do that. Maybe a spooky ad tech carving. I'm not sure. So our guest today is a friend of the pod, friend of everyone, Chris Harihar, and he is a PR pro. He gives free advice to everyone who wants to listen on X. So you don't even need to hire him. Just follow him on X, and it'll tell you what you're doing wrong. And we're gonna get to the bottom of it, what's working or not in Ad Tech PR. He is the EVP of Mod Op. So, Eric, have you worked with Chris? Do your... Some of your clients work with him? [00:01:55] S1: No. I I never worked with Chris before. Have known him through X seemingly for for years. I had met him a few times. Cool guy. He's on it. Sharp. He's like super prolific. I love to get into just, you know, the zeitgeist with somebody like that. So it should be a good one. [00:02:11] S0: Yeah. And I wanna learn what Aristotle can teach us from ancient Greece about PR. So that'll be a question we'll tee up. We also have a ton of news. The Google weak earnings report, FreeWheel's future. Walmart has an MCP server. There's just too much. There's too much [00:02:25] S1: for M [00:02:26] S0: M and a. Of course. Alright. So stay tuned. We'll get we'll get right into it. Alright, Chris Harihar. Thank you so much for joining us. [00:02:36] S2: Of course. Thank you for having me.
00:02:36 · Chris Harihar, Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:02:36] S2: Of course. Thank you for having me. [00:02:37] S0: So, we're getting immediate feedback on this pod. You know, the the loop between us broadcasting and us getting, feedback on x is very short, and apparently, you're not a big fan of the fortune cookie ads. [00:02:51] S2: I am not a fan of the fortune cookie ads, and I feel bad about that because I I [00:02:55] S1: You should. [00:02:56] S2: I like the idea in many ways. But in practice, I... I'm gonna say conceptually and in practice, I'm I'm a... I'm not a believer, and I'm happy to explain why. You know? Though, go for go for it. [00:03:11] S0: No. No. No. You do. You said... I'm gonna quote your tweet. People tolerate ads in places where they expect them. A fortune cookie isn't one of those places. [00:03:19] S2: That is correct. [00:03:20] S0: So hit us. [00:03:20] S2: But first, I'll say this. If we're being honest, fortune cookies are kind of a weird experience. You know, if we're being thoughtful about it, they kind of play off of, a number of, you know, weird and dated stereotypes. It's sort of like the the play on, like, the the wise minority. At the same time, I kinda like fortune cookies if we're being honest. [00:03:43] S0: They're very American. They're they're not very Chinese. They're very American.
00:03:43 · Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar, Eric Franchi
[00:03:43] S0: They're very American. They're they're not very Chinese. They're very American. [00:03:46] S2: They are very Americanized for sure. But, you know, I think the ex... I'll say fortune cookies, like, love Chinese food. I love fortune cookies. It's... They're one of the the rare moments, I feel like, where you actually get, like, a delightful surprise. Like, you're actually presented with a fortune that you will find ways to describe meaning to your life with that fortune. And to have a... An ad on the on the reverse side of it, I think it it clouds your it clouds the authenticity of... If you will, of of the fortune and undercuts the fortune. So if it says, like, you are poised for a great year, and then on the back, it's it's from, like, dude wipes, I would be like, what... Is this... Did Dude Wipes come up with this, you know, fortune? [00:04:35] S0: You'd rather someone in the back of a fortune cookie manufacturing company, like throwing darts at nouns and verbs and using chat GPT to write [00:04:43] S2: That is right. That is right. I I like the... I like I like a black box when it comes to my fortunes. I don't I don't need to know how the sauce was made. And when you have a brand involved, I I feel like I'm I'm getting too much too much insight into how this might have come together. [00:04:58] S1: I don't want to over rotate on this one because we have a lot of good stuff to talk about, but I have to ask you Did a you go to the site and look at some of the creative? Because I I... It's hilarious.
00:04:58 · Eric Franchi, Chris Harihar
[00:04:58] S1: I don't want to over rotate on this one because we have a lot of good stuff to talk about, but I have to ask you Did a you go to the site and look at some of the creative? Because I I... It's hilarious. [00:05:09] S2: I agree. And at the same time, if I pass my my daughter, for example, I'll I'll... You know, I get a fortune. I'll give my daughter a fortune cookie. And if she opens it up and it's like, you know, and it's from, like, Polymarket, I... It's just odd. It's an odd experience. And I think that I think that... I I actually think that this idea doesn't scale. Really, it's it's kind of a fun idea. I think it's built off of sharing the fortunes on social where people, like, will rage bait and get pissed off by the fact that there's a a polymarket ad on a fortune cookie, and then they just post about it. And so you drive... Like, it's it's meant to to play off of, like, anger angertizing if you will, which I think is a an increasingly common thing where everyone's so inundated with ads and like good ads are are are... Good ads don't even stand out, so people focus on creating experiences that are meant to elicit a reaction. In this case, like a fortune cookie ad, I think, drives a negative reaction for most people. And so they post about it on social, you get... And it drives reach that way.
00:06:15 · Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar, Eric Franchi
[00:06:15] S0: Well, we'll have to have a debate maybe at the Marketecture Live study. Although, I will say a couple points. One is that they guarantee their advertisers a minimum percentage of QR code scans, which is a pretty aggressive KPI because it's hard to get people to do that. And they have a pretty big growing business. So I was really excited. That's why we had... We had them on the show because not because it was a cool idea, but because they're actually executing at scale, which was surprising to me because I thought the same thing you did before the interview. For sure. But let's get I think [00:06:44] S2: the big lesson here is, guys, if you have an idea, just go for it. You know? Absolutely. Just go for it. [00:06:48] S0: The one thing I think we could all agree to is that the people who smash their fortune cookies to get the the fortunes are psychotic. You gotta crack it in half and eat it. [00:06:58] S2: How angry are you as a person when you're smashing [00:07:00] S0: the fortune How much disdain do you have for for cultural norms and stuff? [00:07:04] S2: You have to delicately crack it open. [00:07:06] S0: You delicately crack it. That's how it should [00:07:08] S2: be done. [00:07:08] S1: You don't [00:07:08] S0: have to eat it. Save the cookie [00:07:10] S1: for someone else. Yeah. [00:07:11] S2: Also, on the other side though, the the true psychopath is somebody who bites the fortune and [00:07:17] S0: then Yeah. [00:07:18] S2: And extracts it from [00:07:19] S0: their mouth. [00:07:20] S1: And then
00:07:20 · Eric Franchi, Chris Harihar, Ari Paparo
[00:07:20] S1: And then [00:07:20] S2: gently pulls the the fortune out of their mouth. That is on the other side of it. That person is psychotic. [00:07:27] S0: I see [00:07:28] S2: that. I'm talking about my five year old. That's clearly... [00:07:32] S0: That's the equivalent of the people who, like, tie knots and cherry stems with their tongues, which is a great skill. [00:07:37] S2: We're getting into some weird territory. [00:07:38] S0: No. It is. Okay. Well, the reason we're having you on the pod, well [00:07:41] S2: Yeah. [00:07:41] S0: Is that because you have a lot of hot takes. Like, basically, you're you're a one man entertainment machine on x. [00:07:47] S2: I appreciate that. [00:07:49] S0: So your job is is PR and about helping people, you know, get their messages across. So, you know, I wanna start with, what's what's good? What have you seen that's in our space that's that's good? Who's doing a good job?