Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Prof G on Marketing: Should Your Brand Take a Stand? About this episode Welcome to the second episode of our special series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today.
In today’s episode, Scott answers your questions about whether brands should get political, how to pivot when industry assumptions no longer hold, and why marketers must adapt to a world where trust is shifting from institutions to individuals.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:33 Scott Galloway? Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G. Today, we're continuing our special three-part series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today. What a thrill. Let's bust right into it. Okay, what do we have here? Our first question comes from Dom on Instagram. He asks,
0:53 Speaker 02 More and more companies are taking political stances as part of their branding. Growing up, I was told that businesses should never talk about religion or politics in order to stay out of trouble and not segment customers. Does this hurt companies in the long run? Do you think it is smart that businesses are moving in this direction?
1:13 Scott Galloway? This is going to require some nuance. So I've served on a bunch of public company boards, seven. I'm kind of a big deal, kind of a big deal, and probably 24 private company boards. And my general view on political statements is that it's mostly virtue signaling from the CEO, likes to get in front, especially about three, four years ago, maybe five years ago, get in front of a younger workforce and talk about all this woke nonsense. Because why it was nonsense is because they didn't believe it themselves. They were just trying to score, like acquire virtue. Like, I don't have enough Gulfstreams or shares or options here, so I want to capture social status. I think that's actually a pretty decent criticism of the Democratic Party. Instead of focusing on the material and emotional wellbeing of consumers, they want to pretend that they're grabbing virtue rather than actually getting any fucking thing done
1:57 Scott Galloway? at the ground level in terms of what actually impacts people, see above inflation, et cetera. So I generally think it's a good idea to stay out of politics. I tried to separate the person from the politics. I live.
2:12 Scott Galloway? Just south of Palm Beach and a lot of my friends are Republicans and I just think they're batshit crazy. I just don't understand how they can tolerate some of this nonsense. But at the same time, I also recognize they're thoughtful, nice people and I enjoy their friendships. So I try to ignore it when they put out a reel saying, oh, finally the truth that, that these food products cause autism. And I want to write, dude, didn't we go to college together? Are you really that fucking stupid? Because I know that will damage the friendship. So I try to separate that. I also try to separate the company from politics. Now, PropT doesn't do that. You know, we're a media company. We're a small company. We are highly political because a lot of what we do is putting out thought, leadership, opinion, et cetera. And
2:54 Scott Galloway? still, we would probably be a bigger company if I just focused on business and tech rather than taking political stance. But at this point in my life, I get to do whatever the fuck I want. See above, I'm going to talk about. My favorite is when people say in my newsletter, they write, oh, get back to talking about business or things you know. Basically, I got a lot of like, stay in your lane. Well, you know what my lane is? Whatever the fuck I want to talk about. And I've earned that and I'm finally there. Anyways, anywho, for most big public companies, you do want to avoid politics. Now, having said that, occasionally an opportunity comes along. Race relations in the US were capturing a lot of attention. Colin Kaepernick was a great quarterback. Two thirds of Nike's customer
3:35 Scott Galloway? base under the age of 30, not kind of on board with how race relations were going in the United States. Anyone who was upset about them embracing Colin Kaepernick, who burnt their Nikes, had to go out and buy their first pair of Nikes. It was a very smart move. They probably alienated somewhere between 5 and 10% of their TAM to embolden or entrench or inspire 90% of their addressable market. That's a really good trade off. We are in that moment right now. And essentially, I think that things have gotten so out of control where we're rounding up people with the wrong tattoo, doing really stupid shit around tariffs. It's going to do nothing but elegantly reduce our prosperity, put thousands of small businesses out of business. Doge, which was nothing but literally like, okay,
4:20 Scott Galloway? how stupid can you be? Right? We're going to cut $2 trillion. No, I meant 150 million. No, I meant 60 billion. No, I meant less than the subsidies to Tesla. I mean, it has been handled so poorly, so poorly that Americans and are so fed up that the biggest commercial opportunity in a decade. And I said this last week, and I'll say it again, I said it in the last office hours, and I'll say it again, is to come out, not against Trump so much, but to come out in favor of American values of decency, of competition, of being thoughtful around our economic policy, of embracing our great immigrant population, PhD students, of rule of law, of due process, all the things that we've come to expect are American. That company,
5:03 Scott Galloway? that company will register a torrent of new business. I mean, for God's sakes, this guy is flailing, literally flailing. This is the biggest commercial opportunity in the last decade. In sum, with rare exception, though, let me finish where I started. You generally want to avoid politics because you are likely going to alienate 50% of the population. Having said that, on a risk-adjusted basis, this is a calculated risk worth taking. Our next question comes from Instagram. Ambreen asks,
5:38 Speaker 03 What marketing assumption about your industry or organization are you currently relying on that, if proven wrong, would fundamentally change your marketing strategy? And how would you pivot?
5:49 Scott Galloway? Each year, we pick sort of a strategic imperative. I think it's important to have one thing that you're like, this is the one box we have to check this year, because I think being an effective leader is not deciding what to do, it's deciding what not to do. And that is, you only have so much wood. So I think it's important every year to say, this is our strategic imperative. We've got to check this box. For 2025, the strategic imperative for Prof G Media is to get much better and dramatically increase our video views. What I found just fascinating, kind of blew my mind, was that the primary channel of distribution for podcasts right now is not Apple, it's not Spotify, it's YouTube. 20% of the listens of this program right now will be listened to on a television or
6:33 Scott Galloway? watched on a television, which isn't a good idea. All of a sudden, I get very self-conscious because listen to my voice. My voice, ooh, hello, dreamy. I'm handsome, handsome voice. Brad Pitt of voices. Face, for those of you watching on TV, not so much, not so much. See you above. Lost Virginity when he was nineteen. Anyways, so my, my skills play well to audio, but here's the bottom line. Podcasts are moving towards video. Podcasts are essentially becoming TV shows with strong audio components where you can just listen to the audio. If you look at, I think the next Joe Rogan is a kid named Steve Bartlett. When I moved to London two and a half years ago, the first thing I did was drive to the studio in Ipswich in Norwich, or whatever the cool part of town is.
7:18 Scott Galloway? And he had this incredible studio with eight people, cameras everywhere. And I'm like, this is a, this is like Charlie Rose. This is a, but you know, much more deft production quality. And he was basically doing a TV show. And if you'll notice in the last two and a half years, Stephen has busted into the top 10. He used to be in the top 10 in the UK and now he's in the top 10 globally. I think he's probably going to be the biggest podcaster in the world. And if you look at the top 100 podcasts of the 1.6 million that are out there and the 600,000 that put out content every week. The hundred, the top 100, there's been huge churn. 50 new entrants into the top 150 have dropped out. And what is the arbiter of who has churned in and churned out? It's their video game.
8:00 Scott Galloway? So we have spent a lot of time trying to think about, we hired a kid named Billy Bennett, who used to work for us, who's now, was at CNN and is now working with us, just focusing on video. We have a full-time tech guy, our tech guy Drew, who's sort of our head of engineering and has been with us for about 15 years. The woman who runs my business, Catherine Dillon, is a creative at heart and edits and thinks about video. The hard part is that the thing that played to my strengths in terms of video from a personal standpoint is I'm on the road about 150 days a year. So my studio was basically a doc kit that I could set up. I didn't even have a ring light. I would just try and find a nice part of the hotel room I was staying in and do a reasonable job of video.
8:38 Scott Galloway? And that's not longer going to cut it. So we've spent a bunch of money on studios that were replicating in the different places I spent a lot of time in, specifically New York. Florida and London, but I'm not sure that's enough. So we're trying to be really thoughtful about marketing, pushing people to our videos, using more sound effects, usually using more visual effects. The fastest growing part of our franchise, or our portfolio, if you will, is Prop G Markets. And that's because it is tailor made for graphic overlays, because we talk a lot about stocks in a market, and Ed's in the same place, so they can create better production values. In sum, the assumption we made was that the new arbiter of who moves up in the world
9:20 Scott Galloway? of podcasting and who moves out is going to be how strong your video game is. Now, your question is, what would happen if that changed? I don't know, I guess we just have to pivot and be agile and try and figure out what that next thing is. I think the next thing, YouTube is the new channel. I believe that in 2026, and I'm already starting to think about a strategy here, that the new arbiter of success in podcasting is not going to be Spotify, it's not going to be Apple, it'll still be YouTube, but more than anything, or the new player, if you will, that creates the difference between numbering number 300 and number 30, is the following, Reddit. I think Reddit is literally out of central casting in terms of its niche domains, it's the viscosity of commenting.
10:05 Scott Galloway? I think it was tailor made to figure out how they become a platform for taking pieces of podcasts and threading them into different comments on Reddit. I think Reddit's going to be the new platform that kind of picks winners and losers. A possible second to that in 26 is going to be Netflix, who's decided to get into the game. And Netflix just has, with 350 million consumers, with custody of 350 million home screens, if they decide that they want to distribute Mel Robbins podcast, or Raging Moderates, that podcast will immediately shoot into the top 20 of podcasts globally. So they have so much custody of the consumer that they perhaps could be the new arbiter.
10:47 Scott Galloway? In sum, I'm trying to think about not only what's in front of our face, but think around the corner and make bets accordingly. But I think about this stuff a lot. So in sum, you got to make a bet, you got to have a strategic imperative, and hold people accountable, and invest additional resources in that.
11:04 Scott Galloway? Imperative such that you can give people the the resources to move against or act against what you think is important and where the puck is headed. And also think about, you know, looking beyond the second corner. So what's the corner we're moving towards or what's where's the puck going? Video, hands down. Where do we think it might be headed? Reddit and possibly Netflix. Thanks for the question.
11:27 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back after a quick break.
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14:01 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Our final question comes from Needalize on Reddit. They say,
14:07 Speaker 02 I started my career in big agencies back in the early aughts when the internet was young. However, even then, we were talking about how the media was splintering and how it was getting harder to get noticed. As you know, the trend has gone into overdrive. Audience attention is splintered across endless platforms and micro-communities, and trust is shifting from institutions to individuals, from brands to influencers. I keep coming back to this question. How does the humble media planner or marketer even navigate this reality? The age of the all-powerful, monolithic brand feels like it's fading fast. And now, resonance doesn't come from one big message, but from a thousand fragments finding the right ears.
14:51 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I agree. So it used to be, if you think about it, not that long ago, you could capture a third of America in about four nights because 2/3 of America was watching one of three channels five hours a day. Now that media landscape has fragmented just wildly.
15:09 Scott Galloway? In all of that, the costs have gone way up. So we didn't realize how inexpensive broadcast advertising was, how cheap it was. You could capture essentially to a 30 second spot on the Academy Awards 30 years ago was about a fifth of the price and it reached three times as many people as it does today. So it was 15 times, you have 15 times the ROI and yet people still do it. We didn't realize how cheap it was. So the fact that media was so inexpensive from like 1945 to 1995, maybe in 2000, created an ecosystem where the algorithm for creating shareholder value was to have
15:50 Scott Galloway? a mediocre truck, salty snack, sugary drink, shoe or car. Build an okay slash shitty car, the K car or Out of Detroit and rapid and amazing brand codes of tough like a rock or apple pie, whatever it might be, or find a, find, you know, soap, then then craft it with, you know, okay, materials or ingredients. And then talk about European elegance, create a shitty beer and convince people that if they drink this beer, they're going to be hot and have a six pack and be more attracted to potential mates. And you could infuse these incredible brand codes really inexpensively using some creative agency of guys who wore black and gave you awards if you spent enough money on their ad campaign and can every year. That ship has sailed.
16:36 Scott Galloway? That doc just, that dog just doesn't hunt anymore because now we have these weapons of mass diligence that say, okay, and this is the example I always use. I usually used to stay at the Four Seasons, the Rich Carlton or the Mandarin Oriental. One, because someone else was paying. I was usually there speaking or with a client. And two, they always deliver an eight. But the reality is the Mandarin Oriental in Istanbul is just not where I want to stay. The core associations of these hotel brands meant that they delivered, you know, always an eight. But then my social graph, TripAdvisor, friends, weapons of mass diligence, Google, OpenAI. I go to OpenAI now and say, I'm going to South by Southwest in Austin. I'm in the midst of a midlife crisis and I want to hang out with younger, cooler people. And it literally comes back with stay at the Austin proper.
17:21 Scott Galloway? Boom, I don't need the brand. I've never heard of the brand. I just know that I trust these weapons of mass diligence more than the brand. So what do you have? You have people trying to figure out how to game these algorithms in search. You have influencers, the rise of the influencer generation, the rise of Instagram. Do you know how much influence Instagram now has? Also, at the end of the day, and this sounds very passe, the era of Don Draper is just over. The sun has passed midday on the bullshit of thinking you're going to have a mediocre product and a great brand. Now, the product is the brand, and that sounds very passe, but it's true. The companies that have developed the most market capitalization over the last 20 years have really been victories, not in brand, but in supply chain.
18:02 Scott Galloway? Amazon, Alibaba, Netflix's supply chain, they went direct to consumer with DVDs by mail, and then they went direct to consumer using broadband. How much money? What do the most valuable companies in the world have in common? They don't spend a lot of money on advertising. Why? Because they've put all their money into the product, and oftentimes, it's not just about the product, it's how you deliver it and discover it, i.e. supply chain. So what do you do if you're a marketer? You think about, okay, where's my core customer finding and doing diligence on my, on my product? Sometimes the best CMO comes back and says, folks, I gotta be honest, we should put all our money into innovation around digital to unlock new features with our product.
18:41 Scott Galloway? Tesla doesn't spend a lot of money on advertising, and the bottom line is their brand has gone way down because Elon Musk is an enormous asshole, but also because the product has gotten really stale, right? So consumers can find the best product now using these weapons of mass diligence. So what are you going to see? You're going to see reallocation of capital out of traditional marketing into supply chain, into influencers, into social, and into product itself. And this is hand-to-hand combat. There's no single platform. If you wanted to bet on any two platforms, I don't know, you'd probably bet on TikTok and Instagram, and also maybe YouTube. I mean, there's a cumulative effect here, right?
19:18 Scott Galloway? You gotta kind of do it all, but you want to have influencers, you want to have evangelists, you want to over-serve a core customer base such that there's word of mouth, and they absolutely fall in love with your product. I used to use Noralco or Braun or these shitty brands to clip my head, and then I found this, this clipper from a former East German factory that used to make propellers for Messerschmitts, and they make this incredible clipper, and I went online and I found out where. Was and I order them and the more expensive, which is a pricing signal, but you can now find the best product or discover it online. So, look, I don't, I'm not sure I'm saying anything revolutionary here, but the CMO that's like the second lieutenant in Vietnam that gets shot in the forehead within six to 18 months is the one that comes in and wants to do the brand identity
20:02 Scott Galloway? and hire a big agency and talk about traditional media. Boss, that ship has sailed. This is hand to hand combat that is a combination of a better product with digital unlocks, huge supply chain investments, if you have access to cheap capital, and then trying to identify evangelists slash influencers who can weaponize these platforms to your advantage. That was a mouthful. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected] . That's [email protected] . Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.
20:48 Scott Galloway? This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
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