Meara McNitt
gift or whatever. And now that the AirPod Maxes are out and people are like, yeah, the Apple headphones, everyone’s like, oh my god, oh my god. And the people who do tech reviews are like, don’t get those, they’re worthless. Just get these Sony WH-Max 1000, whatever the fuck they’re called. And I was like, hmm, I have taste. No, I’m talking about the over the head ones that JP has. They’re like
Sam Olmsted
These are so small and sleek.
Meara McNitt
the Apple headphones that don’t actually noise cancel or whatever the problem is.
Sam Olmsted
Beats by Tim Cook.
Flynn Zaiger
glad that everyone’s equipment is things that I’ve bought for them. Heaven forbid we have to get our own gadgets one day.
Sam Olmsted
Hehehe
Meara McNitt
Did we not just establish that I bought these lights?
Flynn Zaiger
That’s tricky to buy the lights.
Sam Olmsted
Hehehe
Meara McNitt
So.
Sam Olmsted
I bought the lamp to give my face light.
Flynn Zaiger
Oh, I guess I have a ring light.
Sam Olmsted
Oh yeah, you’ll look great.
Flynn Zaiger
You should have better.
Meara McNitt
No.
Flynn Zaiger
It’s a very rare show.
Meara McNitt
of fun of this podcast is we all just show up.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I saw your TikTok about that. Don’t worry. Is this okay? I don’t know how to do it. Does this look fine? No. Yeah, no.
Sam Olmsted
Nice.
Sam Olmsted
I think that’s good. Yeah.
Meara McNitt
Looks fine.
Sam Olmsted
So I’ll start by just saying thanks for joining us, Flynn. How are you? And then I will pause. And then the first question is, what made you want to start online optimism? So we’ll jump into that. I took away the questions that you scratched out. And Miriam and I will just go back and forth. And we’ll stop around 20 minutes.
Meara McNitt
Also, as this is on and off script, we do not stick to the questions. So I hope, I hope you’re not too prepared.
Flynn Zaiger
I hope.
Sam Olmsted
Nice, okay.
Flynn Zaiger
No, don’t worry. I’m also atlantic my entire life, so
Meara McNitt
All right.
Sam Olmsted
Alright, I’m gonna get started.
Thanks for joining us, Flynn. How are you?
Flynn Zaiger
I’m doing great, how about yourselves?
Sam Olmsted
We’re doing great too. All right, well, let’s just get into it. What made you want to start online optimism?
Meara McNitt
Doing good.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, so I had a job out of college that I think right now we would call it wasn’t the right fit. I was maybe nine, 10 years ahead of the great resignation. And I looked for other positions. And to be frank, no one really hired me. I also have done digital marketing since I was a precocious teenager, helping my parents sell on the new site back then, which was eBay and then Amazon.
I’ve kind of seen all of these e-commerce platforms grow. And I had a couple internships in college that offered to hire me. And I figured if they’re gonna hire me as an employee, they seem to be open to hiring me if I had my own company. And they don’t really warn you when you’re gonna start a company. No one stops you. I think that would be a great program. If before every entrepreneur began, someone was like, are you sure? Would you, do you really wanna do this? Have you actually thought this through? But no one did that. On a $75 check.
to the Louisiana Secretary of State later. I had an LLC and started building this website.
Meara McNitt
Wow, I’m really glad that you took the initiative to start the business because I don’t want to start a business. Everyone’s always like, why don’t you go out on your own? I’m like, no, I see how much work it takes Flynn. I don’t want to do that part.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I often get asked, you know, like, what’s your best advice? And it’s really, it’s really short advice. It’s a don’t do it. It’s by the, by the job with benefits and a paycheck where you could be pretty happy. Um, but I think if you very much want to make your own thing and you want that complete control, uh, I say as now that I think about it, you know, being a CEO, you’re very, very little in control because your employees and customers and clients kind of.
Sam Olmsted
Hehehe
Flynn Zaiger
dictate you every day, but it’s still a little bit more control than you might have another position. So it’s probably really the main benefit of actually running your own company.
Meara McNitt
Alright, I have a hard hitting question. How did you pick the name online optimism?
Flynn Zaiger
Online optimism, like all good company names, was inspired by SEO and trying to rank high on Google. I wanted a company name with online or internet or digital in it. I also am a terrible writer. Thank heavens that we have copywriters on staff now. So I love alliteration and rhyming. There’s anything on our website that rhymes. It was likely invented by me. Like, donate elevates is one of our policies. I’m pretty sure that that’s my blame.
And so I put together a list of a lot of internet words, and then a lot of more positive words. I’m actually not the most optimistic person, although you both gave me very clear directions before this podcast recording to be more optimistic on it. So hopefully I’m sounding great so far. And I figured that if we kind of, I like the idea that this company is both making me a happier person and making our clients a happier person. So we went through things like.
Digital Delight and other weird combinations. And online optimism really kind of hit the guidelines of it was two words, relatively easy to spell, although I’ve learned in the last decade that optimism is not that easy to spell. And back then it had the super important criteria of under 15 characters, so it could be a Twitter handle. And online optimism at 14 characters just snuck in and made the cut.
Meara McNitt
Wow. I feel like.
Sam Olmsted
Digital Delight sounds like a great dessert.
Meara McNitt
Yeah, it sounds like it’s like the new crumble. It’s like crumble cookies, NFTs, digital delights. Okay, so you did touch on the fact that you do not consider yourself an optimist really, but what makes a capital O optimist?
Flynn Zaiger
Well, if you have $75, register the business.
Flynn Zaiger
Yes.
Flynn Zaiger
I think it’s people that are passionate about helping others and also passionate about the internet with like some caution. I think a good example is honestly you two are some of our better examples of what we think when we think of online optimism. When people talk about our culture, I usually tell them the best way to learn about our culture is to talk to anyone else on our team other than myself because we really try to hire people that fit this more like bright positive personality. I also think it’s extremely knowledgeable about the internet.
I know that anyone under the age of 40, or even many people older than 40 now, are very, very passionate about online communities. But I think that what our optimists have is a certain skill set and desire to kind of know the inner workings behind how these sorts of forums or feeds or whatever the next big thing is actually work. You know, understanding how engagement changes things, understanding how memes spread. And while we might not.
do that every day in our workplace. I think it gives us that kind of background understanding so that when an optimist is talking about why a post is doing well or isn’t doing well or why an advertisement is being targeted a certain way, they could communicate it in a positive, simplistic manner, but also actually know behind the scenes what’s going on.
Sam Olmsted
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that one of the things that I see in other optimists is, um, this ability to go to a deeper layer of the internet, um, where it’s not just a passive consumer of information, but someone who’s kind of contributing to it as well. So I think that’s kind of another aspect of, of being an optimist. Um, so I completely agree with you there. Um, what, what have you done speaking of that, what internal efforts have you made in the last 10 years?
because I know Unlocked-a-Mism has been around for 10 years now, to keep up with the various marketing trends. And do you join every social platform? Do you have a Be Real? Let’s talk about it.
Flynn Zaiger
So I will say the best way that I can learn from people is to grow business, is to talk to other business owners. So I know this is kind of a terrible thing, something to say on a for an internet company on a internet podcast, but the best way I learned is face to face communication. So I do try to find organizations that will collaborate and bring that together. So it’s a lot of, you know, old school, traditional business organizations, small business stuff.
It’s one of the reasons that we send a lot of our staff to conferences. I think every director on our team went to a conferences there because I really feel that those sorts of in-person communities are some of the best ways to learn. That being said, obviously, we’re not in person every day. So Twitter has always been a great one. Endlessly following people on Twitter gives me an absolutely embarrassing follower following ratio. I am so sorry to our team who has to show that off occasionally.
but I just love following new accounts and learning from them. Then over the years, it’s turned into what seems to be the cool thing now of Discord and Slack, where people are kind of sharing ideas and having these more collaborative conversations. There’s some LinkedIn as well, just to see what posts are coming up and who’s talking. And that’s been a little interesting to see, particularly in COVID, as that engagement in communities kind of grown. Although I think we’ve also been seeing…
on those more social platforms rather than like the chat room based platforms is that they get to be gamed a lot. It’s why everyone’s Twitter is now just tweet threads with seven lessons hidden behind a reply wall, which is the bane of my existence. And I endlessly try to curate my feed to prevent those from happening by saying, I don’t want to see this anymore Twitter. Twitter does not care. They know I want to see that.
And even on LinkedIn, it’s these weird like morality lessons and long tales that are now appearing number one. So I think why I’ve been gravitating towards things like Slack and Discord in the marketing community is that they haven’t been, you know, there’s no SEO for Slack yet. Sure. One day there will be that says if there’s an audience and there’s eyes, someone like our team will figure out a way to get more eyes onto it.
Flynn Zaiger
But until SEO agencies ruin that platform, I’m excited to use it.
Meara McNitt
Aminaseo is now on TikTok, so…
Sam Olmsted
I think you just…
Flynn Zaiger
Yes, we have ruined captions. Uh, and yeah, that’s actually kind of. I was seeing articles that was about how people are really nervous because, uh, there’s false information on Tik TOK, like everywhere else on the internet was totally fine. No false information. Everything Google showed should be number one, uh, completely ignoring the last 25 years of our industry. Um, I think it’s, I think there’s a lot of fears around Tik TOK as a platform.
that I feel are just as scary if you deep dive into any of the other platforms, but I am probably swayed by their algorithm just being so, so terrifyingly addictive.
Meara McNitt
Listen, not to get us completely off topic here, but every complaint that anyone has ever made about a singular social media platform, I’ve been like, that is all of the rest social media platforms, and this thing that you are complaining about is actually the exact reason why you like it. So, like, it’s like people who hate sugar but only eat donuts, like.
Flynn Zaiger
Oh, the reason that Twitter is showing me those darn threads is because I keep clicking and I’m like, oh, I wonder what the lesson is in this one. And then I just talk about how much I hate it, but I click and the algorithm knows me better than I do.
Meara McNitt
But something that I’m actually suffering through right now is that I hate TikTok lives and TikTok is absolutely moving into a sphere of loving lives. I know that we talked about that recently internally, but because I hate them so much, I refuse to engage with them. So now I get these like really weird lives that it’s trying to get me to watch, like weird like medical images or like this guy like peeling an egg shell off of an egg.
Flynn Zaiger
I got that one too. Mine is egg ones and lottery scratchers, which is definitely a bad sign for my, for whatever it thinks I’m interested in. I think it knows I make bad bets and that’s what it’s trying to get me looped in on.
Meara McNitt
You get that, Gwyn? Yeah, um…
Meara McNitt
Oh.
Sam Olmsted
Yeah. It says you need money and protein and that’s what it’s trying to push on you.
Flynn Zaiger
Hehehe
Meara McNitt
But yeah, so like part of the problem is if you don’t let the algorithms know what you do like, it’s going to try to figure out for itself and you’re going to say some really scary stuff. I’ve seen things that I’m like, oh, that’s going to give me nightmares. So now just whenever a nice little ASMR artist pops up as my live, I’ll watch it for a little bit just so they keep sending me those because there’s nothing scary about someone tapping on their microphone.
Flynn Zaiger
yet.
Meara McNitt
Yeah, you know, black mirror, anything can happen. All right, I’ll move us on to the next question. So, I mean, like, obviously, like 2020 was a year of reckoning in a lot of reasons. But obviously like racial inclusiveness was a big one and a lot of companies use their marketing to show that they are going to be different. And you know, I talk about this with people outside of marketing that
Flynn Zaiger
Hehehe
Meara McNitt
No matter what you do inside, as long as you can convince the world that you’re doing it with your marketing, you’ll get away with it. But with the industry, how do you think that online optimism and the marketing industry as a whole have actually done the work to be more inclusive?
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I think obviously 2020 was a…
Flynn Zaiger
It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to be like, oh, it was great that we paid attention when you kind of had about 400 years to pay attention to the issues behind the scenes. And I think what was most interesting to see come out of it was how this is at the forefront of leadership’s mind, even in the many, many cases now where these conversations are in
anymore where the company did a blackout Tuesday post in 2020, made some donations in July, August 2020, kind of wrapped up the year and made a nice little statement and they haven’t done anything since. From what I’ve talked to with other business owners, those thoughts are still in people’s heads, although I will very much agree that action has slowed down. And sometimes those thoughts are, oh, thank heaven those conversations are over, which is…
Kind of the most ridiculous thing. And I talk about this a lot when talking to other CEOs is that it’s really, really hard for us to understand what is a worthwhile piece of training for our staff and team. And we talk about this all the time with video and social platforms. Is it useful for us to make an investment into say TikTok? Is it gonna be around in 10 years? Who knows? But you know what is gonna be around in 10 years? DEI.
conversations around race and gender because they’ve been around for hundreds of years in America and around the world. So that’s like, if you want a safe investment into something that you know your team is going to need skills and language around for the next decade, there was no, this is a terrible, it’s terrible, but it’s going to be conversations about this. The subjects are going to come up. This is not going to be fixed in America in the next decade. And so it’s worth.
thinking about it and people are thinking about it. I’d love to see more action. I’d love to see more organizations being held accountable. Y’all have heard me even say in meetings like, and it’s on me, like we are, we could be doing more and we should be doing more. And it’s things that we still try to do in different programs that we have, but it’s challenging and to be frank, there’s like less of an impetus when other organizations aren’t doing things either.
Flynn Zaiger
You know, in 2020, we had to do something because everyone was doing something. And then 2021, we did something because our staff insisted, and I thought it was really important. And in 2022, we’re still rolling out programs and we’re still doing nonprofits. And it’s like a lot of work that we’re doing. But, but I do in the back of my mind, it’s always like, you know, if this conversation was happening, it is a national discourse more often, we would be doing more and is it wrong for us not to be doing more, which yeah, it is. And it’s something that we need to think about how we prioritize as an agency.
And I will also say, I think one of the bright spots is that employees are demanding this more. And I don’t want to say that this is just an age thing where younger people are looking for more diverse companies. There are stats and numbers that show that, but I’ve met many, many older individuals and people all around the country and all different states that have this as a priority. So I don’t think it’s that simple, but it does seem to be coming up in conversations
people looking to join organizations and companies where their mission and values reflects the diversity that people actually talked about in 2020. And what’s nice is that they now have two years to look back at the company and to sit down in an interview when they go, do you have any questions for us? To say, yeah, what have you done in two years around DEI and race and gender and your organization? And how are you actually expressing that in 2022, as opposed to what social media posts do you do?
two years ago and then forget it.
Meara McNitt
Yeah, that’s actually a really good question. I feel like I see on TikTok people all the time being like, what should you ask in an interview? And people should ask, absolutely be doing, be like, oh, I looked through and saw that you made a statement after Memorial Day in 2020. What have you done?
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I think it’s interesting in interviews and we often, because we do so much interview training with our specialists who are paid interns about like in interviews, and this is a little bit away from the question, but like this is a two way street and if you’re trying to get a job, great, like think about these questions, but sometimes it’s like a, are you trying to get a job? Are you trying to find an organization that you actually want to work for?
People are at different stages of their life. People will want, you know, some people just want a paycheck and some people want someplace where they can build a career. But yeah, if you want a place that actually reflects your values, you should be asking about those values in those interviews because as you were saying, Meara, super easy to market and promote ourselves as doing all sorts of DEI stuff and initiative and to make sure that we have diverse stock photos and images and all that, but actually asking someone name a single initiative your organization’s done this year.
around DEI, it’s been nine months, you should have had something, will actually give you an answer as opposed to is, you know, is this social media intern just posting DEI stuff without actually telling management? I am so sorry that I said that it was an intern, not an employee doing social media Meara. I know.
Meara McNitt
I was like, it’s not the intern, it’s the director. Ha ha ha.
Sam Olmsted
Hehehe
Flynn Zaiger
It’s because this was a bad company who we don’t want to steal policies from. And that’s why they had an intern doing it.
Meara McNitt
course that explains it all. All right Sam you got another question for us?
Sam Olmsted
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Ryan. So Flynn, what do you think there’s one area of marketing that companies should stop focusing on? As in, it could be a sector of marketing, whether it’s part of paid advertising, organic social media, or organic content creation. Is there anything that you think that is falling out of fashion as we move into the next?
10 years of online optimism.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I think it’s honestly any short-term strategy. And I realize that that’s like, if you’re a business owner and you’re listening, you’re like, of course the marketing agency doesn’t wanna be judged on their first 30 days of performance. Like that’s the easiest way to get out of proving your results. And I understand the frustration. I just feel like at this point in the internet’s evolution, any short-term win, unless you’re in a industry that is a-
that is centered around weird schemes like you’re in crypto or NFTs or any of that. But if you are a small business or you’re B2B or even B2C, anything that you do that works quickly will be immediately duplicated by a competitor who probably has more resources and more time and has staff ready to do it. So you just have to forget about get rich quick schemes. And I don’t mean just making, I mean getting to the top of Google or…
doing something on social media that just works well once. And I think it goes back to the same thing that marketers have been telling people for 30 years and that we never listen to is that whole content is king, is that you have to be telling good, long stories and you have to be actually building on values and storytelling and kind of the culture of your organization. I think that’s what we…
or seeing people, if I can slightly switch your conversation to what do you need to be focusing on is a lot more of the people and the, the mission behind the business. Uh, what has been fascinating is to see that all of these brands that used to be, and I think kind of, and I’ll do the cliche thing of bringing up, uh, Wendy’s Twitter and dual and go tick tock, which I think now has been talked about on about half of these podcast episodes.
But I think it’s important that Wendy’s Twitter, years when it started up, was run by a team of New York comedians, but we never knew who they were. Whereas now we know the Duolingo Owl, although I will say, I definitely think she has an intern in the mascot outfit. I don’t think she’s wearing that mascot outfit that often anymore. And we know who it is, and she’s getting recognition. And I think that’s been fascinating to see, is treating businesses less as businesses and treating them as the people behind.
Meara McNitt
Mm-hmm
Flynn Zaiger
behind the organization. And I think that’s been, it’s honestly a little challenging for us as an agency, because we’re an outside partner and I’m saying that people value the companies and the employees behind it. But I think that’s our job is to, how do we tell this business’s story and talk about the people there.
Meara McNitt
I actually saw a really interesting podcast clip the other day. Sorry, I don’t remember the name of the podcast, but they are basically saying that we’ve just moved on to real life mascots. Like we said, Tony the Tiger and Ronald McDonald and like all these different characters, the Kool-Aid man that like told us why a product was great and we loved them. And now it’s the exact same thing, but it’s just someone within the company.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, and I mean, and this always been like celebrity endorsements is that these are just no longer celebrities. These are just people who create really good content. I think what’s interesting is going to be seeing how they evolve and like their loyalty. I mean, to use a very millennial example, right, you had the can you hear me now guy from one of the phone companies. I guess it’s a bad sign for the advertisement. I can’t name the phone company. But then you like switched years later to the other company. And will we see that with creators like our.
Meara McNitt
Mm-hmm.
Flynn Zaiger
Are you going to steal a creator from a competitor and have them do your content instead of theirs, like, because you think that they’ll carry the audience over. And I don’t think that’s something we’ve seen in the influencer campaigns yet, but there’s been a lot more of giving bigger creators. Like, like Mr. Beast and all them platform incentives to stick on one. And we see that more in the live streaming sphere, which, um, is, is a whole other world, but I think that’s what we’re going to see over time is giving more.
Will creators actually have power for once or will capitalism win over and figure out a way to take all of their earnings?
Meara McNitt
I feel like that really depends. I feel like Dave from the Washington Post could change news organizations, and it doesn’t matter, he’s still Dave. But the girl who does the Duolingo Owl, that humor is so niche and so recognized as Duolingo’s account that no matter where she takes it to, people will still be like, oh, that’s, if they don’t know it’s her, they’re like, they’re just trying to be Duolingo.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah. Well, I think, and that’s also the thing is with like these companies where we can name like what their style is, like, will they eventually like rebrand their personality? And I think it’s like really important to realize that all the digital stuff we do is so new in the world of marketing, that like, really, there’s very few accounts or platforms that have been around for 10 years, which is wild. You’re dealing with brands that have been around for 50, 100 years, like the Washington Post, like, and how?
If that brand has stayed the same, will there, or like when the brands like rebrand and they have like new values and new mission, will the social media platforms follow? Or like, for example, you know, right now, like everyone’s Twitter is just the same snark in just varying degrees of disgust, depending on what kind of industry it is. And I’m curious to see how that evolves.
Meara McNitt
Mm-hmm.
Meara McNitt
I think the only brand who had a pre-internet era, or like early internet era voice brand that has carried well is Progressive and Mayhem. Like he has lasted.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, that might be it.
Meara McNitt
All right, next question. Now this short form video is taking over. Have you found it difficult to adapt to the less produced style of content?
Flynn Zaiger
I love and hate the last produced style of content. I think it was always fascinating because when we first started doing and selling video at Online Optimism, we would be compared to TV production. And they’d be like, oh, these are internet videos. And now you get TV production videos that are just so very low budget things that are trying to emulate TikToks. And…
What’s also weird is we’re seeing the, so basically everyone’s trying to be the other side. Well, now you get like TikToks and the creators are incredible at some of the editing that they do. And they’re trying to produce highly, highly produced content. I think as an agency, it’s the same thing voice. I try to create a story that actually fits the medium where it’s being presented and making something authentic. I think it’s
good for agencies. I think, you know, just because things are low budget doesn’t mean they’re easy. Although of course, when I do talks, I’m like, yes, anyone can film it. And it’s true. Like you literally anyone could go live on TikTok and answer questions and talk about their job. And I think those are some of the more fascinating things, particularly if you have a weird job, but like no one’s ever heard of or it’s just like something that you think you know, like librarians, I don’t know what librarians do anytime, but like they all seem to have great TikTok accounts, which is like, what were they doing before TikTok?
no clue, but I would love to watch a TikTok live and learn about what they’re doing. So I think that’s been interesting. I think the challenge is going to be for organizations like us is how do you show that value to a company? Like, yeah, it was really easy to show value of a video that required a $10,000 prop budget, but what’s the value of a content creator doing a, you know, a
50 cuts in three seconds on a really weird TikTok edit that is just about brand awareness and it’s about growing the account. And there’s just some blind trust that this will help grow the organization over time. So that’s kind of on us to prove the value of.
Sam Olmsted
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So one of the reasons why we’re doing this podcast is because it’s been 10 years since you started online optimism. So first of all, congratulations. Um, and second of all, second of all, what’s next? This is an open-ended question. What’s next for online optimism?
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I think that the first 10 years of running a business is
Flynn Zaiger
And I guess I hope that Jordan, who’s edited this, doesn’t edit out the gulp and the deep pause, even though this question was like, we’re gonna ask you what’s next Flynn, you should prepare an answer. And I was like, I don’t think I can prepare an answer. I think when we think about what our organization represents, it’s helping our clients and our staff. So that’s really what’s been kind of at the forefront of my mind as I think about what do we, what the heck do we do in the second decade of a business, is now that we have
a team, we have equipment, we have offices, we have remote work policies, we’ve survived and have so much knowledge. I really want to kind of build this out to be more, not that it wasn’t long term, like I think, you know, it’s one of the first things that people tend to say to us is just how organized for what’s still vaguely young company we are and how efficient, but I really want to bring it to the next level in building out.
bigger career paths. And I also want to make sure that we’re competitive nationally with our benefits and our services to clients. We’ve really been talking to our team about making sure that they’re always testing things, always being on new platforms, always trying to be on leading trends, like accepting that, you know, if I listen to this podcast two years after it airs, whatever is going to be the coolest network is definitely not something we’re talking about today. Like it’s going to be something weird.
to be like, yes, six second videos are back. Everyone’s super excited for them. Maybe we’ll like get rid of audio. I think that’s kind of my weird thing is now that like everything’s captioning and TikTok’s obviously brought like audio memes back. But I feel like there’s just going to be um there’s like accessibility stuff that I think is going to come into play, which is me getting sidetracked. So let’s say there’s a lot of ideas for the next 10 years of online optimism.
But I really think it’s going to be about hopefully guiding our clients to whatever’s next. Probably weird SEO stuff on TikTok. A lot more video, a lot, a lot more video. I know everyone’s been saying that for 10 years. I know even in 10 years from now, I’ll be like, oh, there’s going to be more video. I think the streaming platforms as Netflix adds on more ads and YouTube is continuously increasing ads. I think Disney has a new ad platform. Plus that’s going to be coming up.
Flynn Zaiger
Apple is likely to roll out a new search network, which is really something I’m excited about, mostly because one of the things that we didn’t get to do in our first 10 years is really like be at the forefront necessarily of some of these bigger platforms getting ready to be on them when they launch. And I’m like, yeah, like Apple doesn’t have an ad platform. They have like ad platform at the moment, but it hasn’t really been rolled out and they’ve been bringing in more and more staff and that’s been.
I think one of my favorite things as a CEO when I have time is like, look at what these platforms are hiring for and see, okay, how do we, before this platform has built out this product, how do we capitalize on that? Um, so yeah, I guess long story short, probably video, something weird with TikTok, Apple, and, uh, yeah, hopefully, uh, happier employees, not that you will both aren’t happy, but even happier, more optimistic, please.
Meara McNitt
like to make a prediction. I think that Netflix sometime in this next 10 years, Netflix is going to try having like live streaming channels. That’s my prediction. Watch it.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, what’s been fascinating is how many platforms add on live streaming. And they get to the same issue that Clubhouse got to. And nothing, nothing I love doing more than bringing up blog posts I read 15 years ago and trying to 15 months ago and pretending I’m an expert in this thing I read way, way ago, but the issue with live streaming is that the content is rarely as entertaining.
as pre-film content, because you don’t have out, and that was like the trouble with Clubhouse, is if you turn it on, I should give the caveat, I haven’t turned on the app in 12 months. So if they are, if they have fixed this, let me know, put it, send it over to our podcast communications. But you need something constantly entertaining, and you expressed this with TikTok earlier, right? You’re getting someone peeling an egg, which.
I don’t know if you ever actually watched it. It’s kind of fascinating for a little bit. Yeah. But like, how do you create endless, endless content? Even the TV networks couldn’t do it, right? You had infomercials from midnight to 6 AM as someone who’s always been an insomniac. Like.
Meara McNitt
It’s weird. You’re like, they’re gonna pop it. And they’re just stuck there waiting for it to pop.
Sam Olmsted
They make a lot of money selling those products.
Meara McNitt
Sam’s a buyer.
Flynn Zaiger
And we see, and you do see that in Asia has been a lot more of live e-commerce and Instagram was dabbling with this, but it seems that a lot of the North American, every time they try this, because there’s so much money coming out of this in Asia, that all these platforms are attempting and duplicating in North America. I honestly don’t understand why it hasn’t worked because like QVC and all them, like there’s people want to buy. But for some reason, the
Sam Olmsted
I’m a buyer.
Flynn Zaiger
hasn’t made the plunge to like people wanting to watch influencers talk about content and then buy that product. And there’s definitely some examples and it’s definitely some.
Meara McNitt
I think they did that for Prime Day this year.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, so they’re trying it and like there’s been more and more but it hasn’t hit mainstream and at this point I don’t think it’s gonna hit mainstream because like you said Prime Day did it and we’re not talking about that anymore. Like I don’t see anyone any part of like the main internet culture which I guess is now basically TikTok videos being shared on Twitter are not doing that sort of communication. So I think it’s an opportunity but we’ll see.
Meara McNitt
Yeah.
Meara McNitt
Yeah.
Flynn Zaiger
I thought your prediction was gonna be that Netflix was gonna die in the next 10 years. And I was like, wow, brave mirror.
Meara McNitt
No, but I will say that… Was that Tom?
I will say that five years ago when I interviewed to be an intern here at Online Optimism, one of the questions I was asked is, what do you think is going to be the biggest social media platform in five years? And I said, I don’t think it exists yet. And here we are with TikTok. Take it over.
Flynn Zaiger
I’m pretty sure that Musically, which was the forerunner of TikTok, or whatever, I don’t know what the actual…
Meara McNitt
It musically was the pre-TikTok, but it was not what TikTok is. It was just lip syncing. There was no original content.
Flynn Zaiger
That’s true. And that was wild to like look at that and go, yeah, that platform, the weird karaoke app is totally going to take over and dominate the entire American culture in five years. But yeah, you never know what things could pivot into.
Meara McNitt
Like our federal government is going to be having meetings discussing this app where kids dance.
Meara McNitt
Totally. All right. Well, that wraps up our time. Flynn, thank you so much for joining us. If people wanna talk to you, where can they find you?
Flynn Zaiger
I’ll be fine.
Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, I am on Twitter. Please follow me. So my follower following ratio gets slightly less pathetic. I’m at Flynn Zager, F L Y N Z as in zebra, A I G E R. You could also email me Flynn at onlineoptimism.com. I’m not going to spell that out because I have the catchall email address. So if you email anything at onlineoptimism.com and it doesn’t go to another human being, it will go to my inbox. So feel free to put whatever fun typos you want on that email address.
Meara McNitt
I’m going to start doing that. All right. All right, Flynn, we’re going to do our outro. So thanks so much. Have a good one.
Flynn Zaiger
Thank you, see you all on Slack.
Sam Olmsted
Thanks, Flynn.
Meara McNitt
All right, Jordan’s gonna.
