The Weekly Listen: The biggest AI story no one is talking about, YouTube takes over the TV, and personalized seat-back ads

Audio by Rahul Chadha, Oscar Orozco, and Paul Verna | Jun 14, 2024

Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

This episode is made possible by Roundel. If you partner with Roundel, you can reach the over 165 million folks who look to Target for joy, inspiration and more. Together with them, you can design curated media solutions that are a seamless extension of the Target experience with everything backed by unequal first party data and measurement. Head to roundel.com, click on insights whilst you're there and you can access a ton of free articles and reports and much, much more. Hello everyone and thanks for hanging out with us for the Behind the Numbers Weekly Listen and eMarketer Podcast made possible by Roundel. This is the Friday show. That thought the film Dune was a western.

Victoria Grace (00:50):

Alright, might be yes, but no

Marcus Johnson (00:54):

Thought it had cowboys in it.

Victoria Grace (00:56):

I thought they rode the worm like a cowboy rides a horse. I was not aware of all the specifics around the worm and I think my version is better.

Marcus Johnson (01:06):

It would have been a better film. It would have been because Dune was rubbish there. Paul said

Oscar Orozco (01:11):

Boring.

Victoria Grace (01:12):

Don't start a fight in the comments

Marcus Johnson (01:12):

Now also the two. I agree. Alright, Paul,

Paul Verna (01:17):

Like watching worms in your garden,

Marcus Johnson (01:21):

Rahul,

Rahul Chadha (01:22):

I think I made up 10 minutes in and gave up.

Marcus Johnson (01:24):

There we go. Yes, consensus. We got a

Rahul Chadha (01:27):

Consensus

Oscar Orozco (01:28):

That never happens.

Marcus Johnson (01:29):

We're the only people. Everyone else left it. I'm the host Marcus Johnson in today's show. What happens when AI eats the world? How much do people watch YouTube on tv, United Airlines to show personalized ads on its planes, seat back screens? It's the best thing that smart home robots could possibly do for us. And I have some remote work stats. Join me for this episode. We have three people. Let's meet. Then we start with our senior director of forecasting. He is based in New York City. It's Oscar Orozco.

Oscar Orozco (02:08):

Hello Marcus. Happy to be on.

Marcus Johnson (02:10):

Hey fella, thank you for being here. If you travel a little further north, just outside of the city, you might run into our vice president of content for advertising media and tech. It's of course, Paul Verna.

Paul Verna (02:23):

If you do see me say hi, please

Marcus Johnson (02:26):

Steer clear and if you keep going a few hours further than that, you might have the pleasure of hanging out with our director of reports editing. It's Rahul Chadha.

Rahul Chadha (02:36):

Hey Marcus, thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson (02:38):

Of course. Thank you for being here. So gents, we have three segments as we always do. We start with the story, we have a game in the middle and we end with some trivia. Let's get to it. We start of course, with the story of the week,

Marcus Johnson (02:56):

What happens when AI eats the World? The hell are we talking about where Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic just wrote that this Spring tech companies made it clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life whether we want it or not. Was he talking about, well, a few examples of how AI seems to be taking over the world. Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook. So that's there now. OpenAI released GPT-4 O, which we've talked about a bunch Billed as a new, more powerful and conversational version of its large language model. OpenAI entered into new content licensing deals with some very major media organizations, publishers. Google launched AI Overviews in its search engine and AI chip company. NVIDIA became the second largest company in the world by market cap behind only Microsoft. But gents, this article prompted for me the question of what's the biggest AI story that no one is talking about? I'll go to Rahul first.

Rahul Chadha (04:15):

I mean, I'm not sure if people are not talking about this, but I'm kind of firmly in the skeptics camp when it comes to AI that you're seeing, like you mentioned, AI getting integrated into pretty much every, not just consumer facing product like you mentioned some meta properties, but also B2B software like the project management tool we use. But I still think that it's not useful. I think part of where we're at right now is the peak of the Gartner hype cycle and AI hasn't really, I think demonstrated great utility in any specific case. I even read a study, there's conflicting information about there about how useful the AI sales tools are on properties like Meta for marketers that automate a lot of stuff in terms of ad buys, placements, that sort of thing. There's the Verge, I think wrote a pretty damning article about how they're not useful. They're actually burning through people's budgets and the ROI is not clear, it's not totally demonstrated, but people seem to be shifting more of their budget towards that, maybe whether they want to or not. So I think really what people maybe aren't talking about enough is AI really hasn't fulfilled I think any of those promises yet.

Marcus Johnson (05:34):

Yeah, my thing was going to be, which I think relates to what you're saying Rahul, is it doesn't seem like it's really solved a problem quite yet, and it doesn't seem like it works as well as its promised. And Mr. War in this piece was pointing out that it almost feels like companies are falling over themselves to release ai. Anything. Obvious example here is Google's rush to launch AI Overviews and there's been some backlash to that. There's chatbot hardware that from Humane and Rabbit, which are devices which are kind of AI centric, which were shipped you says in barely functional states and they haven't seen great initial sales at Tool. And then you have a bunch of employees, former employees of certain companies, OpenAI Google saying that the companies are focusing so much on strong financial incentives. It's led the industry to dodge meaningful insights. And so it does seem a bit like things are being rushed and I wonder how much of a lasting effect that has on AI and its needing to make a good first impression because a lot of people are still skeptical and it does feel a bit, as he says in the article, like the space is assembling the plane midair. So yeah, I'm with you. On your point, Oscar, what jumped out to you when you think of the biggest AI story that maybe is flying under the radar a bit?

Oscar Orozco (06:56):

Yeah, to your guys' point, I mean it's total chaos right now and very wasteful. I mean, I wonder how many billions of dollars are being thrown into an AI bubble that will be absolutely lost and some of them will fizzle out this quickly, but it's here and I think no one can deny that at this point. At this stage. For me, I was thinking, reading through and really a shout out to the digital health briefings analysts here at eMarketer who do a great job of covering this. But in ai, in the healthcare industry, I don't think it's talked about enough, but quietly I feel like it could be the industry that will have the biggest impact. So I'm thinking of things like AI helping to scan radiology, imaging or being used to analyze echocardiograms, mammograms, things like this to help screen for cancer and neurological disorders.

Oscar Orozco (07:50):

We're not hearing a lot of this yet, but I can see how in the very near future it'll have a huge impact on healthcare and medicine and things like this. And if you think about it, I would say the environment is best suited the healthcare environment where there's a lot of trial and error in r and d, it's more commonplace and there's less pressure perhaps to monetize. I think it could be in the hands of really smart individuals that will help implement the technology into their processes. So to me it's healthcare and industry which is a little bit less visible I would say in our day-to-day here,

Marcus Johnson (08:24):

And some of that stuff is going to be on the backend. It's going to be folks who are more familiar with the technology using technology. But to that point, I do wonder, because a lot of people aren't going to be able to distinguish between AI used over here and AI used over here. And so if your impression, if your experience using AI is a bad one, when you see those two letters show up in other parts of your life, you might be more hesitant to engage potentially

Oscar Orozco (08:49):

Very true, more skeptical. Yeah, I agree with that. I could see that being the case.

Marcus Johnson (08:55):

Paul,

Paul Verna (08:56):

I agree with Oscar. I think most of the focus around AI has been, at least in our world around marketing and content and analytics, but I think the real positive use cases are going to be more in the realm of science, in the realm of interpreting climate data. And yes, certainly healthcare. I think the story that I hear the most or the story that you don't hear enough but that I hear when I talk to people in the marketing realm is about disappointment, right? They tried something and it didn't work according to their expectations. Obviously the technology is still young and it will improve, and that's the promise that a lot of the real movers and shakers in AI in AI are holding out for.

Marcus Johnson (09:54):

You do wonder what this kind of rush to put AI in everything, what kind of an impact that does have because it's something like the Metaverse, the metaverse might be a thing, but when you say that word, it kind of conjures up certain feelings towards what that looks like and how people have experienced it. And I do think that could have an impact, whether that AI more than likely is going to be a thing, but how much does do those negative experiences delay lay adoption? We'll see. Very nice first segment gents. Let's move now to our second segment of the day. It's of course time for a game. It's the game of the week. Today's game, the super duper game.

Marcus Johnson (10:45):

It gets worse at the, every time I read it out, it gets worse somehow with Marcus. No, I should, I can't be bothered. How does it work? Three rounds today we have fortune teller move the needle and fill in the blank. The best of the answers, the more points you get. Let's play and we're going to have who's starting for us? Rahul is going to go first in round one. It's fortune teller where we predict the future and we're talking about how much people watch YouTube on TV. In April, folks spent close to 10% of all of their TV time, all of their TV time, 10% of it watching YouTube on the big screen according to Nielsen, that's more time that was spent with either individually NBC universal content, paramount Warner Brothers Discovery or Netflix only Disney contents, which includes of course, Disney plus, Hulu and ESPN plus combined, only Disney content was watched more than YouTube on television and only by a point or two. This 10% for YouTube is only the main YouTube app. It doesn't count its streaming TV offering called YouTube tv. The question though, for Euro Hall first playing Fortune teller, what share of TV viewing will be YouTube content? Currently 10% in three years?

Rahul Chadha (12:11):

I'm going to go 20%. I mean, I think YouTube is kind of like the OG of user generated content that's monetized via advertising. I think you're going to see a couple things here. It's just the dying off of the old model of content creation that is by studios. There's no upfront risk for YouTube in terms of content creation when it's being generated by its users, even users that now are increasingly creating more professional slick content that it is really kind of on par with something that an old school studio might create. And I also think it's social platform competitors like TikTok and even Instagram or trying to figure out how to host longer content that's more easily monetized than that can keep users engaged for longer. YouTube's already cracked the code on that.

Marcus Johnson (12:57):

Yeah, it's an interesting point on the creators thing. Creators versus studios. Mary Ellen, co YouTube's chief business officer recently saying, we're talking about creators as the studios of the future. Obviously they have a vested interest in that being the case, but I thought it was an interesting concept. Are we approaching, will we approach a tipping point there, Oscar?

Oscar Orozco (13:18):

So in three years time I put the percentage at about 11 or 12% perhaps. So nothing like 20%. Like Mr. Rahul said here, it's really Mr. Rahul, Mr. Raul,

Rahul Chadha (13:33):

He's dissing me, but respectfully

Oscar Orozco (13:35):

Sort sort of because 20 is crazy, 20 is absolutely bonkers. Rahul, let's be real. It's no disrespect to YouTube really, and even though Nielsen does not count the YouTube TV bid, I do think that's actually what's driving more of this time, not just from the NFL Sunday ticket deal, but looking at a lot of the promotions. So first time subscribers can save up to 120 bucks a year. You can now subscribe cheaply if you're a Verizon subscriber and they have an incredible reach. YouTube, right? 242 million Americans will use YouTube this year. So it's not because of that, it's because of competition, some of which Rahul was mentioning. But what about fast services and a lot of these sub OTT, what we call here, SPOD services. So the competition is really what's going to limit to that incredible growth. But YouTube will gain share and I do agree with that.

Marcus Johnson (14:28):

Yeah, I mean you mentioned over 200 million folks using YouTube. YouTube says 150 million Americans, these are their numbers. So it's over 40% of folks watch YouTube on a CTV each month, which are just yes, really surprising, remarkable numbers, how quickly they've gotten to that share. But yeah, what will they get to in the future in terms of share of time? Paul, what do you think?

Paul Verna (14:52):

It's funny how when you're taking someone down, you just put a mister in front of it and it works perfectly. So I'm going to disagree with Mr. Chadda and Mr. Orozco. So Mr. Johnson, here's what I would say. Whoa,

Marcus Johnson (15:04):

Whoa.

Paul Verna (15:04):

Oops, sorry. That one got it's

Marcus Johnson (15:06):

Coming in guns pleaing. I know.

Paul Verna (15:08):

I think YouTube will grow its share, but when you look at the shares of all these different companies that are major players, they're in the, except for Disney below double digits. So I think for YouTube to grow significantly in three years, we're looking probably at 12%. And I also agree that other channels like the fast channels and TikTok are going to grow and also incumbents are going to figure out ways to basically try to tap into the creator economy more and more. I do think that overall this creator formula that YouTube has is a very strong reason behind their success because what's held back companies like Netflix and Amazon and the big legacy networks is just the amount of money that they spend creating professionally produced content.

Marcus Johnson (16:08):

Very nice. All right, so Oscar, sounds

Oscar Orozco (16:10):

Like we were pretty close there,

Marcus Johnson (16:11):

Paul, in agreement. Yeah, 12%. Rahul thinks that they've got much more runway looking at 20% in three years time. We shall see. Let's move to round two. We start with Oscar. We're playing Move the Needle where folks, tell me how much this story will move the needle out of 10. The story being United Airlines now showing personalized ads on its planes, seat back screens. That's a story from patients Hagen of the Wall Street Journal. She explains that the display ads United passengers see when they swipe through movies and TV shows and the 32nd video ad they watch before the entertainment starts will now be personalized based on the data United has on its customers. For example, the cities they live in, the places they travel to, their age group, and whether they are flying economy or first class customers can opt out for having their data used for personalized ads. Question though, we're playing Move the Needle is how impactful will these personalized in-flight ads be out of 10, Oscar?

Oscar Orozco (17:11):

Well, I love me some personalized ads I must say, but I am being a bit non-committal year. I'm going to give it a five kind of in the middle. No surprises here. Especially here at eMarketer, we're covering this frequently, the next wave of retail media, commerce media, but what was holding me back from being more excited was thinking a bit about when they're Targeting these consumers. So usually ads are more impactful if people are in the midst of shopping or seeking inspiration or browsing for products or services. I can't imagine the worst time that when a passenger's sitting on a tarmac anxious about their connections or worried about the takeoff coin,

Marcus Johnson (17:52):

Buy the stuff, just trying to get somewhere.

Oscar Orozco (17:54):

It's just not your time. Plus you're supposed to have your devices off so it's not the best time to reach people. I also would add one thing, I wonder how long it'll take before they upcharge. They're extras right now. They're charged for seat assignments and luggage and snacks and wifi. Are they going to start allowing people to opt out of ads? 8 99, no ads for you? Just interesting story, but I'll give it a five.

Marcus Johnson (18:21):

Yeah, interesting points, Paul.

Paul Verna (18:24):

I'll give it a six. I think that really there's no clear use case or definition of a captive audience than sitting in a seat strapped in for 12 hours and now people how captive audience are so afraid to even unbuckle because of turbulence that you've literally got these people by the seatbelt. Let's say the only thing that's keeping this from being a real, real game changer is one regulation, right? Privacy sensitivity. The other thing is that to Oscar's point, I think the potential exists to make this a shoppable experience, but the whole back there is that wifi and planes, even when they have it, it's awful. It never ever works. So if you can envision a real wifi connection that allows you to log into your social media or to basically be able to shop online on a plane, I think people would do that because they're bored out of their skulls for 10 hours on this plane.

Marcus Johnson (19:34):

Rahul?

Rahul Chadha (19:35):

Yeah, I think my colleagues have raised some valid points about how do you solve the problem for measurement, maybe due to issues like bad, poor wifi connections, you've got your device turned off. I don't know, when I read this I was like, who's advertising on airplanes? Is it mostly brand marketers at that point? I think if you're a brand marketer, which I mean I actually went into a wormhole trying to figure out how much scale can you actually achieve trying to buy ads Targeting just any United flyer? I didn't really find a satisfying answer, but the question of scale becomes one question. But I think then also when you're brand and izer, it's like how much utility does Targeting actually have? I don't know. Yeah.

Marcus Johnson (20:24):

Yeah. I think the piece said in terms of total passengers, it was like 150, 160 million, but that's a year. And yeah, I think scale is still an important question. Rahul, at the two thirds mark, Oscar is out in front by a 0.5 to Paul and Raul's four a piece. And we end the game today with final round, which is round three and it's fill in the blank where folks have to do just that. Smart home robots is what we're talking about. Wes Davis at the Verge writes that humanoid robots are one of those dreams that sometimes feels like we're on the precipice of realizing Boston Dynamics has its Atlas robot and Tesla is pursuing robotics while companies like Mercedes, Amazon and BMW are or will be testing robots for industrial use. But those are all very expensive robots performing tasks in controlled environments in the home. They might still be far off. Mr. Davis does point to one of the biggest hits in this space, Samsung's bot Handy, which looks like a robot vacuum, he says with a stalk on top and a single articulating arm meant to carry out tasks like picking up after you or sorting your dishes, but fill in the blank. We'll start with Paul In five years, the most helpful thing in-home smart robots will do will be blank,

Paul Verna (21:51):

The dishes. But I'm not talking about sorting the dishes, I'm talking about washing them. Actually

Marcus Johnson (21:58):

Take in the dishwasher.

Paul Verna (22:00):

Just take the entire task off my hands, let me eat and then just do the whole thing and I'll pay whatever that robot costs,

Marcus Johnson (22:12):

Bro.

Rahul Chadha (22:13):

Yeah, mine was similar. It was cleaning a toilet. Who wants to clean their toilet? I mean, I think there's a reason why the writer of this article had to acknowledge that these smart robots already exist and we call them Roombas or whatever you want to call a robot vacuum. It's like people don't like cleaning stuff. Nobody needs a robot to follow them around and record them. I dunno if you guys watch that interior drone video, but it's like that's somewhat terrifying. And also my enemies are going to figure out how to hack these devices and murder me with them. I am not interested in that. I just want something that's going to clean my toilet for me.

Marcus Johnson (22:48):

Why enemies? Do you mean

Rahul Chadha (22:50):

The people on this call? Exactly.

Paul Verna (22:52):

Can't wait for that guy. I mean, Mr. Orozco.

Rahul Chadha (22:54):

Mroz. That's right.

Marcus Johnson (22:56):

It does sound evil. Yeah, there ever was a villain's name shouldn't have

Oscar Orozco (23:01):

Said that. Mr.

Marcus Johnson (23:02):

Orozco, you're up.

Oscar Orozco (23:04):

Yeah, for me, very similar to my colleagues here to quote the article one task in a controlled environment. I had a couple ideas. I was laughing at one of one robot that can walk your dog and then pick up after the dog and bring it home safely. But just picturing how that could go wrong as well. So yeah, it's just some sort of mundane task in the household. Perhaps the dog idea outside of the household or in the yard. But that's all I can see really. That's just in five years, but 20 years I got to be honest. Yeah, very pessimistic on it.

Marcus Johnson (23:39):

Alright, that's a no for smart home robots. Let's count the scores gents at the end of the game. And this week's winner, a drum roll. I dunno if we still put the drum roll in, but maybe I'll tap the table just in case we don't. Oscar is this week's winner, six points. Paul, five, Rahul also five

Oscar Orozco (24:03):

Plus

Marcus Johnson (24:04):

Game. Good. Well Oscar,

Oscar Orozco (24:05):

Thank you very much.

Marcus Johnson (24:06):

But I also, Stuart who runs the team told me to stop letting Paul win. So that's part of the reason that you are winning today.

Oscar Orozco (24:12):

Look, as long as I beat Rahul, I've been trying to get on the same show with him for months. I'm happy. I'm

Marcus Johnson (24:19):

Happy. MSEs. You get the championship balance and of course the last word,

Oscar Orozco (24:24):

The Euro cup. I'm so excited. It's starting today. We also have the Cup American about 10 days, tons of soccer, football on TV through the month of July. So excited for it. So yeah, tune in. I think. I know the Euro Cup games will be on Fox and FS one FUBU TV for you streamers. I'm not quite as sure on Cop America. Maybe you know Paul, but I'm very excited for it.

Marcus Johnson (24:47):

England actually has a chance because Argentina can't participate in this one.

Oscar Orozco (24:52):

It could be

Paul Verna (24:53):

Copa America starts June 20th and carried on Fox Sports and I believe Univision in the us. Very

Marcus Johnson (25:02):

Nice, very nice. Get your England jerseys out folks. Don't bother. We're going to lose. Alright folks, very nice. Good game. Let's move to the last segments we have for you is of course dinner party data. This is the part of the show where we tell you about the most interesting thing we've learned this week. We start with Oscar because he won the game.

Oscar Orozco (25:24):

Excellent, excellent. Well, I was wondering any of you guys looking for a new lucrative opportunity to help supplement your wages, guys? Anybody? Because I came across the Wall, wall Street Journal. Where's this going?

Marcus Johnson (25:37):

You'll,

Oscar Orozco (25:38):

You'll see where I'm going. Came across Wall Street Journal article a few months by that was fascinating, but no surprises. Americans are very, very wasteful with money. But literally I'm talking about literally, so according to re world, a company that fishes coins out of garbage for profit, apparently about $68 million worth of change gets thrown out per year. It's a lot of money. So the company itself collects about 10 million in discarded coins. Usually only about 6 million are used, are in good shape to be used. So much money. So how do they do it? I was very interested to find out how they can find all these coins, but they have essentially industrial machinery that separates and sorts metals and then they have to hose down literally to find where the actual money is. So one thing that I thought about, I am pretty much cashless at this point and it's because of this. I think that pennies at the minimum should be taken of commission at this point in countries like Canada, New Zealand and Australia have already done that. So there are no more pennies in their currency. And it's also due to the fact that the US Mint spends over $700 million making coins every year, which is just such a waste. So take care of your money, don't be wasteful and just use wallets or cards. People. I know I sound like a millennial or Gen Z here, but it's true.

Marcus Johnson (27:12):

That started like you were going to pitch a get rich quick scheme, so I'm glad. Go look through the

Oscar Orozco (27:16):

Garbage. There's money. Do

Marcus Johnson (27:17):

You read $2,000 every week? To

Paul Verna (27:19):

Be careful. Did you guys hear about that couple that was fishing in Queens last week? No. And they fished out. No, it was real story, a hundred thousand dollars in cash and paper cash. It was not a lot of it was not in usable shape and they turned the money into the US Treasury or the Mint. But obviously, well, I don't know if I should say obviously, but I think it was the product of a drug deal. I mean it was money like in wads of,

Marcus Johnson (27:54):

I lost a hundred thousand in, I was taking the ferries. What?

Oscar Orozco (27:59):

It was in the soup. How did it come? Just,

Paul Verna (28:02):

Yeah, it was in some kind of sack or duffle bag. That's how I carry it. It was underwater, so it was not in great shape. Marcus claim it. I'm telling. Go to Lost and found. How fun

Oscar Orozco (28:17):

Was that?

Marcus Johnson (28:18):

Do you have my a hundred grand here? Is it because I misplaced it? Very good. Let's go with,

Paul Verna (28:23):

I mean, sorry, just one more thing. No, no, please. I never would carry a hundred thousand dollars with me. I would just have my butler do it.

Marcus Johnson (28:30):

That's probably Paul's money. Let's go with Paul.

Paul Verna (28:35):

Okay, dinner party data. So concert tickets. Does anyone else agree with me that they're kind of expensive?

Marcus Johnson (28:44):

Yes,

Oscar Orozco (28:45):

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Verna (28:47):

Awful. So I did a little bit of math. The average ticket for the top 100 grossing concert tours in the US in the year 2000 was $40 and 74 cents. So according to the consumer price index inflation rate since then, by the end of 2023, that $40 should have been a little over $71. But the real average now or at the end of 2023 was $122 per concert ticket. So basically it means that the growth in that 23 year span, the actual growth was over 200%. Whereas in aggregate growth, the inflation rate would've been about 75 ish percent. So they're not just getting more expensive. I mean even allowing for inflation, they're way, way, way more expensive. And there are a lot of reasons for that. As you may have seen or heard, the Justice Department is suing Ticketmaster, which owns Live Nation. So basically they own concert promoters, venues, they manage artists, they process tickets. So pretty much a monopolistic enterprise according to the Justice Department. So that's one of the factors, but it's not the only one.

Oscar Orozco (30:16):

It is a luxury. Yeah, I mean it's just cost prohibitive at this point.

Paul Verna (30:22):

And if you do like to go see concerts, you've probably blown your annual budget on Taylor Swift or

Rahul Chadha (30:29):

The stone. I was going to say, how much did Taylor Swift skew that average? Because I imagine her and Beyonce probably have pretty expensive tickets. Yep.

Marcus Johnson (30:38):

Rahul,

Rahul Chadha (30:39):

You're up. Yeah, so I don't know if you guys are familiar with the mullet, the hairstyle number one on the sides and don't touch the back number six on top and don't cut it. Whack Jack to quote the Beastie Boys. Oh yeah, the mullet is making a mighty return, at least in the Australian Football League. Don't ask me to explain what Australian football is. I have no idea, but no one does.

Paul Verna (30:58):

All two rules.

Rahul Chadha (30:59):

According to an analysis done by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in late May, there was 788 players in the Australian Football League. 150 of them had mullets this season, that's about 19%. And I thought it was really interesting that mullet, the mullet were skewed young. So 38% of players aged 19 had them and no one over the age of 31 sported the look. So they also, I mean these guys really went deep on mullet. So they tried to figure out if there's a correlation between having a mullet and better performance and their conclusion was probably not. And they found that the best players in the league didn't have mullets. But that also might be because those better players also skewed older, which again meant that the prevalence of a mullet dropped among older players

Oscar Orozco (31:44):

At one point. Paul, did you have one? You

Paul Verna (31:47):

I did too. Now that we do have video podcast, I can make hair jokes and people actually get it. I did have a mullet. I also had a man bun and I had all the seven deadly sins of hair before I just decided, you know what? Oh, I had a comb over. Which is what led to what you see now.

Rahul Chadha (32:07):

Every time I would love, I would love to see photo evidence of the mullet Paul.

Marcus Johnson (32:11):

Yeah, would

Rahul Chadha (32:12):

Take, that would make me very happy. That would make great social media content for the podcast too.

Marcus Johnson (32:17):

Head to Instagram page where the picture would probably not be.

Paul Verna (32:21):

I won't see Oscars though. I'm not uploading any mullet pictures unless we all do it. I'll find

Marcus Johnson (32:26):

Some. Every time I see someone with one, I always think to myself both what is happening and also at the exact same time, why the hell don't I have one? Tune into next week's video podcast where we're growing one out. Alright, I have one for you real quick. Remote work stats. I thought it was time to check in on these because we talked about them a ton at the beginning of the pandemic and it's been a number of years. And so what do they look like today in 2024? We'll start with this kind of top line number. 14%. One four of employed adults work from home all the time. So 14% of all employed adults work from home all the time. According to Pew Research Center. Of those with a tele workable job, most 41% are hybrid, 35% are fully remote. So there's some top line numbers, but let's dig into some numbers from USA today.

Marcus Johnson (33:21):

In one poll, they surveyed 1000 American white collar workers. There's a few numbers here for you. Number one, work from home by state, very significantly, Colorado, where our colleague, Zach is, has the highest share of remote workers with 21% working from home at least some of the time. Mississippi has the lowest proportion of remote workers at just over 5%. So from 21 at the top end to five. Number two, ideal number of in-office days, 84% of workers said they wouldn't consider a job that offered zero days of remote work. And then 17% said the ideal number of days spent in the office per week was five. Double that 36% said zero was the ideal number, but 74% said three or fewer three days spent in the office or fewer. That was the majority. 74%. A few more for you here. And number three, the top benefits of remote working were better work life balance, saving time on the commute still and more comfortable working space. I thought that was an interesting one. Top drawbacks of remote working. Were feeling isolated from your team. So team specifically, not necessarily company or colleagues, but team. Fewer opportunities to learn from others and difficulty unplugging from work when working from home. And lastly, the top activities attracting workers to the office were 32% of people saying teamwork. That was first then and second, 27% saying socializing. And then in a very distant third was managing and mentoring with 9%. So all the other options had less than,

Paul Verna (35:09):

So free coffee didn't show up there.

Marcus Johnson (35:11):

It did. Not even a little bit. We did poll

Paul Verna (35:13):

Oscar. That was number one for me

Marcus Johnson (35:15):

And he said, Oscar said his number one reason for coming into the office used to be spending time with Marcus, which seemed a bit much, but it's true. Alright, that's what we've got time for today's episode before us who can reply. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you to that very gentleman, Mr. Orozco.

Oscar Orozco (35:31):

Thank you for having me. Marcus. I wanted to say something about Colorado, but forget

Marcus Johnson (35:35):

It. No time. No, go on. No,

Oscar Orozco (35:38):

No. I was going to say why

Marcus Johnson (35:39):

Colorado if it was a shot, Zach, it's welcome. Yeah, but what

Oscar Orozco (35:41):

Is it with Colorado and the work from

Marcus Johnson (35:44):

Home because they're all skiing and doing little work marijuana before everyone else. That also helps. Thank you so much to Rahul. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to Paul.

Paul Verna (35:55):

It's Mr. Verna to you. Mr. Johnson. Thank you guys. Always a

Marcus Johnson (35:59):

Pleasure. Thank you. So to our whole crew, thank you to Victoria who edits the show. Stuart, who runs the team. Sophia does our social media. Lance, who runs our video podcast. Danny and John who often help out with this show. And thanks to everyone for listening in. Of course. We hope to see you on Monday though for the behind the numbers Daily. It's an e-marketer podcast made possible by Roundout happiest of weekends.