Calling Bullsh!t: Tarnished Trust?

the first place, is trust. I think, like almost all corporations are incredibly performative, especially during like with like Pride, and I think also with like Black History, ronth It's like all just very performative. In my opinion, we're suffering through a crisis of trust. People, especially young people, are just losing trust with institutions of all kinds, and they're calling bullshit. We wanted to get out and ask some folks how they feel, specifically about trust when it comes

to businesses. So our producers, Haley and Basil hit the streets of New York. When you think of a company that is untrustworthy, what do you think of untrustworthy? There's a hundred different ways to look at it. When they like have all these ads like yes, try us, we're good, and then they let you down. If a company is pushing around funds and the money trail is a little shady. That's my biggest thing, like saying that they're like good and sustainable and like, but actually causing a lot of

environmental harm. I think Amazon Amazon automatically think of Amazon. I've heard that they don't actually process their returns and they just throw them away a lot of times. It gets a lot of flak, but I don't know enough to pass judgment and clear of the closing doors. Please what company or come and he's are you most loyal too? And why? I shop at Reformation a lot because they

seem like they're pretty environmentally friendly. I am most loyal to ari e I because ari I is really good with the environment and they have some nonprofits and it's just a lot of values that align with my values. So definitely Trader Joe's because they have great products and I think they do try to cut out plastic where they can. Today people are becoming increasingly activist in support of their beliefs, for example, changing their spending habits to

align with those beliefs. When you think of conscious capitalism, like what comes to mind a business model that can make money and still do the whole capitalist thing. But doesn't harm any groups of people or the environment or diminish any cultures. I don't know if there's such thing as conscious capitalist them. I think shopping at small businesses, especially in New York City, is the only way to go if you're truly going to be like a good citizen.

I usually research a company before I purchase anything. A few people even told us they boycott certain companies because of their values, like BP and Exxon, for example, Like I will refuse to get gas there just because they've done oil spills. I've stopped shopping at like Brandy Um Brandy Melville because of kind of like the whole body positivity movement. And one person felt like the system is

just too hopeless to even support at all. Friends or I like, we don't feel bad about stealing from like Walgreens or things like that because it's a corporation. I don't think there's ever been a corporation where I'm like, damn, that's like they're doing something good. The actual data here is sobering. More than fifty of young people today reject capitalism. They don't trust that it has their interest us at heart, and they really care believe that companies have an obligation

to help solve environmental and social problems. There is a growing list of companies out there who are doing this right, and the market rewards them. Purpose driven companies grow an average of three times faster than their competitors, while keeping their workforce and their customers more satisfied. In the long term, I believe this generation will force the old school bullshitters to shape up or ship out. When we started this season, I thought we'd chosen organizations with a wide range of

BS scores. I honestly thought that more of these companies would fall somewhere in the middle. But that's not what happened. Often, as we dug in the deeper the b S got. Overall, we found that companies were either really low BS or pretty high. You can see this for yourself at our

webs calling Bullshit podcast dot com. No matter where a company falls on the B S scale, each one taught us something new, and as we looked back, three overarching themes emerged about how purpose led companies really require a new approach. First, purpose is not marketing. You have to mean it. As Russell Diaz Canseco from Vital Farms told us, your purpose lives at the core of your business. You've got to live it. You have to live it, even in your darkest moment. You gotta do it for real.

And you've got to start with the purpose and let the business model come from that, as opposed to trying to stick a purpose on top of a business model that you already think is the right one. And we encountered several organizations that use purpose as a marketing tool

instead of an action driver. For example, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, says their purpose is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, all the while prioritizing the most polarizing and often truly harmful content. Here's Ramas Treaty Bazan. The most heinous forms of speech are what are being most prioritized. So, you know, Tie, it's one thing for me to say, you know, you should be able to speak how you wish and you

should be able to read what you want. It's another thing to say that, Tie, I'm just going to keep feeding you insane, crazy and at times conspiratorial and outrageous content. So you go crazy with a dopamine firing in your head, and it's like staring at a burning car the entire time. But Meta definitely isn't alone in saying one thing and doing another. As Joe No Sarah pointed out in our episode about the n c double A, the real bullshit factor to me about the n c A is how

orwellian the language is. They screw player in a dozen different ways, and yet they always characterize what they're doing as being the force for good, as being the people who are trying to to save the college athlete. We'll take this story from Jamie hen about a leaked marketing presentation from BP. Instead of outlining strategies for actually reaching their goal of net zero, it was all about messaging.

They run through this incredible series of slides about how the world changed in because of the global climate strikes in Grettith Thunberg and everything that had happened, and BP was wasn't trusted on this important issue of climate change that the public cared about. So they needed to do something to signal that they got it on climate change. It could be part of the energy transition. Of course, nothing in the presentation was actually about concrete things that

they would do, like stopping gass production. It was all about the ways that they would remarket themselves. This brings me to my second major takeaway doing is believing the opposite of empty marketing is purposeful action. Many of our guests had sent pastic ideas for actions companies should take to help close the gap between what they say and what they do, like this idea that Matthew Weatherley White had for black Rock. If I were Larry think I

would do one release, simple thing. I would change the new client form to require investors to opt out sustainable and impact investing and instead opt in. I think the messaging alone would give Larry Fink so much power, so much sort of political capital to force change within the organization that that institutional operational hesitation slash resistance slash intractability. I think it would sort of collapse on its own weight.

Or this potential action for Meta from RMA Srinivasan, What if Facebook partnered with independent journalists in every single country where it operated so that those journalists could actually have power over media, you know, auditing, tweaking, working with Facebook technologies so that they could reach people in those countries in ways that are more fair. Good intentions must be backed by action. Being purpose led isn't an end state

it's a journey. Like Andreine Clark explains, it can also be a fight, and I say, well, then you've got to grab the bull by the horn and wrestle with it and make it work for you. Wrestling with the problems actually trying to solve them is what makes being purpose led so exciting. But without trust, people just won't come along for the ride, which brings me to the third and final takeaway of this season. The key to trust is transparency. To be transparent, you have to tell

people what's really going on. Are you achieving your purpose? Are there problems that you've encountered that you can't solve? Admit that private prison company Course Civic, for example, would

benefit massively from being more transparent. So I can't find data on their website about a lot of things that I would typically look for in measuring whether they're running a constitutional present and there's a whole list of things that the facility needs to be measuring to show that they're in compliance with the constitution, And you don't see that type of data or that reporting on cours Civics website that Sharon Brett from the a c l U

explaining just how hard it is to trust that Courcivic is living up to its stated purpose. But just collecting data isn't enough. You have to measure what matters. In our episode about America, Andrew Yang was inspired to start a third political party to restore faith in our system, partly based on the idea that GDP isn't everything. Right now, you have these economic indicators that are GDP and stock market prices, and they're going up in up, even as

more people are sinking into the dirt. So what I believe we should do is take our human well being and look at it the same way we do stock market prices and say, okay, how are the kids doing? You know, how how are people doing? How are communities doing? We should be measuring our health, our mental health, our kids ability to learn, our environmental quality are affordability and

access to healthcare and education. Measuring what matters and making those results public is a big part of being purpose led. It's easy to trust that all birds cares about sustainability. There's a comprehensive label explaining it to me on every shoe box, and everyone's compensation is tied to hitting their sustainability goals. CEO Joey's willinger that carbon emission reduction goal that we stated alongside our financial didance. I'm paid on that.

If we don't hit those reduction targets for carbon and I don't make as much money, and same for all of the executives and and leadership team at All Birds. We think about ourselves as a purpose native company, so that alignment between mission and financial outcome was essential for us. So if you want to build trust and close the gap between word, indeed, start with a genuine purpose. Remember, actions speak louder than words. And finally, transparency will keep

you honest. And since we try to hold ourselves to these same standards, you'll hear what it sounds like when somebody calls BS on us right after the break welcome back. In the spirit of participation, we set up a phone number where folks can call in and tell us what they think of the show. Did we get a score wrong or right? Where we maybe bullshit? Hey, it's tied to calling Bullshit podcast. I'd love to hear what's on your mind. And remember, if you leave a message, you

might be featured on an upcoming episode. This is Whitney. I just listened to the Albird's episode. I thought it was super cool hearing about the materials innovations that Albert's is leading with their sweet phone and with the tree runner eucalyptus. And honestly, I'd never really thought much about how a lot of our sneakers are made out of

oil or petroleum. Hey, I really like your podcast, but I gotta say is the latest episode on All Birds is purely a PR pluck Like there's nothing about calling bullshit. It's all about, like you know, praising the company, interviewing the co founder. So I would just encourage you have have to stick to your original format because you're almost like doing PR for other companies. Hi. There, I have to

say my favorite episode has been Vital Farms. I absolutely love listening to the CEO's perspective about however, company is on a journey and the way to progress on that journey is to continue to set really audacious goals and

to hold yourself accountable to those. Hi. I listened to an episode for the first time regarding what it kind of means to be an American, and I really enjoyed the many vantage points that you included in the episode, just kind of hearing from folks that are maybe similar minded, but been also talking to folks that you know may

have had an opposite view. Hey, calling bullshit team, considering the delta between word, indeed between the American dream and lived experience with many Americans, you gave a score of sixty two. I would argue that it should be even higher. For where it's worth I'd give I'd like to hear more about wellness companies at a mass scow that are really challenging the stories that are fed to women in

the capital society. I'd love to see some some more episodes on some of the big guys, the Amazons of the world, the Google's hear what you all think about some of these big tech giants. Another interesting episode for company to eament could be TikTok when you start to smell bullshit in a company? What are the telltale signs that a company is purpose washing versus you know we've made a mistake. Thanks so much, ye thank you everyone who took the time to call in, and please keep

them coming. Even if we're in between seasons. The line will be open, so if you have any thoughts or opinions, hit us at two on to five oh five. Five. We also received some pretty critical feedback via email that surfaced some important questions and made some interesting suggestions. I've asked our producer D. S. Moss to read part of

one from a listener we'll call Joe. It's hard to take this seriously coming from marketing consultants, people working for years in a field that has largely helped corporations avoid accountability and change rather than drive it. Why don't you start by calling bull on marketing firms first and foremost.

They have the biggest say do gap of all. I certainly hope that some of the experts you bring on include activists who actually put their work and lives on the line to get corporations to make those statements in the first place, to show and to tell them what they need to do in order to change in meaningful ways instead of meaningless actions that do nothing real. You're talking about the classics say do gap to build your

brand and to get clients. Other people do it and have done it long before you, and we'll do it long after you move on to something else, because they spend their lives devoted to the fight for social transformation. Ouch. Honestly, though, I thought Joe made some great points here. First, just to be clear, your purp is is not marketing. In fact, it's companies that think of it as marketing or as part of their brand image that get in trouble and

maybe wind up as an episode of calling Bullshit. This email got me thinking more deeply about the role that advertising and marketing play in the bullshit sphere, and so I decided I wanted to have a conversation about trust with a real activist and also someone in advertising, the founder of Sleeping Giants, Matt Rivets. My conversation with Matt

right after the break, welcome back. To dig more deeply into the topic of bullshit and marketing, I called up Matt Rivets, founder of social media activism organization Sleeping Giants. All right, folks, I am very pleased to introduce Matt Rivets. Matt, welcome to Calling Bullshit and thank you for being here.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So to start off, I'd love it if you would tell our listeners a little bit more about your journey in advertising, how you got started in the business, and then maybe a little bit more about how you began to become more activist. Yeah, I started in nineteen I had always kind of known that I was going to go into advertising. I was really obsessed with the early Cliff Freeman commercials.

Little Caesar is that kind of thing, and between that and SNL, I just felt like that's something that I would like to do. And I was lucky enough to get a job and graduated early from college and got my first job in Boston and just started working at Needency there and it was just a great business to be super creative to level up. And then I moved to San Francisco and I got to work on Adidas, which I always wanted to be work on a sports brand.

And then I went freelance, and I've got a great partner that I've been working with for a long time, and we just went and we worked at all these places that we'd always wanted to work. So two thousand sixteen rolled around and the election, everyone was feeling very raw, and I was feeling like I wasn't as concerned about Trump as I was about the rising tide of racism in the country. And I got particularly obsessed with Steve Bannon, who I felt like it was a really dangerous individual,

and he he said at the time. It was just after two thousand sixteen, maybe around there. He gave a speech and he said, let them call your racist where it is a badge of honor. And I thought that was horrendous. These are I didn't think that existed. I was not really tuned to that, so I got really obsessed with him. He was at the time the president of bright Bart News. I had never heard a bright Bart before, and so I went online and I could

not believe what I was looking at. There were these articles that said, hoisted high and proud, that Confederate flag proclaims the glorious heritage, and would you rather your child had feminism or cancer? And the real hard part about it was looking above all those articles and seeing ads for companies that I had worked on previously in my career, And so right then I knew there was something wrong

to have brands that I knew as a writer. You know, they were notoriously scared and don't want a word out of place. And I'd spent the whole nights writing these ads making sure that nothing was offensive at all. To show up next to an article saying the Confederate flag is great seemed really off to me, and I just thought, why, why would they ever support this? And and as it

turns out, I was right. They didn't really know. My parents were very area tune to the world, and I learned a lot about the Holocaust growing up because I'm a Jewish guy, and I had learned a lot about slavery, and I learned a lot about the human rights abuses, and they actively encouraged me to get involved whenever I could. So that was the beginning of my journey in this. I just felt like, alright, some action needs to be taken, and who around is going to do it except for me?

I don't know. That's that's great, and so is that the moment that that Sleeping Giants was born. At the exact moment, I was really scared at the time, but I just decided to go for it. I opened up an anonymous Gmail account and an anonymous Twitter handle. I had had a Twitter account that I had sent ten tweets from all about the Baltimore Ravens horrific offense, and that was about it. That was my That was the

depth of my knowledge about Twitter. But I did know that if you were sitting on the runway for two hours on a plane that you could tweet at the airline and say I've been sitting on the tarmac for two hours, and they would they were getting in touch. They'd respond instantly, and they would send you twenty miles for the trouble. So I knew I could either try to call these companies. That wasn't gonna work. So I

opened up this anonymous Twitter handle. I found some shitty stock art to put on it, and I called it Sleeping Giants because I wanted it to seem like it was bigger than just one person. I put a crowd shot on the masthead to make it seem like there was a lot of people. There was no one following, and I wasn't following anyone at the time, so it was really just from scratch from scratch. So I took

a screenshot of the first at I saw. It was for so Far, which is a progressive loan company in San Francisco, California, next to the article proclaiming the glory of the Confederate flag, and I tweeted it to the company, and then I tweeted it to the CEO who was all on Twitter, and the CEO got back to me within thirty minutes. It was so quick, and he said, I had no idea that our ad was on there, and I don't even know if there's anything I can do about it, but I'm going to try to get

it down. And I said, there's got to be something wrong with the technology where brands don't know where they're ending up. And that was the beginning of all of it. I got real addicted to it. For someone that loves to level up, it was it made a ton of sense for me too. I'm like, okay, well now I got really obsessed and it felt really great. Right these this company said we're not going to advertise on this page anymore. We don't want to support the racism on

this page. Okay, so there's got to be a bunch of brands that believe the same thing. So I started tweeting it every other brand that I could find. You just refresh and there's another brand that would pop up, really big ones. You know that we're placing ads all over the internet, and it's just one by one. They kept coming down. Day by day. They were like two and three that would come down. It was, you know, a week into it, and maybe of teen advertisers left,

and did you ever get contacted by Breitbart. Did they notice that this was taken place? No, they it took a while to land on their radar. And all of a sudden, I had a friend who's the New York Times best selling author, and I said, what do you mind sending this out to your audience? So he sent

his followers. I said, these guys are doing some interesting stuff, and all of a sudden I had a hundred more followers, and then two hundred, and then a thousand, and they were all watching as these advertisers would leave one by one and they would amplify the tweets that went out. And then I thought, well, you know what, like these people are all watching and they're cheering on but they could. This is so easy. It's like taking a screenshot on

your phone tweeting it to an average everybody could. So that kind of happened quick. I just put a set of instructions on the pin tweet at the top of the page, and it caught fire. All of a sudden, there were ten advertised is leaving every hour, and I just said to tag sleeping giants on the back so I could keep track of them. And it just built and built and built and built. Yeah, no, that's that's great. Well,

and this is like shame on me. I didn't become aware of sleeping giants until later when you got engaged with trying to get brands to boycott Facebook. When was that? When did that? That was much later. It really became to me an obsession about the platforms themselves. How do you go deeper into this? It can't just be about advertisers. It's got to be about platform accountability. These are advertising platforms that are serving ads to two sites that really should.

There were white supremacist sites that were getting ads when this thing started, and I sort of became obsessed with Alex Jones, who was harassing Sandy Hook parents out of there. His followers were harassing Sandy Hook parents out of their homes after their children have been massacred, and yeah, it just felt I just thought it was beyond the pale. This person was doing this and he was a conspiracy theorist, and he was making tons of money on YouTube from

ads and Facebook. And I was like, if an advertiser had the option to sponsor this on TV, there's no way way they would do it. So how are they doing it on these platforms and I had started to look up the terms of service on these platforms. How nothing he was saying was matching up with their terms of service. He should have been gone a long time ago,

according to their own rules. So I just started lobbying effort on YouTube, and you know as sleeping giants, as the whole sort of community started to really push this, and there was no accountability that kept saying no, he would get a strike here and a strike there, and then that would go away. That was like they were making up the rules as they went. And eventually I got a call from a reporter that said, what do you think about Alex Jones? And I said, what are you?

And he said, Apple just got rid of them from their platform because they don't make their money from ads. They're just they're a hardware company that also happens to have some platforms, but they they're not relying on ad dollars. And what happened after that was one by one, the next day, YouTube got rid of them, and Facebook got rid of them, and Twitter waited for another two weeks and then they got rid of them. And I said, man,

that is no way to enforce your rules. Everyone should have their own rules and they shouldn't be looking for cover from anyone else. So that's really what got me into the platforms. I thought that was really wrong beyond ads supporting things, advertising supports these platforms and platforms make up their own rules, and what we're seeing right now in the world is they're really making it up as they go. So that really became kind of obsession of

mind and then of sleeping giants rid large. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, And so I mean, I'm not going to go into the history of cod but we share a worldview. We've taken different paths. But like you, I love to advertise thing. I became addicted to it in a way the people really actually it was such a fun business. And then

decided that there had to be a better way. You know, I was becoming much more I guess, sensitized to the damage that we were doing by just creating endless growth, and so decided to jump out and do co collective and you know, way led onto way we were working

with companies. I guess our thesis was, rather than tell your story using paid media, you should do your story through innovation and the customer experience, and that if we could get companies to take action to make it make their you know, their intent real through the customer experience,

we would close the gap between word indeed. And then we decided to do this podcast because in the ten years between the time that we started co and today, purpose got really popular and we started to see examples where it's like, well, that company is saying their purpose left, they're definitely not. And the one that we became just hyper aware of was Facebook, who says that they, you know, want to empower everyone to build community and bring the

world closer together. Facebook is the most egregious when it comes to that their messaging has been one of togetherness and connecting the world while taking zero responsibility for what they've cost. Yeah, literally doing the opposite. This is our season wrap up episode, and so what we're trying to do is just take stock and figure out what we've learned so far, both from our experience just making the show and and also about some feedback that we've received

on the show. And one of the most interesting pieces of feedback that we've gotten is a listener who called bs on us and me specifically for being, to use his words, a marketing consultant who should be calling bullshit on the marketing industry, and I thought that was a totally or point, not like totally accurate, because marketing is a big part of several of our episodes, Jewel and and BP specifically, but definitely a topic worth discussing, and

so largely that's the territory I wanted to explore with you today because you've been both like you're both a highly awarded creative person in advertising and you're also an activist in the advertising and marketing space. Yeah. I mean, I'm a freelancer, so I've been really lucky. I've been able to pick and choose the projects that I've worked on, which has been great, but it is hard. Every time that a job comes up, you kind of hold your breath and go, Okay, is this gonna be the right

thing to do. Everyone's got their own code and what they're willing to work on. How do you do that? Math I I think I do have a line in certain companies that I will definitely not work for on Facebook being one of them, but there are companies that

are doing good things. The other thing is, sometimes you feel like you can take one of these companies and propose ideas that they you know, sometimes you need to use the system itself to try to improve it, and so you have an opportunity to sometimes do that, which is great, and the companies are more open to it now than they've been. But it is tough and it's tough to hold the line. You know. I was an inadvertent activist. I had no idea what I was getting into,

and that thing grew and wow. Yeah, back when I was in more let's call it mainstream advertising, I didn't want to do work with oil companies. I didn't want to do work with chemical companies. I didn't want to do work with cigarette companies. Those seemed pretty obvious to me. And so you're right, it's sort of a personal, choose your own adventure in that business. I was also lucky enough to work for people who who allowed me to recuse myself right based on my personal take, which I appreciated.

I was very energized and excited by what you were doing with Facebook, and it got my attention that big brands got on board for a while at least, and and started saying we're not gonna advertise for a period of time. Yeah, but that was that was a moment in time that Unfortunately, you get more work done in really tragic times. And that was on the heels of George Floyd's murder and there were mass protests in the streets.

People were really angry, rightfully, So you just saw a lot of these brands put a black square on their Instagram page and say we support Black Lives Matter, and man, that was bullshit for a lot of companies I talked about calling bullshit. It just felt like they were being very, very performative about their support. And we did some person on the street interviews as a part of this episode

as well, and that word came up. People know, right and that That's what's interesting is companies aren't fooling anybody when they're when they do that. Not anymore. They used to be able to do they were Information moves fast now and there are a lot of reporters on this beat. You can tell almost instantly if something isn't coming from the right place, because there will be reporting on it and we'll go out on Twitter and they will get fil aid over it if they don't see it through

and everything they do. I I had been really interested in doing some kind of Facebook action for about a year, but never felt sleeping giants is not big enough to do something like that. It was going to be throwing a pebble in the ocean. And I got a call from a couple of people, Jonathan Greenblatt at a d L and Jim Styre at Common Sense Media, and they called me and said, we kind of want to do something about Facebook right now. I just said, I would

love to. I'm in a hunter whatever you want me to do, Like, I'm so flatter do you even ask? I wanted to do it for a while. But I think they they, like I thought that we needed a coalition to do it. We needed a much bigger show of force from a number of different quarters for some something on Facebook. And so I just said, look, I think we need something definite here. We need something that's achievable.

Let's ask advertisers to take a month off. Take a month off of Facebook, because they really were allowing this racism to run wild, they were allowing disinformation to run wild, especially during George Floyd. The toxicity of Facebook was egregious and it worked. I mean, it was really a shot

in the dark. It's amazing to look back now and say, wow, advertised was left within like a two week period, And at first it started with the usual players like the north Face and some more sort of conscious advertisers would lead. And then I think we heard from Verizon and I'm like, oh shit, this is happening now, And we all started texting each other like this is happening. And I've just seen enough with Fox and with bright Bar to know that once one of those things happened, the rest come

down with it. And it was a tipping point, and advertisers left, and we knew that they weren't going to stay away for long, but they all made some really good statements about it, and it was the first time that there was some kind of dent in Facebook, and we felt like, Okay, if we could just get people to think about what they're supporting with their ad dollars, then we have a chance to hold these companies accountable long term, because advertising is ninety eight percent of Facebook's revenue,

and it's not the big advertisers, necessarily a small and medium sized ones that really can't do business without it. Yeah, no, it was. It was impressive. I guess it's it's slightly disappointing to me that given the drumbeat of horrifying revelation since then about Facebook and their practices that more companies haven't just pulled off the platform completely. Yeah, and it feels like Facebook they've got the world in a headlock right there. You know, the biggest and best attention machine

in the world. And that's hard to resist if you've got a thing that you need to sell. But it would be great to see more clients making that a permanent choice. There have been a few, and there have been a few principled companies that have said we're not going to do it anymore, and they say that it's hard. It's hard to do it, and it really speaks to the monopoly power of a couple of these companies. I mean, we have basically an advertising duopoly and they own our industry,

not the way the other way around. Right now, it should be the other way around. As advertisers, we should we should be owning the relationship, not them. They are wholly dependent on us. We are not wholly dependent on them, but they've made it seem like we're wholly dependent on them. So we need more competition in the market. We need new platforms, we need other ways to reach people, and we need to think about that more critically, You can't just ask someone to wholesale leave the only way that

they can actually reach some people. That's not gonna work. And one of the other levers is at agent season PR companies themselves. You know, one of the activists that we talked to this season for the VP episode was a guy named Jamie hen who runs an organization called Fossil Free Media. He's actually one of the co founders of three fifty dot Org, and his thesis is that ad agencies and PR companies are tools that bad companies are using to do harm to the world, and so

he's overtly going directly after them. He overtly went after Edelman for all the work that they do with Exxon, for instance. What do you think about that? Look, I think that the next phase of this is employee activism. We saw it with Francis Hogan and Facebook. We've seen it across the board, and I think the whistleblowers are the most important people in this fight. Within the industry. Our industry, particularly in advertising, we like the status quo

a whole lot. For an industry that loves change, loves to tout change and say that we're changing the world. We're really good at maintaining the status quo and and uh, and I'd like to see that change. I'm still in advertising. I want to be proud of what I do, and I want to be proud of our industry. The governing bodies of our industry are really doing a disservice to the industry in some ways by blindly supporting Facebook and

Google all the time. When Facebook and Google are doing us a disservice as advertisers, They're putting us next to some really awful stuff. They're using our money to fund information that has caused genocide and in two countries. So I think it's really important for our industry to speak up. I feel like it's important for people in every industry to say raise their hand and say I think there's something wrong with this. Yeah. And it's interesting because we

have seen whistleblowers in their industries. You mentioned Francis Hogan, and the ad industry has had things like diet Madison Avenue, which they were taking on toxic behavior in the workplace. But I'm not actually aware of any whistleblowers from inside ad agencies going after clients or client work. Have I missed that having some of them haven't mystic because it's

not really happening. But I also don't know that a lot of people, even people in advertising, don't understand the mechanisms of what we support their I for sure did not, right absolutely, we didn't. We didn't know, And I think that was like the success of Sleeping Giants was more of an informational nature, letting people know that advertising supports all kinds of stuff. Right now, our entire online ecosystem is supported by advertising. We hold up the Internet, the

free Internet. That's how everyone pays for websites, that's how everyone pays for social networks. That's what we support. So I think that we do need more education within the industry to let people know what they're paying into with their time. I don't think that we understand that, And I also think that if they knew that, they would

speak up. And there are a lot of agencies that won't work on certain things, and and hats off to them, and that's great, but we do need employees to stand up and say we shouldn't work on this right Well, that leads to another question I had, which is do you think the ad industry would ever circle the wagons and refuse to do business with a particular industry or an individual company. No or Yeah, somebody somewhere is always willing to do that. There's always someone in every business.

I mean, advertising is no different than any business. They're always bottom feeders in every industry. I'm not saying that, you know, not not calling anyone a bottom feeder in particular, but they're always going to be someone that's willing to take the dough, especially now it's gotten really hard to make a buck. You can't judge a company by trying to pay their employees, you know, in the end of

the day. And and as an industry, it's really hard to get anyone to go on anything like we were really lucky that we got ten twelve organizations to all be on the same page. To just go after Facebook for a month, To get in all every adigency together and say we're not going to support Blank anymore is

really tough to do. Yeah, Another thing that I've said on this show, because I really believe it, is that high BS companies and high BS industries, of which some AD agencies and some PR companies and and marketing in general is definitely guilty of, will begin to lose the war for talent. Do you think that that's happening? Are people choosing not to get into marketing, advertising pr today

young people because of this problem. I don't think that people are as informed as they probably should be on what they're paying into, but I think if they knew, then they would be a little reticent. Look, we're seeing there is there is death only there are people at Facebook that are not happy and and sometimes you need people internally to champion certain causes to make things happen.

But at some point some people are gonna sit up and say, no, I want to work for a company that's going to believe in something, that's gonna put their foot down when it comes to doing something bad in the world, and say I want to do something good and and I'm really banking on that. I feel like we need that. And I think when we have a counterbalance, when you have an agency that's willing to stand up and say, look, there are only certain kinds of accouncil

we will work on. Then once you have that counterbalance, people are going to go and want to go work for them instead. This next generation, my kids give a ship and they look at everything critically. Now, maybe because I've been such an asshole online for five years and they've been listening to me. But this next generation does care. Yeah, they do, and well it's because they're going to inherit all the problems right, and they're acutely aware of that.

What advice would you give to creative people and strategists and a count people working in the ad business or the pr business who are wondering about the ethical issues surrounding their career choice or who are trying to figure out how to move it in a more positive direction. I'd say, make a set of principles for yourself and what you're willing to hold yourself to, and try to stick to that as much as you can, and try to encourage others to say the same thing. Yeah, I

agree on calling bullshit. We're we really believe that it's important to try to nudge capitalism in a more sustainable direction, and so we really believe in getting for profit companies to change and really start to think differently about their responsibilities to the communities that they do business in, you know, and the planet. But my sense is that there are folks a lot of young people among them who are

just beginning to call bs on that. So I guess my question is, is sustainable capitalism itself just a bunch of bullshit? No, I don't think it is. I think we need it. I'm I'm a free market person. I believe in the free market. I don't think it's working right now. I think we've got a lot of monopolies. What we're seeing with you know, the Amazons the world there.

You know, they just got their first union past, and and so you're starting to see employees being able to have some kind of be able to make a stand, take a stand and make a difference. Money makes the world go around, but I think it's incumbent upon us to use that money in the right ways. I don't think it's bullshit, or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

I think that advertisers, you know, in our business, if they are much more purposeful with how they spend their money, then they're able to affect change on the platforms, and then that in turn affects the world in a different way, and it changes the trajectory of what we're on right now. It's super idealistic, I know, but I'm an idealist. I can't continue to all people without trying to come up with a solution. Actually joined a company that is earnestly

trying to change the ad tech land escape. It's called Noble Media, and I've been working with them for like two years and we're just starting to get some traction. It's nice. Can you just say more specifically what the thesis is for Noble Media? Yeah, the the thesis is you can't read the entire Internet, but you can try

through technology to do it. And so they're working with a language scientists who's a professor of rhetoric to identify signals incredible and trustworthy content and also vice versa in disinformation, in hyperpartisan information and clickbait, and how to differentiate the two of those things so that you can actually, as an advertiser, you can target credibility on a page, which gets in turn more clicks and more interaction with their

ads because it's on more trusted content. So for me, it's an attempt to solve the problem that I've been harping about, which is how can we help advertisers so they can support quality content, which is what they should be supporting anyway, and not support all the bullshit on the rest of the Internet that they don't really need to be supporting right now. The system doesn't allow them to do that. This technology does m I love that. I do too, or I wouldn't have joined. I love

it totally. That's fantastic. I hope that works me too. Fingers crossed. I really do appreciate that you joined us today. I totally enjoyed the conversation and thank you for the work that you're doing both with Sleeping Giants and Noble Media. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. I mean I really anytime you know, you can have an honest discussion about an industry, I think it's a good opportunity to take. So I really appreciate that. Man. So what

have we learned from all this? Are we qualified to call bullshit? Should you, dear listener? Trust us? This podcast is driven by maybe the optimistic belief that exposing gaps between word indeed and then suggesting solutions is an act of positive ativity. Talking with Matt reminded me of how powerful information really is and how it can be used for positive change. So we're definitely going to keep doing what we're doing. I also want to double down on

something that we've done in every episode. If you're a leader of a company that we featured on this show and you want to come on and tell your side of the story, you have an open invitation. I also know that there are ways that we can do better. In season two, We're going to feature more founders and guests who are women and from marginalized groups. We're also going to feature more companies from outside the US. Usually I give a BS score right about now, but today

I'd like to invite you to score us. How are we doing? Do you see any gaps between what we say and what we do? Send us an email at CBS podcast at co Collective dot com, or call us at two one two five oh five five. I'm both terrified and curious to know what you think. Thank you for joining us today, Matt Rivets. You can find more information on Sleeping Giants and Noble Media on our website,

Calling Bullshit Podcast dot com. And if you have ideas for companies or organizations that we should consider for future episodes, you can submit them on our site too. And if we wet your appetite for another heap in help and of BS in the fall, subscribe to the Calling Bullshit Podcast on the I Heart Radio, App, Apple Podcasts or

wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks to our entire season one production team Ethan Applebee, Susie Armitage, Hannah Beale, Jess Fenton, Amanda Ginsburg, Andy Kim, D s Moss, Ali, Nuen Hailey, Pascalites, MICHAELA. Reid, Lena Beck, Silison Parker Silzer, Basil Soaper and me John Zulu. And thank you to the whole team at co Collective for really supporting this

entire enterprise. Go Auntie Badgers Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and is hosted by Me Time Onto you, Thanks for listening.