Episode 7: Phoebe Bain, Founder of Marketing Brew, Talks Influencer Pay Equity

This episode features guest Phoebe Bain, an industry journalist, who founded Marketing Brew. Danielle and Phoebe’s discussion delved into Snapchat’s viability as an influencer platform, Tumblr re-entering the chat thanks to Elon Musk (!?), and why we all miss those ubiquitous coffee cup photos. Plus, you won’t want to miss Phoebe’s take on who’s being left out of the equal pay conversation for today’s social media creators.

Standout moments:

• (15:42) With the come up of BeReal and the comeback of Tumblr, you can tell that the current generation is looking for more personal, less structure in the content they have, where it’s not about being an influencer.
• (19:30) Danielle and Phoebe talk about how Instagram used to be and how they miss it. Phoebe also mentions that when Facebook came out, people were the most real.
• (21:36) Phoebe talks about leveling the playing field in how influencers are being paid – that for marketers there needs to be some sort of standardization. She also talks about how bias and discrimination play into this.

Episode 7: Phoebe Bain Transcript

Danielle Wiley: Welcome to The Art of Sway, this is a podcast that brings you inside the world of marketing through the lens of influence, I’m your host, Danielle Wiley. Each week through candid conversations with industry insiders, we will uncover how influencer marketing is making an impact across all consumer buying habits, and is changing the way we talk to each other, let’s dive in.

Danielle Wiley: I loved talking to Phoebe, it was especially interesting to hear about her journey, from growing up on a horse farm with no wifi, to now covering social media in New York City, of all places. We also talked about what it’s like to cover an ever-changing industry, and some of the articles she’s written over the past year that really stuck with her and were her faves, so I hope you enjoy.

Danielle Wiley: Phoebe Bain founded Marketing Brew, A Morning Brew vertical covering the most important news in the marketing industry in 2020. In 2021 the vertical expanded into original reporting and beyond the newsletter, adding many more reporters and an editor to the fold. Before rolling out Marketing Brew, Phoebe wrote for Social Media Today under Industry Dive, and worked on the social media desk for Business Insider. So Phoebe, Hi, it’s so good to have you. I feel like we’re best friends, this is the third time I’ve talked to you in [inaudible].

Phoebe Bain: Yeah absolutely, thank you so much for having me on.

Danielle Wiley: Of course. So we’ve been talking on the phone and on Twitter for probably a year now about all things social media, and we met for the first time, was it last week or two weeks ago? In New York City for coffee, which was super fun to put… I mean, I had seen your face, but to put an actual being to the name and get to know each other.

Phoebe Bain: Yes, to put a 3D body to the name was wonderful.

Danielle Wiley: Yes. So I loved hearing about your unique childhood, it’s such a sharp contrast from what you do now. So I thought maybe it would be fun if you could share a little bit about your very offline growing up environment, which again, it’s ironic given what you cover now is social media all the time. Well, I’ll let you tell everyone how different that is from how you were raised.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, incredibly offline. I mean, I remember going to school, and when the kids were getting into Vine, because everybody at that point had iPhones in my high school experience, and everyone had a Vine account, and everyone was making Vines of each other, and I had a flip phone. And I was like, “This app is stupid. It’s reducing people’s attention spans. It’s all just going to make us dumber.” But I think I just wanted an iPhone. But I grew up in Virginia, in a town called Middleburg, it’s an hour west of DC. But it’s a town of 400 people, it has one stoplight, and truly just no infrastructure for technology, kind of on purpose. There are groups that will be very against bringing cell towers in, or any sort of tech infrastructure.

Phoebe Bain: There’s a Facebook group for the local townspeople, and it’s funny because people during the pandemic, who were looking to move out of the city found out about this town for the first time. And a lot of people moved out here, and more tourists came. And you’ll see people in the Facebook group now being like, “How do you get wifi to your house?” And you kind of can’t. You can get something that’s barely functioning, but not like it is in the city at all, I live in New York City now. But a town of 400 people, super small. And I grew up riding horses, and so there wasn’t necessarily a need for a video game station, or cable TV most of the time, because there was a pony in the backyard. So that’s all the entertainment you need when you’re a horse-crazy little girl, but truly not a high-tech upbringing for sure.

Danielle Wiley: So you left town to go away to college, I think you said you ended up at William & Mary?

Phoebe Bain: I did, I’m holding a William & Mary mug right now.

Danielle Wiley: Perfect.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, it was wonderful.

Danielle Wiley: So this childhood living with no wifi, and the flip phone, and riding horses, and now you’re living in New York City, and writing about social media, how did that journey unfold?

Phoebe Bain: So my mom is originally from New York, and then kind of was the black sheep of her family that wanted to leave the area. She grew up riding horses and this is just what brings people to the town, it’s a very horsey town, so that’s how we ended up here. But I went to New York every Christmas, and my mom tells a story where I got off the train at Grand Central at all of four years old, and looked around and was like, “I’m going to live here one day.” And she was like, “You haven’t even been outside yet.” So I kind of always knew I wanted to be in New York, and truly writing is the only thing I’m good at. I remember taking standardized testing in school, and the math part was abysmal, and the writing part was as high as you could score, so I knew I would be some sort of writer.

Phoebe Bain: Debated being a lawyer for a while, and dated some law students in college, and kind of saw their lives, and was like, “That doesn’t look like a ton of fun.” So when I was in college there was this legacy student newspaper called The Flat Hat, which is one of the older student newspapers in the country. And it was around when everybody was being laid off from the dot com boom and bust, and I was like, “Well, I’m not going to work in print. Print is dead.” That was the idea. Gawker was big, all these online blogs were sort of the new thing, and even if people were getting laid off, I was like, “Well, I absolutely can’t work in print.” And The Flat Hat didn’t really have that much of a digital presence. So I found this online program called College Magazine, which if there’s any younger journalists out there listening that are in college, it’s an amazing program, I think it still exists, it’s been forever.

Phoebe Bain: But they were essentially this online Her Campus-type publication, and when I joined they were working on starting campus chapters. So previously you blog about college life, you write about college life, whatever, but maybe your editor is at NYU if you’re at William & Mary, or if you’re an editor maybe your people are at like UCLA, your writers. But they were starting to develop campus chapters, so I founded the second ever College Magazine campus chapter at William & Mary, and was the lead out there, had a bunch of writers, and just really enjoyed it. And in the College Magazine database, once you became an editor, you had access to this Excel sheet I think it was. And so there was an Excel sheet of every past College Magazine alumni, and all of their contact information, and where they were working now.

Phoebe Bain: And a lot of these people were working at significant publications, and had gone on to do great things. So long story short, I got an internship, I really barely did school, I was barely passing college because I was always doing journalism stuff. But I graduated, and my senior year truly, barely did any classes, and did an internship at Social Media Today, which is under Industry Dive. And after I graduated school they let me go full-time freelance, so I was mostly freelance editing contributor articles that were about the business of social media, social media marketing, that type of thing. And I did that at night mostly, and in the daytime, I moved to New York a week after I graduated, and then was working at Business Insider on their social media desk. And then I got in touch with Alex and Austin at Morning Brew, and it was early days of their company, they’d just been on Forbes 30 Under 30, and that was the only reason that I knew them.

Phoebe Bain: I’d heard of Morning Brew, some [inaudible] on the subway on the way to work, but it was like 15 people at the time. And they ended up starting Emerging Tech Brew, which was their first business-to-business publication, and then Retail Brew, which was their second one. And they brought me on to start Marketing Brew, being that I had a background in editing and writing about social media marketing. So Marketing Brew under Morning Brew, I started in April 2020, I’ve been there for almost three years now.

Phoebe Bain: And I think when I joined the company it was 30 people, it’s now 300. And I’m actually the most tenured employee on the B2B side of the team, because the people that started retail and emerging tech have since left, and we’ve built out this enormous business news reporting arm of the newsroom. I want to say there’s 50 or 60 people on this side of the newsroom now, and there are many, many more publications. We have HR Brew, we have CFO Brew, all different industries are covered. But Marketing Brew itself, I’m now just one of many reporters for it, which is kind of cool. So there are now four of me, and we have an editor, and this whole dedicated editorial, and copy editing, and fact-checking staff, which is amazing being that all of Morning Brew was sharing one editor when I first joined, including the daily newsletter and all that stuff.

Danielle Wiley: That’s a lot.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, I’m one of five reporters for Marketing Brew. And being that there are so many of us I don’t have to just go far and wide, and cover the marketing industry at large, I’ve been able to specialize in a beat, which has been great. So I mostly cover influencer marketing and social media marketing, which is how I ended up here.

Danielle Wiley: Yes. What’s your process? I know when we were chatting a couple of weeks ago in New York, I mentioned something offhand, and you were like, “That’s an idea.” And wrote it down, and then we kind of followed up this week on it. But is that how it works, that you just always have your ears and eyes open for things going on? What’s the process? Because you write a lot of articles, and you’ve actually done some recently, I’m thinking about the one about TikTok couples who break up in the middle of a big sponsored initiative, and how they handle it. And then you’ve had a couple that have gotten a lot of pick-up and notice, so that’s interesting to me too. But first, talk a little bit I think about your process, and how you are endlessly coming up with fun things to write about.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, I really just try and always be talking to an expert in the industry, such as yourself. I joined Morning Brew to kind of ideate and create it in April 2020, but it rolled out in July 2020. So I had some sources from Social Media Today, people that I’d done Q&As with, the world contributors, that type of thing when I was coming into the job, but it really was a lot of source building from home. And just as we’ve rolled into 2022, obviously the pandemic is not over, but it’s changing, and it’s really just been so great to finally have the opportunity to meet up with people like yourself in person. Because I think that I get the most interesting story ideas just from going to coffee, or drinks, or whatever with somebody in the city, and being like, “What’s going on with you? What are you seeing? If you were a reporter and not an influencer marketer, or a social media marketer, what would you want reporters to be talking about right now?”

Phoebe Bain: And typically by asking that people will give me three or four tips, or even one good one, like you did recently, and I can kind of build a story around there. But I think that is one of the most important, but also one of the most fun parts of my job, is just always making sure that you are talking to the right people. Because I’m just a dumb journalist, I don’t have my ear to the ground with this stuff like you guys do. And if it weren’t for people like you, who are willing to talk to reporters, and have interesting discussions among all of yourselves about issues in the industry, then I would’ve nothing.

Danielle Wiley: I mean, you focused very much obviously in the B2B space, but you’re covering influencer marketing, and influencers are talking to consumers all the time. How much are you interacting with the influencers, and do you interview them at all? Or are you really only covering it from the agency and brand marketer side?

Phoebe Bain: So mostly the latter, but occasionally there’s a story where I need to interview an influencer, or many an influencer, just because you have a living ad unit. It’s not like you’re a TV advertising reporter, you can’t go and interview the TV spot that your ad is going to show up in, this is the inventory, these people are the ad inventory in this case, so their opinion really matters. If they aren’t willing to post something or be on a certain platform, then obviously influencer marketers will have to follow their lead in some sense. The entire creator economy has created this business, and they are the creators. So occasionally I’ll have to talk to influencers for a story, the most recent one that I can think of, I forget what the story was on, but it was around Snapchat. And whether or not influencers are interested in using Snapchat for brand deals, and whether there’s an opportunity for brands to make money on that platform at large.

Phoebe Bain: So I had to go and talk to a bunch of different influencers who are on Snapchat, and either have used it for brand deals, or have not used it for brand deals, or have made money off of the platform in some other way, because those stories are important. If an influencer doesn’t want to be on a platform, or can’t figure out how to make money off of a platform, then a brand can’t either in terms of the influencer marketing. So occasionally I talk to influencers, but mostly I’m talking to marketing professionals, experts in influencer marketing.

Danielle Wiley: I’m so interested in the Snapchat thing, because we actually just had a client this week asking us if we thought it would be a good idea to include Snapchat in a program, and I’m not sold on it for influencer marketing. I mean, I really think it’s so much more of a communication tool now than an ad venue, an actual highly produced ad, versus the more authentic voice that true influencer marketing and sponsored content falls into.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, I think that the one avenue where Snapchat can seem interesting, just from what I learned talking to a lot of these creators and working on that story, the people that have Snapchat TV shows. There’s actually a former colleague of mine from Business Insider, her name’s Grace Weinstein, she works for Recount, which is a different media organization, but she has a Snapchat TV show. And so people on Snapchat are interested in following her life as a creator, and she posts on there a lot. But I think that unless you have somebody like that, who is really best friends with Snapchat in with them, it doesn’t totally make sense in my opinion to have somebody just posting on their Snapchat story for an influencer activation. Unless you want to throw it on there in addition to TikTok, and Instagram, and all of that.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah, kind of like a value add.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. I mean, there’s no reason not to, but there’s also… Except for these unique creators that have kind of carved out a space for themselves on Snapchat, which is a very small number of people in comparison to those that have done that on places like TikTok, and Instagram, and all of the above. But it’s not there’s not a use case for, it’s just not nearly as obvious or common of one as there is on other platforms.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah. What’s your favorite platform, and is it different personally and professionally?

Phoebe Bain: Totally different personally and professionally. So Twitter just for journalists is really important, that’s how I share my stories, that’s how I find new sources sometimes just from talking to people on Twitter. I really care about my Twitter presence and making sure it looks professional, but interesting, and all of that weird balance, and all of the above. But personally, my favorite platform is Tumblr.

Danielle Wiley: That’s so much fun. I mean, I remember being at Edelman back in the mid two thousands when Tumblr was just becoming a thing, and it was taking over. And we spent so much time talking about it, and thinking about it, and trying to incorporate it into brand programs, and then it kind of went away, and now all of a sudden I’m hearing Tumblr all the time now.

Phoebe Bain: Think the reason that you’re hearing it all the time is… Well, okay, first of all, Gen Z according to Tumblr, they’re biased, but we can assume they’re telling the truth hopefully. Gen Z is apparently very interested in the app, and you can tell with the advent of things like BeReal, and Geneva even, these less structured, I guess personal almost platforms, where it’s not about becoming an influencer. It’s about whatever those apps want it to be about. Gen Z is really interested in Tumblr according to Tumblr, so that’s part of why you’re hearing about it. But also Elon Musk, when his name first came into the conversation for who was going to buy Twitter, although that has now been an endless saga, a lot of people were like, “Okay, if Elon Musk buys Twitter we’re all going to go to Tumblr.”

Phoebe Bain: And that day Tumblr had this huge increase in users, and we know that because Tumblr tweeted about it, which is kind of funny and ironic. But I think around when that happened, all of a sudden Tumblr was in the zeitgeist and in the conversation. But I’ve spoken to a lot of brands that have had a lot of success in terms of social media marketing on Tumblr, Manscaped in particular. I think that there’s just a lot of fairly inexpensive inventory, and there is a user base there. People use it, even if it’s not all of the people, many people use it. And I mean, I could send you the article that I wrote about it, it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve written about Tumblr in the past year. So if you wanted to google it, Phoebe Bain Tumblr.

Danielle Wiley: I can probably find it quite easily, yeah.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. God forbid it comes up with my Tumblr account. Based on that search, maybe don’t do that, look through my marketing archives. But anyways, that I think is part of why Tumblr re-entered the conversation.

Danielle Wiley: The return to authenticity keeps coming up in these podcast discussions, which is so delicious to me, because when I first got into this it was all about being authentic online, and sharing just because you have something to say, and you want to put something out there, and it was never about making money. I was actually saying this on Twitter yesterday, and I feel like there’s this real yearning to get back to that. And we lost something when all content became highly curated, and there was this money-making desire behind having the platform in the first place, versus having a platform because you have something great to say, or some kind of art to put out there, or whatever it is. And then to have the money-making follow that, I think that kind of cadence really ties into level of authenticity. And I’m personally glad to see us coming back a little bit to more authentic platforms.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, I’m glad to see Meta having competitors, if that makes sense. I mean, I think that authenticity is really an overused word in this industry, because it’s what makes influencer marketing valuable, sum it up in one common piece of jargon. So I understand why it’s overused, but I also think that there’s a lot more value in influencer marketing than exclusively authenticity.

Danielle Wiley: For sure.

Phoebe Bain: I mostly… Go ahead.

Danielle Wiley: I was going to say, it’s funny, my husband somehow started following this lady on Instagram, she’s a mom with a bunch of sons in North Carolina, and he’s much more fashion-forward than I am. She posts her outfits, and it’s all about shopping. And he’s always like, “Look at this one, this is great. This would look good on you.” And it’s very highly curated, the room always looks perfect, and her outfit looks great, and her hair is perfect, and actually the outfits do look terrific, and I was clicking through to Nordstrom from her feed yesterday. So there’s a place for that more curated lifestyle and platform online too, but I don’t know, I just miss people being real.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. And I mean, the realest honestly was Facebook. That was when people were the most real, was when Facebook came about, when I was in high school, college.

Danielle Wiley: I got to show you some of the mom blogs from 2005. [inaudible].

Phoebe Bain: Oh my gosh. Yes, would love to see it. But that was the most real, it was your family photo album, or your friends from college photo album, or whatever on there. But then Instagram came about, and I frankly really miss the early days of Instagram. Even having those filters, I remember getting an Instagram for the first time and being like, “Wow, look at all the things that I can do to my pictures. It’s so cool.”

Danielle Wiley: Yeah, and the white frame around it, and making the picture look super seventies.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. But I liked that it was artsy, I liked that they were playing to this hipster demographic. And now it’s really mainstream, and obviously that’s what makes people money, influencers money, and the platform’s money. But I wish I could post a grid photo of a coffee rather than an Instagram story of a coffee, because I don’t necessarily want that to go away, I understand why Instagram copied Snapchat stories in that way. But I thought the platform was more unique, and frankly authentic. It was just a different kind of authenticity, obviously if I’m posting a perfectly curated photo of my coffee that’s not authentic, but I am drinking coffee rather than posing with my friends at their wedding, and that’s every single Instagram picture I post.

Danielle Wiley: And I think there was more community then too, that’s one of the things I like so much about BeReal, is it kind of reminds me of those early Instagram days, were the only people on there with me are people I actually know, and we’re chatting with each other and connecting in the comments. I mean, that’s kind of gone away from Instagram. It started off being just people I knew personally, and friends, and them seeing what you’re up to, and having that real life connection and community, and now it’s become something very different.

Phoebe Bain: Very different indeed.

Danielle Wiley: So what would you say is your favorite article you’ve written in the past year? What surprised you the most, or was the most delightful to write about? From whatever angle you want to answer that, but what was your favorite?

Phoebe Bain: That’s a really good question. So I feel like having a beat as a journalist is like unspooling of ball of yarn, and so it’s basically a series of articles that would be my favorites. But once I realized that I was doubling down this influencer marketing beat, obviously just going and talking to influencer professionals, I realized that one of the biggest issues facing the industry is how people are paid. There is truly barely any standardization, at least when I started covering it, there was almost none. And there were these platforms that were popping up, Clara and FYPM, and now these platforms have grown a lot, but they’re essentially glass door for influencers. So influencers can go on them, and say that I’m doing a influencer campaign for PetSmart, I could go on there and see 10 other influencers that had reviewed PetSmart, and see how many followers they have, what their engagement rate is like, and then what PetSmart paid them per whatever unit of post they did.

Phoebe Bain: And so it’s started to level the playing field for how influencers are paid, which for marketers there needs to be some sort of standardization in order for this to become the channel that it has the potential to be, in order for it to become something like TV, or out-of-home, or whatever. And we’re getting there, but this payment stuff is really important. And so in the midst of reporting on a lot of different stories about those platforms, and fair and equal pay, all of that stuff, there were a lot of discussions about folks being paid equally, and bias and discrimination in terms of how these people are paid. white female influencers make more on average than Black female influencers, that’s not okay, a recent study had come about like that. Even though there are so many more female-identifying influencers than male-identifying influencers, men are still getting paid on average per post far more than women are

Danielle Wiley: I actually think that’s the reason, because it makes us crazy that men demand higher payment as influencers. But as someone who pays influencers, we often end up in a situation where there’s not much that we can do to rectify it, even when we see that issue, because there is a smaller pool of them, especially when you’re working with a lifestyle brand. And it’s a scarcity thing, it’s supply and demand. This doesn’t answer the white women getting paid more than Black women, because that rule should make it that Black women get paid more. But in the male and female one, what we see is that there are so few men who are doing sponsored content, especially on Instagram, that they are demanding more money because they know you can’t find someone else.

Phoebe Bain: And also it’s feminized labor, so it’s valued less. And if they know that, then they’re smart to demand more money, because the work should be valued more. But anywho, that’s another discussion. But the story that I’d been excited about writing while we were all realizing these equal payment issues, we were all talking about equal pay a lot when I wrote this story, in terms of gender, race, et cetera. But people that were being left out of the conversation of being paid equally were children, there are mommy bloggers and children of influencers who are in so much content. Think of the children that open toys for a living and review them on YouTube, who are all of seven years old, those people are really not being paid equally, if at all. And with Jeanette McCurdy’s new memoir that came out, it’s honestly relevant again, because the only real rules around child labor in terms of this talent industry, are in California you have to have something called a Coogan account if you are a child actor, or model, or whatever.

Phoebe Bain: And it takes a percentage of this child actor, or model, or whatever’s income, and puts it away in this account for the child to access it when they are 18. Apparently Jeanette McCurdy, there was something that went wrong with her Coogan account, and so she didn’t see any money from acting all those years on when she was younger, according to her in this memoir. So I wrote this story about why children and kid influencers are being left out of the equal pay conversation, and I ended up talking to a lot of different parents who have their kids in content, and they all have different approaches of how they pay their children, if at all.

Phoebe Bain: So some of them were kind of newer to the game, and were like, “That hasn’t even really occurred to me. We’re trying to do this to keep up our family’s income, and make sure that we can all have good lives and stuff.” Others have been doing this for a long time, and had savings accounts for each of their children that they had put a percentage of the money into themselves from these influencer deals. Others had recently raised their rates, so they have one rate if it’s just the adult in the content, they have a higher rate if the children are in the content, but there’s truly no standardization, it’s a child labor issue, it’s an equal pay issue. And I don’t think that a lot of people had really explored it before at the time, so the fact that kid influencers and child influencers are being left out of the equal pay conversation is one of the articles that was more interesting to write for my own purposes in the past year or so.

Danielle Wiley: It’s such a juicy topic. I mean, we did a program a few years ago that used all kids, and we had four-year-olds, and we were flying them across the country with their families. And first of all, it was so much more work, because you can’t just deal with the influencer, they have a whole posse with them because they’re four and need care. But there was a mini-documentary on CBS profiling three families with kid influencers, and to your point, it was so crazy to see the disparities. I mean, one of the families, they were not saving any of the money for their kids, it was all going to improvements towards their house, and just the family lifestyle, but nothing was going to the kids at all.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. And is that okay, or is that not okay? Child labor laws in the US I think dictate it’s not, but this isn’t totally viewed as labor yet. Yet it is, many people have full-time jobs influencing.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah, crazy. Okay, so this has been so much fun, I could talk to you forever, and go off on a hundred tangents, but I know we don’t have all day. But one of the things we do on this podcast is we close every podcast by asking our guests to tell us what their favorite commercial was as a kid, what commercial has stuck with you since your childhood?

Phoebe Bain: Oh my goodness. I mean, I barely watched TV, and when I did it was definitely just infomercials.

Danielle Wiley: Oh, that’s right, this is the hard question for you. When you were at your friend’s house watching their TV…

Phoebe Bain: Yeah, exactly. There was one, it was Education Connection, we were actually talking about this in my Marketing Brew Slack channel recently, about local commercials that every kid in some local area remembered, and it was a jingle that you remembered and sang it to. But there was a commercial for something called Education Connection, and it had a fun jingle, and it was this cool hip girl, it was a Nick at Nite, and all I remember from it is that the beat was Education Connection. But the jingles were very important to children, and we all sang this one in my County of Virginia, where this school was.

Phoebe Bain: Also, I was brought up during the Snuggie infomercials and commercials, and if there was ever a piece of advertising that can really say, “Okay, this works. You can build in industry off of this.” It was Snuggies. Who else would’ve purchased or known about a Snuggie if not for the Snuggie commercial? And I remember you could go to the As Seen on TV Store in the mall, which that’s a whole other story that somebody could tell, and buy by a Snuggie.

Phoebe Bain: And I had a micro plush one, it was a lux Snuggie, very fancy. And I remember I’d look at the commercial, and on the commercial they have these people in fleece Snuggies, and I was like, “They’re doing it wrong, they need the deluxe Snuggie.” So it was a lot of infomercials. I feel like today, traditionally you watch the Super Bowl, and you see commercials, and they’re these heavily produced spots. And they’re out somewhere on a beautiful landscape driving a car, and there is lighting and cameras, and I think that every single commercial I saw as a child was filmed in a white box in some studio somewhere, I don’t remember seeing commercials like that.

Danielle Wiley: It’s so interesting, the generational difference of this question has been super, super [inaudible]. Kids of the nineties, or kids of the two thousands, and then myself growing up, just glued to Saturday morning cartoons in the seventies, and it was all commercials all the time. And I don’t know if, I pose this question to my kids I guess, I don’t think they’d have an answer for me at all, because commercials aren’t a thing.

Phoebe Bain: Yeah. Well, it’s funny, because that is what the public speaks about, that commercials aren’t a thing. I mean, when I first started at Marketing Brew I had to report on every single aspect of the marketing industry, because it was just me. So I was like, “All right, I got to be up on the TV commercials.” So I bought all of the streaming services, and got all of them with ads. And it’s funny because my partner is like, “Why do we need to have ads? We can pay the $10 more to not have ads.” And I was like, “It’s for my career.”

Danielle Wiley: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me, this was awesome. And if people want to follow you, we will not tell them how to find your Tumblr. But if they want to find you on Twitter, you are @notnotphoebe, and they can find you there.

Phoebe Bain: Absolutely, yeah.

Danielle Wiley: Well, thank you so much, this has been awesome.

Phoebe Bain: Thank you so much, this was great.

Danielle Wiley: Thank you for listening, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. Please check back next Monday for a new episode featuring marketing conversations through the lens of influence. I am your host, Danielle Wiley, and this is The Art of Sway.