Joe Gagliese | What Does Social First Even Mean & Is It Right For You?

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0:22Joe Gagliese:Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Typeface has completely changed the process of large campaign executions. Everyone knows AI can help with images and headlines, but the real impact is making the leap from a creative brief to a live multi-channel large campaign at speed. Typeface just announced its marketing orchestration Engine, the first platform built to automate campaign workflows. You can roll out campaigns that used to take months in just a few hours.

1:04Typeface uses agentic AI to orchestrate the entire process, taking one campaign and instantly orchestrating it into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email, and video. Major brands like ASICS and Post Holdings are already transforming their marketing with Typeface. See how to move from brief to personalized campaigns in hours, not months at typeface.ai slash CMO. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

1:51I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Joe Gagliassi. Today's topic, he told me how to say that too, by the way. Today's topic, what does Social First even mean? And is it right for you? Now, Joe is a co-founder and co-CEO of Viral Nation, a 12-year-old social-first marketing and technology company that specializes in influencer and creator marketing, creative content development, and creator talent. There's a lot of creators in there. Their belief is that the marketplace is shifting from media-centric marketing to creator and social-centric marketing, and they've worked with many of the world's leading brands by growing into a global business.

2:43Welcome, Joe. Thank you. Thank you. The Italian accent was strong on the last name. You know, well, you had me practice before we started. That's the most we have ever done for a show. I always tell you, it's funny because I'm the only Italian in my extended family who ended up in marketing. So I'm a solo Italian marketer. Okay, very good. Molto bene. All right. Let's start at the top. give us the actual definition in your mind of social and then what does social first even mean we've had all kinds of firsts over the last few decades mobile first digital first customer first cloud first give us your take on social first you know what mike it's pretty simple uh social first means you stop treating social like a place where you recycle campaigns kind of built somewhere else.

3:37And you start with the reality that for most consumers, discovery, influence, and validation increasingly is actually happening on social, especially as we think about commerce. So social first is really a planning philosophy, which is build from how people pay attention now, not how brands used to buy attention. So when you think about what's happened, Mike, you know, the world has changed completely, but the tactics of how we go to market with marketing have been slower to change. And now when you think about the average consumer, be it myself, I built a, you know, me and my wife built a house, Mike, and I guarantee about 90 % of the things in my home came from Pinterest.

4:18I always tell people, Mike, all the time, it's one of my funniest sayings that I haven't bought something for over$100 in the last eight years without watching a YouTube review about it first. Discovery and commerce is really happening at the intersection of social. And social first really just means a brand who understands that they develop for social first and then drive the standard marketing later. And that's really what it entails. Hey, Joe, can I draw a parallel between this and, you know, mobile first, where there was that big pivot where everybody started saying, instead of designing for the web, I'm going to design for the phone and then the web second.

5:00Is that what you're saying this is like, or is it something different? Well, it's funny because that one was the adaptation, right? We were spending more time on our devices. Why? Because of social, right? So I think those are tied very similarly. I think that these firsts really emulate the change, right? For instance, we've been hearing a lot recently, Mike, about Viral Nation just launched an AGO practice. So now we're doing a lot of AI SEO. And if you look up Viral Nation on any LLM in the world, will come up in first place. We've been working on it for three years. That is the next website.

5:37That is the next commerce. So I think in the not so distant future, we'll hear AI first. So I think that these first really emulate where people spend their time. And I would argue right now it's predominantly on social media. Second would be, you know, real life. And then third is likely now becoming AI. But it's just really a representation of where the people are. Okay, so let's talk about what is a social strategy? Is it a strategy? Is it media? Is it something else? And how do you think about it in terms of nesting it in to all the other marketing that's already there? Yeah, well, you know what?

6:17It's cool, Mike, because social really just started as a channel, right? And then marketers treated it like a content outlet. Today, the best marketers treat it more as a behavioral system. So when you think about strategy and social, it's less about a particular idea or creative. What social allows us to do now, Mike, that no other form of marketing really ever has been able to do is listen to people. So the big, big, big change, in my opinion, Mike, is that creators and social media is a version of the people's media. So not too long ago, there were seven companies who control basically everything that we see.

6:57There was a big democratization of that. Now people control the media. So social media is where we communicate. That's where our communities live, et cetera. So when we think about strategy and social, it's not about just the good idea. It's about reading the signals from social that tell you what the customer wants and then in turn translating that into something meaningful. So strategy on social is very different than standard advertising in that you can't build for it. You need to build what it wants. and the closer you get to building what social wants is where you start to see things like this went viral or poppy gets acquired by x amount of billions of dollars or logan paul's line is the number one selling in walmart these are not strategies these are manipulation of community at scale in a new form of media so i have a couple follow-ons to this which is you know if you go back 20 years when Facebook comes on the scene it kind of starts really pushing a lot of this category you know and everyone thought oh Facebook's just for the young people and now it's definitely not just for the young people um where is it now and then how do brands stay true to themselves in this game because the way you just described it almost by definition the brand is what the people want the brand to be versus what the brand wants to be Well, we're just living in a world of radical transparency, Mike.

8:27So now, you know, back in the day, brands used to get away with a lot of stuff, right? So you would run an advertising campaign, you put out a product, maybe the product wasn't exactly where you wanted it to be, but you put it out anyway for timeline or for stock purposes or whatever it may be, and you might get away with it. The problem today for brands is that it's not a decision if you want to be social or not. It's a prerequisite. and how you treat that prerequisite means everything. So now when Sonos Speakers or Ford puts out a new model, they almost have to put out the model, Mike, and they wait to see what the internet and what social media says before they continue.

9:06Because we've seen just in the last 12 to 24 months, brands completely, completely miss based off social. What's a great big miss that you can put on the table? A beautiful example of that, Mike, is in the automotive space, Social is probably in the top five most important industries for social is automotive. And funny enough, automotive is probably the most behind in social. But what happens in automotive is they release a car and this network of thousands of reviewers get their hands on it and they do these reviews. Those reviews end up becoming religion that people follow in order to make the acquisition.

9:42So a cool example was when Ford launched their EV line. So when they launched their EV trucks, they have big stockpiles of these EV trucks and they're having a hard time with them. But if you go to YouTube and you actually look at the sentiment of the reviews around that vehicle from start to now, they've been mostly detractors, right? Versus an organization that figures out how to kind of tap into that in a way that is natural, sees the opposite results. So now companies are at bay to these social communities and the communities, us, determine the success of those products. Hey, can I go back to the fourth thing?

10:20Is that an organic network of car reviewers? Or is that like all the people at Car and Driver and Automotive Weekly or whatever else they have? Yeah, those have become a much less relevant channel because the biggest intersection of difference between the traditional publishers, Mike, and the creator publishers, the creators are not analysts, they're everyday users. So one of the things you'll see in the automotive category, Mike, is a thing called one year review. So people do a one year review of the vehicle. I've had the vehicle for one year. Here's my take. That's not something that's ever made its way to traditional automotive media, right?

10:57So it's a much more relatable and authentic, and I don't love that word, but it's true, channel to understand what's going on. For instance, I read a stat the other day, Mike, that folks are going into a dealer and they know more about the car than the actual salesperson does. That's the first time in history, right? First, you used to try to get people into the dealer. Now the dealer is the last step because the client comes in already sold. And that's happening with social. We are taking a short break from this show for a word from our sponsor, Typeface.

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12:28Now back to our discussion. So just to make sure I have it right, you're saying these networks and these reviewers and these creators, they organically just exist. And then when the brands, though, reach out and then take them over or help them or give them stuff, how does the network stay true to itself versus become co-opted by the brands? So that's a much bigger conversation, Mike, because this is the fragmentation of social that's causing a problem for most brands, because most brands look at these things as singular challenges. a really good brand mike who is social first and operating at scale right is able to tackle wherever the opportunity might lie that being one of them but the problem is today is they're looking at each one separately so for automotive for instance you just don't want to go pay a guy to do a good review that won't work right so in that space what you need to do is you got to have them come to your events you got to give them a first look at a vehicle you have to develop relationships with the creators who are speaking about the brand, because you're trying to increase your odds of that positivity versus pay for it.

13:42Whereas when you're in a market where, let's say you're selling on Amazon or through commerce, there's actually creators who make a living from promoting products to sell on Amazon, right? So it depends on the type of customer, and the type of product what indicates the strategy, but what all these big brands around the world, Mike are missing is that none of them actually have the internal organizational setup or rigor necessary to run social first, because if they did, you can capitalize on those things differently. A lot of them today will either hire multiple agencies to do all different parts of social, or they will go after one component where another competitor is going.

14:23But you're starting to see, Mike, now that massive shift, right? You're seeing Unilever go 50 % into creators. Some of Viral Nation's clients have pivoted from media-led to fully social media-led today. So that's really the big transition. It's not in the small stuff. It's in how these companies rebuild themselves from being media plan ahead, comms and organic to this always-on social engine that is basically driving all of global commerce. And when you get that right, then you can basically adapt your company's marketing into those specific channels, whether it's automotive or reviews or whether it's paying for creators, whether it's, you know, even celebrity today, Mike, we're doing celebrity campaigns, but we only work with celebrities who are big on social, right?

15:09Because we don't want to pay for the extra media costs that comes with buying a commercial and all those things. We can get a celebrity who gets more views than the Superbowl, right? So it's just this adaptation to now that allows us into all those different channels easily. Hey, so I want to go into what makes a strategy in a minute, but I want to say if I am a brand and I start inviting all these creators to like drive my Ford or whatever, and then I give them free stuff and everything else, do I over time ruin the credibility of the channel because I am essentially gifting these people things?

15:49Like how do I keep my authentic social credibility as a creator in this? It all really just comes down to the approach from the brand, right? You know, like speaking candidly, there's lots of brands out there who would say, I'm paying for this and this is what I want to be said. Yeah. I think the best approach today in like 2026 is a company should have a brand they believe in and stand behind. They should put that brand they believe in stand behind between the people with the microphone and let them do their thing, right? That question, Mike, only becomes a problem if a brand has something to hide or something's wrong.

16:25If things are what they say they are, giving the creator the unobstructed ability to be able to experience what you've developed goes a long way. One of our really incredible new clients is Lucid Motors. And Lucid Motors is a very strong community-engaged company. And for instance, their drivers are their biggest advocates. right they they have customers making content about how much they love the vehicles they you know and they got they got they purchased those vehicles and they're still saying those great things so it's just about aligning those specific um those specific touch points together in a way that's meaningful like for instance uh my viral nation one of the things that makes us unique is uh we're one of the world leaders on the social ai side so what we're able to do mike for instance on that specific thing is we can go to Ford and say, hey, Ford, well, why don't we only bring creators in front of you who already drive a Ford, who have already talked positively about Ford in the past?

17:24We as Viral Nation, it's our job, not the brand's job, to figure out how we land the right folks and the right message and the right content for that specific brand. And we've developed and operate our own technologies to kind of do that piece. And that piece is the difference between I just hired a guy who likes GMC who just talked about my Ford and now I'm in trouble and the authentic nature of what we're after. So help me with, we have all of our listeners out here. How should they evaluate this topic in their head? Well, I think it's first. Like from a strategy standpoint, I got to think about, I want to develop this strategy.

18:04What do I do? How do I think about it? Yeah, I think it's first, I think the main critical point, Mike, is you have to acknowledge acknowledge whether you believe it to be true or not. I think what's happening in the market right now, Mike, is people are on the fence between what's worked for a long time and what their KPIs and objectives are tied to, and the reality of how the world's moving. So what I've seen is the social first leaders, marketers who have made the transition and who are growing, had a moment, Mike, where they went, you know what, a lot has changed. And I know this is a harder channel, it's going to create a lot of work.

18:42But I'm willing to do that to future proof this business or to continue to grow this business. So I think first is the acknowledgement, because I think a lot of organizations still today, Mike, believe it or not, are, you know, I like this, it works, my KPIs for how I get my bonus are tied to it, you know, etc. Versus a lot of the people who are winning in social are ones who went, I don't care about any of that stuff. I care about making this business big and strong. And I want to be where the people are, and they make the transition. So I think that's the first thing is really committing to do I believe that the modern consumer is a social first consumer.

19:16If the answer is yes, that's the first step. I think second is evaluating your own company first. A lot of people, Mike, will run out and just, you know, call a viral nation. But the problem with that is that like media took a long time to be able to do, a lot of these organizations, Mike, today don't actually have social media leadership, right? It's generally very antiquated, or it's small, or it's junior staff, or they don't have a VP there. So understanding what does our organization need to look like? And what do we need on our side to be successful in social, I think is a big misstep. Because then you end up hiring a viral nation.

19:54And now all of a sudden, you're under resourced against all of the things that come back from our side when you're operating at that level. I think third is breaking this notion of fragmentation and social, Mike, as the third thought, which is social is a living organism, Mike, it's very different than TV and broadcast and programmatic in that it actually all works together really natively. So community management, for instance, Mike works exhaustively with creator marketing, creator marketing works incredible with paid social, paid social works incredible with conversion and CPA. So these pieces all work.

20:33Most of the modern companies, Mike, believe it or not, still have social between three divisions internally and six outside parties. No, I believe that. I also, are all brands, should all brands be social first? I mean, the way you're talking about it, it's almost like, you know, this is the future for every brand. is is is there a little curve you would give for more likely to need social than others yeah you know a poor fit is usually not kind of about category mike it's about readiness right so if your legal process takes six weeks to get something through or your leadership hates creative risk or your product story is unclear social's not for you right but when you also think about the buyer journey.

21:19If in your buyer journey has a very low frequency and is very relationship driven, then you know what social is not as important. I also want to caveat Mike, but like, you know, I'm one of the social guys who thinks that traditional advertising is critical. I'm not a replace theory social guy. I just believe very strongly that if you put social as the first mechanism and you build behind it, you can create maximum output. But I do believe that there's certain situations where social doesn't become the driver, but then it will morph into something else. I'll give you an example, Mike. For Deloitte, you might argue that's a relationship business.

21:58They drive those commercial impact. My view for Deloitte wouldn't be running creator campaigns. It might be, how do we turn our top 10 global partners into LinkedIn creators so that we get more attention in those specific verticals? Social's not always just about you know pay a creator do some paid social etc it can form in many different ways but i think social is critical um in enterprise as critical as it is in small business hey and joe how do i measure this if let's say you know we'll go to how do you know you're ready in a minute but let's say how do i measure this thing i'm gonna i'm gonna say okay i've gotta go do all this yeah how am i gonna measure it because you know measurement everyone always wants measurement You can measure all the performance marketing and blah, blah, blah.

22:45The brand is harder. Blah, blah, blah. Tell me about this one. Well, welcome to the Achilles heel of social media. You know, Mike, that's been the bane of my existence for 12 years. It's actually what I could bring that up, Joe. Yeah. Viral Nation has spent more in that area than any other area of innovation inside of our company. And the reason is simple. we believe and we know emphatically, I know on my kids that it is the best driver of conversion. What's been difficult, Mike, however, is that because the social platforms are inherently advertising companies, right? Meta's an advertising company, Google and YouTube are an advertising company.

23:25Their main objective is to stop people from tracking anything that's not going through them. So you have this setup right out of the gate where you have an advertiser and you have advertisers like me advertising on an advertiser. So what they did was they put up this big wall and that wall's been there, Mike, really since the beginning all the way to this day. So what we've had to do is we've had to adapt. So we have four different systems of measurement. One is the simple stuff, brand lift, neuro studies, the things you're used to, the Nielsen of it all. We can do that. Part two is what we kind of dub as time series.

24:00So what we've developed is our own systems to be able to determine conversion, but we use time. So if engagement from a campaign is really high over a period of time, we can actually reverse correlate that into sales for a retailer, for a commerce company, et cetera. So we use time graphing in order to do some of that. Third is our partnerships with the platforms allow us to get more information than your average Joe. So we've been able to develop our own models. One of them is called the culture quotient, which is basically understanding the value of the viewership to brand and conversion acknowledgement.

24:38And we've spent about three and a half years developing that tool. And then the final one, and it's interesting because it's the one I was least excited about that ended up being something we do quite a bit, which is we actually adapt and build into existing mixed media models, Mike. So one of the big maturity steps we took two years ago was viral nation. We're one of the only social companies with, we have almost like a 27 person business intelligence team that does just reporting. And we had them work on methods and methodologies to be able to back into enterprise brands, existing mixed media models that they're running already.

25:12That's been a big unlock. So basically Mike, we've, we've exhausted everything. The reality with social is you're never going to be able to go direct link to conversion perfectly on every campaign. Yeah, so it's a little like brand. Exactly right. I want to say, Joe, you got your talking points out super well in the last. I mean, super well. This is 15 hours a day for 10 years up here. Hey, if I am interviewing an agency that's not you or somebody I want to hire for a position running my social first strategy, what are questions I should ask them? Yeah, I think just to keep it simple, Mike, there's like five ones that'll make the agency shake a little bit that I think would be good for the audience.

26:02think? I think number one is that brands don't ask about creator pricing with the same type of rigor they do with media. Meaning you can spend half a million dollars on a creator much easily than you can spend half a million dollars in media. So one of the big questions that's very valuable to ask any company in the social first world is how do you do creator pricing? How do you think about it? And how do you optimize it? I know that sounds simple, but it's a question may be asked one of 10 times to us, Mike, that I think is really, really relevant. Wow. I think number two is really, really, really questioning the scale.

26:38So can you scale and determining that? Because one of the big things we've learned, Mike, over the years is there there's 7 ,000 agencies that can do a million dollar social campaign. There's maybe five who can do a$10 million one, right? Because social is a very hands-on business. So when it scales, as it breaks. So if I'm a large enterprise, excuse me, I'm asking, show me your scale, show me what it means when things go well, and we need to go to the next level. A lot of brands will want to go social first, Mike, get in bed, do all that work. And then when they go to scale, they have to switch to a viral nation or someone like viral nation.

27:15So you said there's five, so there's three left. Three left. The other one is brand safety requirements. So in this world, Mike, the the scariest thing in social first world is social is as powerful negatively. It is positively and how we operate. Everything that goes out the door needs to be under the condition of brand safety. Far too many companies neglect that component. So asking about how they're basically protecting your brand from those things as we scale, because Mike no one wants to make a million dollars in social and lose 10 million in market valuation because something went wrong.