Gary Vaynerchuk: Fighting Your Customer Never Creates Value

26:40I can sum up my entire career when I wrap up. Consumer-centric. I have no feelings. I don't have the luxury of having feelings. I want to deliver value to the audience and they get to decide what value is. That is really, it's one of the theses of this show, which is, I don't know if it's a theses of the show, but one of the things I say a lot on the show is that the ultimate determinant of value is how valuable your audience thinks you are. That's it. In fact, back to like our relationship and a lot of our friends that will listen because we'll share it and they're going to listen. One of the great vulnerabilities of Fortune 500 advertising is that people are struggling with the level of humility required to execute on what we just talked about.

27:30People want to in our industry, both on the creative side and then the CMO side, to think their subjective opinions of a campaign is the right path to create business growth. Yeah. Because that's what we lived with in the Don Draper 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. And we have this incredible opportunity to take advantage of the social network algorithms that measure relevance, which is obviously the precursor to consideration and purchase. And we're struggling to have the humility required to be consumer centric. Well, I mean, honestly, I don't even know if it's about humility. It's like, if you're not consumer centric, who the fuck are you centric about?

28:11Well, I would argue our industry is industry centric. Well, there's no doubt there's a lot of that, right? Well, that's a, you know, again, Jen Pop's going to watch this because I'm going to share it because I want this show to be massive for you. Appreciate you. All the Gary Vee people that follow me for all sorts of other ridiculous random things like mine. Oh, by the way, I'm going to be Sethi M from now on. I love that. Anyway, you would be stunned how much the biggest companies in the world's advertising is predicated on appeasing the industry, the ad ages, the make the Forbes list. No, I wouldn't be stunned.

28:45Well, no, normal people. We know. We know. I mean, Seth, when I talk to real business people, when I have a dinner with like five private equity guys and gals, and we go into this part, they're baffled. Because they're just coming from fine. They're like business, right? They're like, what do you mean like they did that to get a can lion? I'm like, they did that to get a can lion. They're like, that can't be true. I'm like, you have no idea. But you know. Well, I was sitting. I won't. I was sitting with the head. No names. No names. The head of a portfolio of agencies with one of the big companies two, three years ago in Cannes.

29:22And I said to him, I was like, what percentage of the work that's going to win a line here this year do you think worked in the marketplace? And his comment was, well, it's probably a little higher than zero. His comment was more than it used to be. I was like, well, shouldn't it be all? Like, you know, work that doesn't work that wins awards and doesn't work. It's an you know what? Look, a young creative is building a portfolio and awards help them build a portfolio, which helps them build a career. Stop there. Yeah. But I'm telling you, this is what's so interesting about this industry. Pepsi did not sign up for spending money.

30:05General Electric did not sign up for spending money so that an art director can do work that does not sell product for them but helps that kid get a creative director job at Ogilvy. A hundred percent. But let's go from that creative director to the CEO of a Fortune 500. My company, let alone. Well, a huge company, right? Which is to say there continues to be an absence of alignment. A hundred percent. Over and over and over again, within groups, across enterprises, about what success looks like. I agree. I agree. considering if you've got, having seen as many, having sat in and alongside and worked with and for as many enormous companies as you have, and again, the startups, is there anything besides gut, right, which was on the value creation side at the startup end of the conversation, where you're like, yeah, this is, destruction can happen quickly or - I got something for you.

31:02Yeah, bring. To answer your question, the other thing that works versus the other side of the pillar, what does not work, is the variable of real reports versus fake reports. What do you mean? The biggest other aha, in startup land, every report is so directly attributable to the actual business because they won't make it to the next round of fundraising if it's not real. Mm-hmm. You can, when money's flowing, you know, you can sell dreams, but like in real life, you know, it's just real data. Like how many customers did you acquire? What is their value? It's real stuff. What took me a whole half a decade to calibrate in Madison Avenue and Fortune 5000 land was brand lift study and Miller Brown this and Nielsen's that.

31:47I'm like, and you know, I'm inquisitive and I also came in knowing nothing. I came from Silicon Valley and startup wineland. I knew none of these terms. So I'm in these meetings of like, well, how do we, the MMM you're relying on to make every decision. Can we just pick up the hood and explain it to me? No, no, no. It's just, I'm like, what do you mean it rained on this weekend? And so we have to not attribute, like I didn't, I'd never been involved before where the reports were justifying the behavior. Yes. Versus the reports were justifying the truth. And so I would say the thing I look for in meetings is how much is the energy based on real life versus reports that justify the inertia?

32:30Well, I think it goes back to what you were saying about insecurity earlier, which is the reports don't just justify the behavior. They dictate the behavior in advance. Reports which are by definition backwards looking because we can say, well, the data set. That's right. When it fucks up, the data set. That's right. And the data, I use this line all the time. It's Rory Sutherland's line. He wrote a piece with this title on LinkedIn a couple years ago, The False God of Perfect Measurement is what he called it. And we all think there's a perfect measurement. We don't ask why enough. There is a perfect measurement.

33:04It's called How Healthy is the Business? And, of course, brand takes you out further, so I'm empathetic. But I will say something that has just not been accepted in advertising, which is when you're doing good brand work, you're feeling the effects in business very quickly. This hyperbole that, well, in nine years, that's true. I mean, we just talked about it with Apple, you know, and that was a product and brand, but. Well, they're inextricable. I mean, by the way, I lived it. I built Wine Library. This is a really interesting story. I love when sometimes people are like, Gary, you're not enough about brand.

33:37I'm like, you know nothing about me. I renamed my father's liquor store. Who would say to, even the Gary V that's inside Gary Vaynerchuk, not anything about brands. I mean, I think it's when, you know, listen, I put a lot of pressure on Madison Avenue with a ton of content during a period of time where a lot of people didn't like what I had to say. And so I had some really funny interactions at places like Cannes or Adweek, where people were pretty combative. And I understand people's, when your livelihood is being challenged, I understand that doesn't shake me. But when it was funny, like multiple times, Gary, you don't respect the work.

34:15You're not about brand. And I was like, I'm only about brand. In fact, it's how my life started. I knew eventually I was going to leave my dad because I knew that I was never going to make any money. And I knew I needed to check the box of like helping my family. It was very, it instilled in me immigrant life. So from 22 to 34, I worked a hundred plus hours a week building a business for my father that I knew I was going to leave. And so it was important that I built the wine library brand because I knew the day I left, it would go back to a different world, the one that my father ran. And by the way, that did happen.

34:47And by the way, Wine Library lost an extraordinary amount of revenue after I left. But it was only the brand in a lot of ways that held it up. And then I got back involved because I had to. But, you know, yeah. So I believe in brand tremendously. But you feel business results when you do good branding pretty darn quickly, especially at the size and scale of Fortune 5000. You can do both. You can drive sales and build brand at the same time because there's enough budget. And so this, I don't know. Well, brand does drive sales. And in today's world - The most. Exactly. In today's world of good enough products and services, oftentimes the only meaningful difference is the brand.

35:26I always confuse people when I say this because I love being a salesman and I'll go to sales driven conferences and I'll say, sales is what you do when you can't do marketing. That's how much I believe in brand and marketing. You're absolutely right. It's more effective. It means the money's coming. It means they're coming to you, not you're asking them. That's right. It's the best. I mean, I tend to use sales and marketing interchangeably as proxies because marketing's job is to sell. Yeah, marketing is the most effective way to sell. There's no confusion. It's very simple. Although, of course, there is.

36:02Agreeing with you completely, there's a fuck ton of confusion. And that's why I think, you know, at the CEO, CFO level. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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38:02I want to ask you, you brought up your immigrant story a couple of times. And I want to ask you something about that, which is as somebody who came to the United States and had to find a way to fit in, to acclimate, to assimilate. Is there anything that you learned, did that experience, knowing you were young, I think you said four, right? But did that experience and the experience of your parents, right? Because we carry that with us. Did it teach you something about, well, I'm sure, but specifically about how value and importantly meaning get constructed that maybe somebody like me, who has grown up here third generation American, might not see?

38:52I'm not sure. I think, let's break it down. I think the one thing that is very clear to me, and this is not a focus group of one, this is observing many that had similar versions of my story. I think the family dynamic of immigrants is different than the American family dynamic. Mm-hmm. You know, there's a, as a child. And probably different within different immigrant communities. Yeah, and we know this. We know this, yeah. There's stereotype, but as a whole. Yeah. If we're just going whole, there's a sense of responsibility a child feels of giving to their family or delivering for their family that I feel is less obvious when you're born here.

39:30Right. And because I, of course, made it about me as you said that to try and figure, I feel very little responsibility to give to my parents. Correct. I feel nothing but responsibility to give. That's right. You got it. So you're talking about up and down. I'm talking about up. Yeah. I'm talking about fully up. You're right. And even left to right. And by the way, I got the full mantra. Sorry, dad. I was the oldest child. I mean, I mean, from, you know, it is not, it is, you just as the oldest and born in the old country got compounded. So it was siblings and parents. So that's one thing. Two, I think there's some really cool advantages.

40:07And now this, I would say, I see a lot of great American families do, especially lately, because I think there's been more focus on what's going on in your home. the other thing you got and that a lot of immigrants get is they have a different world in their four walls than they do outside yeah yeah i mean i grew up in the soviet union when i was in the house and i grew up in america when i was outside yeah and that ended up being i mean you could see i don't know if you see my goosebumps yeah i'm talking i do in fact quite a bit actually i i i can my goosebumps probably just happened because can you cry on demand too i cannot but this happens that's crazy isn't that crazy yeah i think i just touched on something that is clearly deep inside of me and I verbalized it, hence that just happened.

40:50Having this advantage of the humility, the old schoolness, the Seth, do you know that I have never even considered disrespecting my mother, let alone actually verbalizing it? You know, some of the things that were taught inside the home that were different than what was going on in American culture. So I think that ended up being an advantage. There was some learnings perspective. You know, I'm incredibly empathetic. I think that's a little bit more DNA, but I think it was honed well because of my circumstance because I have it more than my siblings. I think that's a little bit of like a DNA trait.

41:27Yeah, I mean, also I think, again, there's so many variables that go in. I'll tell you this, you'll enjoy this. I think a lot of listeners will. It's very clear to me lately. I'm like, oh man, I've always talked so much about my mother's everything. You know, we're talking about the immigrant thing right now. I gotta tell you the insanity of 80s pop culture shaped the shit out of me yeah what parts of it like Back to the Future Michael J. Fox Transformers the 84 Los Angeles Olympics He-Man and I had a three and a half year younger sister that I was very close to so it was not only He-Man and Transformers it was Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids Atari Nintendo you know David Letterman you know The Simpsons so how what did all those ingredients I was curious always why things were popular, which I think made me a very good consumer strategist.

42:17Yeah. Which then clearly, you know, baseball cards, market dynamics, collecting, wine, baseball cards. Now it's such a big genre. Things come very natural to me because I was always curious. It was such a superpower. It was not just what I was into. What was my sister into? Why did my friend Robbie Turnick skew more G.I. Joe and I was more Transformers? Hulk Hogan and Hulkamania like all the Rocky movies all of it and if you look at that window because right now you're not seeing as much of that we're retread city the last 20 years currently right it's like Avengers 67 and I mean even I know you love Star Wars Train but this latest Star Wars like offspring like what are we doing like third variant of Boba Fett fifth variant of Yoda like I don't want to I want to go back the sheer originality even things that didn't work max hedgerum and like you know things like that even the things that kind of worked my little ponies the sheer creativity shaped me too do you think that that's cause or effect of you know in the 80s we had a mass market today we got nothing um like the the the retread is just it's so hard to build a fucking brand today if i start with a little bit of equity i have a better chance is is i got a good answer no the finance hearing yeah getting so ahead of the creative class and the creative class is living on the internet and it's fragmented to your point yeah yeah it's just different it we you know what that was in hindsight it was the crescendo apex climax moment of something that had been building for 40 years right the 50s yeah but just like the 80s you're talking about.

43:59Yeah, the 80s was a byproduct of all, I mean, you know, I just named the 80s. Somebody could be listening now and be like, oh, Gary, what about the 70s? You know, like, don't take Star Trek and Star Wars, you know, and it was just building and then just film and television. Don't forget, 80s was also the decade that a lot of us went from 13 channels to 36. Now you got MTV. Now you got Nickelodeon. Theaters were at their apex. 85, 1985, Ghostbusters. I mean, it's just pouring, right? Pre-internet, crescendo, video games are just coming. TV and film, wow. Music, MTV, radio, Walkman. Now music is portable in a different way.

44:38It was just Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Jesus. So what did you learn about what makes things popular when you were a kid then that you use today? And that you tell your clients to consider. So there's a couple things. One, it's not that I learned what makes something popular. It's that I learned not to demonize someone else's popularity. Don't yuck on my yum. I can't believe you just used that. That is actually because my kids grew up with that being said in their school. That is, I believe the biggest mistake that I see every day of the week in advertising and business is people spend 95 % of their time yucking.

45:22consumers yum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally sitting in a room, you're selling coffee to a certain demo because of a certain piece of content and you're like, that's bad. That's not what our brand stands for. So I'm like, wait a minute, let me get this right. You, one human being who's subjectively deciding what your brand stands for is more powerful than 40 ,000 people just reacted to that, bought your stuff, but you think that's too lowbrow because you want to make pretend you work at LVMH while you're selling deodorant? All right, but that's an interesting tension. It goes back to what we were kind of saying about the Lions, right?

45:56Or the work at the Lions, not the Lions. But it worked in the marketplace. But let's give that marketer credit for saying, yeah, it worked, but it worked today. I worry about the longer-term implications of us being a little lowbrow. I agree. I think that's fair. But that's not how it's working. You know, there's not a level of thoughtfulness going on. I agree with that. It's a visceral reaction from a human. That's how it's actually showing up in these rooms. All right. We just have a couple minutes left. So I want to ask you, before we get to the last question, you talked about having dinner with five PE guys.

46:35How does private equity define value and the ingredients that go into value creation? Because they're getting - They don't do value creation. Well, so what are they buying? Aren't they buying something that has the ability for value accretion? They're looking to make money, but it's not creating that. They're creating financial arbitrage. Yes. Value to me is very different. How do you define it? Something that's actually being built that has sustained, you know, equity that can allow it permission to do many things. Not let me buy this because I see a vulnerability and in six years I'm going to flip it and yay.

47:11Right. And by the way, I don't, again, I think judgment is the greatest weakness of all time. I don't have passion or excitement to excel junkie my way to some dollars because I bought Dairy Queen when it was fucked up, cleaned it up, put good operators in. I actually am an operator, so I like a lot of private equity. But they're looking for arb, financial arbitrage. And people get off on that and you can make a lot of money. And I'm empathetic and it's right for a lot of people. In fact, I want to build a private equity firm, but I want to flip it. I want to be the first private equity firm that creates hyper growth instead of financial arbitrage.

47:48Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting. That's why I built Vayner. I built Vayner to build the operating system to allow me to consistently create hyper growth. And I've been testing it. Resi, the restaurant app, Empathy Wines, VFriends, my books, my own brand. It's almost like the comic books, the scientist that works it on themselves. I'm a little bit of the Hulk in that way. And I'm enjoying that part right now. There can, N of one can be very dangerous. It can also be very useful. Correct. All right. As I think you know, this is the last question I ask every guest. You got all the power in the world.

48:23What would you create tomorrow and what would you destroy tomorrow? And you do not have to answer it through a business lens. I would not, I don't even think about this. It's funny what just happened. I blanked when you just said this. You know how my brain works. I don't know. I'll think about what I, I'm going to answer what I destroy by telling you what I will create. If I had all the energy and power and dollars in the world, I would create the Ozempic pill for insecurity. And that would then destroy everything that bothers me. I would create a pill that everybody could take on earth that would get them directly into pure confidence.

48:58Not ego. Ego is insecurity with makeup on. I would create a pill. You would swallow it. And all of your insecurities would dissipate. and the next day you would deploy nothing but love. At bare minimum, the worst you would act would be indifference. There'd be no deployment of hate and tearing down. You would just worry about building your little building, not worried about tearing everyone else's down so your little building looks big. And I would create the pill, the Ozempic of insecurity. When you figure out the patent, I'm in. It's a good business model. Gary V., thanks for being with me. Thanks for being with me.

50:05and just as involuntarily. My point is that cities are amongst the most powerful of all brands. They carry meaning that's been accrued through the accumulated weight of every decision and action made inside them, whether in their control or not, across decades and centuries. The architecture, the food, the weather, the people who came and the people who left, the industries that rose and collapsed, the laws that were passed, the cultures that emerged, the stories that got told and retold until they became inseparable from the place itself. Yes, Virginia is for lovers. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

50:38The City of Lights and I Love New York all contribute and some endure. But no marketing created this meaning alone. It was created by the sum of a million product and policy and customer service decisions that nobody would think of as marketing, but all of which shaped what people eventually experienced, felt, and remembered. And what's true of cities is true of every company. The value your brands carry in the world aren't built by your marketing department alone. To the contrary, it results from the accumulated weight of the past and it's being created or destroyed right now by decisions being made by people, those within and outside of your control, who have no idea their marketing.

51:18Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. Support for the show comes from Injun. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Injun is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10 % back on hotels. And in 2025, Enjin customers save more than$300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS.

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