Attention Drives Modern Growth - Ryan Harwood

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. Today's episode comes to you live from possible, but not just any possible location. We are at the VaynerX Yacht. Did I say that right? I'm getting the yes. Yes. Yes. Where possible, where every hallway has a pitch, not on the yacht, of course.

0:42Every table has a meeting, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Today, I'm joined by Ryan Harwood, CEO of Gallery Media Group and Tamara. Tamara? You got it. Tamara. Tamara Group, two businesses sitting right at the center of where modern brands are trying to go next. attention, relevance, culture, and growth. Ryan has built companies that understand the simple truth many still miss. Attention isn't bought once, it's earned every day. From scaling Pure Wow into a category leader to growing Gallery Media Group into a powerhouse reaching more than 155 million consumers to now leading Tamara's Group new model for the attention economy, He set a front row seat to how media, creators, storytelling, and commerce are colliding.

1:28Ryan. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you for having me. This is a first, dude. We're recording this in a bedroom on a yacht, and there will be visual proof of this as my girl Rachel's taking pictures. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nothing wrong. Right? It's all in the up and up. Yeah. Okay. I was saying yesterday that we did our interview, Gary and I, in that bed snuggled up. And I'm jealous. Way more normal. Yes. Right? Way more. Well, depending how this conversation goes. We might get in that. We'll just leave it there. Okay. I want to start with what you're building right now and what problem you're trying to solve with brands.

2:02Sure. So the newest thing we're building right now, we announced it yesterday here at Possible is Tomorrow Group. So underneath the hood of VaynerX, we have four core businesses. We have three full service agencies. There's VaynerMedia, there's Chuck Media, and now there's Tomorrow Group. And then on the side, there's Gallery Media Group, which is a modern day publisher. So I am CEO of two of those businesses, Gallery Media Group, the publisher, as well as now Tamara Group, which is the agency. Very different business models. The one that I've been doing for the last 15 years is the media and publishing business.

2:39As you mentioned, when you introduced me, PureWow was my first foray into this industry. It was a women's lifestyle digital media company. And then we acquired Cuffator, which is a luxury fashion publication. And we own a lot of social channels. One of the largest ones being at Cocktails, which is the largest cocktails account in cocktail culture in the world. But it's on Instagram. It's on TikTok. We're going to be launching it on other platforms as well. So kind of at all times, we're trying to solve for winning that mid funnel battle of relevance for brands. We're doing it in very different ways on the agency side versus the media publishing side.

3:22We sell different products. But at all times, we are trying to solve what we call day trading attention, right? Finding attention where people are actually spending their time, creating content at scale for many different cohorts and driving relevance. because relevance drives consideration, which drives sales ultimately. Can you just repeat that and have that plastered on the wall? Because it's really that simple. It really is that simple. Relevance drives consideration, which drives sales. Does everybody get that? Okay. So you've gone from building Gallery Media Group to now launching Tamara Group.

3:57Tamara. What's the through line that connects that journey? And what have you learned about attention along the way? Yeah, so Tomorrow Group stands for the Attention Media and Relevance Agency. I've been in the hallways of VaynerX for 10 years now, which is crazy to say. I came in through acquisition. PureWow was an acquisition. You know, I've had the privilege of watching how the agency business has run and grown and evolved on the VaynerMedia side. So when you ask the question, kind of like, what's the through line? Gary has watched me operate Gallery Media Group for 10 years underneath his umbrella and obviously has seen how I've been able to understand and gravitate towards the agency model as well.

4:37We also, what's funny is on the Gallery Media Group side, over the last four or five years, we became a little bit of a hybrid of a media publishing company and some agency services. Kind of happened not purposefully. It was out of market demand and need. Like when TikTok came about during COVID, a lot of our clients asked us at Gallery Media Group, can you launch our TikTok channel for us? Can you run this for us? And they didn't need a full service agency. They just needed someone to launch that. And then influencer marketing, we were actually ahead of the curve there. So we had a whole team that was doing influencer marketing for brands.

5:12So they would say, hey, could you run our influencer marketing for us? So we kind of depotiously fell into agency services on the gallery side. But when we really lifted the hood recently and kind of saw what we were, we were a true hybrid. We were a little bit of a Frankenstein. And I needed to course correct that because it was starting to get confusing, candidly, even internally to my own people. Like, what are we selling? Are we selling the agency services or are we selling our media publishing products? And at the same time that I wanted to course correct that, Gary had a very strong conviction that he wanted to launch another agency because there was a lot of demand at the VaynerX level for more business development coming into the funnel.

5:53So it was a great moment in time where we both wanted to do this. And that's when we split the business in half to some extent. And we created Tomorrow Group to now be a full service agency. And we obviously ported over some of the agency type clients we were working with over at Gallery. And now Gallery is back what it should be, which is a pure play media publishing company not offering agencies. There's definitely a lesson there for you made sure your internal messaging is right. Yes. Because otherwise it's irrelevant. Yeah. And it's confusing, right? And by the way, external too. For the last year, you can ask one CMO, what is gallery media group?

6:32And they might give you one answer and you ask the other CMO because we're working in a very different way with them. They're going to give you a different answer. And I didn't like that it was starting to go that way. So I wanted to fix that, but I also wanted to service the agency clients in a much bigger way. I mean, Ulta is a great example of that. Who's our first initial anchor client. We were, we had ambitions together to grow into a much larger remit because they had more needs and more demands. And I wasn't going to be able to do that out of gallery. So we had to create our group to do that.

7:07So what we did is we took great talent from Gallery, we took great talent from Vayner, and we took external hires to fill some gaps, and that was our initial employee base for tomorrow. It's really, I use the word simple a lot, but it's really no more simple than the market was telling you, yes, what you needed, or what they needed, I'm sorry. Yep. And you went, you listened, we listened. That's exactly right. Okay, so there's no shortage of agencies, we know that. Is there a specific gap or gaps you've solved other sports solving, not naming names? Of course. But what were some of those? There's a gap there.

7:41There's a need there. What makes it different than what you guys are doing? Yeah, 100%. You know, to simplify that as well, we'll stay with the kind of like simple narrative here. Tom Brady throws a football and I throw a football, but he throws it a lot better than I do. And I think there are a lot of social agencies out there, like you just said, but I think the craft and precision and the obsession that VaynerX as a company has over how to do social properly is next level. I think, you know, top down, we have a chairman, Gary, that is a practitioner day to day of using 10 plus platforms, producing 400 plus pieces of content a day for his own personal brand, if you don't think that trickles down in Slack channels and every single moment through text chains and everything with leadership about every new feature, every new platform, everything happening in culture from emerging hip hop artists to emerging female athletes and everything in between, like it is a true obsession.

8:47And I think that's what it takes. When we said in the beginning here, when we were sitting here and we said relevance drives drives consideration to drive sales. Relevance is not easy. That's not an easy game to be the best at. You need to be obsessed with it. So when you say, are we filling a gap? We still, at the end of the day, feel that social organic, organic social is the most important yet most misunderstood part of everyone's marketing strategy. We, yeah, Tamara and Chuck and Vayner do all types of configurations of how we work with clients. We might just do creative through the whole funnel.

9:23We might do just media through the whole funnel. We might just do social organic and social paid and that's it and not touch above the line or any other digital. So we work in every configuration you can think of, but the most common way that people come in typically is through organic social because I think that I don't think there's even a close second in the industry to what we do there. Yeah, I happen to agree. I know one of the things you talk about a lot is the attention economy. Yes. Right. What are some things marketers still misunderstand about that? I think that the scorecards that have been in place for a very, very long time, the MMMs, the MMAs, when you lift the hood on that, it's not properly doing the scoring to show whether your marketing is working or not.

10:08Because at the end of the day, if you're getting low CPMs and getting a billion impressions for a low cost and everyone's excited because they think they did a great job this year, but the business is down. That doesn't make any sense. There's a disconnect there. So when we say the attention economy, we mean, what is the price for that impression that you're paying? So we're not against TV. We're not against any medium. It's the price that you're paying to get in front of a consumer and get their attention, which is why we think organic social, if you are doing a high volume and you are doing strategic rigor around what cohorts you're actually going to producing content for, that is the most valuable thing you can possibly do in order to get attention and to validate creative before you put a dime of paid media behind it.

11:03That is in the most extreme version of our model. We would hope and pray that every single Fortune 5000 brand in the world, by the way, every brand in the world, not just Fortune 5000, would validate their creative concepts in organic social to see if it's resonating and if it's relevant before they put any paid media behind it. And you almost, no one does. You do realize half the people listening just fall through terror. Yeah. What do you mean? I can't do paid. Yeah. Yeah. I know that. And by the way, even in our best, best, best relationships and best form, we still don't have them a hundred percent to the right there, but that is the ultimate goal.

11:38It's no longer a creative problem. Candidly, it's an organizational problem. Totally. Absolutely. Without question. So for CMOs listening, what's one thing they need to unlearn, if you will, if they want to win in a social first always on? They need to relinquish control that they feel like they're the only people that understand what is on brand and what their brand stands for. If you actually go into Instagram, TikTok, and you search, pick a brand. I'm not going to pick a brand. You pick a brand. Any McDonald's. Okay, great. If we go into the discovery feed or the search and type McDonald's, you're going to have billions of posts about McDonald's.

12:20That is what the world thinks about you, not the campaign you just put out there. The amount of people that are seeing that campaign are de minimis compared to the amount of people that are seeing all of the content being put out there into the universe about McDonald's. So our point is to be precious about whether the color is red or blue on that button in the piece of content and not just create and market for the sake of more marketing and for the sake of more insights is something they need to unlearn because they've been taught through academia that there is a very specific way to kind of create taglines and campaigns and marketing and you know the Don Draper out.

12:58Yeah. And even more recent. Yeah. And that's just not the way marketing works anymore because one vanilla piece of content trying to appeal to the amount of diversity out there and the way people think is just, it's wild. So from your perspective, why are you mentioned campaign mode and it seems like so many brands are still operating in that. Absolutely. And it's crazy when culture happens in case you missed the news in real time, but there are those brands still planning those campaigns. And this is my second quarter campaign. This is my third, like it's 1995, let alone Don Draper. Why is that?

13:32It's just easier. It's easier and it's what they know. That's it. It's what they know and it's what they were taught. Yeah. It's really hard to do what we're doing, to produce hundreds of pieces of content a day on 10 different platforms and actually be vulnerable. Because when I say vulnerable, our performance is there for the world to see. You're either generating views or you're not. That's the brilliant part about social. It's real time. You know, real time. And five years ago, it wasn't. This is the first time in history that you are literally being judged on the merit of your creative output based on whether the AI algorithms of all those platforms are actually pushing it out organically and getting you views.

14:11You used to not be able to know that it was disguised and you'd have to pump paint behind it and you'd say, look how great this did. This got a billion impressions. You paid for every single one of it. Doesn't mean anyone paid any attention to it. But if you are getting 100 ,000 views, 200 ,000 views, a million views, God forbid, 5 million views on an organic piece of content, it means people are consuming it, sharing it, engaging it, and the algorithms want to keep people on the platforms. So you've earned the right to get those impressions and you need to, oh my God, milk the hell out of figuring out why that worked and then double down on that and then put paid behind it and not just like boost it.

14:51I mean, like the deft of a TBC campaign, you need to figure out how you're going to slice and dice that piece of creative and hit different cohorts and have different messaging and different hooks. And really it's scientific. What's the opposite of that though? If something doesn't work, do you still take time to analyze and give it a second life? Great question. We absolutely will take time to analyze it. We absolutely will try sometimes if we're like, Oh my God, you really thought that was a great creative concept. Maybe we just didn't nail the angle of it or the delivery of the tone. Let's try it again.

15:21But we also move on very quickly. Like if it doesn't work after two to three times, we're just like, okay, it doesn't work. Got no views. Clearly this is not relevant, but we have something called PAC platforms, algorithms, culture. And that has that is the strategic rigor we put around every piece of content. So this is the other thing where a lot of CMOs or marketers struggle is what I'm talking about. Sometimes they'll say, well, that's just throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. And that is not the case. What it is, is when we're doing platforms, algorithms, and culture, we're actually deeply analyzing the platforms that the people you want to reach are actually spending their time on.

16:01We're looking at what the algorithms actually want in order to generate that reach for you. And then culture, which is the most important part, we're figuring out what is the conversation. I'll make it up. 35-year-old mom in Pacific Northwest has two kids that love skateboarding and eats cereal every day. I went really niche there. You did. What is the conversation that that mom is participating in this moment in social media? Understand it and get in the mindset of creating content for her if that is one of your 10 cohorts that you're going after. Correct. And that is not throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

16:38That And Don Draper walking in a room and guessing when a campaign idea would go. Oh, my God. Yeah. So how should, let's come back just from two years till now. How should brands think differently about like things like creators and community and even content? Yeah. In two years, which doesn't seem like a long time, but you and I both know it's a lifetime. Yeah. So creators, we absolutely use creators. The way we structure our teams is we have full-time internal creators that are on our staff. But then, as you know, if someone wants a niche cohort that we don't have someone on staff for, we're absolutely going to outsource and find a creator that looks and feels like that cohort because we can't staff every single cohort under the sun and every demographic under the sun.

17:20So we will use external creators. Also, external creators, they do this for a living. They're created for a reason. And they understand the platforms themselves very well, too. That is definitely a part of it. We define influencer a little bit differently than creator. A creator is when they are creating for the channels for the brand, not posting it themselves. They're creating for you. So it's almost like a production service. And then an influencer is when you're using them for their influence and you're using their distribution almost like a media channel. So you're getting creative and media from them.

17:51And that's going to be way more expensive than just using them for production. and you need to be very skilled on the influencer side and understanding what is overpriced and underpriced. Because you can, the thing with influencer marketing is it could be the best campaign you've ever done in the whole world, or it could be the worst campaign you've ever done in the whole world based on whether you overpaid or underpaid for that influencer or those influencers. Okay, so I have to interrupt. So I'm gonna play CMO. You're going, that sounds great, Ryan. Yeah. But how do I know if I'm working with the rate of?

18:20Okay, so you need to have a pulse on the market. You need to truly understand the market and what create, in our opinion, this has changed also over the past couple of years, right? It used to historically be follower count. Yeah. Engagement. Yeah. All of that stuff, right? We view the market now as, does that influencer have the ability to generate views? Because I don't care if they have 10 million followers, if their average views on an Instagram reel are 100 ,000 views, and then I find someone with 200 ,000 followers, but is getting an average of 200 ,000 views on every reel. I'd much rather that person.

18:55And guess what? That person's going to cost less too. Obviously the slight nuance to all this is like, sure, there's clout. There's clout that's hard to measure. There's brand affinity that's hard to measure, like just the rub off of co-signing a product if you're using Alex or someone that has a lot of influence and clout. That is a third factor that needs to be factored in. But oftentimes people, that's when people overpay is when they overvalue that stuff and they chase because they fall in love with a name and they're like, I have to have that name and they end up overpaying as a result. Yeah.

19:27Okay. So we took a look back a second ago to yours. As we wrap up, I want to give you fast forward three, four, five years. What does the best marketing organization have come to you? Their pie has shifted dramatically on how they spend their money. We think that everyone that wants to be, that says they're social first is social last. And then we have a middle bucket that we call social with, which is where a lot of the more advanced clients are actually in, but we think almost nobody is actually social first. What I mean by that is like, in my opinion, your whole pie, when you look at the marketing pie of how people spend their money, big brands spend their money, they're gonna actually end up having to spend considerably less paid media dollars if they do a true social at the center mindset first, because they're gonna be able to validate the creative and find out what is good creative, and they're not going to have to spend as much paid in order to get the same amount of impressions if the creative has been validated already and is actually good.

20:23By the way, you also can use what creative has been validated in the social platforms to actually act as the brief to maybe your TVC campaign. So now you're not paying an above the line agency, an ungodly amount of money as a retainer because you can actually just generate the briefs and the campaigns based on what you see working in social first. Yeah. And let's take it below the line to performance now. You could also take the creative that's working in social organic and then add right hooks to it and go a little bit more brick to forehead sales messaging, but use the same creative hooks that have been working, but use it for your lower funnel paid performance marketing.

21:01So the mid funnel should feed the upper and lower funnel, but you need to find right instead of guess right. And if you do that, it means that you're going to be spending more money in social organic, but you're going to be spending a hell of a lot less money everywhere else. So the net net is you are saving millions of dollars guaranteed, but their mindset gets broken because they're like, wait a second, you want me to spend what in organic? Exactly. But you know who loves this more than anyone? CFOs. They get it more than anyone. Because they understand it. They take up on it quicker than anyone because they're not stuck in kind of a past way of model way of thinking.

21:40And they're about the bottom line. And this model is about the bottom line. It's fascinating. Yeah. Listen, Ryan, I can't thank you enough. I might have started a new career, start recording podcasts from bedrooms. I like it. Right. So I may just start a whole, speaking of niches, I may start that. And then we're going to target you guys that have podcasts on yachts. Exactly. You're a cohort. Exactly. So far it's one. But listen, my friend, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Well, that wraps up another episode of the CMO Whisperer Show. I hope you shared this episode with your friends.

22:12And if you have not already, please subscribe to be kept up to date on all the latest episodes. And if you're so inclined, leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.