2025 Marketing Strategy That Will Revolutionize Your Ads

0:00If I give the greatest speech of my life in a forest and no one hears it, what did it actually do? The ability for a video to go viral as we sit in this conference room right now is Dramatically higher than it's ever been in the history of marketing how brands grow right in the 90s is vulnerable in 2024 it's all rah rah rah and fun and games But then if your numbers are down you go back to tried and true biggest conversation in marketing going forward We can now measure if the creative is good the creative is the variable of this entire conversation Now the creative finds you because the AI is that good.

0:33We've put common sense way back and we need to bring common sense back into companies. Thank you.

0:42Attention is the number one asset. I choose optimism. Your old principles of building brands still stay true. Yes, but I think it's been the vulnerability of the industry in the last 30 years. You know, us wanting everything to be matching luggage and on brand based on our subjective opinions has made us incredibly not relevant. But I will say that how brands grow written in 1991 and some of the stuff you learned in the 90s in college about building brands is vulnerable in 2024 because distribution is different, consumer behavior is different. And so to me, incredibly optimistic about the transformation that I think you're going through definitely have been burned by companies that are going through transformation in my 15-year career as an agency owner who's really trying to do consumer-centric work, not corporate work, in that you need a lot of things to move to actually get this done.

1:39So you may feel it in an off-site like this, but then next Thursday, if you're making a decision based on defense, you become in trouble. What I mean by that is, it's all rah, rah, rah and fun and games, but then if your numbers are down the last 90 days, what I notice is that you go back to tried and true, which actually means let's kill ourselves even faster. And so I've been through a lot of transformations with all the Fortune 500 CPGs because it's my favorite category and everything gets going until it's a bad quarter or something else happens and then people go to fake math. I mean, our entire current, you know, one of the challenging things when I looked at bullet point three, let's measure business results.

2:22Well, then let's bring back media and creative under one roof. I mean, look what's happened in our industry the last 30, 40 years. Media and creative used to sit under one agency and we held them accountable for our business. What we've done is we've separated media and creative since the 90s. And what that's done is made you spend a lot of money on reports to measure stuff for no reason. The biggest elephant in the room is we've put common sense way back. And we need to bring common sense back into companies. I appreciate that very much. you touched on a couple of these things. I'm gonna build on a few things that you said.

2:58So you just released yet another New York Times bestseller book, Date Training, Attention. Everyone's gonna get a copy of the book, by the way. I highly recommend it once you do. By the way, just a side note, I got an email from an English teacher in high school. So I am a historical poor student. Mrs. Horvath gave me four Ds sophomore year and three Ds and an F senior year. And in her email, she said, this was an amazing email. I haven't talked to her in 30 years. She said, if you told me the student in my history that would have seven New York Times bestselling books would be you, I would have laughed you out of the room.

3:43I saved that email. It's a good one. Your books cover randy topics. This one is more marketing focus. and it underscores how to build brands and how to grow sales. We've had a lot of, you touched on how brands grow, we've had a lot of exposure to Byron Sharp and how brands grow. Could you just share a little bit more about the perspective from the book and how, what it takes to actually, and you guys will see it in the book, actually is underlined, how to actually grow brands. Well look, if I give the greatest speech of my life in a forest and no one hears it, what did it actually do? I think the writing in theory or philosophy is a great idea because there's truth to that.

4:30I mean, some of my favorite stuff to think about is that. But I think where we've lost our way is in execution. The way to actually get a brand to grow is to win on relevance at scale with as many consumer segmentations as humanly possible so that every person on earth buys your stuff that could conceivably buy your stuff. the only way to do that is first to get the media to actually be consumed when you are buying potential reach like this company does at scale versus actualized reach you're already in a very vulnerable spot i own one of the largest e-commerce wine businesses in the country i know everything about everybody i'm marketing to but when the creative doesn't convert you still lose.

5:16The creative is the variable of this entire conversation. Even if you could target everybody everywhere. If I knew every single person I was talking to and everything about you it still doesn't mean I'm going to convert you. Your partners that have all the leverage don't convert all the time too. But when I say that here's what I mean. I mean that we all stink at marketing because it's hard. It is hard to make a picture and a video or written words that compel someone to switch over to you or to buy your stuff when we're convening with so many other things like convenience or prior history or a million other variables.

5:52So, you know, for me, what I'm most passionate about is mitigating the risk of creative. What companies do, we start buying up fake reports to justify our creative, right? We used to do animatics or and things of that nature, but you all know this. You're in real life. The decision on creative is being made by three or four or two of you subjectively. And then we buy reports that are incredibly flawed to justify the creative effectiveness. Meanwhile, we're all infatuated with talking about AI and the single most important AI in all of marketing sits currently in the seven social networks platforms and their algorithms.

6:33We are now living in a social media world where the creative is finding you. Not you follow someone like I grew up with and you would get all their stuff. Now the creative finds you because the AI is that good. All of creative testing in all of Fortune 500 marketing should be happening in native social media creative ads because those analytics and that data and that AI is disproportionately the most powerful. It's also in the platform that's gonna actually reach the consumer. you can get unlimited quantum call information out of just being good at doing day-to-day advertising on social media.

7:12And not only is it disproportionately the best creative testing, but you're actually getting the testing by actually doing marketing. You're literally getting a two-for-one. You're advertising for the sake of better advertising. Yet we prefer to be corporate and what we are doing and the elephant in the industry is that we take organic social media as something that's a nice-to-have matching luggage number 16 on our list of importance to our big campaign idea when it is disproportionately the most important place of consumer attention and the mitigation of creative risk. And once you understand that, then we can start to compete.

7:58Thank you.

8:03Luke, I'm gonna take this moment because I feel like I want all of you to hear this. This is a profoundly important conversation. Because of our subjective opinions of what social media is and our deep misunderstanding of what's happening there and because it's hard for holding companies and independent agencies to make a lot of money in it, we as Fortune 500 companies have disproportionately allowed startup brands to outflank us on the single most important platform in marketing in the world, which is organic social media creative. And what has happened is in the last three to four years, the platforms have completely changed to a for you page, content finds you dynamic built on AI, which is actually in our benefit because we're getting to test the creative in that environment.

8:56But the word test is banned at VaynerMedia because to me it's not a test. It's just a good ad that I'm making for someone to go to Target and buy my stuff that will give me feedback, quant and qual, to then make better ads going forward. And so you have to go consumer up the funnel, not boardroom idea down to matching luggage. We are getting outflanked. Brands in this portfolio are getting outflanked by startup brands with a couple of million dollars in VC funding because they are winning in consumer-centric environments. and we are doing things in corporate environments to appease our retail partners who are taking all of our money to private label us out and to appease our reports that we pay a lot of money for that are fake.

9:46All right, you guys remember what Mike was saying about the power of constructive debate. I think we are seriously at the real time. Which is the point. Well, the debate is starting to unravel for the counter because now we have things like Prime Energy Drink and Poppy and now we have unlimited brands that people can talk to. Liquid Death was started by a creative director at VaynerMedia. Started by. Day before, Mike is working at my company. Next day he's like, Gary, I'm leaving to start a bottled water company. Would you like to invest? Thank God my mom created a kind human being. So out of charity, I'm like, sure, Mike, I'll give you 10 ,000 bucks to get him.

10:26I'm gonna make like$30 million on this shit, Luke.

10:32But he's executing the model. I don't understand. There's nobody here that is confused. There's nobody here that's, that was big, you know, Luke, that was the biggest eye-opener of being in this business. I came in thinking like I was smart. I was like, these people don't get it. You do get it. It's just I'm empathetic that it's hard for you to change because the rules, the bonuses, the way everything's measured, and how I get it. People have mortgages, people have goals and dreams. So we are operating not on what we most believe our money is spent on to drive sales. We're doing what is accepted within the organization.

11:07We must debate the internal KPIs. We must debate what's actually happening out there. Because I know you see it. You're too smart. You wouldn't be in a soft site if you didn't see it. and let's stay on this a little bit longer because in the book you also talk about a mistake that many fortunes of 100 companies make is to bring a traditional mindset the TV and her mindset into social which forces brand guidelines into every single piece are you really interested in sitting and debating for 31 minutes about a color or a font on an individual social media post like it's a Super Bowl ad. But we do it all day long, Luke.

11:55No, I believe. We do it all day long. And meanwhile, if you understood, so I'm sure all of you do social differently with different agencies, however you do. Just please, if you remember anything from this talk, please remember this. Whatever thought you have subjectively on that creative, ask your agency partner to make that as well as let them post what they made for you and then let the data educate you on it. We continue to debate in the boardroom as if the internet doesn't exist. As if these social networks don't have unlimited analytics. I'm empathetic that you have so many other, I mean, half the room is even in marketing, so I'm incredibly empathetic that even for the people in marketing in this room, they're not so deep on these platforms that they understand what these platforms provide.

12:40But my friends, we are literally wasting ungodly amounts of dollars in boardrooms debating our opinions of what's on brand versus taking advantage of the quantum quals signals of the modern distribution platforms. Like my team asks me all the time, Nick will be like, what do you think about this? I'm like, I don't think. Like meaning I don't know what to think. I'm not interested in my opinion about this 13 second video or this picture. what I think is have we done best practices to get the most amount of people to see it. What I think about is the first second of the video. What I think about is the thumbnail.

13:21What I think about is the copy. What I think about is as I sit here right now as a practitioner of the craft of marketing, not as an executive of it, that I know that a one second loop reel is over indexing on Instagram this nanosecond and for every brand in this portfolio, we would get hundreds of thousands of people to see it versus 800 people. I think about the craft, not in the way you were all taught, which is like it's got high production value and the bougie creative director can romance you to think it's good. I mean the craft of the biggest conversation in marketing going forward, which is we can now measure if the creative is good.

13:59It is happening in the platforms, not in some SaaS software that you paid a lot of money for. Luke.

14:13Well, I would not confirm more than that.

14:18But can you talk a little bit about how you see, in that context, how do you see the role of the brand identity and understanding the brand and what the brand stands for? People are like, Gary, but you don't get it. We have like a brief or we have a brand guideline. Like it's important. I'm like, you know what else is important? the Constitution.

14:42The Constitution's important. It's been written. I don't know if you've heard, half of the country sees it one way and half sees it the other way. So what do I think about what the brand stands for? Who, what brand positioning in this portfolio do we want to talk about? First of all, all of your brand positioning, all of it, is a vanilla sentence so you can do anything. By nature, every brand position is very wide empowering the everyday. I won this debate with Nick on a famous flight at VaynerMedia because I decided to ask my 12 executives who deeply disagreed with me that I decided to go for the juggler and said, let's talk about just do it.

15:22You guys like brand positioning? Let's talk about just do it. I go to them. You're not allowed to talk to each other. All of you take out your phone and I want you to write yes or no in the notes pad of the phone. I'm about to ask you a question. And I said, just do it. Does that mean that that is, does just do it stand for a student going hard at homework every week to become a remarkable student? Reply yes or no. Luke, can you guess how the 12 votes worked out? Let's clap it up for Luke.

15:58Of course brand positioning matters. And comma, no human on earth that buys our stuff thinks about brand positioning. They think about relevance. We have lost our way on academia dictating our behavior and gotten too far away of how humans work. The only thing that's gonna save this company or any other CPG from what is just starting to really wake everyone up, which is this retail dynamic, is a bigger deal than you think. It's just starting. 30 years ago slotting fees were small now they're a bit shopper marketing's budget has gotten much bigger retail media what are you going to do when a retailer represents 50 of your business and they ask you for another 20 million dollars in retail media you're going to say thank you very much we must build demand to offset the toll booth the only way to build demand is relevance at scale.

17:02So what do I think about brand positioning? I think it's wonderful. I also think the interpretation of it is much more fragmented than the ideology we hold about it. And so what I mean by that is keep doing it, knock yourself out. But how you actually execute ads to the consumer is incredibly important. It starts with the stuff we talked about earlier, Pubis has set up. Yes, you have to get in front of people and have as much information as you want. But good news, your direct competitors will always have the same ability to do the same. All big data and all AI at scale always become a commodity.

17:39What is not a commodity is an operating system to outflank on creating as many stories as possible that can motivate someone to buy your thing. That requires very different creative at scale Because if I'm buying or anything like a Latina mom living in Texas who's 28 making$150 ,000 a year is a very different consumer than a 41-year-old first -time mother in Boston that loves the Celtics making$41 ,000 a year. And how on earth is the same video or picture going to convert them both? this is an incredible misunderstanding of the power of social and why that needs to be the beginning of your marketing journey and then you go up and then you do socially informed campaigns campaigns that have black and white quantum qual data that consumers actually care about the creative and it's dictating their behavior and then you decide how to distribute it in places that are actually being consumed versus potentially being consumed.

18:51It's why I have always been a champion of Super Bowl. Super Bowl is the cheapest and cheapest added marketing. It's the most expensive, but for$8 million, you get 130 million people to watch 30 seconds of a video. No matter how good you are at day trading attention, you will never pull that off right now. The problem is if the creative isn't good, you're dead. Right? And now you just wasted 25. So to me, why I've become infatuated, Luke, with social is being able to mitigate the risk of the creative I put in Super Bowl by doing marketing all year is exciting for me versus what, as you know, everyone does, which is they start with a brief, an agency comes up with an idea, and then you bet the farm on it at Super Bowl, and then you do matching luggage the rest of the year.

19:40We have it backwards. I appreciate that. We're going to open up for questions from the audience in a second. So folks, please start to get ready. I'm going to slight pivot one more time. And then we'll open it up. Slight pivot, you talk a lot about leadership and leading with empathy and kindness. Yes. Could you just talk for a little bit about your leadership philosophy and how you think it better at new people's performance and acting transformation? Weaponizing fear as a leader has unfortunately had tremendous short-term results and often does in a corporation. It just doesn't have long-term results.

20:31so I believe leadership styles are really the story of the tortoise and the hare you have a lot of people that come out the gun with like you got at these numbers and all that and there's unfortunately so many people that feel that fear is the right tactic even when it's subtle and clever they may not yell but it's just a simple little comment of like if we don't hit these numbers you know and I am empathetic to that my father led with fear um so I understand it I just think it's incredibly the wrong way to go about it I think it is uh uh the reason we continue to do it politicians parents think about your parenting you'd be stunned if you recorded yourself for a year parenting I mean you you I love when people in a corporate environment like yeah yeah screw fear and I'm like as a parent damn I'm straight pushing fear really don't know no baloney if you really think right now whatever you're dealing with with your children you'd be shocked how 97 percent of your tactics are fear-based I'm gonna take your phone da da da da da da da da da like it's it's just a short-term weapon but it but parents that parented their children only with fear paid the ramifications of that when the kids become in their 20s 30s and 40s and the same way about corporations it's not sustainable and you'll do it but you're you're gonna you're i don't think leaders that sell on fear realize they're just getting seven out of tens from people the only way to get 11 out of 10 is love period and unfortunately and i'm sure especially with the political situation in our country this is not confusing to anybody given where society is right this minute like you know love windows tend to be smaller love is hard you know optimism is a much harder game to play than cynicism somebody said to me the other day Gary I'm just keeping it real I'm like real negative you know in life my friends I'll just go very philosophical here is the biggest thing I believe in and I for a living basically watch people behavior, which is why I'm early on stuff.

22:42It's just I see it early because I'm always looking for it. In life, you find what you're looking for. If you want to be upset, I've got good news for you. You can open your phone and turn on your television. You can be upset 24-7. What people don't realize is if you want to be happy, you can't turn on your television, but you can turn on social media and be very happy. The algorithm is exposing who you are, not forcing you to be someone and that's a great misunderstanding. I really do believe both in society and in marketing we have a very deep very naive point of view on social and we also are incredibly not accountable.

23:23Humans and definitely human Americans and definitely human Americans that sit in this kind of room like myself and all of you we've become remarkably good at pointing fingers not thumbs.

23:35Because I talk a lot about social media, get confronted. I'm pumped I didn't get, it was so early in LA this morning. But maybe on the way back now, Luke, I'll give you a preview of my life. I'm going to go to O 'Hare right now. And somebody will come up to me like, Gary, I like you. I like your stuff. But I got to say, you're wrong about the social media stuff. It's a real problem. My 15-year-old, I'm really worried about a China and this and that. And then I look and I'm like, so why are you yelling at me? I'm like, you're the parent. somebody literally told me this is the thing that they most fear is going to kill their child and I said so be a fucking parent and take the phone away

24:16like if you're sitting so worried about social media that it's gonna cause all this great harm to your children shouldn't you be a parent and take the social media off the kid's phone parenting's my next book Luke it is by the way it actually is I'm writing a book called Perfectly Parented and it talks about what I think my mom was able to do which is find this purple in a world of red and blue and that's how I think about bringing it back to marketing brother back to this I don't think everyone realizes how deeply traditional we are you're way more traditional than you think I'm on the inside and I would challenge you to get dramatically more educated on how brands grow and sell in 2024 and I'll give you the answer to the quiz.

25:09It's called social media and as long as you continue to disrespect it and boy do we disrespect it and let me tell you how we disrespect it. There's a multi-billion dollar company out on the West Coast in the apparel business. New CEO, I'm friendly with him. we're starting to talk. I brought him some information this weekend. There's a t-shirt brand that's gone from zero to$100 million in revenue in the last five years. They spend$6.6 million a year in organic social fees. Agency creative, 6.6. This quadrillion dollar company for its brand spends... That's what's happening. we disrespect it because you don't allocate the right money to it given its importance you spend more on a fake report to measure your creative than you do on making creative and social

26:11okay end with that

26:17it really is incredible no bull crap like it's wild to see how many of the elements are sitting in the room. Like, I am, we're in a lot of buildings. The speed in which over the last 24 months, we've had productive conversations, crossing T's, looking at it. Like, I just, I don't want to, before we go to Q &A, I want to say this. As you can see, I'm incredibly passionate about this. And I think we really have a huge opportunity. But it takes big girl, big boy decisions to get there. That being said, it shouldn't bury the lead that in the last 24 months, there's been significant progress on respecting the ability for that creative in social to be a meaningful force to above the line.