How Brands are Using Social Media & AI in 2026

0:00We chase no virality as a marketing agency. And I show them that it does not correlate to business results the way you would think. In fact, it's really profound. Your seven and eight statement was very important. I hope a lot of people heard that. It is hitting singles and doubles as often as possible instead of striking out or always trying to hit a grand slam. I would show your kids here are nine million people that went viral for a second because there's nine million examples. of virality over the last 15 years that literally a month later led to nothing. Nothing was created and nothing was meaningful and then make them sit down and watch Star Wars and explain why this piece of content led to a trillion dollar outcome.

0:46It's about education. It's about having real conversations. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Welcome Gary and Sean to Dell Technologies World. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you so much. to have you here. All right, so we know all of you come to Dell Technologies World to learn and to be entertained, and we are so confident the session is going to do both. Right now, media and technology are being disrupted by the exact same forces. It's in an infinite world of content, AI-curated algorithms. Attention is incredibly scarce, and trust is both harder to earned and more valuable than ever.

1:29So you in the audience, it isn't your just job to deliver technology anymore. It's to help people believe in it. So who better to help us learn about capturing attention and unshakable trust than Gary Vee and Sean Evans. Give them a round of applause, everyone. All right. So Gary, you are one of the foremost gurus on monitoring and looking at how attention happens. What do you think companies still misunderstand about how people discover information and decide what's worth paying attention to? You know, I think the bigger a company is when it comes to deploying their marketing, the more likely that they have fake reports.

2:20And so the industry of Fortune 500 land has a really tough challenge. And I'm empathetic. How do you actually capture or measure if people paid attention? Yeah. Right. There's a lot of proxies, but it's very hard to actually measure it. I think to answer you directly, I think what companies continue to get wrong is I think it's about time that we bring common sense into the boardroom. And I, yeah, thank you. And, uh, and, and, and that's what I spend most of my time thinking about, you know, the, what is a potential reach moment versus an actualized reach moment. When big companies talk about television ads, they'll say, yeah, but it still works on sports.

3:08yet it works on sports when it's Super Bowl because common sense for everyone here we know that people want to watch the Super Bowl ad but last night's remarkable Knicks game thank you when those when those when that game was going into timeouts nobody was like oh I can't wait to see the commercials that are about to play and that happens with social media that happens digital, that happens with print. So I would say the biggest issue is that we've become completely reliant on reports that most people in this audience know are not actually exactly right, but the company measures that way. And I think we have to have more courage to have real conversations in the boardroom.

3:53And that's the real answer. I love that. It really is about evolution of measurement and being honest about it, right? Not putting things in front of you that tell you a story that may not be exactly true. Yeah, we need to be honest in here. There's an entire advertising ecosystem that have created these reports, and they're making money, but I think it's hurting brands and businesses. And I think people know better, and I think we need a little more courage, a little more common sense, a little more truth, and a little less corporate checking boxes and inertia. I love that. And I think we can all learn from you, Sean, in that area.

4:32You started Hot Ones back in 2015. Absolutely amazing. Is there anyone who does not know what Hot Ones is? Thank you. Love it. So I think, maybe tell us real quick, how did that idea come about? Well, it really came about as a matter of survival. Like in 2013, 2014, every magazine pivoted to becoming a YouTube channel. So if you're working at a magazine as a writer, you had to come up with a viable media property and video property quite quickly. Otherwise, you were going to lose your job. And in this magazine office, there'd be celebrities walking the halls all the time. So you're like, well, maybe I can do a celebrity interview show.

5:19Maybe because of my proximity to it, maybe I can pull this off. And then there was a problem that we were trying to solve for, which is celebrity interview shows are boring. Why are they boring? Because everyone's in this PR driven flight pattern. So we thought about, well, what can we do to disrupt that? And then the best dumb idea ever was, well, what if we had the meat increasingly spicy chicken wings over the course of the interview as a way to break them down? And then we shot a pilot and that was almost 12 years ago. And we haven't stopped shooting episodes since. absolutely and 12 years later over 30 million people still tune in for 30 minutes and watch your show so what do you think that tells us or what have we learned about what audiences actually want versus what we think they want well i think that there's a lot of looking into the crystal ball about what audiences want but to me it's always been anecdotal or like it to me it's always been personal like i grew up on escapism television and the 30 minute time slot the comfort viewing sitcom, that was a really important part of that experience for me.

6:24And I think that there's this tendency, especially these days, to kind of over-index on like either side of the polarity, whether it's like short, full, vertical video, there's a ton of that that's a highly competitive and congested space. And then on the other side, you have, you know, like marathon length, four hour podcasts, or even if you go to HBO, like any sort of like standard drama now, episodically, they can be the length of a feature film. So I've always thought that the 30-minute sitcom time slot is a little underrepresented, something that invites a comfortable seat on the couch and a blanket and a snack.

7:01It also invites the next episode without it feeling like a time commitment. And then the reason why I think people watch is because there's something eternally compelling about the world's most famous people absolutely getting crushed by hot sauce and eating Blair's mega death sauce with liquid rage and having a list Academy award winning actresses eat the bomb beyond insanity. So I think it's that unique novel hook combined with what is hopefully a thoughtful career spanning, unimpeachably good interview show alongside of it. And then when you combine those things, that's how I think you can have a show that lasts a long time.

7:37And I love that because that that 30 minutes is something that generations grew up on and still is true today. And so in an infinite world of change, people still want it. Yeah. And that's always going to be the case. Like you don't really need to worry about consumer behaviors and think about the trends and all of these new things. Like, do you stick to the things that are classic and you just understand people where sometimes you want to just hang on the couch and watch something and connect with it and escape from the real world for a while than just like give people what you know they'll always want.

8:11And then the interview is the oldest construct in the history of media. You know, there's no poking holes in that either. So it's just putting those two things together and then practicing it and staying consistent over that time. That's amazing. And I think we're all trying to learn, you know, in a fast changing world, what we want to change and what we keep the same. Right. So Gary, I'll go to you. What does the evolution of media teach us about how people adopt new ideas, especially when those new ideas may be unfamiliar, complex, maybe even a little scary, like some new technologies? I mean, you know, I was a profoundly poor student, but I got very good grades in history.

8:56and I never really understood why until maybe a decade ago. I'm like, oh, this was part of my entrepreneurial framework. I use the history to tell me the future. The evolution of technology and the evolution of the media landscape go very hand in hand, right? I always think back to, that was a funny way to set this up. I don't always think back to, but I often think back to the printing press And the fact that amongst the first million books ever printed, a shockingly high percentage was religious content and I think has had a profound impact on society. What is always true is that our attention moves to different platforms.

9:46You know, I'm shocked by how many people don't realize when the television was invented, the radio and newspaper people made fun of it as a bad technology and made fun of sitting for 22 minutes or 30 minutes and watching a sitcom. And that was going to ruin the children. And even more interesting to me, the kaleidoscope. If you want to go and be more optimistic that our kids are not going to be ruined, go read all the articles about the kaleidoscope and how that was going to ruin all the children. When there's new mediums, the internet really is the one that we all lived through. When the internet came along and it created new distribution, attention went away from print and radio and television.

10:32Not completely, but more attention went to this new medium. and an entirely new world was spun up. Sean would never, I would never be sitting here today if the internet didn't exist because no one would have greenlit the things we did. We didn't need to get greenlit by YouTube to start the wine show or hot ones. And so what that allows is for a lot of different voices. We are now at scale because of social media of an unlimited amount of different voices, which is creating so many micro fractures, so many micro communities, so much fragmentation, which is a real challenge for businesses from a marketing lens, because we were all taught to have a brand positioning and then be consistent.

11:16The reality is, is you need to be more relevant to as many different consumer segmentations as possible to create that consideration to actually grow your business. That's whether you're a media entity, whether you're a business, whether you're a personal brand that's trying to start a side hustle. So what it teaches you is that it always moves. What's unique about right now is that so many people have weight with their opinions about everything. And that's a level of information that is far more nuanced and confusing for the end consumer than it was when Walter Cronkite told us all what to think in 1964.

11:55And that is creating a lot of tension and concern, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race and I have a funny feeling we're going to figure it out. I have a feeling we're going to figure it out also. Sean, what about you? I agree with a lot of what Gary said especially the gatekeeping of an idea that doesn't really exist anymore and I often think too about the experimentation that it took early on like if Hot Ones tried to go through some sort of traditional route before the internet and technological breakthrough, like we would have been canceled after a year, after two years, you know, like we had to find our perspective and figure out who we were.

12:37And that's all been very positive. But yeah, it's, there's, I think about when, you know, like Gary was talking about the TV coming along, there used to be these paradigm shifting breakthroughs in media that would happen once a generation, you know, like radios dominant for a long time and then TV and color TV and cable and these things used to happen once a generation. Now I've only been doing media, you know, I've had a career in media for a decade and a half and I think there have been like at least four or five of those paradigm shifting moments. You know, like the reason, you know, we have the success we do is because we sort of were a rose that grew in the concrete at the exact same time that eyeballs were leaving linear network TV and then going towards the internet, which coincides with celebrities wanting to chase the eyeballs over to the internet as well.

13:25And then I've lived long enough to see that torch get passed from YouTube being like the eyeball dominant king with the crown to then TikTok. And then, you know, I think if you look at this new crop of young people who have found, you know, nouveau fame, it's really like a streaming revolution that's happened. And that's, you know, that turns me, who was at one point at the forefront of this change towards YouTube. Now that makes me like the old dusty establishment guy, you know, and then that's going to happen continually, like every three or four years. And so I think we're just in a state now where it's just a perpetual wild, wild west.

14:05And how do you think about then when to follow or when to stay in that? I, to be honest with you, it's one of those things where I've always just been informed by the tried and true classics that have been going on for decades and decades and decades before me. Like, I'm actually someone who looks back more often than I look forward. And maybe, you know, there'd be some differences of opinion here, but I think about there's a giant graveyard of media companies that all did what you were supposed to do and chase the algorithm and followed, followed the audience wherever it was going and pivoted to short form.

14:43And then what did that leave them with? Or I think about Quibi, which is like this platform that was totally optimized for exactly how people are watching. We're going to do short form vertical video. We're going to have celebrity involvement. It's going to be connected to a high concept show. And then as far as media platform launches go in my lifetime, that's probably the biggest failure of them all. So there's this tendency, I think, to always try to buck the trend or chase the thing. But if you look at the most durable properties in all of media, from the Super Bowl to Saturday Night Live to these soap operas that have been on for 65 years, these are things that are not defined by strategic pivots at the right time.

15:26You know, these are things that have been defined by their consistency, and that creates a level of trust with the audience that's been unbreakable for a really long time. So I'm somebody who thinks that timeliness is overrated and timelessness is underrated. I love that both of you actually really love history and look back in order to move forward. Do you actually have that in common? Yeah, I mean, we have many things in common. Our love of history, our shocking good looks. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting.

16:02Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. But I think, if I may, the other thing that I'm fascinated by of what just transpired is, and this is just a statement about earth and our society, but it's very real in business. We have an inherent infatuation with or. it's either this or that I can tell you what is incredibly clear to me including some of the tried and true when you understand how to fall in love with and I think it gets much much better Super Bowl for example deployed almost a thousand creators for short form content as an add on to the experience this last year To Sean's point, it is not their steak or the main meal, but it is a side dish to the reality of understanding where attention is.

17:01And I think when you're a marketer, it becomes even more compoundly more important than, let's say, a content or a pillar of media. And so I would just caution everyone here on AI or analog, social or long form, short form, long form, algo or print. The reality is that everything can work if you're actually good at it. Let there be no confusion. Because I've been there from day one on YouTube. There are millions of people who tried to do the show that Sean and his team did who failed. And they were 30 minutes long and they sucked crap. And Sean's show does not. Does not. And in fact, you do something so beautifully well.

17:49You have an amazing ability to build trust and then create a space where people can be vulnerable. Part of it's the hot sauce, probably. But, you know, tell us a little bit about your process. You know, I think when I'm interviewing a guest, I think it's important that I know everything that I possibly can. So I'm marinating their lives. If Ariana Grande is coming in the studio, then her music's the soundtrack of my life for a week. If Matthew McConaughey is coming in, then I'm ending every night with a double feature. If we got Gary Vee, I'm just doing a full content download. I'm just going to make sure that I know as much about him as possible.

18:26I take notes of all the things that I'm just naturally curious about. I put them all in a big, long list and then pull from that the ten topics of interest that I think over the course of an interview, each wing can peel a different layer from this person. And then I do a little armchair psychology, try to figure out who they are, and then execute that vision of how I think it's going to go against the reality of actually being in the room. Obviously, when you're doing an interview, it's complicated because you're creating this rhythm, this sense of rapport, this trust with someone you've never met before in your life, and then you're doing it in this ridiculous setting of being on a TV show, and then the absurd context of eating these scorching hot chicken wings along the way.

19:12So it's a lot to juggle, but overall I just feel like I'm somebody who approaches the work with a positivity and a cheerfulness and a joyfulness, and I'm there for my guests, and I want to dance with them and be supportive with them and have this real human connection or these human moments where everything about it is so artificial from the outside looking in. And it is so, so authentic. And I've actually seen you be interviewed, and everyone asks you, who's their favorite, who's the funniest, what's this? But what I want to know is, or what we want to know is, who actually inspires you the most?

19:49What guest inspired you? Well, my earliest core memories of falling in love with entertainment was when my mom was out of town on business. Like, the fun, cheeky thing me and my dad got to do is, he'd let me watch Letterman with him. And I remember the lights, camera, and action of it all. and the Ed Sullivan Theater is packed and the curtains open up and Dave takes the stage. And I think that broadcasting was the first true abstract concept that I ever understood. Where I'm like, here's this guy who's doing a show in New York and he has this profound effect on my dad's life in Chicago. But my dad's just really one of millions.

20:24I was like, wow, what magic broadcasting is where he can make a whole country laugh or feel something emotionally or reflect. And I thought that that was incredible. and then I kind of just really became a freak, a talk show obsessed freak. I would put Howard Stern on like a data disc and take it to study hall and listen to him. I went to study broadcast journalism and ended up doing exactly what I knew I was going to do all along. Even my summer job was doing architecture tours of the Chicago River in Lake Michigan just so I could get in front of these audiences time after time. And then it's been really amazing on the other side of it to have all of these guys that I look up to, whether it was Jimmy Kimmel who's done this show or Conan O 'Brien who maybe has done one of the great episodes of Hot Ones ever.

21:11I was on the Kennedy Center stage with Stephen Colbert. All of these guys who I was really inspired by and looked up to have now become people that I kind of compete with which has been crazy. And so interesting that those shows too leverage the platforms you leverage now, right? They film in a very traditional way, but they, the, but everyone's chasing the YouTube news. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. So I want to ask both of you, because you also do a lot of interviews, um, you know, what earns trust fastest in a conversation and what can break it fastest? I mean, from my perspective, I think I overly rely on my intuition.

21:57I think we forget that we're animals, and very quickly, in a job interview, if I'm making public content, us two right now, us three, excuse me, you two right now, like, I'm paying attention, and if it doesn't feel good in my tummy, then the trust is starting to erode. And then there's a logical part, right? When you're asking very direct questions and they're dancing their best stance. And I think the audience is incredibly smart. I think one of the great mistakes of many is disrespecting the audience and their intelligence. And I think when you go down that hallway, you lose trust very quickly.

22:43Ah, that's beautiful. What about you, Sean? I think with a guest, you know, I like to see a nice shoulder drop, and that's how I know they're trusting, and that's kind of how I sequence an interview sometimes, where it's like the first question will be about the project that they have coming up. That gets the publicist to take a seat, and then hopefully from there you can have this thoughtful career-spanning interview. So in the second or third question, there's little things that I throw in there to show that we're meeting you halfway here. You know, like if I'm going to have you eat a wing-doused and Blair's Mega Death Sauce with liquid rage, at the very least I can do my homework and let you know that I care about you and your journey and that's ultimately how it goes we kind of trauma bond over this thing and then whoever goes on Hot Ones it's one of two ways they either never want to see me again or we become best friends and our paths cross again over the years so I think that that's it is just in showing that you're meeting your guest halfway no one who I interview needs to be interviewed by me they're all very successful people So I just try to make sure that like, you know, you're not coming in here for no reason.

23:48Like we're going to celebrate you in this moment. And then I think with the audience is consistency. And I mean that in like the watch experience of almost every episode is a seven or an eight. It doesn't have to be a 10 or whatever. And every once in a while you're going to have things that don't work. But hopefully you have more classics than you have bricks. but I think like if you live in that seven to eight that's you know the audience shows up to you because they have an itch that they need to be scratched that they need scratched you scratch that itch for them you do it for a long time consistently and then they'll just they'll trust it well and I love that because you know every day we you know we don't show up as tens as human beings and so you know it's very very relatable so Gary you and I have a lot in common that we absolutely love brands brand is at the heart of what we do and what we love and so how do you go about building trust with your brand me personally yeah it's really funny it's good it I this place where my brain just went ties in quite a bit to Sean's career my breakout moment the start of my journey was 20 years ago, February, when YouTube was only five months old.

25:08I started a long form wine show on YouTube and it was incredibly early. There was literally nobody there. If you got a thousand views, you were a hero. Almost all the content on YouTube was ripped off IP content from television. And I remember why I started it. I was running my father's wine shop and I wanted to make videos to sell wine. I was thinking more QVC than I was thinking content. I sent a stock guy to Best Buy to buy a camera. He came to my back. We set it up, and I went to go film my first episode. And literally, this is insane to think about because how profound it was, the red light goes on, and in that nanosecond, I was like, oh my god, I'm about to taste these three wines.

26:01I've never tasted them before they're supposed to be good but i'm not i can't tell the audience that it's good even though we're trying to sell it if i don't think it's good and just like in a nanosecond um look that that that show the wines were exceptional they were good but really that show blew up for me because i was literally tasting wine and telling the world not to buy wines that we were selling um I guess ultimately like I always think about like how people are always like how do you how do you be cool how do you be relevant how do you be cool you be cool like how do you win trust you be trustworthy like back to the point I made earlier I just intuitively felt it from the nanosecond even though I had a different intent when I filmed the first episode that I was there for the audience, not for my dad's liquor store.

26:58And I think brands need to realize that they have to bring value in their content, in their advertising. If everything is buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, you know, it's going to get very easy for them to tune you out. And so I think it's a value exchange when you're building brand, which is why humor works. You know, if you look at the history of commercials, humor's always over-indexed. It's why making you cry works. If it's emotional, you brought someone value. You took them to a place. And so I think most marketing infrastructures around the world are not bringing value with their output.

27:39And so for me, if you look at all my content, there isn't a piece of content that I've ever put out in my life that is what's in it for me. And I think the reason most influencers and creators never grow is they make content because they want the likes. They want the followers. They want the brand deals. They want you to think they're pretty or smart or cool. They're really not thinking about. And so it's why my content evolved from business tactics to a lot of mindset and perspective stuff. because I realize the most valuable thing is getting people out of their insecurities and getting to a place of building more self-esteem so they'll actually do something.

28:22So I basically can't think about making a piece of content without, why would somebody watch this? What's in it for them? And that is my framework. And that is an incredible foundation. That is also why you're very, very successful and authentic. so we've seen this shift in media we've continued to see both your brands grow tremendously how do you think about besides what the audience wants when you're trying to introduce something new how do you think about adoption? I mean for me and my companies I think about it through the framework of dictatorship tell us more You know, when I'm trying to get 5 ,000 employees across the six companies I'm most actively involved in, I push it down nicely.

29:14You know, it's nice dictatorship. But, you know, when you're pushing down something that is meaningfully offense and oftentimes really required to make sure your business continues to stay alive, you know, I'm passionate about it. I over-communicate with the company at scale to why. But I think where a lot of organizations fail is when they're executing something mission critical, they're not clear enough with their employees, and they're not emphatic enough in the speed in which they need to execute it, especially if you have more and more employees. So for me, I think about it as mission critical, and I treat it as such.

29:56I love that. I love that. That tops down mission critical. And speed is more important than ever. Yeah, and I think, listen, we're in a moment right now that's incredibly complicated. Yes. You know, the AI thing is big. And there's incredible amounts of fear at the employee level of, are we trying to implement, like, oh, you want me to implement this thing that's going to make me lose my job? And I think leaders are doing a very poor job overall being authentic with their employee base and are losing a lot of trust. seven months ago I got in front of all 3 ,000 employees at VaynerMedia, the marketing firm, and I said, listen, this AI thing is inevitable.