How to Win on Relevance in a Modern Market

0:00The only way to grow a business in 2026 is to win on relevance with as many different consumer segmentations as you possibly can. And the only way to do that is to drive down the cost of creative, create a process that actually measures creative, and stop wasting working media dollars on dumb shit. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Okay, so there's a lot to cover. I think the thing that really drives me in these last 15 years of running this agency and working with such substantial companies is the stunning lack of common sense. That, and I mean this, the stunning lack of common sense that comes into the boardroom that I thought about 15 years ago.

0:58I remember my first couple meetings when I started the company, I called my mom. I'm like, Mom, I'm a genius. And then I realized about six months in, I wasn't a genius that employees of large corporations had to abide by scoring systems that oftentimes were not correlated to the truth of what was happening in the market. I stand here today, warm welcome, the good vibes you're all giving me on the back of having the great luxury of the last, really, even though I'm 50, I've kind of been in business for 40 years of my life because I was a kid that did sports card shows in the malls of New Jersey and worked in a retail liquor store when I was 14, 15 years old.

1:43I've never had any North Star that looked like a brand lift study or an MMM or a can lion or reports or worst of all, the subjective opinion of my boss.

2:03This is going to be a good session.

2:07You know, I've always had the luxury of the way my life played out that there was only one judge and jury, which was the consumer. So we built a very large agency over the last 14 years and it's because when we're fortunate enough to work with someone like yourselves, I do not think of you as the customer. I think of your customer as the customer. And I'm willing to lose you as a customer than to compromise on some corporate bull crap to justify us sticking around. I have no interest in whining and dining and playing on politics or relationships or fake proxies or adage saying that the video was good or a canned lion, I am a businessman who happens to love marketing because marketing is the offense of a business, right?

2:56Now, marketing is the offense of a business, yet there are businesses, much like many that are represented here, where you're really a sales organization, not a marketing organization. And that's cool. I love B2B. In fact, it's really cool to be here. me and my agency have disproportionately been the loudest advocate publicly over the last seven or eight years of how remarkable LinkedIn is as a marketing platform. It scares me to my bone how much opportunity there is for many of the business units here that do B2B work on LinkedIn. You own LinkedIn and you don't do it.

3:39So, yeah, I guess that's it. See you later.

3:46Let's talk about a lot of different things that are kind of framed up in that opening. One, our industry is riddled, from a marketing standpoint, with spending an extraordinary amount of money on guessing an idea, and then spending even more money distributing it into the world in places where people don't see it. Right? Our currency, the way I'm sure, and I have not looked under the hood, but I've been around long enough. The way your media infrastructure in this company is structured, you are buying potential reach, not actualized reach. We must talk about this. So many of the metrics that you are scored on, GRPs, impressions, my opening line, your common sense as human beings, you all know, it's not actually being seen.

4:35But our reporting is structured that way and so you're stuck in acting that way. And this is something that keeps me up at night, which is, at what point is our industry, Fortune 500 land, going to get to a place where, as a corporation, there's a staggering amount of talent that I'm looking at right now that isn't able to actually bring their talents to the table. because you're reverse engineering into the reports that are fake versus using your actual human strategy that you know is true.

5:15You feeling it? You feeling this? You know what the best part is? And I love you for that. That felt very good. I feel like a reverend. Can I get a hallelujah?

5:31Again, back to that joke I made about the phone call I made to my mom, which I made, and you all know it. So where, what, how? Like, we must get out of this rhythm. And here, I'm gonna go very human with you real quick. Here's my biggest concern. Because the company's the company, and this is a remarkable company, you know, I'm 50 and grew up in a tech kind of way. You can imagine how I feel about this company. It's very legendary to me. And I really am very proud of the company. I think the last decade has been really fruitful and leadership has done a really good job. It's been very impressive on so many fronts.

6:06But I'm actually more worried about the human beings that are sitting in this room. We are going through one of the most substantial revolutions in technology history. You all know that, right? You're at the forefront with seven or eight other super scalers of creating this technology, but you are the humans within it that might be affected by the thing you're making, right? What I'm concerned about is not even the intensity of what AI means. I'm just worried about that the gig is starting to be up in marketing. Meaning, I spend so much of my time with the biggest private equity firms in the world and board members of companies that look like this and their temperament towards CMOs and marketers is not in a good place.

6:53I probably spend more than five hours a week between two and seven meetings a week at this point in my career where board members, CEOs, CFOs, activist investors, private equity firms just rail on their complete shock at how bad marketing is and they don't understand a word that's coming out of the CMO's mouth. That day of reckoning is coming. I've been talking about this for 20 years publicly. I've only been talking to the real decision makers about this in the last 12 to 18 months. I know the walls are closing in. My concern is that many of you know actually what's going on, what to actually do, but you're keeping your mouth shut because you're in a corporate environment and my point of view on life is it's so much more fun to die on your own sword than to die on someone else's and I believe we're going into the half decade.

7:55How many people in here are marketers? Raise your hands. Raise it high, please. Don't be sad. I'm a marketer. Everybody who just raised their hands, I think we're going into the five-year window where there's going to be substantial change. And I don't want anyone who just raised their hands to be penalized to being on the wrong side of history because that's how you show up on your Microsoft Teams or in the office, but not what you actually think. and I came here in a very real way with the hopes that one of you is hearing me and you have the courage. I'm lucky. I own my own company. I do not have a board.

8:35I have no interest in selling my company. It's not public. So when I do things and it doesn't work out, I just yell at myself in the mirror. You, I have empathy for it. I am able to be aggressive in boardrooms and in meetings. but you can respectfully and calmly without undermining your boss or hurting feelings communicate why you don't think buying programmatic banner ads is going to move the business or why you think buying a television commercial for the kind of money it is is asinine when you're trying to reach a B2B audience and I know you paid a big fee for some sort of thing for the 30 second thing but no one on earth gives a crap about it.

9:22So I think you need to start doing that. Because what's happening in the next five years in our industry is going to address that. So now that we've laid that foundation down, let me tell you what I think. Let me tell you what I think is the biggest opportunity for the room, I'll start with B2B because it represents so much. There is something that I believe has formed in the last three to four years called the mid funnel. The mid funnel that I and our organization defines is organic social media creative. Organic. Creative that is posted and does not have media support tied to it up front. In this room, it is shocking how important LinkedIn, Twitter X, Substack, and Beehive are.

10:10The opportunity is extraordinary. Given the size and scale of a B2B conversion, it only takes one remarkable piece of creative to really change the calculus and make it ROI positive. The key, though, is most organizations, because we come from a television history, and honestly, every other medium, outdoor, direct mail, we come from a place where we think in working media terms along with the creative. I would argue that for the last 70, 80 years in marketing, that working media dollars have been used to hide bad creative. And I believe we are going into the era, we are in it now, and I'd like to get you fully in it as quickly as possible because it will be good for your business, of the era where working media will be used to amplify good creative.

11:04Good creative is no longer going to be judged by the most senior people in this room, by a fake focus group, by some bullcrap technology that measures creative. It is being decided by the views achieved when you post it in social. Why? Here's why. Somewhere about four to five years ago, we left social media. I would argue that social media itself is dead as we all grew up and knew it. I believe we are now in interest media. As all of you know, when you open your app of choice in this room and you go on social, you are now currently seeing content that is relevant to you of what you're into right now.

11:50You're no longer getting your weird cousin's post, not your friend from high school, not somebody or account that you used to be into. You're getting content that is mapping to what you're currently paying attention to. I know you all have political points of view on all of this. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a second. This is very important. Here's why. That algorithm from LinkedIn to Snapchat Spotlight to Twitter X to Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and YouTube Shorts, all of them over the last four years, those algos have been written more and more and more towards relevance.

12:33If you're a marketer in here, and many things have changed, but what has not changed is that relevance leads to consideration, leads to purchase. For the first time in the history of marketing, the platforms that we are marketing on are aligned in our interest. In 1992, if Microsoft made a bad television commercial, creative-wise, CBS and ABC and ESPN could give a crap. So would the Wall Street Journal. So would Bloomberg Magazine. So would Westwood One Radio. So is the United States Postal Service. They could care less what the creative was. They wanted your money. The platforms that we love to razz, because you know in society we've gotten very good at blaming everybody but ourselves, those platforms for us in business are actually fully aligned with our business objectives.

13:33LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack want to keep all of us on their platform for as long as humanly possible. They are writing to keep us on. They will show people more and more, and this will continue over the next three, four years, more and more, they will show you what you want to see with the hopes that you stay on. When we make creative that is relevant to that developer, that CIO, the CTO, procurement, CFO, CEO, when we make content creative that is actually relevant and conducive to the platform we're creating on, contextually in format, and maybe even in texture of culture, that creative has a high propensity to reach that audience.

14:18For the first time ever in marketing, creative is creating the reach. This is incredibly important and has never existed before. the first time I saw it actually was in 2010 I was an early investor in Tumblr you guys remember Tumblr? in fact if I was making videos back then it'd be one of my worst videos I called my brother after I invested in it I said bro I just invested in a company that's going to be bigger than Facebook and Twitter combined and the reason I was so excited about Tumblr was it was the first time I saw a platform that was based on interest not on social and I was in a really funny age when the social media exploded I was in my early 30s I had already just lived through the high school college transition where you knew by your late 20s 30s your social graph was changing and so the theory of followers and I just also back to my back story I grew up on email marketing so social made sense to me very quickly because it was a different version of email marketing how many people here have done email marketing in their career raise your hands just raise it hi just want to see there's some youngsters in here let me watch this in 1997 97, in 97, I had 100 ,000 people on a wine email newsletter and had 92 % open rates.

15:37And I bring that up because I'm going to tie that together. It wasn't because I was a genius. It was how many people over 48 in this room? Raise your hands. Friends, can you tell the neighbor next to you? Us, 48 and older, back in the late 90s, we read every single email word for word.

16:01We still thought it was the post office. Us marketers hadn't ruined email yet. It's what we do. We ruin everything. I'm proud of it. So the reason I bring that up is I was affected. I built my dad's liquor store with no money in five minutes from three to 65 million in revenue on email and Google AdWords. The day Google AdWords came out, I bought every wine term you could ever imagine, including the word wine, all the way down to Leonetti Cabernet 1997 at the time for five cents a click. There is always an underpriced arbitrage in marketing. Procter & Gamble today, in 2026, is still one of, if not the biggest consumer packaged goods company, and they outspent everyone in the early 60s on television when television was underpriced and the OGs still believed in radio and print.

17:06Amazon, your neighbor, was the leading advertiser on Google AdWords in the first five years by 5X. Number two was eBay. They're still here today. There's always an underpriced marketing behavior, especially when big corporations spend all their money on yesterday's reports. Today's disproportionate opportunity and underpriced marketing behavior, the ones that build consumer brands like Liquid Death and Poppy and all the things you know is happening in organic social first as the starting point to the marketing mix. The starting point. Any business unit, if I sat down with you right now, tell me what you're trying to accomplish, create 20 to 30 consumer segmentations based on that.

17:56Gender, race, income level. I'm talking about the B2B people. Who they are as humans. Interests, create those segmentations and literally go directly into creative production and start making pictures, videos, written word to try to win on relevance with them. Post it across the seven to 10 platforms for consumer, Xbox, others, B2B, 3, 4, 5, a little different, but you can still play a little bit. And then watch if the creative was actually relevant on quant and qual to who you're trying to reach. And then when there's been true validation of creative, the creative has earned the right to get working media dollars.

18:46This is the underpriced behavior of today. This is called common sense if you have a half a brain. This is what zero corporations in the Fortune 500 set are doing today. And so that is the opportunity. That's what excites me at the end of the day. Now, there's levels to the game. For example, one thing that really excites me, which is on the complete opposite side of modern AI technology all the way over here is analog experiential marketing. Now let me tell you why. I am obsessed with this company's ability to scale, but tweak strategically its experiential marketing. Experiential is interesting to me because I no longer view any experiential event, a B2B conference like CES, all the way to sponsoring a Seahawks thing that you do outside.

19:47None of them, to me, is now an experiential event. It is a production day for social creative. That happens to be an experiential event. When we do it at our agency, and we take it over from an experiential agency, even the creative of the event is with the thought of what it's going to look like in social. How do we make it dynamic? Let's build a 10-story Xbox Xbox, because that will be insane. Obviously, we could do that in AI for like a dollar, but we'll talk about that later. And then how do we treat that day? You know, you're doing this, I heard over dinner, you're doing this AI tour around the world.

20:31Every minute should be filmed. Everything should be post-produced. Now, the key is post-producing that content, whether it's experiential or it's us working together on net new assets. putting executives out in front, which we need to get into on X or on podcasts. The key to the game today, the ultimate skill in the modern underpriced marketing game is what is called a vetitor, a views editor. This is a human that has the ability to understand what the difference is between LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts, two unbelievably important platforms for all of you. YouTube Shorts, because it is feeding Gemini's LLM and will show up in AEO and GEO for every business unit here and no one is lost on what the consumer behavior is going to be with Agentic AI.

21:31And obviously you've got Copile on your own thing, but Gemini will have plenty of market share and they will wall guard in it, meaning they will take their content from YouTube and Shorts as much as possible to sucker us all into making content there. the key is a views editor because this is a human being that understands at all times what the algorithms are favoring. We call this internally hack. Platforms, algorithms and culture. I'll give you LinkedIn. LinkedIn right now is favoring images over video by comparison to just three months ago. Six months ago, you could put up a crappy video on LinkedIn and it would get views because they were favoring video because they wanted to stand it up and learn the data.

22:22And then over time, once the platforms are shifting to what they need to do, then the merit of the creative really takes over. But in moments, at all moments, there's opportunity to figure out, is it this long, is it that long? Is it a carousel ad? If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see that I'm doing picture then video second often. I'm not doing that for fun.

22:47This company has to become remarkable at understanding what content, on what platform, in what way, post-production to maximize organic views is religion. And it is a real skill. We have 100 employees at my cockamanian small agency who spend their entire life understanding what nine platforms algorithms are doing? How many does Microsoft have doing that? These are the questions that keep me up at night and excite me. This mid-funnel is extraordinary. It's important. And if you really get into the philosophy, you'll understand why CFOs love our model more than CMOs. The amount of money that is saved when you stop spending working media dollars against creative that no one cares about is extraordinary.

23:40In fact, this universe is going to change the marketing mix. The working, non-working dollars are going to shift because of that. Our most progressive clients have literally gone from 85-15, 80-20, working, non-working, to two of our most progressive clients who've been on a three-year journey are getting dangerously close to 50-50. Because what you start working on, friends, I don't know who here is and pays attention to this part of the marketing procurement or I don't know exactly who's watching at home. We start working on effectiveness, not efficiency. We stop rewarding our media agencies for cheaper CPMs for efficiency.

24:25I don't know if you know this. In real life, when you go outside, when you pay less for stuff, it's usually crappier.

24:35Yet we've become obsessed in marketing to pay less for our CPMs. Do you have any idea what media you're buying? The black box of these things showing up at 3.43 in the morning on the oxygen network?

24:55But you're pumped at home because your CPMs hit and you're bonusing and incentivizing in your media agency on efficiency, which is a slang term for really, really, really crappy media. And so that's the stuff I'm thinking about. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy.

25:26Let me tell you how the mid-funnel works. Let's just go very, very example-oriented. We're trying to reach a developer to use our cloud computing or some other product or an enterprise to switch to Outlook or something of that nature or our suites. You put out the content. We normally, because of what we do in a B2B environment, we normally get 500 views on our videos. Just who we are. We're not Alex Earl or Mr. Beast. We normally get 500 views. This piece of content, because we keep looking at the qual and quant of the content we make every day and the machine gets smarter. You know, you start posting 12, 13, 14 pieces of content a day.

26:04You start getting really interesting data. You start getting smarter. Makes sense, right? The more you put out, the more context, the more quant, the more qual, your next piece of content can get better. Now you put out something that got 47 ,000 views. When you take that piece of creative and you send it from the mid funnel to the lower funnel and you take that creative that got 47 ,000 views, You add a slight tweak of performance to it. We call it brand-formance, right? You're putting brand content in the mid-funnel, but it did well, you're taking it lower, you're giving it a call to action, a phone number, an email to a salesperson, whatever call to action you want, and you run media against that, when that out-tacks, and out LTB and ROASs, your best AB practices, the entire organization starts to change its tone and tenor.

26:52and that is exactly what's happening at scale. When you also take that video and you take it up to brand, whether you use that video as the brief to a campaign or that video itself becomes the campaign versus guessing on a big campaign, you can see why the midfunnels flexibility really changes the calculus. A couple other little things I'll talk about before we do a little Q &A or whatever we're gonna do here. One, podcasts, Twitter X, LinkedIn, Beehive, Substack, these are the weapons of choice for the executives in this room. The firepower of the engineers, of the product people. Just the sheer brilliance of humanity on these products that sits in this organization that has not been utilized is a humongous miss.

27:57Now, I get it. There's corporate comms, there's fear, I get all that stuff. And let's call a spade a spade. Some of these engineers should not be on video.