If You Want to Win at Marketing in 2026, Listen To This

0:00You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok. and you may not know exactly the platform nuances of all the things you can do with that reel. Are you using the filters? Are you using the add-ons? Where is the URL placed? There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy to make all of this work. Especially if you're good at running ads because the money hides the bad creative. You think you're doing well on your$39 CAC when if you did the creative strategy right, It's actually 16.

0:38Before you go to the podcast, I've got a big announcement. I know several years ago, a lot of you bought 12 books of 12 and a half to get the NFT, the Book Games NFT. I also know that a lot of people have dropped off on their journey with VFriends, which is a massive mistake because what we're doing on Burn Island and what we're doing on base with Book Games is remarkable. So you need to go to VEEFriends, VFriends.com slash old books. go to vfriends.com slash old books with an S you will go to that landing page and we will help you explain if you are trying to figure out where your NFTs are how to bring them over to the website and how to start activating them so that you can start using them for all the incredible exchanges and draws and raffles and experiences that we're doing for people that actually own the book games so please go to vfriends.com slash old books where you can start your journey on reactivating your book games journey.

1:37This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I think for me, the universal answer to any of these questions is grounded in very hardcore self-awareness. The reason I'm so big on patience is for a room like this, the thing that I always worry about is how healthy is their ambition and what is the fuel of their ambition? you know for me as i've gotten older i'm like oh the fuel of my ambition is like this beautiful mix of like gratitude and even like micro guilt that i had this perfect circumstance of mother immigrant upbringing it comes from such a place of like fuck i'm so happy and like whoa so many people aren't that like i'm like very inspired on a daily basis while i'm doing my thing to figure out ways to say something and change the perspective in some way that might help someone start to achieve more happiness.

2:39The other big revelation for me as I go through my journey is how many people's ambition is completely fueled by insecurity. And that's been really eye-opening for me that people want to show their parents that didn't do the right thing. The girl or the guy or the system or like the town they came, like, you know, or like. That's where a lot of ambition comes from, right? Yeah, and I actually think that's a problem. It's unhealthy, that's what you meant by unhealthy. It's not sustainable. Right. Right, it becomes not sustainable and then very honestly, when you're able to use that to amass dollars, money doesn't change you, money exposes you.

3:16So if you're in a bad place and you like wanted to prove everyone wrong and then you got the money, then you're gonna spend that money on dumb shit. and so you know my advice is you know it's really funny i don't think of myself as being in the advice business i understand what i do i i view myself in the here's observations and i'm hopeful that whether you completely agree with it or completely disagree with it that you're able to take it process it through your self-awareness and reality and see if you you can extract value from it, whether you wanna do it or completely run away from it, because boy oh boy, do I know a lot of people who make$47 ,000 a year that are really in solid places because they live a$38 ,000 a year lifestyle and they have a good sense of who they are and what makes them happy.

4:05And I know even more people who make$3 million a year, live a$4.9 million a year lifestyle, have no idea who they are or what makes them happy and are completely swirling out of control. What makes you happy? 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. What makes me happy is a couple things. On a selfless standpoint, Gary Vee makes me happy. You know, leaving an impact on the world makes me very happy. I am very aware, and I'm a young man.

4:40I'm 47 years old. I live a life where more than a thousand people a day reach out to me and say thank you for something that they didn't buy for me or I sold them and that feels incredible. So that feels unbelievable. Selfishly, I love spending time with friends and family. That's not selfish. Yeah, I mean, I think the things, fair enough, but I think the things that I love getting, I love my hobbies. I really love the escapism of rooting for a team that sucks. I enjoy, like I really love garage sailing. I'm not kidding. It's amazing to me like how excited I am that it's like early March because I'm like, couple more weeks.

5:28You know, so silly things like that. Probably the thing I enjoy the most is like, and I've done this since I was a 10 year old child, I'm really good at doing what I want to do. The reason I got D's and F's was I wasn't even willing to put in the minimal effort to get C's and B's because I was like, fuck this. I'm really good at having pure conviction but I'm willing to deal with the ramifications of my conviction. I think I'm very good at respecting the game more than wanting what I want. So I love entrepreneurship because I micro-lose all the time and I love that. So I'm just very grateful that I get to do what I get to do and then I think what makes me happy is the luck of the draw of being the first born to very young parents.

6:21I'm 47, my parents are 69 and 67 so just very grateful for that. Yeah, just like, you know it's funny, I do a lot of things professionally. I'm a very high energy dude. I put out all sorts of content, I get it but I'm extremely simple, like wildly simple. Love it, love it, great answer. so I've seen the garage sale thing and I always thought that was really interesting I remember going to garage sales as a kid myself is that where you think you maybe got the love from did you go to garage sales as a kid? I did that happened because there was a time and place where my content was like hey you know I worked for 12 years in my dad's liquor store I never made a lot of money but I lived within my means so I was able to have some savings and then Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr came along and I invested that money into it and you can too and then I started getting emails like fuck you I don't$25 ,000 to invest in a startup and I was like and I started getting enough of that that I was like that's good fine I'll just go further back in my journey and I'll show you what I did when I had zero dollars and zero cents and like I woke up at six o 'clock in the morning on a Saturday and went garage selling especially when eBay first came out there was a supply no different than the way I talk about social media creative which is like when there's a new platform that has enough attention on it there's not enough content for it so if you go there heavily and aggressively and you post organically you're going to get a lot more organic reach for no cost and that's a land grab of attention and that runs all the time between paid and organic and because social is where so much of society is playing out this is very important well the same thing happened with internet 1.0 so few people knew what was going on on eBay, there was more people searching for stuff to buy because it was the first time collectors in the late 90s could find Pez dispensers or video games or comic books, not going to a big show or a store, but there wasn't as many people listing them.

8:24So everything was super valuable. Like you literally could make a thousand dollars garage selling with 80 bucks every single Saturday if you were willing to put in the work. Obviously that market evolved, but it's still very true. I still believe to this day that the easiest, aka hard, but easier than other things, that the biggest opportunity for somebody who has$500 to their name is to buy and sell things in the arbitrage of the way society works between Poshmark and a thrift store and Craigslist and a garage sale and a pawn shop and eBay. And so I got motivated to make that content to help people.

9:04And like now it's super fun because my profile's grown, that content's done well. So now when I garage sale, 10 people that are actively garage selling as well somewhere in New Jersey roll up on me and tell me their stories. And it's really, yeah, I learned a lot in garage sales. I learned more in baseball cards shows, I would say. But then I started working for my dad's liquor store when I was 14. And just watching customers behind the register is definitely, watching customers that, you know, flea markets, watching customers at baseball card shows, watching customers in a liquor store, really framed up my intuitive and skill around following attention and understanding what to put in front of it.

9:49Great. Great answer. And leads right to the next question. So a lot of us in here, we run a lot of Facebook ads, Google ads, very familiar with social media. And one of the things that we know about you is that you've been very, very good at knowing the up and coming platforms kind of before pretty much everyone else. So what would you say is, are the up and coming platforms currently besides, you know, Instagram and TikTok, where currently you get a lot of organic reach? What would be kind of your advice beyond that? So Instagram is actually not doing well with organic reach. I'm sure a lot of people are feeling that.

10:20And TikTok is still doing well, but Jesus Christ, if all of you listened four and a half years ago when I was yelling at the top of my lungs, you could be below average and dominate um facebook reels is crushing everybody here should get very aggressive with facebook reels so much attention on that so many people actually on that my fastest growing audience on facebook fan page on my proper facebook is 18 to 25 which is completely mind-boggling um so i think facebook is probably the thing that most people are underestimating here linkedin is such a massive opportunity even for consumer goods if you're selling purses and orange and you know anything like it's not just business.

11:02That's a feed that has a lot more attention. YouTube Shorts, if you title your videos very smartly, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. That has incredible long tail potential. You might make a video today that might crush on search three and a half years from now in YouTube Shorts and be a big driver. So YouTube Shorts is another place. Twitter ads, if you put the URL or the call to action in the copy is a massive arbitrage right now because a lot of advertisers have run away from Twitter as a political statement, which has created a supply and demand opportunity. Those really stand out for me right now, but they all require something that we call, I call at VaynerPack, platform and culture.

11:51You know, everything I just said is right, but many people here will go home, especially a crew like this, and actually do something about it. And it may not work because you're not winning on pack. You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok. And you may not know exactly the platform nuances of all the things you can do with that reel. Are you using the filters? Are you using the add-ons? Where is the URL placed? There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy to make all of this work.

12:30Especially if you're good at running ads because the money hides the bad creative. You think you're doing well on your$39 CAC when if you did the creative strategy right, it's actually 16. And there's a big fucking difference between 16 and 39. Especially at scale. Absolutely. Love it. the C in culture is very important. I kind of talked about the P. The C is, do you know what's happening in society? Like, do you know two years ago that mom genes are gonna start trending with young women? Do you know that like XYZ is happening or protein this or, you know, which rappers are doing well or what couples in Hollywood are doing X or what's the sneaker culture?

13:13Or, you know, do you understand that health and wellness brands need to be outrageously clean to even be considered by somebody under 25 and da, da, da, da, da, da. Do you understand what's happening in popular culture? Do you think that's a really important thing to kind of tailor your content basically to popular culture? I think it's a massive misstep of most people that they're not taking advantage of the emotion behind popular culture and integrating it into the reality. Look at how I popped. Wine Library TV is how I hit the scene. You know, 17 years ago, I did a wine show on YouTube the day YouTube basically came out six months later.

13:51And I did a wine show and I tasted wine. But why did it work? It worked because while I was doing the wine tasting, I was referencing what was happening in the world of that day. And so if you think about drive time radio, if you think about daytime television, if you think about things that are, you know, shock jocks or podcasts or social media, like if you make it relevant, people are not winning on relevance. People are trying to sell shit. instead of build emotion. And popular culture is one of the pillars of our emotion. Human truths and popular culture. Love it, love it. What do you think about the current state of AI?

14:32I think a lot about it. I think it's an inevitable train that will become oxygen in the way we live. Humans will always become more efficient. I think that people are going to make a lot of emotional decisions about it and make missteps because of it. They're scared of it because it's hurting their business in the short term. They become too altruistic and think it's taking people's jobs away and don't realize that then they should throw away their iPhone because that took people's jobs away. You know, I think there's a lot to it. But I think that there are going to be enormous amounts of tasks and things that are done in our society today inefficiently by human beings that will be done by artificial intelligence.

15:17And then those humans and we as humans will learn from that. Other things will be created from that. And we will adjust to that reality. It's an enormously big invention. and I'm just worried that too many people are putting their head in the sand out of ideology and fear. One of the things that I'm fascinated by is humans' capacity to think humans are bad at scale. This is where media and information and the way the world works fascinates me. Humans are stunningly amazing. Of the eight billion people that roam this earth, it is stunning how many are remarkable, to at least neutral. Yet we are infatuated with paying attention to the 1 % of the 1 % of the 1 % that are not.

16:08And so I'm very optimistic about human beings. I mean, do I think the robots eventually win and kill us? Maybe, but that's just not something that I can spend a whole lot of energy on. That's gonna happen one way or another. Right, it's either gonna happen or it's not. So do you, kind of on that topic, you know, Neuralink and other stuff like it, I can either see you being one of the first to jump into that or one of the last. Where do you think you're gonna land there? I'm not educated enough on Neuralink. Are you talking about like me turning into a robot? Yeah, well, I guess sort of. It's where they can put a microchip in your brain and you can essentially access the internet and whatever.

16:46Yeah, I think to your point, I feel like, you know, it's funny, it's the same thing I talk about with like Gary, you're always so da-da-da. I'm like, I'm not predicting shit. I'm just a very fast mover. once I see shit. With something like that, I think I would need to see a couple of hundred to 10 ,000 people there. But my one friend said, I'll never do that. It's gonna give me cancer. I'm like, your cell phone's not. I always think about the people who are completely confused about cigarettes back in the day and we're all like, these fucking idiots. And then I'm watching us put earpods in and the phone to the brain and I'm just like, fuck.

17:23Like, you know, in 20, 30 years, is everyone just gonna be in a really bad spot? And are the kids that are born tomorrow gonna laugh at us of like, how didn't we know that putting like, hardcore technology into our head 24 seven was not gonna be a problem? So like, before I worry about robots killing us, I try to pay attention to today. And so, that's where I'm at. All right, let's take some questions from the crowd now. Raise your hand if you have a question and then let's run the mic over. How are you? How are you, sir? Good, my friend. How are you? Good. You talked a few times.

18:02So I'm still pretty green, I guess, compared to people in this room. And I think we're doing a lot of things right. I don't think we're doing much wrong, but the question I have is, how do we do things better? Like, if you're at the lifting weights, you know, you can lift them this way, or you can improve your form and actually grow. So you're doing it anyway, are you doing it right? And in the sense of, it's the point now where I'm like, we have 16 full-time staff members in house, we have 50 people in the field doing contractor work. And essentially, how do we know what our next hire is? Who are we missing right now?

18:40And it's a big question, but like, how do you fuck it up? It's very broad, let's narrow it down. what are you most intuitively feeling isn't going well? I feel we're missing the mark on a lot of stuff where I know that our organic content is good. I had to take a little bit of a step back last year. We're getting back to really pressing forward, full steam ahead. We have a good staff for media. They're real creative. We have a lot of good stuff. They're very organic. We're not doing much paid ads. Why? Why not so much paid ads? That's what I'm saying. Who do we get when we move forward with that?

19:20It's not my forte. I'm going to create it. I've got 20 people in this room that have ad agencies. You're good to go. I'm sure you're going to get, if that's true, you're going to get swarmed. Here's what I would say. You know, the reason I jumped on that is paid is scale when it's right. You can waste money in paid. you can waste money in organic. But paid has an incredible amount of scale behind it if done right. And so that's definitely an area. It's back to lifting. Of course there's form and we just talked about that in the whole pack and sock, strategic organic content platform and culture strategy.

20:02The content can get better. I would call that form. But it's also about using every platform. So like, you know those dudes that are like super fucking huge up here and have like fucking stick legs, they're not doing leg day. If you're not doing YouTube shorts, if you're not doing LinkedIn, if you're not doing Twitter, if you're not doing Facebook and TikTok and TikTok stories within TikTok and live on Instagram, not just posts, if you're not doing them all, well then you're not working all your muscles. Is there an easy way to do that? Well, easy-ish way to do that? Not having to have like a team of guys I follow you around filming and cutting video because it's very hard for most of us to do.

20:44It's only hard mentally. You just haven't decided that's the most important thing your business does. Would you say that is the most important thing for most people? It is the most important thing. It is. Of course. Oh, wow. Creating demand and consideration for your business is always the most important thing. Always. If you are able to grow top line revenue in perpetuity, you always have the ability to fix ops and costs. if you don't, you can die. So it's actually very easy. Every single person, if you told me everybody here does from one million to a hundred million in revenue, it's super easy.

21:22They're just taking too much money home to buy things. Yeah, we all can do it. I guess we didn't know the importance of it really. Yeah, I think that becomes a thing. It's just very simple. And this goes back to the first question. The most important thing might be to sell your business and go sailing. It might be. but if we're talking next level like you're in business and you're about that life well I would argue there's nothing one can tell me here that is going to get me more excited than having them completely commit to creating demand it's very hard for me to think even if you're inefficient a lot of people when they're inefficient spend all their time on defense you know this is going to be a very nerdy sports reference but there used to be a late 80s basketball team called Loyola Marymount and they used to beat teams like 179 to 157.

22:10It was like wild. This is an era of like 80 point games, 50 point games. And I've always stuck with that. I'm like, damn, that's how I do business. I'm gonna win 179 to 154. And so, yeah, I think to your point, I think way too many people in this room think it's a nice to have, it's one of the things. It's very clear to me that most people don't understand it's the thing. And I think once you decide it's the thing, you start realizing how much more money you can put against it, more time you can put against it. Yeah, this just goes back down to like, where is your actual ambition? It's the thing.

22:48I think that's great. Let's get a few more questions in here. One quick follow-up. How do you know who the next hire in your organization is? When is it time to have a CFO? Is that the right next hire? Who is the next person? Yeah, you really, for me, it's always, what is the biggest pain point? and what am I spending the most time on that I don't want to be doing? What am I spending the most time on that I don't want to be doing is the next hire. So I've never posted a Facebook reel ever, but I will today before I leave you. But so this is also one thing, got it. How do we do it to all the channels at once?

23:25There's nothing more that I hate watching a reel or something and all the text is at the bottom, right? So sometimes the text is at the top, sometimes it's at the bottom or whatever. Is there a certain tool that you like or something to get across those platforms because we probably should post organically to every single one versus using Hootsuite or something like that? Yeah, I think that's right. I like people. That's the tool. You know, I just think it's a commitment of time and people. People.io or people? Humans. You know, I really think we need to make a bigger commitment to humans. Yeah, look, I mean, again, if this was all first day I'm starting my journey, I'd have to talk about what you're gonna do about it.

24:06But again, if I'm hearing this right, one to a hundred million in revenue, you need to take less money off the table and put it into people to do social media content at scale and run ads. And to maximize the efficiency, you need to audit every person you have and what they actually do for your business. And most of all, you need to audit yourself. There's not a person in this room, me included, that doesn't have meetings on their calendar next week that are double too long. And most of my meetings are 15 minutes. That's double too long. Like the amount of big shots in this room who take 90 minute meetings that are actually seven minutes worth of meeting is staggering.

24:50I'm with you there. Meetings are killing you. Absolutely killing you. Hey Gary, question for you. What's been your most rewarding and most challenging this is the center of why? Most rewarding was building my dad's business for him. And it was the most challenging. The first 12 years of my career are the most interesting of my career. To be 22 and have so much confidence and passion and ambition and be able to go into a mental place that you're gonna spend the next decade or two building a business for not yourself. Even if it's your dad, it's not for yourself and be grossly undercompensated the whole time and work in a retail environment six or seven days a week for 13 to 17 hours a day was just like, you know that, you know Rocky IV?

25:45Do you know that movie Rocky IV? You know how he gets ready for Drago and he's like in the snow with the fucking log on his back and just like doing that shit? I just basically did that for 12 years. Like it was just such a fucking like I'm gonna turn off everything and just go to the woods and disappear for 12 years. And it's just super rewarding because I really wanted to do that for my parents. But it also meant that at 34, I basically had zero money. And that required a level of conviction and humility that has serviced me really well. A lot of people, when they really know my story, like the actual people that watched it from my teenage years, they're flabbergasted by the level of growth from 34 to 47 the last 13 years.

26:33And for me, when I think about it, I'm like, it was just the training. You know, I was in such a like fucking crazy mental place that once I had freedom to do it for myself, I just went so hard and so creative. And so it was super rewarding, but incredibly challenging because especially as I got into my late 20s, early 30s, like when I went to go buy an apartment and they laughed me out of the bank because they're like, you don't have anything. I'm like, right, I don't have anything. I'm like, I don't own shit. I have no money. I'm like thinking, like, you know, I just took a business from three to 75 billion.

27:09I'm like fucking really good. And they're like, this is cute, but you don't own anything. You have nothing. I'm like, I remember walking out of there. I was like pumped. I was like, yeah, I have nothing. You know, like, like it was, it was really motivating in a weird way. And so, you know, that was hard and this is why I make so much content about patience. Listening to these fuckers at 27 who are like you fucking asshole I was making$63 ,000 a year at 27 working in a fucking liquor store. You're way ahead of me. Stop crying and figure this out.

27:46Ashton Shankin over here. Young agency on earth we grew really fast. We had 45 people with a computer this year. I'm very curious if you built a machine and VaynerMedia, what are some of the pivotal decisions that you made that really deeply impacted how VaynerMedia is worth this today? Trying to make no profit for as long as possible. So now I'm gonna really fucking give you a brain twist after what I just said to him. So now I have no money and I start a new business and I decide to make no money. Right? So Vayner started in 2009. First two years, AJ really ran it. I still had to run the business plus I wrote Crush It.

28:25and the Gary Vee thing started happening. So we did 1.3 million the first year, 3.7 the next year. And then I came full time, and we went from 3.7 to 14, and from 14 to 27, from 27 to 49. And the whole time, we poured all the money back into business and paid each other$100 ,000. The pivotal decision was feeding the business, not my ego or my bank account or my vices.

28:56All right, so we have time for one more quick question then we gotta move to the meet and greet portion there. Spank. How are you, Gary? Good, brother. You know, you watched the obviously growth of my business since we had dinner together this year ago. We had a really profound growth at scale. January and February of this year, we've seen 23 % slide of our MRR because of tools like AI. Makes sense. Trying to figure out, and I'm not scared of AI. I embrace it. I love this shit. It's fucking amazing. Trying to figure out how to pivot the business now so that the clients who think that AI is going to magically do a better job than a human who understands emotion and context gets us to stop this shit because we have six more months of this and we're about to have business.