POV: You're An Intern At VaynerMedia & I'm Sharing My Social Media Marketing Playbook | GaryVee Q&A

0:00Hi, hi, hi, hi. Let me see, this will be better, I think. Hi, everybody. What's up, Gary? Hi, hi, hi. In person? Love it. Gary, thanks for joining us. I just kind of gave everybody this spiel. I know you love the Q &A portion. I'll give you the floor, and I ask everybody to kind of think of questions they want to ask. Great. Introduce yourself. And real quick, I think Olivia and Lee, I think some of you are actually in the building. I couldn't recommend for you to come to the Empathy Elephant Conference Room more. So if you're in the building, please head over. All right, Zhang, thank you. Great to see you as always.

0:39How's your fantasy baseball starting off? It's good. Thanks for asking. Happy draft yesterday. I'm in first place for Dallas. All right, good. Hey, everybody. Great to see you all here. Hi. All right. Gary, I think the one thing that might be helpful, and Urs asked a couple questions last week from the All Hearts about the elephant meetings. there's been a little bit of just thoughts in general about how should residents think about when it's time to have an elephant meeting. Obviously, it's a little bit of a more newborns conversation with their positioning on their team, still trying to get to know everything.

1:11Yeah, I would say to kick that off, I mean, look, I'm struggling to get SVPs who are 40 years old and have had 20-year careers to call elephant meetings. so you know let there be no confusion there is 0.0 expectation that you're going to drive an elephant meeting you know that being said I think it's incredibly powerful for you to practice in your career there is a gracious humble way to to maybe raise your hand if you're in a meeting where you can hear that the client's not going the way we're going and maybe you ask in your slack or for your direct report or Zhang or like, hey, I think XYZ is not doing what I think Gary's saying where we want to do.

2:00You know, how do we go about it? So, you know, I think that's how I think about that, Zhang. Appreciate it, appreciate it. Okay, guys, raise your hands. Yeah, raise your hands on screen. There we go. Ariana. Hi. Hi. I'm Ariana. I'm resident on the 2BT in L. Amazing. And I saw your LinkedIn post about AI. And AI will recruit you for kind of doing a robotic job if you're not creating a new thing, like creative thinking. So my question is, like, in relation to media, what do you think the future of, like, AI in that space looks like? And as someone, what skills can I kind of up-level in to make sure I'm well-positioned in the next few years?

2:44Everything that AI will do is force more value on thinking and less value on commodity executing. To become great at media, I believe it's based on the biggest thing that I'm pushing as we go into this next chapter with media. I believe my relationship with our media department is really interesting because a lot of things that the media department currently believes, I don't believe in. because they are forced to believe it because the way the client measures awareness is based on potential views, not actualized views. That I believe a lot of you, even given the head nods in here now, that if your life depended on it, you would not buy programmatic trade desk, garbage digital inventory with ugly banners and pre-rolls to sell a thing.

3:35I think what's gonna happen is that AI is gonna force everyone to realize it's the thinking, whether that's creative or whether that's strategic that all the value in the world is about to go to thinkers. This is why school is such a bad framework. This is why I've always challenged school so much. School, which all of you are so close to at this point in your life, I don't think anything is lost on this with any of you. You're not being rewarded to critically think or to be creative. You've been taught your whole life in school to do something that AI is now gonna do. It's really true. Like what?

4:15Like you were taught to memorize facts? I can get the facts in a second. You were taught math? I can do math in a second. All of the value in the world is headed towards creativity and strategic thinking. So if you're in media, AZ, do you know where attention's shifting? Right? Like for example, people are like, Gary, what about Reddit? I'm like, Reddit doesn't have good ads. I love Reddit, but I don't like what we can buy on Reddit. It's not gonna do anything. I'm aware that people go to ESPN.com. I'm sure you looked at your brackets to see if you're gonna win anything. I get that you go there.

4:56Raise your hands. You've never clicked the banner ad on purpose. Raise your hands. That's it. I just want you to know our industry, the industry you're doing this with, spends more working media dollars on banner ads than social media. Are you fucking kidding me? So I think AZ, it comes down to are you a thinker, right? Do you use common sense and truth? Do you know where trends are going? Do you understand the thinking? Like how, it goes back to planning. Everyone's gotta be the best planner. If you're using a historical term, you're a planner. I'm giving you a million bucks. I want you to sell this hat.

5:36What are you fucking doing? Influencers, Facebook, Instagram, pre-roll. buying a placement on Pat McAfee's show? Like, what are you doing? So whoever here is the best at thinking at how to spend the money to make the sale in the short and the long term. Sale in the short term, brand building in the long term. That's who's gonna win. And AI will take away a lot of the jobs of like what you do in a fucking Excel sheet or on Tracer, like hand-to-hand bullshit. Can I just go follow through the quick for answering the question? So how do you think creative, you said creatively, but what do you think about chat, GBT, like creating images or like how are you using it as a tool?

6:15Like do you think that's gonna take over as well or no? Yes. Like why do I need a designer to spend four hours making something that I can make in nine seconds? Like if you're a designer today who doesn't have her or his own ideas, you're in trouble. But if you were the leading salesman selling yellow pages in 1999, you don't even know what yellow pages are. How many people here have no idea what the yellow pages are. Yeah, so, yeah, bro. Like, the yellow pages used to be a book that every person had that you would look at for information in your general area because there was no internet. The telephone book.

6:57The yellow book. Well, when Google came along, Yahoo, search engines on top of the internet, there was people who made their living, paid for their family's mortgage by being salespeople for Yellow Pages. They went out of business. You're going through it for the first time, so you're like, oh fuck, my cousin John is dead. But that's what always happens. When the tractor was invented, everybody worked on a farm. This is just evolution. And if you're a designer, if you're a creative, by definition, the first requirement is ideas. Otherwise, what are you bringing to the table? So, AI's gonna put a lot of pressure on the world.

7:41You guys are in it, congrats, you picked a good time to be born. But I would argue it's the biggest opportunity. For a lot of you, it means you'll end up not being an employee, it means you'll end up being an entrepreneur. Because you're gonna learn how to use these things and instead of being an executive here and making 150 ,000 a year, you'll do something around something you love making 150 ,000 a year because you'll be able to because your AI infrastructure and capabilities will be the power of a workforce of 10. So, pros and cons to everything. What's the best way to improve our either specialized skill set or overall skill set to really become those people of, like, note and become, you know, the experts in the field of digital media?

8:26Well, what do you think, Jathan? Oh, I think the start is listen. but it's a pretty good open door policy. I've been making the best of it, trying to get as much feedback and insight from everyone up the ladder as much as I can. I think that is a remarkably smart and strong observation. The only reason that this is a good program is because of the culture we've created for the last 15 years, where you have senior people that are willing to spend time with you. Now, of course, some of you just heard that and you're like, no, not true, Gary, fuck. I reached out to like two people and I haven't been able to get a response.

9:09There's gonna be always moments in time, right? Like if there's a fucking account on fire and you happen to be on that account and like you want like, hey, teach me and they're like, fuck, we're just trying to save the business. That might just be the luck of the draw. But as a whole, including what I'm doing with you right now from the top down, there is a much bigger appetite to just help you than you will find in 99 % of businesses. And so I'm proud of you that you've sniffed that out and like you know this, like Amir in your office. He's fucking smart as shit. He'll tell you everything. Amir is my manager.

9:43Makes sense. So like to me, if you're like Amir, will you, can we get like drinks from seven to 10 and talk about things in detail? He'd be pumped to do that. This is just a good life lesson for all of you. The concept of getting one no being the end of your journey is hurting you so much. Ask 13 times until someone says yes. Nicely. different people, different things. So there's a lot of no's here, circumstantial. People busy, three people are out on mat leave and that person's got to cut. There's just a million things that could be going on. But don't let a no to getting some one-on-one mentorship deter you from asking the next person.

10:18Sometimes you can get the boss of the boss to give you a half an hour versus your direct boss just because of the nature. It's just the serendipity of just how work works. I want to be Gary or be past Gary. That's good for you, as you should. Let me give you the answer of how to do that. Get out of being in a marketing agency and get into actually doing something. Gary's Gary because the first 20 years of my career was using marketing to build things, not being in an agency. I'm a practitioner. Right? So you may need to seriously start a side business where you do all the marketing because all of a sudden marketing is not about reports or theory or politics.

11:00it's about the merit of the execution. Zhang will tell you and he should do a follow up with this he's been here from day one as we brought in fancy math people and seemingly me as the DNF student should not be of that ilk with the media department they could never beat me because they were playing in media for the sake of media not the true goal of growing a business. Marketing is a proxy. It's not an actual thing. It is a part of a thing called growing a business or an entity, a nonprofit, a personal brand, a campaign. It is an energy of offense. Hello. Hello. First of all, Gary. Finally, nice to see you through a fireside chat.

11:44I wanted to say this has been a great opportunity during the residency and it's taught me a lot. One thing, oh, so just off, I'm a media analyst resident based in the EMEA locations in London. I think you're going to be joining us this week. Yes, I'll see you in a couple days. Yeah, so, yeah, you'll see me in a couple days. I actually want to bounce back to Ariana's question and kind of like the question that's been going around in regards to like AI. How do you feel about AI and how it's kind of developing the marketing field and how will VaynerMedia and possibly in the near future implement that into its ecosystem?

12:22Because that's one thing I'm very, very curious about. Yeah, I mean, I do, so I'm old enough to remember when companies were asking this question about internet. Right? And everybody was like, I was just with Pearson and the head marketer at Pearson, she said to me, Gary, you know, Pearson is gonna be an AI company. I'm like, no shit. I'm like, just like Pearson said 25 years ago, we're gonna be an internet company. A year and a half ago or a year ago, everybody was wondering in the company why I wasn't making all of us learn mid-journey and like use, you know, like, it's because of what you just saw GPT do last week.

13:01Like, we're still early. Like, how am I gonna implement it? It's oxygen. It's not even how I'm gonna implement it. It's how AI is gonna implement itself in all of us. There is nothing. AI is not a thing. It's like a process. It's like oxygen. Yeah. You know what I mean? So, we will use all the codes. We will, you know, we will, excuse me, We will use all the platforms. It will just be fully ingrained back office. Every single way that project managers take notes will be AI. Every way we do media execution will be AI. Every way we make creative will be AI. It's just omnipresent. Which platforms, what I did well that other people got caught on is we're not in a five-year contract with technology that's now already old.

13:49the amount of agencies last year that locked into two, three, four year scopes on SaaS businesses that are now can't get out of not to mention the AI tools that Facebook meta and TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and all these companies put at the forefront of the places we do the marketing are gonna be better than the tools that are in the market like what GP does for making imagery I'll be able to do just inside of X and Meta and TikTok, and it's gonna have a propensity to know it gets more organic reach because it has the data, chat GPT doesn't. Wouldn't it make sense that if Meta made me an image inside of Meta that more understood the propensity of engagement, that that creative is gonna outperform me doing it in a silo on Adobe or chat?

14:39So look, I'm always me. If I'm not moving fast on a technology, it means that it hasn't fully baked yet. Gary, I think the one thing that might be helpful, Urs asked a couple questions last week in the All Hearts about the elephant meetings. There's been a little bit of just thoughts in general about how should residents think about when it's time to have an elephant meeting. Obviously, it's a little bit of a more new ones conversation with their positioning on their team, still trying to get to know everything. Yeah, I would say to kick that off, I mean, look, I'm struggling to get SVPs who are 40 years old and have had 20 year careers to call elephant meetings.

15:20Let there be no confusion. There is 0.0 expectation that you're gonna drive an elephant meeting. That being said, I think it's incredibly powerful for you to practice in your career. There is a gracious, humble way to maybe raise your hand if you're in a meeting where you can hear that the client's not going the way we're going. and maybe you ask in your Slack or for your direct report or like, hey, I think XYZ is not doing what I think Gary's saying we want to do. You know, how do we go about it? So, you know, I think that's how I think about that thing. All right, let's keep it going. Sam, good work.

15:59Hey, Gary. I'm Sam. I'm a media resident out of Toronto as well. I had the pleasure of working with Jason. All the way up on the CNC, the elephant meetings, I'm super curious as the agency grows, as you have less ability to touch everything, what's the balance between escalating up to you and cultivating that ability to handle elephant-type situations at every level? How can we kind of develop those skills so we don't necessarily have to have a higher level? Or would you prefer that people do? I prefer that people do. Here's why, brother. I think this is similar to the Jathan answer. I like people to taste things in real life versus theory.

16:49Another reason why I struggle with school. You know, it's theory. Like, you could read about doing push-ups, but you've got to actually do them for the thing to happen. I can do more in 15 minutes than a lot of our team can do in three months because I lack the fear of losing the client, which is uniquely mine more than anyone's. I have to be empathetic to my SVPs and my leaders. They believe that it's all good in theory that I say that, but if they walked in my room and they're like, so Gary, I had the elephant meeting and Bose fired us so we lost 10 million, thanks, see you later, that that would be bad for them.

17:25I know that that would never happen if they had an elephant meeting. In fact, I know that if you don't have elephant meetings, that's how you actually lose the business. so what I've seen Sam is that more people are affected in being good at it by seeing me do it in the room with them it's not like I'm having the elephant meeting by myself some of you may be in an elephant meeting because I want you to learn so I do yeah it continues to be an ideology for those people that make six figures a year and have a VP or an SVP title that say my job is to keep Gary out of it and it's my job to keep telling them that'd be fine if you were keeping every client so the proof is in the pudding ultimately so yeah I mean you'd be let me go even further Sam nobody asks for it I just interject myself when I can smell it at my level we are still not good at this at all brother people are predominantly driven by fear that's why politics means what it means, it's how your parents parented all of you, don't touch that, you'll burn your hand.

18:33Fear is the currency. Right now, I'm sure it's not lost on any of you, it's at scale. That's what's really going on with politics. Occasionally, politics will use hope, and that's why you've heard about Obama or JFK, but predominantly it's fear. And parenting is almost all fear, and corporations are almost all fear. and I believe the reason that we are different and we've been special and we're just starting and we're gonna get very special is I'd like to think that already you've realized that I don't lead with fear. It doesn't mean I'm naive. It doesn't mean I'm stupid. It doesn't mean I'm delusional.

19:11It means I just know that it's the second best way to get people to do things. Fear is good at getting people to do things in the short term but then trust is lost and it doesn't become awesome. Yes, Sam, I've just not been as successful to get the leadership team all the way there yet. Those elephant meetings are strictly for the VPs and the SVPs in this company. I'm hoping to affect directors that become VPs, that they've heard it for a long enough time, but I'm telling you these, especially people that have worked elsewhere, when Liz B, you know, or Connor Bryant, or Jonathan Murtaugh, when they grow up in different places, it's the old, you know, that old adage of like tough to teach an old dog new tricks, it's hard.

19:54They're like ingrained, Sam. They don't believe me. No bullshit, they don't believe me. Maybe through this residency and the faces around you, from that ground level, you can start to build that up. Yeah, it's exactly what's happening. And obviously, I have a very different equity with people here than I did when I started the company. There's a lot of people here who've known of my existence since they were in middle school. That's a different relationship. I have than when I started this company where nobody had ever heard of me, period, outside the wine business, and definitely not in advertising.

20:32Some of you have literally had my videos or books part of your curriculum on your journey. So I have a lot more leverage, to your point, Sam. That's why I'm so optimistic. That's why I care so much about this program. I'm obsessed with this program from one of two things. One, it's the thing that showed you that it can be like this in a company and the skills that come along with that common sense. Or two, this room has the future C-suite in it. Like I'm going nowhere. Like 15 years from now for me is like cool. Like that's tomorrow. And so that's exactly right. That's why this exists. Otherwise we just hire people from one year in and other places.

21:15What's your vision in five years? Yep. Like how can we contribute to that? Like what's one word that you see they are going to that we can like embody? This will be hard to land because a lot of you don't have context elsewhere. But let there be no confusion. Like, hi, we do marketing very differently. All of you are younger and you're more naturally, your day-to-day lives are more social media centric. So it may seem like very common sense to all of you what we do. But again, if some of you have worked or interned in other advertising environments, like we are very different. So my goal is to change the way marketing is done by every company in the world in our industry by us having continued success.

22:04If I was thinking about one word, I would literally say common sense. It's probably the biggest thing that makes me think, like most of our, like think about this, clients genuinely around the world that are, let's say, Fortune 5000 companies think it's a better idea to spend way more money making a television commercial than making any social media content? How is that possible in 2025? For example, let me bring in politics. You know, I'm sure this hit everyone's radar. There was a lot of conversation about how Kamala spent so much more money than Donald Trump. And I'm sure all of you heard, like, the podcast did well.

22:38That's the same conversation. Many companies spend more money on making billboards than making social media content. I'm so happy all of you are here because you can never unsee what you're about to going through. You'll always know this information. Whether you're here or somewhere else, you will be grounded in this information. And for a lot of you, you've used social for real life, not from a business lens. So for a lot of you, it's also been a great, it'll be a great learning experience or was a great learning experience because you thought you knew things because you were about it every day, but now you're looking at it from a different angle from a business angle and you're seeing different nuances, which is also valuable.

23:18So, common sense. Yeah, I unfortunately have to go, but it's a pleasure. And hopefully we get some more time together. And thank you for all your contributions, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.