Social Media is Dead.

0:00If we just use common sense, I have a funny feeling that a lot of people would realize a shocking, almost nerve-wracking amount of human attention is on this device. And when you look at this device, the shocking percentage of what's being consumed outside of gaming is social media content outside of streaming television and gaming. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Hello, San Antonio. this is not exactly where I thought I would be this evening as a diehard Knicks fan but very honored to be here and I'm a well-parented individual so you keep your commitments regardless of the outcome so it's a real pleasure to be with all of you especially this crew because looking at the people that are attending this conference there's a lot to touch on that I think is very relevant to a lot of the different micro groups of people that are in here.

0:57I'm going to give you a little context of how my career went because it will really foundationally start everything I'm about to talk about. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came here when I was three, real immigrant life. My dad got a job as a stock boy in a liquor store to kind of make our American dream happen. And so I lived in a studio apartment in Queens, half the size of the stage that I'm on right now with seven, eight family members, really humble beginnings. And my father started that journey and eventually owned a small liquor store. When I was 14, I got to start to work in that store.

1:33Prior to that store, back to consumers and insights and all that, I was very entrepreneurial in Jersey in the 80s. I don't know how many of you remember big wheels, those little bikes that some of us grew up with, but I somehow coerced four or five of my friends to stand behind my lemonade stands while I made signs and put them on different trees and poles trying to figure out where the consumer's attention was in hindsight. And then at the end of the day, I would ride my little big wheels around and collect all the money from all the lemonade stands like I was Tony Soprano or something. And then when I did baseball cards, which was where I really learned a lot of things that I'm foundationally still building on, the malls of New Jersey, laying out my, you know, table understanding marketing and signage and behaviors.

2:23It was a very, very big part of my life. And then eventually when I got into the family business, at first I didn't really like it. You know, my dad's store was called Shoppers Discount Liquors. We sold liquor and beer predominantly, but my dad's store was in a very interesting location in New Jersey, kind of like one side was very blue collar and one side had affluence. And some of the people from the white-collared neighborhood started to come in and ask for wine. And then on one faithful day, when I was 15 years old, a gentleman said that he collected wine. And that was really the hook for me.

2:56I really, at that point, became incredibly passionate about becoming as knowledgeable as possible about wine. And my great goal was to open up lots and lots of wine stores. Back then, and I called it the Toys R Us of wines. I was going to open up 50, 100, 200 stores. And then back to the opening talk here, back to what I know a lot of you were thinking about, which is when things change, how does the calculus change? I spent basically 15 till 20 believing I was going to open up all these stores and literally as a teenager would go and look at Wegmans and Whole Foods and try to analyze emerging retailers of the late 90s and 2000s, long before I knew what I was doing.

3:40It was just very intuitive to what I was thinking about. And then on a faithful day in 1994, I heard, for some of the youngsters, if you don't know what that is, a lot of the other people do. And that was the first day I saw the internet. And within five minutes of me being on the World Wide Web, on AOL, I decided I didn't need to open up all those stores, and I was going to do this thing. and in 1996 I launched one of the first three e-commerce wine businesses in America and that's kind of what began a process that got me to this stage today. What I did for my father's business over a 12-year period was one basic thing in hindsight which was a complete and utter obsession with the end consumer.

4:30I worked on the floor. I worked at the register. I watched every single thing that every person did on our website, what they clicked, what they didn't, why they would abandon the shopping cart, and on and on and on. And it was all just 100 % watching. 15 years ago, I started a large advertising agency called VaynerMedia. Today, we have 2 ,500 employees. It's a$400 million a year top line revenue business. I work with many of the people's companies that are represented here. and one of the things I definitely want to talk about that I'm sure is resonating with so many of you and I'm very now 15 years later empathetic to what all of you are dealing with but the biggest elephant in our industry right now is the fact that our industry runs on dirty data.

5:16The entire industry runs on fake reports and that is an extremely big challenge for me. What was so interesting of spending 15 years in entrepreneurship. I built a large business for my dad's business. It went from three to$65 million in sales in a five-year period on the back of consumer shifts, email marketing instead of direct mail. You know, Google AdWords was an enormous shift. But what was most interesting to me when I entered this universe of Fortune 500 land was struggling with understanding how to make the reports work backwards. When I first got introduced to, whether it was Miller Brown or Nielsen's or internal MMMs or MMAs.

5:59And none of these companies are bad. It just, it lacked a truth against the actual business that was fascinating to me. And I think what is the biggest opportunity for our industry is to very honestly start bringing a little bit more common sense to the table. What I've been fascinated by is I know how many people in this audience have thoughts and beliefs that counter what the report might be saying. They are actually intuitive to the truth, but I've come to learn how challenging that is to fight that kind of machine. I get it now. I remember a year into running VaynerMedia, I called my mom driving home one day.

6:41I'm like, mom, I'm a genius. And I was explaining, like, I cannot believe these incredible executives don't know this stuff. Two years later, I realized I'm not a genius. I'm just an entrepreneur that didn't have to deal with bosses and reports and boards and bonuses and all the things that stop us. But what I'm most fascinated by is that in 2006, when I had very little amounts of savings, because I don't know how many people here are the child of an immigrant family that had a family business. Can you just raise your hands just real quick for me? So the 15 or so of you know what I'm about to say.

7:20I worked 100 hours a week in my dad's store for 12 years, but he never paid me anything. And that's just how we do it in the immigrant game. And so I had very little savings, but I bet my whole farm when I was 31 years old on two startups that I thought were going to change the marketing and business and world. And those two companies were Facebook and Twitter, so those were my first two investments. So that's good, because I'm really rich. And I think we're in another time now where I think you all know what was just referenced. Like, as someone who's had the luxury of being 50 years old, which means my entire professional career has been grounded in extreme consumer shifts, the internet itself, search engines completely changing the way information came, the mobile device, social media, and many other little things.

8:11This latest move, this new thing that we're all going to deal with, with AI, is pretty extraordinary. I was a really poor student. which was unusual for Russian immigrants, but I did get A's and B's in history, and I never understood why until maybe about 10 years ago. I really do use history as pattern recognition to the future, and I've been studying so much about how consumers and the world dealt with electricity when that was invented or many other profound technologies. Many of the businesses that are representing this room are dealing with the same thing that I am in all the many businesses that I'm involved in, which is so many human beings right now are incredibly concerned about AI.

8:53They're concerned that it's going to eat up their job and things of that nature. And we as leaders really have to navigate how to get people on board with this because I'm sure it's not lost on any of you because looking around, this is not a middle school crowd. People have had a couple years in their career here. This is an inevitable outcome. And it is an enormous shift. And it is something we really need to take a real deep look at. And obviously there's many societal things and government things that will happen, but the end consumer, and for all the incredible retailers that are represented here, they know this truth amazingly well.

9:30The old adage of convenience is king is incredibly real. It is staggering what people are willing to do to buy a little extra time. And what this profound technology is going to do is going to completely change the paradigm shift for so many of us of how much time can come back to us and what we could do with that and i think for the products that are represented here that are being sold the way people discover the way that people buy is going to be profoundly affected how many people here are running an open claw for themselves right now by by any chance so about five or six so the five or six people that just raise your actually can you stand up open claw people?

10:10Sir, that lady, E3, can you just stand up if you're an open claw person? I just want people to see these people. Please find them and talk to them about it because I think they're really living, thank you so much, I think they're living in a future that you should know about. My open claw, for example, is now purchasing most of my household products. It literally has ingested all my prior Amazon and Walmart.com purchases. It's understanding how often I bought them historically to understand the kind of pace that I'm at for using toothpaste and shampoo and cereal and beer. This is a monumental shift from what I do for a living, which is try to market and get you to purchase something at the retail level or on a dot-com.

10:54This is gonna affect all of us in the next five to 10 years, which ironically elevates the power of brand dramatically, elevates the leaders in marketing in here quite a bit because as we set our preferences of the products we buy, on the supply chain and people that are making the products in this room, as we go into the Internet of Things era, where the products in our home reorder themselves, when the six-pack of beer, when it's down to one beer, itself reorders itself for us. These are really massive things to wrap our head around. And I think as we go through this five - or ten-year window, So when I thought a lot about this talk on the flight down here, my great passion is to really push everyone here further down the path of what the true data is.

11:45What's the truth? This is where retailers have always had a big advantage over CPGs because they're at the customer level. But this is a really important time. Let me give you some examples. I'm gonna go a little bit deeper. Let me give you an example of why I'm obsessed with social media marketing in a world where I think people continue to underestimate how important it is. One, if we just use common sense, I have a funny feeling that a lot of people would realize a shocking, almost nerve-wracking amount of human attention is on this device. And when you look at this device, the shocking percentage of what's being consumed outside of gaming is social media content outside of streaming television and gaming.

12:25Let me give you an example of AEO, GEO in this AI era. One of my great wants and hopes for all the businesses represented here is that in nine years, in six years, in four years, where every consumer goes to their AI bot, whether that's Claude or ChatGPT or something else, and asks the questions or makes the decisions that they today use Google for in Google search or some other product, that when they type in, I need shampoo, or where should I go traveling, or what car should I buy, my great hope and dream professionally for all of you is that your product shows up. I think as consumers, actually here's a fun one, I want you to see this.

13:06By show of hands, go high. How many people here now go to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini to do a search or a query that two years ago they would have gone to Google to do the same thing? Just raise your hands high. Please hold it for a second, I just need everyone to look around. And again, just to remind you, this is not a middle school-aged crew. 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. Thank you. Every person. So this is going to eat up the oxygen.

13:43I desperately want for you to show up first. I think since everyone raised their hand, the reason I did that, I think you all agree with me that the way AI works is different than search engines and you will be less likely to click an ad in ChatGPT and Claude than you would have been in Google because it's just a different thing. You think the results, as they get better and better, the results are going to be sharper. You're going to trust that more than the first three results on Google. So the conversion, and we already see this, is going to be dramatically higher organically, even though they're going to try to create a paid item that they'll try to get every brand in here to spend on.

14:17So for example, let me give you a for instance. I know that a lot of people are in different parts of the organization here, but bring back home to some of the decision makers in marketing, if that's not your lane, For example, Gemini is getting an extraordinary amount of its information from YouTube Shorts. Every single brand in here making content for YouTube Shorts the way that you would be making it for Instagram or TikTok has extra benefit when you're doing it in YouTube Shorts because it's mapping the GEO and AEO for Gemini's results. I could argue, based on the list of the businesses represented here, that most brands in here should be spending$10 million a year.

15:02Obviously, there's some startups, but there's anybody in the Fortune 500 set here should be spending$10 million a year just producing YouTube shorts content just to feed the results on Gemini over the next two to three years. I could also, because I'm in this business, I'm also aware that the far majority of Fortune 500 brands in this room don't spend$10 million a year producing social media content across the board. These are the shifts that I'm really, really curious about. And it's really interesting. I think if you really take a step back, especially there's so many analytical people here that I think you'll get this on a human level and then how are we gonna measure this?

15:46I think we're going into a very interesting thing that I'm calling the barbell syndrome. Extreme digital over here on the barbell. AI at scale I think we all know where this is all going and we haven't even started and then I'm sure some of you are recognizing this especially if you have teenage children over here on the other side of the barbell is the extreme rise of analog concerts sporting events restaurants running clubs, hiking we are starting to finally see for the first time at scale not on an individual basis we're starting to see consumer behavior actually tune out and actually start to, especially Gen Alpha is very much reacting to Gen Z's anxiety and saying, fuck that, I don't want what my older sibling's anxiety is.

16:37I need to be a little bit more careful with this, which is gonna have humongous impact. And for example, VaynerMedia, my agency, we're doing extremely well and we're gonna be affected by AI as well. and one of the things we're making the biggest bet on this year is actually being an experiential agency doing real life activations. When you do real life activations at the NBA All-Star Game at a Formula One Miami or in a store or sampling in a park or what have you, I think we all know this. That stuff's very challenging to measure. You know, so many people I talked to over the last 12 months are feeling this analog explosion.

17:19So many people want to commit more dollars to trial and sampling in real life, to events, to activating and culturally relevant events. And so many people are not doing it because it's hard to measure. These are smart executives like this room is filled with and we're choosing not to do it because it's hard to measure or justify against the models we've created. That is the data, that is the thing that I'm most passionate about, which is I believe the extremities of growth. I'm sure everyone here is following. One of the things, actually, let me just finish this point. The extremities of growth in technology and consumer shifting is going to outpace the way we score internally and we must have more meaningful conversations in the most senior boardrooms around giving all of you and your contemporaries back home the breathing room to do what we think is right, not just showing up and doing our homework post-game to justify it.

18:20For example, how many people here have bought something on TikTok, on TikTok shop with a live show or on whatnot, the collectibles app? Raise your hand. Just raise it high. Just want people to look around. 10, 15 % maybe. So a lot of global companies here. Some of you've had global experience or may be aware of this. this year in China, $1 trillion worth of product in GMV will be sold in live shopping apps. $1 trillion. How many people here are familiar, actually, how many people here are not familiar with the startup app in America called Whatnot? You don't know what Whatnot is. Raise your hands.

19:04So I'm going to assume most, and it makes sense to me. Just for context, Whatnot. Whatnot. I'm not an investor. Whatnot. is going to do$20 billion in GMB this year. And most of this room, rightfully so, it's not a RAS, I think it's just such a young thing and it's niche, most of this room is unaware of it and it's going to do$20 billion in GMB. One of the biggest things that we're seeing right now on consumer trends is the maturity of social media in the Western world starting to catch up with what we've seen in Asia and China and that we expect a very substantial growth engine for so many of the brands in here.

19:50The retailers need to pay attention to it because it's the first meaningful scaled size thing that can actually change the calculus of this incredible run that retailers have been on for the last 30, 40 years. I'm sure the brands are not lost on how much money they're now giving to retail media after they've already given plenty of money to shopper marketing and slotting fees. So it's been an incredible run for the biggest retailers in the world. For the CPGs here, this is an emerging channel. If it plays out the way we saw in Asia, it becomes a leverage point to have a better relationship with the retailers instead of where they're at right now.

20:26And this is a massive trend that needs to be followed. I've now gone through four meetings with clients where the reporting or the justifying of its behavior is challenging because it's not been mapped yet internally. It was hard to push it through to the execution. All four executions were a phenomenal success. First party data, another channel for them to sell through. And again, so much friction in that reporting versus reality framework. But would highly recommend anyone here that is curious about what's going on with the consumer, I would argue, again, predominantly consumer brands in here, I would argue live shopping is disproportionately the most, you know, obviously AI is like on a different planet.

21:16That's like oxygen. That's omni. That's ever present. But as a core reality for the retailers who need to create that capability, no different than all the retailers who did not do that in the late 90s and early 2000s and got outflanked by Amazon and others. And then definitely for all the consumer brands that are represented here. I saw there was a lot of smaller kind of brands also represented here. If you look at something like Gruen's and others, you're talking about Gruen's 26 months selling for$1.2 billion to Unilever, predominantly on TikTok affiliate, just affiliates making content and live shopping.

21:53That was the whole punchline. And so, you know, there's a lot going on. And what's really interesting to me, and what I hope to inspire at least as a debate or a conversation here, is many of you are consumers and real human beings outside the office that are acting a certain way. And then we have the challenges of bringing that person or that perspective or that data to the room. So at Vayner, we call them elephant meetings, where we are just willing to lose the client to tell the truth of what's going on with the consumer because we think if we're aligned with the consumer, we win. And it has been a remarkable shift.

22:30You know, I've been running the company for 15 years. The last three years have been incredibly liberating. You know, obviously, by the way, we've lost some clients by telling the truth and that's never fun and very scary for the people. But we've been able to triple and quadruple down with many clients by telling the truth. Obviously, that's a certain dynamic agency to client. Obviously, a lot of you VPs, directors, you've got higher ups, what they're used to, what they're comfortable with, different departments. I understand that whole landscape. I would tell you the thing that I'm most thinking about is what AI is gonna do to the job market.

23:03And I would tell you, for the people that are resonating with my talk, if you believe something to be true that you do not bring to the room, and then you no longer have the gig you have, I always believe this. It is so much more fun to die on your own sword than someone else's sword. I implore all of you in a respectful way understanding company politics how to share your actual points of view on what's happening in this ecosystem right now versus what you know the organization wants you to say for example back to marketing a place I love we no longer live in the Don Draper madman era of where people should be paid to come up with random ideas and bet the farm on it.

23:51Every piece of content is now measurable. For the first time in the history of marketing, every piece of content is measurable because I don't know if you know this, but the seven social networks, because of what TikTok did by turning social media, I can easily argue, in fact, I do argue, that we no longer live in social media. We are now in the interest media era. I'm sure everyone here that has TikTok or Instagram or Facebook is very aware of what I'm about to say. You used to get content from the people you followed, like your friend from college or your random cousin, and now what you get is the things that you're currently interested in.

24:31In fact, in about a minute, I'm gonna ask everyone to come up here in line, and we're gonna take your phone, and we're gonna share with everybody what your feed looks like so we get a full insight on who you are.

24:46so I don't know if you know this back to how marketing actually works relevance leads to consideration if I see something relevant to me like in this moment if I see something about the New York Knicks it's going to stop me if a brand does that that stops me on relevance which gets me to consider that brand because it sees me it feels me and then that leads to purchase every single social media algorithm is written on relevance there's an incredible misunderstanding in general society that thinks there's some wizard of oz like zucks or china behind the scenes feeding crap to you or your kids social media is fully written on relevance social media changed no one social media exposed everyone in fact if you don't believe me and you don't like your feed after this talk tonight, go to any social media that you're using, go to the search engine and type in rainbows, enter, like two posts, sunshine, enter, like two posts, happiness, enter, like two posts, Gary VEE and follow him.

25:57You will be absolutely frabbergasted what your algorithm looks like the next day. Because of this phenomenon, I don't know if you're aware of this, we're now in a place where I have 15 million followers on TikTok. Sir, do you have a TikTok? How many followers do you have, sir? 15. 15. Perfect, by the way, thank you for that. I have 15 million, this gentleman has 15. If both of us made a piece of content right now about the bottled water on the table, there is an absolute chance that he will get more views than me because every individual piece of content is now being measured on relevance, not on how many people you follow.

26:36Following has still got some leverage, but on an hour-by-hour basis, let alone a day-by-day and week-by-week and month-by-month, it is declining. This is a level of merit and creativeness that's profound. Who here is on the media spending side, if anyone? Just curious if anybody here is on the media side or impacts the spend of the media and their company. So for seven or eight or 10 people, you must hear this. There is zero rationale to spend$1 of working media ever again on any content that hasn't been proven to be relevant by posting it for free on social. This is a profound shift. Now let's talk about most of this room.

27:19I create a lot of products for a lot of different companies. I have many of them, as you can see by the slide. When we do product innovation, go-to-market strategy, packaging design, all of it is done through content and social media to see if it's relevant. we have a strategy department that is purely based on consumer insights what they do for a living is not search reddit or work with claude to figure out things or even go to things that i like like go in the trenches and go to a supermarket and watch they literally make content on hypothesis that are based in questions and we post on social consumer questions and get dramatically cleaner data than anywhere else we go.

28:03This era, I think you're all aware, will go away. There will be a day when social media, free social media, free to post social media will go away. It won't exist. We'll go to glasses. There'll be new platforms. We'll go to VR. We'll go to AR. Someone will invent something tomorrow that will change the world. Not television, not radio, not direct mail, not outdoor media. None of those things were free. You guessed and you spent a lot of money with the hope that it would work. This platform is free. Of course, you can spend media on it, but if you start all your content and you post it organically and you only take media and amplify the things that actually do well, you will grow your brand, you will drive your sales.