Stop Guessing: How to Use Organic Social Media Content to Validate Your Ideas

0:00A hundred years this industry has used good working media dollars to disguise bad creative. We are now going into the era where you can amplify, use good working media only to amplify good creative. Good is not judged by an award, the USA Today ad meter, me and Mark seasoned veterans. It is done when organic content over indexes organically through the AI relevance algo and then you take it up for brand and down for performance. My email at Wine Library has exploded because the mid funnel we define as organic social. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

1:01and maybe work to cover off three different areas today. The first for us always is when we think about all of the different tools that a marketer has to go and try and reach an audience, that email is only one of those tools, and to talk a little bit about during our conversation the relevance or not of email as a channel for the marketer. Follow that by something that for us is near and dear to our heart. We call it ethical marketing. You know, we try to do the right thing when it comes to campaigns. Then finally, we've got a whole bunch of questions from our brands about AI and about thinking about generative AI in particular and the tools around that in 2026 going forward.

1:47So that's our agenda, you know, for the next little bit. Sounds good to you? Sounds pretty easy. Awesome. Well, why don't we start with email? I mean, we have been, we're biased of course, has spent a lot of time with some of the world's largest brands helping them with email and the delivery of their campaigns. But we've heard over the years, right? Every time there's been more enthusiasm and virality around a new channel, the reports around this is the death of the inbox, email's going away. Give us your point of view on this. Is email relevant still? Yes, because if print and outdoor and radio have a seat at the table, how can't email?

2:32Even me in my younger days before these gray hairs kicked in, brother, you know, I think, and even like in my older age, you know, on the record, I think 50 is incredibly young. I'm working till I'm 99, so I'm only at halftime. Look, friends, for everyone's watching, I think you all know this as marketers. In your soul, it may not be the thing you're most thinking about. there's the key here is of course it's relevant but let me tell you my email story brother I launched an email service in 1997 for my dad's liquor store it was the foundational channel that changed the course of my family's life I built a 60 ,000 person email list for wine buyers by 1999, in 1998, we had 83 % open rates.

3:27Mark, it was new. It was underpriced attention. You know, when I get excited about live social shopping, like I am right now, it's because it's grossly underpriced attention because it's a supply and demand game. When I fall in love with social media back in the day, it was that same reason. In fact, social media at first was email marketing. Get as many followers as possible, post content that you hope they open and convert on. Email today with AI technology, as you know and I'm sure you all are thinking about this, has the potential to get smarter and smarter, more and more targeted. We could actually achieve 80 % open rates again instead of 20s and 30s and teens if the email titles are so uncomfortably specific to me.

4:12And look, I don't think we get to 80s but do I think everyone can get a 20 to 40 % bump on open rates with what I anticipate is the potential of best practice email marketing in a year or two? Email is a central hub of information and attention. 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. At the brands that we work with about the foundational nature of email in their programs and some of the fun conversations we end up having with a lot of the creative folks at these brands when they think about their campaigns can be across the channels it's the difference between kind of reacting to a piece of content maybe a video on social or tick tock or pick your favorite platform that's you know grabs my attention right and i want to go share that quickly with the network who shares with their network and we vastly have this piece of content being exposed to and being reacted to by a huge audience and then on the one side and then on the other the that that great subject line that was personal over personalized to you right that got you to open an email maybe there was a attention-grabbing piece of content as well as some sort of video grab in that email but around that there's text right there's words there's a requirement for the reader to actually go and process and engage with that content you know kind of a lean forward way a little more and what I wonder about from your perspective is as you think about the marketer trying to go and you know bring a new offering to market or create demand for an existing product, whatever it is, how do you think about that different kind of lean back or lean forward dynamic about these different shales?

6:10I view it as an and, not or. I will tell you, and this is with all due respect, Mark, I know how nerdy I am about this. I think the way you described social is a yesterday nuance. Let me explain what I mean by that. I don't know if you know this, and every marketer should know this. You cannot get organic reach in social unless people leaned in. that is a huge misconception. So the number one engagement metric that actually leads to a million views versus 50 views is not like share or comment. It's actually lean in. Zoom in. Stay on it. My best practices on social is writing five paragraphs to an organic social piece of content.

6:50So look, social's incredibly special for now. You know, you can get both. You can get, you know, when you have an email, as you know, it's funny, I grew up in the era where people actually did forward their entire address book and email. That was, remember? That was virality. The joke of the day. Look, when you understand how to do email, its conversion capabilities are remarkable. Right? They're just remarkable. And SMS is similar now. As you know, we've started getting into that era. So I think it's incorrect that we're in the era of social where it's only snackable. There is a major lean-in.

7:27Email is lean-in. you know to me and I get why because it's the darling now it hasn't been but social is the wrong place to look at for email if we want to grow email's market share with marketers it's kind of everything else you know to me for example television programmatic banner ads pre-rolls outdoor direct mail these are all mediums of conversion hopes that email can destroy when done right and again let me throw a A curve ball. I can tell all, in fact I'm gonna tell all of you how to waste$5 million on social media right now. Make three pieces of content like you're doing television, post it, but post it with a million dollars in media to support it because you want it to do well.

8:16Wasted money, Mark. So all these mediums are about execution, but I think to your point, email, we've been conditioned to read it. Some of my best conversion emails for Wine Text, in fact I hope all of you sign up for WineText.com, there's a little right hook for me. What you'll see in the emails, we do text, but we also do email, you know, are very in depth, nerdy talk about red burgundy, things that are very hard to come across in a lot of other mediums, like how many acres, how the yields are done, like I tell a story about the dog running on the yard, on the vineyard and eating the grapes, and this is the best Pinot Noir and you're gonna impress the boss or get the girl or get the promotion.

9:00This is, you know, an email. Some of the other email is like, you better buy this right now or it's gonna be sold out in four minutes. So email also has its flexibility for snackable lean in and lean out. In fact, one of the coolest things I do as an operator, I have 2 ,700 employees. When I email the entire company, it is often the entire message in just the headline. Yeah. Like nobody. So again, I get excited about talking about email because I think anything can be great in marketing and anything can be horrible. There are many people watching right now that are massively wasting money, time, and energy on email but it's not email's fault, it's their fault, Mark.

9:42So when we think about that, Gary, and those folks that are looking to not waste money, want to take that money and do good things with it and they've got a, this is the world's largest brand, or global organizations, they've got teams dispersed across the globe trying to further a brand that they probably spent decades fostering and nurturing and using omni-channel approaches to get this done. So they're looking at making sure this campaign rocks, not just on email, but also on SMS and also on social. What's your view? Does there need to be great harmonization in every campaign across these different channels?

10:19or is it totally cool to have email look this way and X win, not win? I'm of the belief that both can and do work. Yeah. I'm a very and guy, Mark. I get passionate. Listen, I've been branded very aggressively much because of my execution over the last 10 years around social because it's underpriced. I mean, I wish for this conversation, Mark, I was making videos in 97 to 2000. you would have saw 74 ,000 email videos about, and then it would have been Google search. And you know, I think both work. I know everyone who's watching was taught for cohesiveness, you know, matching luggage, on brand.

11:02I believe that the data on growth in sales and long-term brand prove that fragmentation and cohesiveness both can work, both don't work. I'll tell you what I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about if everyone, here's my argument with everyone here that does matching luggage across the board. They guessed, Mark. They guessed on the tagline, they guessed on the color, they guessed, Mark. We guess, and we have to own this marketers, we guess in boardrooms, focus groups? You mean the ones that are always wrong in politics? A, B, simple testing, not enough. bullshit metrics that SaaS companies have ripped off our clients with for creative X testing.

11:52This is my obsession about social mark. That when I post organically in social, if it gets used, I've confirmed relevance and I can then understand the creative. For the first time in creative marketing history, we can actually measure it by organic views achieved because of how powerful these AI algorithms are. so if everyone wants to go cohesive I'm looking at your backdrop right and it all has to be this scheme and this font and all that I'm not against it but I sure would have liked it to be validated by something that is true and I have too many examples of things that have looked different and done well that are not as cohesive and I know that it's based on academia not on the streets the hard streets of business world and so that's where I sit on this issue I appreciate that.

12:42I think we tend to slam toward do the right thing for the channel. You know, is the advice we tend to offer most of our brands. If you have a rocking campaign in text that, you know, interacts a certain way with an audience, don't match the luggage to email. Well, Mark, if I may, I'm sorry to interrupt. And there's a nuance, that's why I got inspired, so I apologize, sir. But, and then you can keep trying to, like, if I could eradicate the word or in marketing, we would explode as an industry. It's and brother. How about I've got a campaign working in social, I wanna take it to email, and the first time I go, I underperform on my open rates and conversion.

13:23I don't think that means you should not try again. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's just more at-bats at it. I mean, there's social media posts that I've posted four different times with a slightly different variation, and the first three got 70 ,000 views on average, and the fourth one got 6.3 million. We don't do enough post-production. We don't do enough nuance. We don't do enough context. We don't do enough third bite at the apples. I'm telling you, Mark, I'm gonna, this is on my children's health. The subconscious inertia of television first hurts our industry, brother. I want to come back to this concept of dynamic content, trying and trying and trying, personalization, particularly with AI, in a minute.

14:07But can I take us there through a conversation on ethical marketing? Please. You know, this concept, always just do the right thing, period. Like, it's that simple. At least I was raised. I think you were raised. And, like, you know, you just do the right thing. You have your customers back. You don't spy on people in email, right? You don't go kind of buy lists, kind of glom out big content all out and hope and spray and pray. Like, do the right thing, right? do the right thing all the way through i think about the the long game right that marketers can go play here right that i think a lot of the world's leading brands get they must but that it's always tempting you get the hard sales folks in the room you get the cfo in the meeting room they're like man we need more give us more pipe let's go let's grow let's let's blast out another four million emails right to a list we just bought from somebody on the street yep like what's the what's your perspective here?

15:07How should a marketer go back to that CFO and back to that sales guy and be like, dude, off the gas, let us do what we do. We are cultivating and nurturing a community of folks who want to engage with our brand that we can go and build meaningful pipe around versus this just volume 11 blast out we go. First of all, I agree, comma. I'm thinking about starting a fashion brand for about two years now. The brand is literally called Nice Guys Finish First. Love it. So I agree. Comma. I would argue that all of the marketers, if they're Fortune 500, how many Fortune 500 marketers do you think are on this call, Mark?

15:52490 of them. I would argue everything they do in campaign work, outdoor and television, is spray and pray, yell, scream, guess. all the stuff you're rightfully arguing against, which is why I have been who I've been on this issue, other than Super Bowl, best ad in marketing.

16:13There's a lot there. First of all, one of the great disservices to our industry was that we call performance marketing, not sales. If I became the king of marketing and everybody had to listen to me, and it's a monarchy, it's a monarchy of monarchies, and it's the marketing monarchy and I got chosen to be the guy. King Gary. King Gary. First thing I would, oh he from my top of my mountain is we must rebrand performance marketing to performance sales because we are confusing each other because it is not marketing, it is sales. And that's what you're alluding to Mark, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I believe in brand over everything which confuses people because they hear me talking about certain aspects of execution of traditional marketing and they think I don't like the principles.

17:03I only believe in relevance to consideration to purchase. I only think in lifetime value. When I was building my father's liquor store, I was building a brand called Wine Library because I knew I was gonna leave one day and I didn't want my dad to screw it up so I had to build a brand, not just sales, right? So I believe in all of that stuff. What I would say is, look, it's funny, Vayner, we've exploded because I think CFOs like us more than CMOs. I only like marketing because it's the offense of a business. So I would say a couple things. First, at our marketing worst, a lot of us push back against CFOs and business leaders and head of sales because we're not accountable and this is why CMOs are struggling.

17:46We're playing a bullshit game. Too much MMM, too much MMA, too much Can Lion, too much Ad Age said it was good. we, friends, this is business. We needed to perform. That being said, I can tell you, I learned my lesson on email. Let me tell you how, Mark. Yeah. When Wine Library launched its email service back in 1997, do you know what it was called? I don't. It was called the Wine Library Weekly Email Newsletter. And I sent it once a week. And then one sunny day in 1998, I was like, wait a minute. What if I send it twice? We'll sell more stuff. And do you know what happened, Mark? The opposite?

18:32Nope, not yet. I sent it and motherfucker, we sold a ton more. Okay, I see what's going on. I know you do. I'm helping you here. Now I'm a shark with blood in the water. I'm like, okay, immediately. It took me a year to add a second day. within a week, we're Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Right? Within three months, we're on the weekdays. Can't bother people on the weekends. Within six months, we're Monday through Sunday. And Mark, we are cooking with gas. But all of a sudden, 80%, 70%, 60%, right? And now it's costing me more to replenish people in. And then you know what happened, Mark? I said, what if we email people twice a day?

19:21And you know what happened? We made more sales. And then something happened 24 months later. We were in trouble. Because 80 became 60, became 40, became 30. And I remember why I was winning, because I was acquiring customers from now Google AdWords to the email, I was cooking. This young kid was smarter than this old guy, probably in some ways. I was cooking, but eventually I started to understand lifetime value, retention, how am I bringing people value, and I took the pedal off, and the reason WineText, the thing I mentioned earlier, which we're doing in SMS and email, has revolutionized my father's business is I am not making the same mistake on SMS that I made on email.

20:03And so what do I say? I say I'm empathetic, I'm a businessman. If the team, Mark, it's all circumstantial, you know this, if the team is telling you to send more and more emails because we're going public next week or next year, I get it. Maybe you do it. That's right, brother. If I know we're trying to sell the company and we want some more top line revenue, I get it. But if you're like me and you're playing long and you're running a marathon, then I highly recommend you become disproportionately empathetic to the person on the other side of the email. Psycho about bringing her and him value and I would argue that that's how I think about everything and I would say that SMS, email and social, I'm specifically passionate about being great at that because you can be great at that there in a way that's harder in outdoor, harder in television, harder in other places.

20:59I love that empathy piece. That is, you know, we think about compassion, empathy, trying to be in the spot that our customers, our marketers are in every day thinking about a lot of these folks who spent their career and and their team has spent their career fostering a brand in a world that was quite different right than what we find ourselves in today and now here comes ai right here comes we have this great opportunity i think no place more so than in marketing right to go benefit from ai and at the same time for sure i mean part of our business care is we work with the mailbox providers like Microsoft and others worldwide, right?

21:39Yeah. To try and help them figure out is your mail, should it go to the inbox or should it go to the spam folder, right? And so part of that, what we hear from them is, yikes, you know, for the last couple of years, the amount of content now finding its way in exponentially larger, much of it's really lousy content, right? Obviously, terrible generative AI spam, right? And so now the marketer's like, all right, yikes, I've got to go figure out how to benefit from AI. I've got to go have my signal-to-noise ratio stay good, even though the amount of noise just went through the roof. What, you know, again, these are the world's largest brands, right?

22:19These are folks that are working hard to try and keep pace, right, with the innovation and a lot of the upstarts. How do we offer them some perspective on how to win with the advent of generative AI in digital marketing and email? Well, because this is a Fortune 500 crew and not startup, they get a very different answer. Let me explain. One, you know this, and I can see by your reaction, you probably know where I'm going. If you're really sharp, you know that this is exactly what's happening. These next two to four years is challenging because the end consumer doesn't want AI right now because actually the reason they're pushing back against McDonald's AI ad is because they're scared to lose their job to AI.

23:00so the masses, Genpop, are asking you all who are watching right now to not do it but the ankle biters and startups that we're competing with are going to do it and are going to outflank us and then just like online dating Mark, how old are you brother? I'm 55 You look great, I'm 50 You look better I don't know about that but hear me out on this one because you definitely are going to agree with me remember Match.com 2002, 3, 4? Of course, sure If you had a buddy or you met someone on Match.com and that person became your girlfriend or boyfriend, you told everyone, including your family, you met at a bar.

23:39Of course. The stigma was extraordinary. Right. Today, it's the only way people meet. I mean, not really, but you know what I mean. The majority. The stigma of AI creative and gender AI will go away because society will always evolve. This is an incredibly profound strategic moment for everyone on this call. A, everybody on this call, as a human, needs to know Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity. You need to know it, friends. You need to touch it. Do not become your grandma that you made fun of for not having a smartphone. That's what this is. I would say it's also a very interesting time. I've never seen this market.

24:22I've been in the game now for a little bit. I was there early and invested in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. Those are the stock certificates. I lived through the web.com Again, email, website, search engines First day on Google AdWords Me, a liquor store boy in New Jersey Not in Silicon Valley Buying all the wine terms I've watched it all I watched the August 2000 crash of pets.com Watched Amazon, PayPal, and eBay Go from$100 a share to$3 The web is dead No, front page of the Wall Street Journal The web was a fad No, no, we got to the other side Or Washington Post NFTs and blockchain I'm living through it on that front right now it's very important everyone listens to me on this you have to understand it there is stigma on the output there are a lot of things you could be doing on the back end to be more efficient that doesn't need to be the front facing thing to the consumer but we must navigate this as fortune 500 and understand we need to understand it but I'm not doing much because I'd never seen in the 90s mid 2000s there's been three There's been three webs prior to this one, right?

25:27Web 1.0, late 90s. Web 2.0, 2005, 6, 7, 8. And Web 3.0, 15, 16, 17, 18, blockchain. Or really more 19, 20, 21. This AI, I think, Mark, I've never seen anything like this before. Nano Banano makes something amazing. Three days later, Microsoft. These super scalers, Meta, Microsoft, Google. This is an arms race that makes Russia versus America in the 70s and 80s embarrassed on their technology. NASA, all those things. like the Soviets, like, this is like happening on an everyday basis. So I think one thing is be careful what you commit to, because there'll be better technology tomorrow, unheard of.

26:04Imagine signing up for Salesforce back in the day, and then a day later, there's a better Salesforce for half the price. This is literally what our customers are faced with. I know. They've been overwhelmed. And I think about this from the empathy side, that, you know, they're, for three and a half years now, every one of their core vendors, Salesforce, is a great partner of ours, great company. Adobe, Oracle, SAP, all the big marketing clouds have been promising. They may be hiking a little too much, right? Here's the agentic solution coming for you, our Fortune 500 customer around our new AI-enabled cloud marketing platform.

26:42And a lot of those are gonna be awesome. They're gonna be awesome. They're just not awesome yet, right? And - Or, to be frank, they are awesome. I would say slightly different if I may. They're awesome now compared to what you're doing. They're just gonna get outflanked the next week. And so what do you do? You wait. I mean, you know, I don't know why this analogy jumped in my head. You know all the big cats in the jungle, the puma, the panther, how do they eat? They're patient. Right? If you jump too fast, that elk and rabbit's gonna get away. I think that's awesome. I think that's great. That's a good one, right?

27:22That's a good analogy? Well, what's great about it too is that it pairs nicely with the fear, right? Correct. And the empathy that we're trying to go and provide for these marketers, right? Who are like... But in this scenario, Mark, the CMO is the panther and the leopard and our empathy is not for the rabbit or the elk. Our empathy is that the panther, if it doesn't eat, dies. Correct. And it makes the wrong decision. That's right. And so, you know... This is the hardest one I've seen. And by the way, what I think is gonna happen is great companies like yourself and others, I think the incumbents are sitting in a nice spot.

28:01They're intertwined. You know, it's funny, people are like, what's your AI strategy? And I giggle. It's fun getting older. I didn't realize it would be. I was there when it was like, what's your computer? Literally, what's your computer strategy? Like, does your company have computers? Wine Library, my first developer, I gave him a business card because everyone had a business card back then. It literally said Eric Castor, computer department. That's, that's. You know, then it was, what's your internet strategy? How many people say, what's your internet strategy? Then it was, where is it? Then it was, what's your mobile strategy?

28:37Then it's, you know, AI is oxygen. That would be like asking someone what their electricity strategy is. Right. Like, this is omni. This is present in everyday life. Everything will be AI enabled and we need to think that way. And I would just tell everybody on this call, do not rush into contracts or if you do, have good outs. You know, like don't sign some, you know these freaking SaaS companies. You guys probably do it yourself. There's some poison pills in there. Like you gotta be careful, everybody. Like all joking aside because I know you guys do the right thing. but I really am pushing my CMO.

29:19I'm sitting in a really cool part of my career, Mark. It's probably not lost on you. When I came out the gate in Fortune 500 land, most of the people were kind of like, who's this joker? Because I've got a personality, I've got a funny communication style. I'm a Jersey boy with a lot of extrovert energy. But now I'm in this cool spot where my stripes were earned, not only by the success, but more importantly, and this is why I wanted to do this, because I respect this so much about your company. I'm a good dude. My mom, not because I did it. my mom is all time. And so I have a lot of, and anyone here that wants to hit me up on LinkedIn, but there's no C before my last name.

29:54It's Gary Vaynerchuk with no C before the K.