The Best Marketing Strategy For Businesses | Fireside Chat at Palmers Marketing and Sales Summit | #10 of 2024 Top Podcasts

0:00Hey everyone, we're counting down to 2025 with our top episodes of 2024. for. Here's episode number 10. Enjoy. First of all, thank you for having me. You know, my career really, in essence, besides the lemonade stands and the baseball cards I sold all around New Jersey growing up in this great state, really started my dad's liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey. And in 1996, I launched winelibrary.com. So I started direct to consumer e-commerce wine business in 1996. And so that was on the back of a single store retail store that I had at at that point already worked in for the last seven years.

0:36I started working there when I was 14. So, end caps and signage and customer count and moving, this is one, there's a lot of reasons I say yes to things. We're so grateful for the Sasha relationship. I really love really what's happening in CPG. You know, I'm empathetic that people in CPG may not like it because there is a lot of change. Like, I mean, right off the top, I'm petrified about retail media. like you're already paying enough in shopper marketing and slotting fees and now they want you to run media on their sites like we're left with no money to market. Like there's real talk, there's a lot going on and the reason I start here is I don't think everybody, I'm flattered if anyone knows who I am but I'm setting up for everyone to know that since 1996 all I've ever been thinking about is Omni.

1:24And so everything I built was from that and this agency is built really to be an operating system for my future private equity behavior so I'm in this conversation deep. I'm also very close to Logan Paul and Mr. Beast and I think your biggest competitors are not the Proctors and the Johnson Johnsons and L 'Oreal's. It's gonna be influencers. Humans are the next frontier and I lived that already. I started a direct-to-consumer wine brand called Empathy Wines five years ago and in 18 months I sold it to Constellation Brands for a nine-figure exit. There's a lot going on here and so let's talk about it.

1:59Obviously for this room, there's the realities of your actual day-to-day. And the retailer has all the leverage, at least the big ones for the eight of you that are going to those. And then for the people you're managing in this room or partnering with underneath, there's a little less leverage when it gets fragmented into specialty stores and things of that nature. There's really only two things that, you know, really there's many things, but at the end of the day of selling stuff, there's only two things this organization's doing. It's marketing and it's selling, right? And we're losing leverage on the selling front because the retailers have too much power.

2:30and the big ones have way too much power. And that doesn't even get into the fact that Amazon is gonna continue to take market share and they're gonna take that first party data and make decisions when there's enough critical mass to private label everybody. You think private label at big box stores are tough? Wait till you see private label from Amazon and the future of what's coming which is you're gonna wake up in a year or two and you're gonna see that Meta or TikTok bought Target and now what? Like what happens when you wake up in the morning and Facebook bought Target and now they're requiring you to spend your marketing money only on Facebook if you want those slotting.

3:05So there is something, I actually thought about writing a book recently called The Channel Conflict Wars, which is predicting out what I think is coming, which is we are in direct conflict with our retailers at scale and we don't have the leverage, which is why I started a marketing company. The only thing in real life, not in the fantasy land that we all live in when and it's in our vested interest that can allow this brand that is so iconic. And you do have the trends going in your direction. And I do think the product has incredible permission to win in the ever-changing landscape of the consumer.

3:41However, if this company is not able to effectively market and brand, it will lose. No matter how epic this sales infrastructure that I'm looking at is. Because that's just real life. and so you know in cliche talk I'm so empathetic for the majority of this room because we go so hard to make the selling happen we have such cynicism to the marketing right look at all this money they're wasting I'd rather have that you know those dollars to get a couple more shelf space or this and that but the problem is we're just digging our own grave so I think a real if we're talking real business a big strategy in general is really understanding this opening sentence and even being more supportive in a lot of ways.

4:27I tell a lot of sales organizations, you've gotta be supportive about what you're doing in marketing and instead of being cynical to it or upset that we're allocating too much to it when I can make more of it, you should realize that unless we achieve that, it's game over. That's real talk. So what's gonna change? Most of it. You know, TikTok is going to effectively be a retail outlet. They're just gonna follow what's happening in China. like it's done it's already happened you know the QVC-ification of social media is here in the next two or three years the far majority of this product demand creation is gonna come from human beings live on TikTok and Instagram or whatever pops up next like it's just different and it's really different and so of course we can formulate better products and yes we are much luckier than other products where the trends are going in our direction to our product but But unless this company is capable of creating consideration and demand to give us the leverage with our retailers, it will be tough sledding.

5:32They're gonna keep taking more money from you.

5:37All right, on that note. I was like, I gotta look for another job. Ready for that? Boga. I'm thinking this is a big one. They're gonna be calling for a boga. That's my joke. I like it. In all sincerity, some of the words you mentioned, or what we're talking about here, we have a unique difference from our key confederates. We talk about Unilever, we talk about Proctor, and you're right, maybe they're not the ones to worry about, but what we love about who we are is we're faster, we're more nimble, we're more creative. You're not faster than a young woman that lives in Atlanta with 29 million followers.

6:12Correct. That's true. And that's where it becomes this idea we've been talking about for the last day and a half is about unthinking and thinking differently and how do we teach these teams? Because I'm scared. I put a dinosaur on the board and the guy in the right corner there is our e-commerce specialist, knows everything. And I'm going to sit with him and just keep learning. Of course. And we all have to be progressive that way. But the question I was going to ask you is around how do you teach your team to go next level and think differently and to be forward? By not incentivizing the short term.

6:46Another tough thing in the construct of what we've got here. I'm empathetic to everything that's going on here but it is the answer to your question how do you know what I mean like again I'm really trying to be in this room and say I understand I've been around the block my gray hairs are coming in you know like I'm a businessman like I understand to answer your question the reason my world is always incentivized in innovating is because I don't build structures that incentivize short term KPIs because when you're incentivizing short term KPIs you become I'm too oriented on the transaction. And I'm a salesman.

7:23So I understand the energy in this room. The health, you know, you might not even be, you know, don't forget, I also own and operate on my own businesses. I'm not publicly traded. I'm not trying to sell them. So I am giving a lot of care to 17 years from now. I can't ask that of my employees or of any of you. You know? How many people here are retiring within the next 17 years? Raise your hand. Real talk. You know, tough for me to say, hey, I really need you to give a shit about the next 17 years from now. Tough to ask that. So for us, it's easy. My religion is also day trading attention. I think the only thing that, of course, I think the only thing that matters in the world is who's the best at garnering attention.

8:05The end. There's no other currency. It's how the whole world's always worked. I was born in the Soviet Union before I immigrated here. And I'm 47 years old. So I grew up in Jersey in the 80s, very captivated by the Cold War because that's where I was born, but this is where I was growing up. And I was also a pretty poor student because I was really a purebred entrepreneur, but the one class I was good at was history. And now I understand why. I was interested in pattern recognition. When there's a coup in a country, at the same time the army or whoever's doing the coup is going to the palace to get the guy, they'll go into the radio station, the newspaper, and the TV station to control the message.

8:45All of the anxiety and unrest we all have in our country and in geopolitics right now is because communication has changed. We've gone away from the big platforms owning it, hence the governments, and now we have decentralization of communication. Mr. Beast couldn't be a threat to Hershey's. Logan Paul couldn't be a threat to Gatorade. You know, the influencer that I'm most worried about for you in the next five years couldn't be a threat to you because they didn't have enough scale to compete with you. You didn't have enough scale to compete with P &G and Unilever at that level. Now a single human can screw you all up because she can reach everyone for nothing, zero.

9:27She doesn't have to run commercials. Right? And she doesn't need the retailer. She doesn't need Walmart. Walmart is taking your money to give to people like her to seduce her to come into the store because they need her. Shit's changed. And I think the energy I'm trying to bring to this meeting is we don't have the luxury of believing we're fast. You're slow. I'm coming here with one agenda. The deep hope that the energy of the conversation makes you go faster and makes you go realer. We can't waste money. You are not in a position, I know this business well enough and the competitive set, you are not in the position to waste one penny on marketing.

10:13And so that's what day trading attention is for me. What's the underpriced influencer? What's the underpriced platform? Last week TikTok worked like this, today it works like that. What creative works there? Why is organic social media the most important thing in business, yet nobody's looking at it? Because everyone thinks it's an afterthought and a nice to have when it is the foundation of the competitors that are eating up the ecosystem. Sally in Atlanta didn't start with a$40 million budget. she posted on TikTok and it went viral you need to do that that there you go next one's me again dovetailing from that it feels like there's this whole idea of creative commerce and digital and you've got to be really present to do what you said about the TikTok effect is take advantage of selling that's right so what's your thoughts on creative commerce and all that that could be I believe everything's always been the same Procter and Gamble let's use them, outspent everybody at the right time on television to become Procter & Gamble.

11:15Do you know that Amazon outspent everybody, everybody on Google AdWords the first five years, which is why it's Amazon. There are moments in time when there is underpriced attention and the best practitioners in it. I'll use a real estate comp. Somebody bought all the beachfront property in Malibu at some point. It wasn't yesterday, but 80 years ago, somebody made the right bet and they bought four or five acres there and that worked out 15 20 years later you were on the fourth street away from the beach paying twice as much as she or he paid for beach side 15 years earlier it's just arbitrage right some you know slotting fees like private labels you know there's some ogs in this room the cpg retail relationship looked very different in 1980 than it does today.

12:03We had 100 cents on the dollar to do marketing. Right? And so they took our money and slotting fees and created competitive products to us. And that hasn't stopped. That's accelerating with all the data they have now. Right? The data's really clean. This is why we have to build our own DTC capabilities, not support theirs. Of course we have to support theirs because we're in trouble if we don't. But we have to milk every dollar we have to know who the customer is because they know every customer and we know very few, right? And so, you know, creative commerce is to me like asking, like what do I think about oxygen?

12:41That's a sign of it. You know, like yes, it is essential to live. Yeah, the next question's a little bit of a gear shift and I really like what we're talking about now and I feel like in some ways a brand like us we're held hostage to some of those shopper marketing programs and slotting fees where we feel like we're not big enough to say no. You're not? And news alert, neither are the biggest companies in the world. Pepsi and Procter and Kraft, they're not big enough either. When a retailer represents 30 % of your business, you're in trouble. Well, just to talk about something else, there is a lot of change out there and AI, right?

13:25That's what everyone's fearful of because we all don't understand it. How do you think that's going to impact creative selling or whatever? It's going to make it more efficient. Once people start demonizing it and fearing it, I was in, actually this is so incredibly fun for me. Wait till you hear what I'm about to say. I was in New Jersey, in Union, New Jersey, at a Chamber of Commerce event in 1997 that looked pretty similar to the room I'm in right now. and I said, we were talking about this thing that they wanted me to talk about called the World Wide Web. And I gave my spiel the way I'm giving it now and with the same level of conviction and the same Jersey mouth and somebody raised their hand and said, Gary, I was explaining like finding, you know, this was early web.

14:21There's some kids in here, like for some of us that are a little bit over 45, like the internet was like, what is this? Like it was like crazy. Kind of like the way you may feel about AI now. Like it's something, but how, what? And I was talking about a directory and like search. Like, you know, find, like if you remember for the OGs, the internet used to mainly be referred to as the information superhighway. It was predominantly known as a place to go get information. And now it's obviously the foundation of society. Anyway, I gave my spiel and a guy raises his hand and goes, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

14:55He said, Gary, I was talking about if you needed to find a plumber in Jersey. He goes, if I need to find a plumber, I'm gonna go to the Yellow Pages. And I said, for now, but you won't. And he laughed. And most of the people in the room laughed until they didn't. And so AI, we're in a different place because now we have 25 years of technology and everyone here who laughed at the internet, who laughed at email, who laughed at the iPhone, who laughed at social media is like kind of understanding that they're wrong. And so none of you right now are completely dismissive of AI. Instead, we're now on the other side of the pillow.

15:33We're fearful of it. Is it gonna take my job? Are the robots gonna kill my kids? Like, you know, we've turned it into fear instead of audacity. The answer to the question is AI is gonna do for us what the tractor did for us when 80 % of us in the world worked on a farm. There was a day when 80 % of the human beings on Earth worked on a farm. And then the tractor was invented and allowed us to do other things. AI is going to allow us to do other things. We are gonna be able to do work that used to, I can make a deck in three minutes. And that used to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in employees in three weeks.

16:13Now, the question becomes what happens to those employees? They'll do other things. You know, this is what they said, I mean, the car was debated heavily. Electricity, my friend, I don't know how many people like history. Electricity was demonized aggressively by humans. Most people claim that it was demons running through your house. So basically what I'm hoping, I just need to, even the people that are retiring in the next 17 years, all of you will be affected by AI for the rest of your life. And in great ways, like it will do your taxes for you and you don't have to pay an accountant the money and it will actually be right and you'll get your full tax credits and it'll take two minutes.

16:53That's good. Right? And the way you sit here and say, really? Is the same way that people sat a hundred years ago that I can go to Australia within the day and that used to take a month. The world's moving. Innovation doesn't stop in our lifetime. And AI will be one of the most profound things that you ever see in your life. And it will completely change all our lives. However, this company at this moment should spend zero minutes on it. Maybe a little bit for internal, maybe decks to each other to be a little faster. We need to talk about the first step. This company needs to figure out how to be more relevant to more customers at scale within the money that it has to become a defense mechanism to the infrastructure of how their product is sold.

17:39Marketing is the only way out.

17:43Which is like super hardcore because again, I'm marketing and sales and this is a sales, like I get it, but marketing is the only way out. I believe it. It's true. But, but, but, but to the point of the joke of all this, you can waste all your money in marketing. You can't in sales. And that's why we have the feelings we have. But marketing is the only way out. I'm with you, babe. We do sales and marketing, but you take it from me. I'm the only way out, Liz. You are. I'm gonna follow her. I'm gonna follow her. You know, social media is important and you know, obviously that's something you've been preaching to a lot of brands and companies and I think that we've leaned on it heavily because we didn't have budget so we actually maybe were a little further.

18:30I don't want to put this back. But what are some of the big mistakes you see companies make with social media? Not understanding how much science is behind it. The science behind the art. you know I post my content my personal posts on LinkedIn are scheduled to the exact minute like I will post on LinkedIn at 9 0 7 a.m. because more people will see it than if I posted at 9 0 6 and 9 0 8 and nobody thinks about that stuff I think about the first three seconds I think about the creative all I think about is how the algorithms work to give me more reach to what I want and then and I layer human psychology, and then I layer my business objectives, and then I layer that Kelsey and Taylor Swift are dating, and how can I use that?

19:18Pop culture, and so I'm playing a game of ingredients. I'm using pop culture, I'm using platform reality, I'm using science, I'm using best practices, I'm using human behavior, I'm using business reality. So the level, again, the hardest thing in the world to do, in the world, in marketing, and I do it all, is social media creative. And yet, it is deemed the easiest by every organization. And what I mean by that, I mean it's the thing that most people don't actually really care about. This is where you can outflag your competitors. Your direct competitors, the biggest companies, many of that we work with, will take more seriously a 30-second commercial and spend more money on the catering of that 30-second commercial and the T &E of that 30-second commercial then they'll spend their entire year on social.

20:12Which is why they're also reliant on influencers. Because they don't know how to do it. And so my big take is that people, marketers, business people, sales people like ourselves will go to a dinner table and we will have conversations about social media if we do on two fronts. One, how it's ruining the country. Two, how it's ruining our children. All right? So general conversation amongst people is they will literally have dinner conversations with gusto on how powerful this platform is that it's ruining how scared you are of it. What it's doing to the politics, what it's doing to politicians, what it's doing to the country, what it's doing to your children.

20:53You will sit there the whole time on Saturday night with your best friends or your relatives and then you'll come in Monday morning and you'll look at it as the least most important thing in your marketing mix. I've literally had CEOs of companies who I do business with especially when a lot of stuff was going on three or four years ago in America and they would yell at me for 10 minutes about how bad social media was because it's put democracy on the brink of its knees and then we would switch over to business once we were done with our opening cocktail and letting that person rant and they would explain to me how social media can't sell their product the way that print can.

21:36And I was like, let me get this straight. Social media is powerful enough to put democracy on its knees, but it can't sell lipstick? Get the hell out of here. That's great. I'm just going to jump off script a little bit. Because you mentioned one word near that is what I believe we're about here. And I get made fun of for my Bronx, New York accent coming out here. Humanity. We believe in this room, our sales competitiveness is that we have better people. And I believe that deep in our heart and that's why they're here. The key is to understand that AI and all this other stuff still needs us to a degree.

22:12100%. Right, it still needs us so we've got to not be afraid of it and embrace it and elevate our game with it. So, any other thoughts on that? I'm a full buyer of that. Like, do I believe at some point the robots can win? I do. I don't think we'll see it. But like, if you told me in 200 years like robots are, like dinosaurs didn't think they were finished. Like, you know, things happen. I believe in those kind of things. I don't think in our lifetime. And so that's exactly right. A lot of you in this room did not move fast or hard enough on the internet, did not move fast and hard enough on social, did not move fast.

22:45I mean, some of the people here actually held onto their BlackBerry three years longer than they needed to because you needed to touch the buttons. Yeah, that's right. So what I would ask is to inspire this is I agree with you. Like again, a robot is not going to a specialty retail store that has 15 units in Ohio and placing the order. It's not coming. Not any time in your career. So you need to figure out how to use ChatGPT to type in, how would you sell to a, this is literally something you could do with AI. Hey, ChatGPT, how would you sell to a cliche third generation business owner who owns 40 drug stores in California?

23:26Like, do you understand that it will spit out stuff and may say one thing that you may just try on a phone call being a human and it might work. Use the weapon. Here's how I've always thought about technology. It is the biggest tidal wave coming that you've ever seen. And we've got one of two decisions. Grab a surfboard and run it. Put your head in the sand and pray. And the second one is not a good outcome. And that's what I think about AI for you. Find your way to use it. Great, thanks. anything else we've got a question and answer just a quick one because in leaning into social media and how you know those those influencers have all the power right now we've had success with great influencers who have organically mentioned this and we and those are fun I don't want to say they're the only successes we've had but we haven't been able to replicate that I think about this a lot my so I'm I'm writing a new book about what I'm talking about this is why I'm so in it right now.

24:32It's called day trading attention. And the thesis is what we're talking about but it's also that we've never been in time in marketing in the last hundred years where you can steal it or you can get murdered. Right? Right, think about the analogy that just happened. Influencers is a big one for me that I talk about in the book. It's what you just talked about. You might wake up this morning and like something good's going on. You're like, what's going on? And then you finally figured out by midday that a single human made a single video and good things have happened. And you paid zero. And then you're all excited and you're like, all right, let's like milk this.

25:08And you go out and try to find other people that seemingly look like that person, right? And you give them money and nothing happens and there's confusion. And the confusion sits in the day trading of attention which means every, the reason I use day trading is, you know, there's two different ways to invest. You invest like me, which is you make a, make different big bets and you go to sleep and you know that your grandkids are gonna be happy or unhappy with you. Or you day trade and you're making it in the margins hour by hour. And both are different ways to do it. Marketing used to be the other way.

25:40Nine months, we're gonna plan the campaign and we're gonna pray that it works out. And now it's, if you are not marketing every single day, someone's outflanking you. It's hard. And I'm empathetic. By the way, I wish it wasn't like this. I wish I was Don Draper. I wish I was chilling in midtown, drinking for four hours, coming up with a slogan and you're thrilled with it. That would be a great life. It's just not the reality of what we live in. You know, and so, I think that, I think that influencers is something you have to figure out. It's why I bought a publishing company. I actually think advertorial is something people should be doing more of.

26:18I don't know if you know what green screening is. It's when you see people, right? You've seen it. Like I see some people shaking, but for the ones that don't know, in TikTok or Instagram, you see a person talking, but in the background it's like a headline. I think you should be buying advertorial. You should definitely connect them to Gallery Media Group because then you're writing your own, oh got it, good, thank you. Oh that's right, I'm sorry, that's right. That's gonna work. You're literally writing the headline you want people to know and then you have a human endorsing it. That's pretty good.