The Future of Brand, Culture and Marketing | Fireside Chat with GaryVee & Michael Smith

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience. I hope that some of you have already read the headlines of Chili's in the US where 40 % of its revenue in Q3 is attributable to one TikTok. The mango gummy craze of people selling it on eBay for a premium off of one TikTok. The Ocean Spray thing, I think everybody knows what that did for Fleetwood Mac and Ocean Spray. We've never had the luxury of something so phenomenal. For such a low price, we can change the outcomes of our business but we must become actual practitioners. I think the industry got it reversed. As you know and as all of you know, a lot of people took social in-house or fund it very small because they think it's the commodity.

0:43It's supposed to support the campaign. I think of it as reverse. I think the campaign is the commodity. There is, this room alone, let alone the world, has many brilliant strategists and creatives that can come up with the tagline and the commercial. To me, that's the commodity. The science around the art to be able to win on Facebook versus Instagram, Instagram versus Snapchat, Snapchat versus TikTok, LinkedIn versus YouTube Shorts. We have over 100 employees internally that work on something called PAC, platforms and culture. All they do for a living is understand how the algos work on the eight platforms that matter or what's happening in popular culture across all different segments around the world of interest, Korean pop, gaming, slime trends for girls making slime.

1:30I mean, why Sabrina Carpenter happened, like all of it. And so I think we're wasting our time on audacious philosophies and academia and we're not in the trenches. In fact, I think it's crazy in 2025 to spend media on any creative that wasn't validated by the algorithm that consumers wanted. The thought of spending media upfront in 2025 only speaks to someone that doesn't realize what's just happened. Social media, the one that I fell in love with in 2005, six, seven, eight. Social media in the early days, the reason I was so intuitive about it was the way I built my daddy's liquor store was not social media.

2:07It was email marketing and Google AdWords. It was direct mail. It was a lot of different marketing functions. Social media when it first came out and for the first decade, 2005 to 2015, was email marketing. Get as many people to follow you as possible, post something, and get a kind of guaranteed amount of people to open, right? What has happened in the TikTokification of all social media platforms over the last three years is we don't live in that world anymore. I've been doing this every single day for 17 years, hardcore. And the fact that somebody in this room who's never posted on social in their lives could decide to open a TikTok account today, make their first post, and that video can get more views than my post later this afternoon is a level of creative meritocracy that has never been seen in the world.

2:59So I was showing you last night, and I don't have a camera here to make it worth, I don't want to, I'll just tell you what's here. I showed Michael last night to really tell him the extremes of what's going on. I showed him a piece of content on my account, my Instagram account. I have 10.3 million followers. I showed him a piece of content, and it got 19 million views. My most successful video in that platform. I showed him another piece of content, and the logic and why I thought it was going to do as well and great. I was super fired up about it. that was posted three days later and I got 400 ,000.

3:29I don't think most, as you know, one of the things that I think has really helped me, one of the reasons for all of you, this may make sense to you, one of the reasons I still do Gary V is because I believe being a practitioner is the advantage. I do all of the marketing. V friends, my dad's wine text, like being an operator of marketing every day as a CEO is a substantial competitive advantage. So for me, I don't believe that people have realized the extremities of what's happening in organic social. Over and underpriced attention, can you share a little bit about that framework with this group and what it means for marketers and advertisers?

4:12I think anything could work. I don't think newspaper ads are per se dead. I think that they're just very expensive based on how people act in 2024. I think television can work. In fact, you know this. I believe the Super Bowl ad is the single best media buy in the world. I think it is grossly underpriced. When you get 130, 140 million Americans to consume a 30-second video for$7 or$8 million, that is insanely challenging, even if you are remarkable at best digital and social and influencer work. The problem, as many of us know, is if the creative's wrong, Now you're in real trouble, right? So there's attention, and then what do you do with the attention?

4:55And so for me, I've become infatuated because my career was built, and I watched the biggest companies in the world built on over-investing and underpriced attention. In the first six years of Google AdWords, Google AdWords were uncomfortably underpriced. There's no mistaking that Amazon, being the number one spender on Google AdWords, by a magnitude of 5X to the number two spender of eBay, in that era doesn't have a direct correlation to how big Amazon is today. Procter & Gamble is Procter & Gamble today because when we transitioned from a primary radio society to a primary television society, a lot of advertisers held to writing copy for radio because they were romantic about it and P &G went all in and their execution in the first 10 years of television outpaced every other consumer brand.

5:49The things we're all seeing today are dictated by what we're seeing in social, influencer, and other underpriced behaviors. So when people say like TV is dead, I don't think TV is dead. I think the standard television commercials, media cost is grossly overpriced in comparison to if you understood how to do every marketing behavior, direct mail, search, television, social, digital, banners, pre-roll. If you knew everything and you could do it all, why wouldn't you spend your money and your activities on the things that were better priced? And so the thesis of underpriced attention or the concept of the book I wrote, date trading attention is, what I think is a good deal in marketing or content creation changes constantly.

6:37You know, we took a long flight yesterday together. We're talking about virtual influencers. We're talking about live social shopping. Like this is moving fast and trust me, I wish I grew up in marketing in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I would have loved drinking a fucking cocktail in the middle of the day. Shooting the shit. I'm very good at coming up with slogans. I'm good at that shit. I would have fucking dominated. I would have high-fived the fuck out of Don Draper. But I didn't get that. This is the era I'm in and so I feel as though the merit of marketing is misunderstood. The separation of media and creative was a really big issue for all of us.

7:22It created an ecosystem of fake reports that we all overpay for. It's all corporate shit. You all know it. I'm not smart. I'm just independent.

7:34I couldn't agree more. I'm petrified of virtual influencers, as you showed me yesterday. Yes. We'll see where that goes. Well, let me tell you where it's going to go. Please.

7:47There's a stunning chance that your son could marry a non-human being. He's only four, man. But where I'm going here, again, one thing that I don't think we do well is we don't look at all eight billion people, right? I'm sure this will land with this Canadian crowd. Fucking Americans piss me off. They're so in their own shit, I'm like, you know there's a world, right? You know, and so when you look at, for example, virtual influencers, these are AI people. People that are not real, but on Instagram right now, by the nanosecond are starting to look more and more real. A year ago, you could kind of tell it was a little too Photoshop-y.

8:30Right now, I promise you, some of you consumed a human. You thought it was a human, and it's not. Meanwhile, in Japan, and again, if anybody here has lived there or has had the luxury of marketing or doing business there, this is pretty advanced. VTubers are a big deal. There are people that are consuming unlimited content of live streaming virtual influencers called VTubers and it's gone so far that there are many people that are paying to be in relationships with a VTuber. And so when people say like, oh my God, everything's all fucked up now. Like all the kids are in social and on the phone.

9:08I remind people that the beeper was here just a few minutes ago. The Blackberry that you all loved so much that you would never leave because you had to feel the buttons. And so I tell parents, if you're scared about what's happening right now, wait to 25 years from now. This is the mundane. and I tell you back to history, go Google or AI search articles about the kaleidoscope. When the kaleidoscope was invented, the amount of articles written in Europe that it was gonna ruin the children because they were always like this.

9:52Michael, I think fear, I think fear is unfortunately very effectively being weaponized right now. I think fear is having a good moment, which is really devastating to me. But I challenge everyone here, when you hear a virtual influencer and having a relationship with it, I'm not confused that everyone's like, what the fuck, right? But I challenge you to realize humans continue to evolve, things are different, things change. And if you come from a lens of optimism versus pessimism or fear, I think it opens you up both in your human spirit and in your marketing and business behaviors. I am firmly in the business of maybe in a world of people that are just in love with no.

10:43See, the alarm just went off. That's it, see ya, thank you for having me. So you talked about the business of maybe. I wanna talk about that a little bit more. One of the things that you say a lot, which I absolutely believe in, is this idea of a yes and culture. Yes. And brands and marketers, so many grew up in a world of scarcity. Yes. So can you talk a little bit about what yes and means and what's the importance of both quantity and quality to success in social? So I think we unfortunately continue to treat social media with a television mindset. That it is that we will sit in a boardroom and come up with ideas and judge every word and the grid of our Instagram is being treated like a full page ad in Vogue.

11:32We're not letting go of this incredible insecurity known as my subjective opinion. And so when I think about the firepower of this room, I'm desperate to see all of your ideas hit the end consumer. And that to me is not spray and pray and throw against the wall and see what sticks. and even test and learn. That is, distribution has changed.

12:04Distribution has changed. Where consumers attention has gone has changed. This is now, without a shadow of a doubt, the primary device of society. It's not even close. I couldn't even comprehend anyone arguing the counter. But people do in marketing industry because we want to hold up books that were written in the 90s, decks that were written in early 2000. And so what yes and to me is, if you're trying to sell Starry or these sneakers or anything that's represented in this room, our number one job is to create consideration from as many different consumer segmentations as humanly possible. Why, if you were trying to sell something, a vision, a story, or a product or business, why wouldn't you want everybody on earth to buy it?

12:54So sitting around and thinking one video, one vanilla video, and then matching luggage to support that vanilla video is the right way to do marketing in 2024. You do understand that every basic common sense, somewhat solidly bright person on earth that doesn't live in our industry thinks everything we do is stupid, right?

13:22Like animatics? focus groups of six customers when we have social media? Like what are we doing? And so, yeah, I mean, we love a good campaign. We're gonna wait, I mean, I feel so bad for creative agencies. All I hear from CMOs is like, blah, blah, blah, they didn't crack it. No shit they didn't crack it. You're making a subjective opinion, they're pitching you subjective opinions, but I also don't have empathy for it because in 2024, spending seven months on a brief and an idea and then pitching it is illogical. And so yes and to me is everyone here has unlimited good ideas of stories that may resonate with many different consumer segmentations and now we have this blessing, marketing blessing called social media where for the first time in the history of marketing, the creative creates the reach.

14:14Let me say that nice and slow for the kids in the back, Michael. For the first time in marketing history, The thing we've all wanted as creatives is true. The creative itself creates the reach. Not we make a piece of creative and we spend an ungodly amount of money to force people to watch our shit. This is huge and until people understand it, they will continue to lose market share. Couldn't agree more. I want to push a little bit on the idea of behaving as an operator. You sit across VaynerX at this point. point, multiple different companies under the umbrella, you could easily just focus on leadership, chairman style role across all of these different entities.

15:01But you spend a lot of your time engaging in the day to day of all of those businesses and spending time researching to truly actually operate the businesses. Number one, how do you think about the balance between acting as an operator and trying to act as a leader across all of those businesses? And number two, how do you think that manifests itself in a competitive advantage against other agencies that might operate in a different way? Well, look, I mean, the number two is simple. And for anybody that owns an agency here or aspires to, staying independent as long as humanly possible is the competitive advantage.

15:36I don't, again, there's a lot of things that have happened in my life where I don't get high on my own supply. I don't think I'm special or good or smart. I think I structured, I made a good decision to give me the freedom to do the thing, right? So when I think about our competitive advantage against other agencies, we opened up Canada 18 months ago. Why? When I looked at the landscape in this incredible country, it's mainly holding company owned. And if you're in a holding company owned environment, you're not less good than VaynerMedia. You're not less creative. You're not less smart. You just have to make numbers every 90 days or you're fucking dead.

16:20If I had a board, or I was part of a holding company this year, this is real talk, this is not hyperbole, I just need you to hear this nice and slow because I'm hoping this brings value to somebody. If I today was publicly traded, even if I was privately held and had a board that had power, or if Vayner was part of a holding company, I would be getting fired at the end of this year. We did not grow enough and we made a lot less money this year. A lot less. And do you know why I'm happy? Because I invested my fucking face off this year and I'm gonna fucking kill everybody next year.

17:05That does not make me better than the competition. It means I have the luxury to do that. and so I have actually deep empathy and compassion for the agencies that are part of this. I feel bad. I get it. Those MDs, there's a lot of stress and the industry's changing. Nobody's confused by that. There's a lot going on in our world. So that's how I think about that. The practitionership, yes, you know this. I come in cold into meetings that I know what's going on because I'm living it every day. My team's like, we want to prep you for the meeting. I'm like, I've been prepped. There is no prep. There's no need for prep.

17:40I'm not coming cold. I'm not a banker. I'm in this shit. Yeah, that was a dig. So that is a very big deal to me. And you know, as far as the way practitioner operating or leader, chairman, look, I think when you own a business, just like when you're a parent, everything's on you. How do I think about it? That is my responsibility. And I have been flow. And I think again, for parents or owners in here or leaders or CEOs, I would ask you to not beat yourself up. You're trying. Like some weeks are gonna be better than others. Some years are gonna be better than others. Some months are gonna be better than others.

18:19Sometimes I feel like I'm the most dominant force in the game and other days I'm like, man, you're fucking overrated, Gary V. You know, like, you know. But I think that's the life journey. You know, to me, I never get too high. I never get too low. One of the reasons I've been able to be a public figure for so long is when I post something and somebody puts a goat emoji, I don't think I'm the greatest. which protects me from when somebody says I'm a piece of crap because I don't think I'm a piece of crap. And I worry about what people that actually know me think about me. And I'm enjoying the process.

18:57Thank you. It's very nice. So number one, I think that's right on. I want to make a little bit of a shift from some of the practitioner aspects of social media. I want to talk a little bit about values and perspective. I've had the luxury of meeting people that work across a lot of VaynerX. What I've seen consistently and I'm really impressed by is the shared values and culture of everyone who's in your orbit. And so how do you think about maintaining a sense of perspective when we're working across everything you're working across? There's so many demands on your time. And then how do you think about the shared values that I see at least across everyone that's in the Vayner universe?

19:41And how do you think about the way that you project that out on a day-to-day basis? Thank you.

19:51Two very simple sentences that I think answer that question. Number one, if you are a leader and you are confused by the following sentence, you have no shot of winning long-term. the sentence is employees and anybody that works for you are actually your boss. The second as a leader you understand you work for everyone, not the other way around, is the second that you can actually accomplish something. Humility is the sheer superpower of society. So number one, I think the reason you see what you see, and it's not just, you know, VaynerX has eight or 10 companies in my advertising home, but then as you know, there's VaynerSports, there's VFriends, my Pokemon thing, there's the restaurant group, there's a lot going on.

20:39And you see it across the board on two things. I work for everyone. And number two, I fire every single person that is not a good human being, regardless of how much money she or he makes for me. Woo.

20:57There is no quicker way to fuck everything up than to look the other way at someone who's talented and contributing but is a piece of shit human. Period. And so my success rate is not based on how I hire. My success rate is based on how I promote and how I fire. Hiring, my friends, is guessing. Let there be no, boy oh boy, was I gifted with intuition and people skills. It's a real blessing. all, give all the credit to my parents having sex at the perfect nanosecond.

21:40And I have hired atrociously in my 30-year career because I'm too optimistic. There's a little bit too much charity in the way that I hire. It's just who I am. Hiring is guessing. Promoting and firing is knowing. Hire faster because you're not going to figure it out in any way. fire faster and promote fastest one of the big mistakes a lot of us make is when we know we have something great on our hands we wait a year we wait two years when I smell or sniff out somebody great I'm letting them know fast often with action on title and or dollars if nothing else by human interaction of like having a dinner and saying you fucking got it I want you here let's get to know each other.

22:28The lack of time that people spend with their people. How could you have a relationship if you don't spend time together? The amount of time that bosses don't spend with people is staggering to me. I spend a shocking amount of time on 15 minute check-ins, 30 minute drinks, human interaction. Again, this industry knows this. I have an agency that's 14 years old. We have almost 100 people that have been at the company for for 10 plus years. Do you know how fucking insane that is in our industry? That is earned, that is by giving a shit. That is by actually caring and knowing that continuity and culture and family business vibes build an unstoppable force.

23:10And so effort is the answer, my friend. I think that's right on. I wanna talk about your other superpower a little bit that we were talking about yesterday, timing. So again, you've launched multiple different companies. You've leaned into platforms when the industry wasn't ready for it. How do you think about and how should everyone in this audience think about figuring out when is the right time to make a change? When is the right time to make a shift? When is the right time to take a shot on something that might not be common knowledge or an expected play at a given point in time? Ironically, we've talked about both of the answers to this question.

23:55Number one, when you have humility and don't think you know anything and think the customer's always right at scale, it's the easiest thing to do all the time. Six years ago when I was yelling about TikTok and now I get a lot of flowers for that, that wasn't a genius, that already happened. When people give me a lot of like, you know, I'll do a podcast, they're like, Gary, you see around corners you're Nostradamus, you're this. I'm like, no I'm not. I'm just paying attention. Right? Like Saturn, let's do a real one right now. In the US, Saturn app. What is Saturn app? Most people don't know it, definitely not in Canada.

24:34It's a US thing that's really happening. It's a calendar app for high school kids. In the US, 80 % of high schools have this very weird model where you're on a five day cycle. I don't know if they have it in Canada too. like it's not like Monday, Tuesday, like Tuesday could be day three. It's confusing. So they built an app to make it easier for high school kids that looks like a Google calendar and has now penetrated 80 % of high schools in America. 80 % of 14 to 18 year olds are on an app. Then they miraculously add chat on top of the calendar. Go fucking figure, smart fucking move. There's 80 % of high school kids 14 to 18 right now as I sit here and bam on this app.

25:18When I start talking about it in this exact meta moment and in three years when it becomes the first thing since Snapchat and TikTok to actually be a thing, it wasn't that I saw around corners, it's that I'm paying attention every day and it's already happened. You just don't know about it. Meaning people at my level are living in penthouses not playing in the dirt, Michael. I'm in the fucking dirt, Michael. Can I go to the penthouse? You can. You so can, brother, because what I believe is the penthouse sounds nice. But if you love the fucking game, the penthouse is boring. So, you know, what's my timing about?

26:02It's about humility and listening. Like, I'm just paying attention to what consumers do all the time. Live social shopping, like, what not is crushing. TikTok shop is crushing. it's not like of course live social shopping is going to be the buzzword next year it's happened I'm not guessing I've been watching it for six I've been watching whatnot for four years timing is about watching everything knowing when things are premature and then getting loud when they're ready when everybody was like we need to build metaverses when you know obviously I'm very bullish on NFTs and blockchain but everyone's all my clients were like we need to build a metaverse we have this pitch we need to build like a store in the metaverse for a million dollars.