The Most Underrated Social Media Platform You Need to Start Posting On

0:00Podcast Nation, what's good? It's Gary. One thing you're going to see from me a lot more is original content for the podcast, which I'm sure everyone's like, yay. In fact, leave a review and some stars for that if you haven't. Anyway, this is a talk I gave this week at Snapchat at an offsite with marketers. I think anybody who's got a personal brand, anybody who's got a small business, definitely a CPG brand, a fashion brand, a consumer brand, pay very close attention to what I talk about here on I get into very real detail about interest media versus social media the interest graph, how the algorithms are working how to get more out of your performance marketing if you're spending on CAC and ROAS and LTV some bigger kind of philosophical consumer behavior points and really a recap of some historical things I've done in context and what it means for you and how you can make more money, get more followers get more happiness, get more joy and so and and most of all talking about an underpriced attention for a place which is snapchat spotlight if you go to your snapchat right now bottom of the app you'll see spotlight i mean the tiktok and instagram feed of snapchat is one of the great opportunities for a lot of you to break out and build a bigger brand and i recommend it this is the gary v audio experience I am so excited that you're here.

1:23So a small story. When I was my first product marketing role, we were trying to figure out how to encourage advertisers to make better creative for Facebook back in the day. And Vayner was one of the companies that we studied because of everything that you guys were doing back then to help with creative asset development and improving performance. So this is a huge, like, fan girl moment for me, so I'm very excited. But we're very lucky to be joined by Gary today. Gary is of course the founder and CEO of Interacts and Data Media but doesn't really need any introduction. So thank you for being here today.

1:54Thank you. Should we jump right in? I'm ready. All right. So I wanted to start with your sort of statement about social media being dead and this being the era of interest media. So I was hoping that you could tell the audience, and we sort of talked about this a little bit, we've got a lot of performance marketers and agency folks in the audience. tell everyone what you meant by that and then maybe share a little bit about what you think it means for this room yeah I mean I think you know I was there when the term was coined and it really referred to the fact that you know you would follow and people would follow you based on your social graph the people you knew the people you went to high school with college co-workers this was your social network and And the point I was trying to make with that content recently, and have been talking about this for about three or four years, really, was really what first fascinated me about Tumblr.

2:49I was a very early investor in Tumblr back in 2007. And what I saw TikTok was doing in 2017, even musically. You know, there's some funny content about me being very scared to talk about musically because it was primarily 14 year old girls on the platform and I was like, oh shit, I think this is gonna work but can I talk about it? Was, oh, this is no longer getting content from who you follow. This is about getting content of stuff you're interested in. And so I find it unusual that the majority of the people in this room, given what you do for a living and just kind of looking at all of you, that anyone is confused that over the last five years, more and more of the behavior on social networks is not predicated on you getting every post from the people you follow, but now it is clearly around the content and the subject matters that you're currently into.

3:46Like even the speed in which the content is moving, probably for a lot of people here at some point this summer, you might have been getting a little bit more soccer content than you're accustomed to. That's probably faded away. I think that is a profound shift. I think for people in the context of this that think about performance often wildly overthink about math and underthink about art. And I think the art of the way the algos and the way that consumption and attention is working is far more based not only on your general interests. You know, my interests are the New York Jets and wine and collectibles.

4:26but I am stunned by the speed of which across all social networks if there's something I'm just like fixated on for about five minutes like is Harry gonna get married? That content really populates and has a time cycle and it's fascinating for me to also watch and I'm not using myself as a focus group of one. What's so great about Vayner is we have such a broad view of the world. I think all of you know this. Some of those niches become a one week thing where you see running content for a while and it goes away. And others, those niches become pillars of who you are and what you're interested in.

5:03That dynamic needs to be understood dramatically more. And I think what it means for everyone here is the difference of if you understand it and understand what to do with it from a branding and a performance standpoint versus not understanding it, I think it changes your CAC and your ROAS and your outcomes and your career and everything that has to do with your professional life. Say more about that. I mean, say more about kind of the impact on the metrics that a lot of people in this room care deeply about, right? On CAP, on ROAS. And specifically, one of the things that struck me when I was listening to some of your points on this is really around kind of relevance and how that relates to what marketers are trying to accomplish.

5:41Like, maybe tell us a little bit more about the relevance side of it and then the impact on outcomes and sort of how folks should be thinking about that. I think our industry is shockingly broken up between performance and brand. And I think it's hurting a lot of the businesses in this room and the industry. I think when you really focus on attention and relevance, it kind of sits almost like middle funnel. And then when you understand it, you execute in it. I believe currently in an organic social network environment, you know how passionate I am. that Spotlight is not talked enough about and understood enough and it's a huge opportunity that when you really understand what organic social media content is, that it becomes the starting point in the middle as a mid-funnel play and that it wildly affects your lower funnel and upper funnel.

6:31For the lower funnel, we continue as Vayner and I as Gary when I'm on a board or an investor continue to shock the most mathematically sound individuals in this room by showing them that it's very cute that you're A to triple Z testing with content with AI and OpenClaw and Nano and all this, but if you actually go organic first and you actually understand what's getting views organically, not hidden behind media to disguise that it was garbage creative and understand what that means and how you then post-produce it for a lower funnel performance, it outperforms the best performance creative that the team guessed on.

7:13No matter how good you are and how many variations you do, the algorithms that are based on interest that these platforms are building are better than you. And then that creative becomes a starting point not only for performance, but it also becomes the brief or the consumer insight to do something that you might view as more upper funnel, aka taking that creative and expanding on it on a higher fidelity execution, whether that's the creative you put on outdoor media or whether that's the theme of an in-person experiential event or if that becomes the insight or the creative pillar to doing a higher fidelity premium video for brand purposes that you may deploy in a YouTube or Amazon Prime and or in social feeds themselves aka a$40 ,000 production for an organic video only after the fact that it's been validated by organic views achieved because of relevance across many platforms.

8:12That is not a science that I think enough people are playing. What metrics are you looking at? Like what gives you the confidence? Okay, this is the one that's taken off. This is the one to maybe put lower funnel spend behind. Like how are you thinking about like the core metrics to look at? And what recommendations are you giving to your clients? The only metric I give a fuck about is organic views achieved. And then how do you play that through to their lower funnel performance? Because it always does well. What will make sense to all of you, and I'm watching the body language of the room, I don't know where everyone's on their journey, but when creative gets a million views, 150 ,000 views when you normally get 80, or 400, or 4 ,000, whether you're B2B or B2C, when that creative gets a half a million views, there's a reason.

8:59It was relevant. It may not be relevant in a way that you wanted it to. It may feel like it was off-brand, and shit, this is silly, and we're supposed to be serious. But that's you disrespecting people giving a fuck about it. And no one buys shit until they give a fuck about something. And so what's crazy about this is this is the purest form of relevance to consideration to conversion that we've ever seen. The greatest measurement issue of our time was to measure brand. Right? To measure creative. And now the social networks from Snap to Shorts to Facebook Classic to Instagram to TikTok to LinkedIn to Twitter X have done it for free as a byproduct of the platform they built because their interests are aligned with ours which is they want to keep people on their platforms.

9:53Thus, people seeing content that's actually relevant to them is more likely to keep them on the platform than you seeing a bunch of shit that you don't care about because your cousin posted about something you don't care about. That is why we went from social to interest. So your and your seven competitors objective of keeping people on platform aligned with us who are trying to sell shit on the thing that no one has been able to figure out how to do for 100 years because television and print and radio and billboards and direct mails did not have the technology stack in place to be able to even achieve that.

10:28The fact that pure creative testing is now a free byproduct of doing proper organic social media content production is fucking insane. So what happens is when you do that, by nature you know that piece of organic content is a monster when you start getting good at understanding how to take it down to the lower funnel which I assume based on the context of this conference is something a lot of people here are thinking about. When you know how to take a grandma and a granddaughter walking down the street and eating a lollipop and it made people cry and you sell lollipops, when you understand how to take that and add some form of call to action or free shipping when you buy a case of the fucking lollipop or whatever you're up to, when you know how to subtly interject performance DNA into a piece of creative that had won on brand and then start to run ads against it, you will see how it outperforms whatever you came up with randomly to test in an ABCD triple Z framework.

11:28Hey everybody, 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 how are you thinking about you like that right like I'm really proud of you that you can like guess 7 ,000 different variants of creative ideas that you pulled out of your ass but why not pull those out of your ass in a branding format into these platforms where you'll get by accident business for it but you'll get what you're really trying to get which is validation if it's interesting without spending the media dollars to do that the micromedia spend A-B testing framework of the great era of meta of 2015 to 17 that built Bonobo socks is over and so that's that thanks for having me I love it the product I was working on back in the face when I was studying everything you were doing was our creative testing product which was an epic failure for a lot of the reasons that you're talking about the reality was actually the best testing that you could advise to a client was go put it out in the wild and see what will happen, right?

12:35And like see how, where things go from there. That's what really works. Yes, my whole career has been the Pied Piper of social media while the platforms continue to go to VaynerMedia and try to tell us about things that we adamantly disagree about. Yeah, yeah. So what about the role of AI? Right, Peter? The role of AI is it's gonna make all this shit better. Do you think, so how much would you trust AI? A lot. If you produce the creative assets that you put out in the wild to test? An extraordinary amount. Are you doing it now? Of course. Say more. It's fucking AI. Like, I understand that there's things that we all worry about as human beings, and we should.

13:13I have no interest in fighting a fucking robot in the street. But if we're talking about this small little thing that we're doing here, which is we're trying to do marketing, on what planet don't you think AI is going to help you be better? That'd be like saying, the internet's not going to help you be better, or a computer is not gonna help you be better or a typewriter or electricity. This is the story as old as time with people. Big technologies come along that change the entire paradigm and people either are super hyped or super scared depending on the current temperament of the political climate this time around.

13:50I promise you, if AI came out in 2009 or during the Clinton years, we would adore it. There was a different temperament. there's a lot of cynicism, concern, fear, and when the leading combo when it first hit the scene is, guys, great news, AI is here, it's massive, you're all about to get fired. Like it's very hard for us to be like, yay. Hooray, yeah. But in a much more true way, not hyperbolized too far to the left or too far to the right, this is a profoundly insane technology that I assume everyone here has flirted with in different ways. maybe your political views or emotional or ideological or delusional views have allowed you to not go far but if you haven't like you're going to like what do you think is going to happen in your life?

14:39AI is going to go away and so yeah of course we're using it tremendously and like for me I would argue what you know it's been really an interesting journey for me as a marketer because like one of the reasons Vayner did well in hindsight now looking back was when I built Wine Library I did everything I did the media spend. I did the strategy. I did the creative. In fact, for the first five years of VaynerMedia, we didn't even have departments. I thought every marketer did everything. Literally, I thought you should be the media person and the strategist and the creative and the producer. And so I got very fortunate.

15:12I got trained in all of it. And at the end of the day, what I've really realized is if push came to shove and I went to ad school and went into the industry, I'd probably be a strategist, but not the strategist of like a brand strategist that's gonna write a brief. I will tell you all, what I do for a living is just watch what humans do at hyperscale. And that's why social is so intoxicating when it came along in 2006 and 2007. Before I used to go to blogs, hey kids, I used to have to go to blogs and fucking forums and like read comments on WordPress to figure out what the fuck the world thought.

15:51Then Twitter came along. I'm like this, I mean people thought Twitter was the duck. I invested in Twitter in 2006 or 2007 and like everyone made fun of me to invest in it because everyone's like, so let me get this straight. I know this might be hard if you're under 25 in here but this was literally the conversation. They're like, so wait, you invested in this company. I had no money and I kind of like bet the farm on this. They were like, you invested in a company where people are gonna go on their phone and tell people they're walking the dog, they're eating a pizza, they're watching a show and literally everyone I knew was like, that's the stupidest shit I've ever heard who would possibly want to listen to that and my response at the time was everyone what I knew was why do we have traffic on highways when somebody had an accident on the side of the road that has nothing to fucking do with you we are incredibly yenta based we're super fascinated by people in good and bad ways and my belief was that everyone was gonna care that you're going to Ibiza or you bought this purse or you're watching this show and it ended up probably being more true than I ever could have imagined but I really thought it was gonna play out like this.

17:05I have the video receipts and then so here we are. Yeah, and here we are. Well, okay, so we've talked a little bit about other platforms. Let's talk about Snapchat. Please. Because you've talked a lot about Snapchat. So tell us a little bit about, you've referred Snapchat as maybe an underutilized opportunity. we've talked about Spotlight, like share more about what you see as the big opportunity on Snapchat and where you think maybe marketers are getting it wrong, where they're misunderstanding and what they should be doing differently. I mean, I think marketers listen to two things, the market or the platform.

17:39You know, my passion is for one of my favorite people, let alone entrepreneurs, your CEO, to be louder about his conviction on what it means for marketers. I'm very excited like anyone about AR and VR and I'm super thrilled about glasses and you can be a glasses company if you want to be. And I just think this platform, the reason I said yes to this on a very busy day for me is I really am kind of here for everyone because I already gave you what I could give you. Like what I just told you is the thing, go do that. but for you but for you all on Team Snap like you know I'm sure the reason some people are here is this is their little secret weapon this is a channel that does performance well for them that they know a lot of people are not talking about right so there's that part I know that to be true I know a lot of the you know deep technology and AR and avatar and like all that stuff I know all that to be true you know where I'm at.

18:48I believe that Spotlight is the most underrated opportunity for people because of what I just told you. I am obsessed with organic social creative as the starting point for all marketing. From the Super Bowl to your campaign to all your performance, it is the starting point and any place that I can get under priced attention is good for me. And so usually and I know, I assume based on what you do for a living and how much content I put out, it's probably on your radar that I have a solid track record of getting to platforms early. Early is one of the ways to extract underpriced attention. If there's a lot of people paying attention and you're the only one or one of the few or one of just a dozen that is marketing heavily, you're going to gather more.

19:31It's buying beachfront property in Malibu before anyone understands it's Malibu, right? Obviously, whoever pays nine blocks from the beach and paid more than you did didn't do as well as you do. That is one of the ways I do well. The other way I do well is this exact situation. When platforms have not positioned themselves well enough in my opinion to let people know how profound it is. I view Snapchat Spotlight as Instagram and TikTok's equal. I don't know of anyone who talks about it besides me. I think that's the biggest opportunity in marketing. One of the things we spent a lot and talking about when we were talking about Spotlight was the combination of like Spotlight plus chat or Spotlight plus other parts of the app.

20:17Well, chat is what is your fucking trope. That chat is your fucking thing, right? Like everyone here knows because again, looking at the crowd, they either lived it because that's their age group or they have siblings or nieces or nephews. Chat is the sticky motherfucker you have. If you didn't have chat, nobody would be here. You'd be gone is what I mean. And so chat, chat. Put very simply. Chat is definitely the moon and everything else is hovering around it. My point of view is you've got them all with chat. Just make them understand that Spotlight exists at a higher level. The potential of Spotlight is profound.

20:58Secretly, sometimes when I sleep, I'm like, should I sell all 13 of my businesses and become head of Spotlight? That's how much I like it. And I think people should look at it. and I'm sure some of you again given the context of this I don't believe a lot of people who are giving a shit about it and I think that's the biggest opportunity in the room especially if you believe the first half of my talk which is organic social is a starting point because then if it does this will make sense I'm sure to all of you if it does well organically in Snap it's going to outperform it probably in performance even if you took it out of spotlight and put it on Instagram like when I do cross pollination of platform the creative does not act exactly the same on every platform as you all know.

21:41So winning within it organically on Spotlight and then putting into performance in Snap versus winning organically on Shorts and then bringing that into performance in Snap is gonna have an interesting different variable. We're talking a lot today about like the new performance playbook, right? So I wanna hear, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Like what would your performance playbook look like on Snapchat, do you think? Like if you think about the different services, the different experiences, like if you were coming in cold, which you're obviously not because you're you. But what would your, how would you think about like the performance playbook on Snap?

22:14What do you think would be the winning formula? This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. To win organically on Spotlight and post-produce it with performance elements that have the most native elements of what's working on Snap, right?

22:58So whether it's the classic overlay of the wording on that bar, whether it's current filters that are over-indexing, you know, having a remarkable pulse of what's happening within the environment of Snap overall, both in Spotlight, but also in the filter ecosystem or the AR ecosystem or in the news or that whole bottom nav of the app, like everything that's happening, how do I factor that into what just did well in organic overlay? And how do I really, because this will make sense to you. I natively have to take this, let's go back to the grandma and the granddaughter and the lollipop. I have to now add some elements to that that just did well and make it performance.

23:42Inherently, I could fuck that up. Right? Like if I'm too aggressive with the call out, like you've got, you know, it's art. Understanding the current slang of the moment within Snap of what's working to add the element of how I'm gonna communicate free shipping or buy three, get one free or whatever I'm doing, if you do that with proper slang, AKA, what font am I using? What filter am I using? Right? Is incredibly important. And that's how I would do it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, we've got like three minutes left. You sort of just mentioned one of the big things that you're good at is seeing things early that might take off.

24:24What's one of the biggest things that you, what's your big kind of next prediction that you feel like people aren't paying enough attention to right now? Live social shopping. Say, tell us more about that. The QVC-ification of every social network is an inevitable outcome of the next decade. And what's happening on Whatnot and TikTok and eBay Live right now on GMV, which is gross merchandise value, if you have not dug into, is massive. I literally cannot wait for the second that, I just need you to get pumped about Spotlight before you guys even put in live shopping elements into Spotlight, but I think it's gonna be profound.

25:09It actually, to Snap's credit, there's some real long, I mean, I had conversations with Sean Mills a decade ago of doing live shopping stuff with Snap. As an overarching thing, especially for performance marketers, which I think, I assume you guys wanna sell things, it is a category you need to pay attention to. inherently this industry, marketing, Fortune 5000 marketing, is incredibly bad at patience and investment. This is gonna be a massive channel. I'm sure a lot of you know it to be true if you're paying attention. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars in gross merchandise value being sold on the QVC part, not the affiliate part.

25:55And so it's definitely the biggest trend that I'm paying attention to. That makes sense. And then the rise of the live shopping influencer. There's so many, even people in this room who are potentially destined, so many people are not destined to be Alex Earl or Logan Paul or being like, you're not a content creator influencer as we all know it today. But because you have salesmanship, you actually are very destined to be a leading live shopping celebrity. And I actually think those people will end up being incredibly well paid I don't know if you guys know about sales, but those fuckers make money.

26:33And so I think, I'm excited for some, even people in this room who have a hard pivot, if this inspires them in their career, I think some people are really about to step in some good shit and be like really substantial live shopping influencers and have a very, very fruitful career. That's really interesting. Well I think it's, I mean, a lot of what we've talked about, and we've gotta wrap up, like I think sets up, for some interesting stuff to come for all of you, right? thinking about how to kind of be present across like the Snapchat experience both within Spotlight, within the chat, within all of the different services to kind of make that connection.

27:07What are you offering to them for the, how do I get into the chat? I want to penetrate everyone's chat. So I think the biggest thing that everyone's going to hear about today and like sneak peek, we're going to be talking a lot about actually dynamic product ads being in the chat today. So ads in chat exist. There's a great opportunity to be there. The most performant, interestingly, in chat is when you use a creator. so when the chat cell itself comes from a creator and it's sponsored by the brand that does twice as well. Well no shit. Obviously. This is like this is always your point about like common sense over spreadsheets.

27:36Yes like if you're like wait Dobrik's sending me a message oh damn he wants me to buy Twizzlers. Yeah but you then you opened it you looked at it because he got you to look at it. For sure and that's step one and then the question becomes are brands smart enough to create copy and creative that takes us from oh we're excited to oh we're disappointed to then oh I'll consider it. And well and like one of the big things that helps there that we've seen through our day is like offers which again no shit right but it's like when you open it and there's something that captures you that makes you think oh there's something in it for me like something different that's also really exciting.

28:12So I think like. I mean it's obviously the holy grail. You know it's obviously something I'm sure debated at HQ very aggressively because it is your golden goose. Yeah. So putting marketing in there normally marketing that I think we can all agree that people don't necessarily want in that golden place is a fine line. But SMS marketing is working extremely well. And this is clearly an incredible channel to figure out how to penetrate. Like that definitely has my personal attention of like, oh, I need to figure that out. But it is, again, and I hope you got this from what I talked about. Our industry, all of you will do dramatically better if you understand the creative, the art, is the variable of success.

28:58The math is the commodity. And it's about to get way more commoditized. Because all that brilliance you have, like AI's coming for your brilliance, the math is the commodity, the creative, the gray, is incredibly fruitful in this next half decade. And so even that part, Snap has now allowed us to get into the holy grail room. But now the question becomes, what do you do with that? What is the sentence? Like the collaboration with the influencer is gonna have higher returns, but every day it's gonna diminish once the end user on Snap starts to understand influencer being used for this. So our cynicism as consumers will grow over time of like, oh damn, Charlie D 'Amelio is not texting me to say what's up.

29:51You know, and then when that happens, when that happens, open rates are gonna go down. But even if they're up, the only way you're gonna sell something is based on the creative. That sentence, the creative is the variable of success in our industry. The biggest up of their opportunity is understanding where the attention is that's underpriced and is actually consumed, not potentially consumed. That part is gonna get commoditized more and more. the art will continue to rise even with AI's incredible advancements it will continue to rise and the humanity and the access and the real life stuff like we're doing here is actually going to explode and understanding how to factor that in to what I'm talking about will be a fruitful venture for all of you that's the secret sauce alright we gotta let you go thank you thank you thank you