The One Variable That Can Set Your Business Apart | 2022 Meta Marketing Summit

0:00You know, I believe if you're a large business, call it a fortune 15 ,000. One of the 15 ,000 biggest businesses in the world. You need to be producing a couple of hundred pieces of creative a day. A day. And as you know, and as people watching know, some of the companies in the Fortune 1000 don't produce a couple hundred pieces of social creative in a month, or sometimes even a month. Hi, welcome everyone to this year's Meta's Marketing Summit, building deeper connections today and tomorrow with Gary Vaynerchuk. My name is Nicole Tan, and I'm the country director for Malaysia for Meta. And joining me here today, on behalf of Netta, I am very delighted to welcome renowned speaker Gary Vaynerchuk, or more fondly known as Gary Vee, to join us today.

0:43Hi, Gary. How are you? I'm very well, Nicole. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for coming on our fireside chat today. You are one of the world's top authorities for culture, relevance, and operating in a digital world. Your presence here is really going to help move the needle for a global audience. So we're going to jump right in. As you might imagine, more than ever, the internet is changing. So many things are changing. And the battle for audiences' attention spans is just unrelenting. You're the authority on this. How can brands today connect with communities and audiences and customers?

1:21How are we connecting this art of storytelling to the science of technology? What are you seeing that hasn't changed? And what are you seeing that's new from your point of view? Well, the thing that doesn't change is a good story moves the world, right? You can go back to religion and, you know, politicians and great spiritual leaders, those who can communicate, whether through the written word, audio, video, or even through arts like music and painting, sculptures, these are the individuals that and organizations, if you look in the last hundred years of business, whether it's a Coca-Cola or a Ford or a Procter & Gamble, these are the organizations that tend to win and humans that tend to win audiences.

2:16So that never changes and never will it change. I'm sure the person that was best at drawing inside of caves many, many, many, many years ago, was achieving her, his goals. And I believe in 500 years, whichever robot slash human is best at it, they will also achieve their goals. I think what has changed is the mediums, right? Where the distribution is. And so I think the biggest challenge for brands today, inside of Meta, executives, outside of Meta, the agency partners and the brand leaders, Most people have really not gotten the subconsciousness out of their body of being a television-centric advertiser.

3:08The biggest elephant in the room is that even when you look at the execution with creative against meta, even the way meta itself does communication at times on TVC or other places, even the most progressive companies, your contemporaries, the Googles, the Teslas, the Netflix. the casting of the creatives and the decision makers in marketing are still grounded in television mentality, which is very heavily focused on reach and by nature is not focused on relevance because they're not making enough creative. You cannot win relevance with very few pieces of creative. It's just fundamentally impossible.

4:00Look at APAC. I mean, geez, so many different countries, so many different religions. And then you get into things that are, you know, very real everywhere in the world. Income levels, gender, age, race. So my hypothesis is that Facebook and Twitter and MySpace even before them, YouTube, they came along in the mid-2000s. And no different than the radio, the television, or the printing press. they became the communication layer on top of the internet, which is obviously one of the most significant inventions of all time. And they changed the context of distribution and actualized consumption. Today, more people will consume a Reels on Instagram or a TikTok or a YouTube short today than people will consume a newspaper ad or a television commercial.

5:00And the world doesn't act as if. And so the thing that I see is a humongous disconnect between the amount of creative and the context of the creative and the nuances of the creative that are needed on a daily basis for Fortune 5000 companies to produce globally. you know, I believe if you're a large business, call it a fortune 15 ,000, one of the 15 ,000 biggest businesses in the world. If you're global, you need to be producing a couple of hundred pieces of creative a day, a day. And as you know, and as people watching know, some of the companies in the fortune 1000 don't produce a couple of hundred pieces of social creative in a month or sometimes even in a year.

5:57Yeah, I think that's interesting because, you know, I watch a lot of your videos, obviously, and I follow you on Instagram. And one of the things that you were talking about was how, like, there's a need for volume, but also a need for quality and for storytelling. You mentioned about how you can't have, it's difficult to get creative nuances in short. How are you helping clients, help them shift from this long TV view to storytelling on short in quantity and quality? Like, what do you think is the secret sauce to that? There's a couple of things. One, quantity is not debatable. You and I can look at, let's use this, Starbucks, and we can look at their accounts, and we can say today they made 97 pieces of creative, and you and I would have to agree on that.

6:49On the flip side, it would be impossible for you and I to agree on if it was which 97 were quality and not. Which ones did you like? Which ones did I not like? Right? It's impossible. Right. Nuances. Yeah, yeah. Agree. Yeah. So my answer is you have to take a step back as an organization and understand that truth. And until one organization does, they are always vulnerable. If you and I were the CMO of Nike and Adidas right now, and we were making subjective calls on the content our teams were making, our teams are in a very precarious position because they are at the mercy of our opinion, not the fact of what the consumer likes.

7:37So I think there's a couple of things. One, I think you can't, quality is like beauty. It truly is eye of the beholder. If you look at Reels and TikTok and places that benefit the audience appreciating the content, it is very clear that nobody on earth can predict virality. virality. Some of the things that work on my TikTok and Instagram and YouTube shorts are things that I could never have imagined. On the flip side, things that I'm positive when I post them that they're going to hit don't. And I'm a human being who's been doing this for 15 years every day, every day, every day. And I'm good at it.

8:22And I've been successful. And yet I am often wrong of the tone and temperament of the moment of my audience. How agencies and brand partners sit in ivory towers in boardrooms and think they know is audacious at best and ludicrous at worst. And so my hypothesis is don't cripple the creative people that you chose. If you're the CMO of Pepsi, you get to pick your agency. If you're the CEO of the agency, you get to pick the people you staff. But after that, you must let them fly and let the data, quantum qual, speak for itself over a period of six months to a year. Everything else crushes the process of creativity.

9:13If you don't go with the route of volume and letting people do their thing, you are slowing down the process. The meetings themselves become more expensive than the output of the creative. And most importantly, you will eliminate finding right, and you will still sit in the audacity of thinking you're right. And that is a very dangerous place for marketers in 2022. Great. I love that. And I think it really, I can really relate to that. I think it's very interesting how you break down storytelling into, it's a game of both volume, but also creativity and giving the opportunity for that creativity and using the technology to maximize the creativity opportunity almost, right?

10:00So it's personalization powered by technology, so to speak. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. We're going to move to a second topic, if that's okay with you. I'm not sure if you've heard of social commerce. So in Southeast Asia, 70 % of Southeast Asia consumers, they adopt business messaging, right? And I myself use WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Direct, connect with products in small businesses. I just became a mom and literally everything that I buy for my babies from Instagram, toys and all that stuff. What are your thoughts on this? Some people say it's a quiet revolution, but I think it's huge, especially in this part of the world.

10:39What do you think of business messaging, social commerce? What's your take on that? You know, I launched an e-commerce business in 1996. I did a YouTube show within the first four months of YouTube being alive. And in that show, I embedded the YouTube video on a website and linked out the four wines that were on the show in the WordPress to my father's wine shop. So you're speaking to somebody who's deeply entrenched in commerce DNA. I mean, also by being a global character, the integration in China, the more integration in Southeast Asia than the U.S. You know, I have actually been very disappointed in it personally as a fan in Meta's speed of integrating, you know, commerce as a more aggressive aspect.

11:48To be frank, I think the opportunity is enormous. I agree with you. I think I think people who think it's a nuance are crazy. I think it's the most important part of the conversation. I mean, if you really look at the economics that are being captured by influencers, organizations, by creating awareness on social, but then doing commerce off of social, and the friction involved, and how much we lose in that friction in conversion. You know, it's funny as one of Meta's great strengths, something I admire quite a bit, is when there are trends, how quick the platform, the organization from markdown is ready to move into it.

12:40Snapchat stories, that format of storytelling was a profound shift in communication. and it was just a brilliant move by Meta to understand that they needed to integrate that product into Instagram. We saw a similar thing happen with two separate companies, Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, right? And so, but I think where Meta should be focusing more energy is innovating commerce instead of overtly worrying about short-form video, which I think it should. But I do think that, especially because Instagram is such a visual medium, obviously the investment in short-term video is growing. But, you know, if Instagram gets too far away from its image DNA, some other platform is going to be able to pick up where they left off because people want to consume pictures.

13:43It's why magazines still sell today, even though it's an antiquated medium, right? And it's also foundational to humans. So for me, the commerce opportunity, both in video, both in QVC and shopping, network-like dynamics like we see, influencers going live, I think there needs to be a lot more innovation on the product side to eliminate friction. I think that the opportunity is extraordinary. If, for example, Instagram was really strong feature-wise in live selling, I go live and everyone's credit cards are already loaded and the UI is very easy to click to buy one, I'd probably be doing wine videos right now for my dad's store.

14:31I'd probably be going on once a day tasting one wine, having a button there by now. But because there's so much, there isn't those features in place yet at the level that I would want. Right. I don't. I believe that I am one of 50 million people that would do that tomorrow. Yeah. And I think that in this part of the world, especially people are finding ways to do that with or without the features to a certain extent. I think, you know, So business messaging is important to Meta, and I think there's a lot of work that we still need to do. But just looking at the enormous opportunity in this part of the world, what excites you about business messaging?

15:13I think for me, it's just the personalization is a little bit different from what you see in the other forms of e-commerce. But what are your thoughts on it? What do you feel distincts business messaging from the rest of the e-commerce channels that you're obviously very familiar with? Well, it chopped for me, Nicole, the first part. One more time, I apologize. No problem. No, I was saying that, you know, I think you're really deep into understanding all the different e-commerce channels. And I think it's, we know the opportunity is really enormous for business messaging. And one opportunity, at least from my point of view, being here in this part of the world, is that it's much more personalized.

15:56the customer relationship is very different from, say, the frictions that you get, whether it's on websites or even on email or even shopping on the feed. Of course. And I think that's, yeah, that's the unique opportunity that business messaging has. Well, that's because humans buy from humans. That's right. That's right. Of course. And so, you know, it's one of the last leverage points that a retailer that has a physical location has is their sales staff's high touch. And so to your point, to your point, live streaming or interacting is one of those real mediums. I couldn't agree with you more.

16:45I'm very bullish on it. I think it's a huge factor. And I think every platform playing in social needs to be thinking about it more than they are. And yes, people are figuring it out. I do it all the time. But I think that there is no debate that the feature sets could be stronger for the conversion of sales within live social executions. That's what I'm looking for. I think that there's definitely more opportunity for improvements, both in terms of the features. But still, we hear from a lot of clients that they're debating. They're debating whether business messaging is still something that is, is it a trend or is it something that's going to last?

17:39Do you see this as something that is, you know, for the long term or what are your thoughts on that? I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't understand how someone would think that that's not a long term reality. People buy from people. You know, the home shopping networks have been around for 40 years already. And those are on television. I mean, the thought that anybody thinks it's a short term. I would like to meet the human who's taking the stance that buying through social is a short-term fad. I would love to understand their logic. Right, right. Okay, yeah, I love it. And definitely I get the point.

18:26It's definitely not a short-term fad. Messaging is here to stay, and it's going to get much more prevalent. So, you know, the other topic, and I know this is definitely something you're very passionate and interested about. I think if you go anywhere, go to, you know, talk to anyone in recent months, all of the conversation is around Web 3.0, you know, including the metaverse, including NFTs. Congratulations on your 50 million funding for VFriends. Really cool. And there's this whole entire economy spreading around the concept. Some people say that, you know, it's happening. Some people say that it's 10 years from now.

19:05Everybody's expecting this hockey stick growth. What do you think? Is it going to change the way we live, work, and play? How big a deal is this? It's massive, but the timing is the more interesting debate. So for everybody who's watching, if you look back at the Internet hitting consumers in the mid-'90s, Windows 95. It took some time. The reason there was such a big internet stock crash in March, April, May of 2000 was everyone got overexcited about how fast and how prominent. And if you were just an internet company, you were worth a lot of money because people didn't understand. Similar to why I made videos last summer saying 99 % of NFT projects are going to go to zero because the reality was that people were overvaluing the NFT projects just for being NFT projects.

20:07The consumer blockchain is extraordinarily big. It is fundamentally enormous. The emerging VR, AR world is also quite big and important. The ability to own things digitally and bring them into a VR setting is very fascinating and profound. Yeah. Very exciting. Obviously, there'll be very open platforms, completely decentralized. And then there'll be these things that I call Web 2.5, which I think is where Meta and Oculus will sit because, obviously, it's a centralized slash decentralized mix, right? So I think that it's definitely going to change the world. it's so obvious to me that the consumer blockchain is going to create for transactions what the internet did for communication.

21:12And so it's a ledger at scale that isn't controlled by anyone. This is a very profound hypothesis, and it's starting to play out already, right? 8 ,000 people came to a stadium to see me put on a super conference for three days with all sorts of luminaries. And all of those people were able to get in because they owned a specific NFT. And anybody who did not was not able to get in. That is a very big deal. That is a very different reality. And whether it's airline tickets or sporting tickets or many others, buying a home or, yeah, so I think it is. I think for marketers, it's an opportunity to build relationships, even potentially use the NFT as a gateway to first-party data.

22:04I think there's a lot here. And I think over the next decade, it will become more obvious to a lot of people. The speculation around the collectibilities, the collector's items, that had beanie baby DNA in it, right? And so that is why you saw the correction. But the overall technology, whether it's Ethereum or Solana or something that gets invented tomorrow, obviously we'll see multiple blockchains. I believe long-term we'll see that they're all interoperable. and I think we're in for an amazing journey here over the next 20 years. Yeah, I can't wait. I'm really excited about it. It feels like, you know, the early kind of internet days, but at this time I'm older so I know what I'm doing, or a little bit more.

22:57But, you know, a lot of clients ask us this question, what can we do now? And I'm sure you get that question as well. What should brands or businesses be prepared now and ready for this potential change? What would you advise them? I think that they absolutely have to start with education. They have to know what's going on. You know, too many decision makers don't understand the platform, the technology. Too many of the top executives have no idea. Too many agencies are running around and selling things. and campaigns and things that are going to be more detrimental than positive outcomes for these businesses.

23:41So I think there's a lot that they need to do as far as education and strategy. So I think this is where, you know, we have a company called Vayner3, Bain, McKinsey, MediaMonks. I think there's people running around that are trying to play that role, and I think that's the right decision. And if I was the CEO of Coca-Cola today, I'm spending$5,$10 million on internal education and strategy before I go waste$10 million doing bad campaigns.

24:13I think that's really interesting. So I know we've got, we're kind of running out of time. It's always too short. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and insights today. So we have the audiences from Southeast Asia and emerging markets listening to us today. you know, Southeast Asian emerging markets is one of the most resilient, fastest growing regions in this part of the world. What's the one key takeaway and maybe like a shout out or encouragement for the businesses and for the audiences that we have today? Well, listen, we have almost 300 people in Southeast Asia, all over the region with Vayner.

24:51So I'm incredibly in tune to what's going on. The words of encouragement are not needed. And here's what I mean by that. The innovation, the creativity, the ambition is the word I would use. The sheer tenacity and effort that I'm seeing from my employees, potential employees, candidates, competitors, clients, non-client executives. There is such tremendous energy in the region across the board. And, you know, I'm humbled by being able to be here and share with everyone. My words of encouragement would be as simple as keep going. Everything that the region's been doing for the last two, three years, four years is very obvious to me to why there's so much innovation and creativity.

25:44And I would just say more and more and more.

25:54She's a怕 Avengers.