The Secret to Marketing Success | Double Down on What Works

0:00People want it regulated, banned. It's so powerful that it's ruining our children's lives, but it's not powerful enough to sell fucking sneakers. The fuck is everyone talking about? You're gonna literally be watching Emily in Paris and you can pause the screen and buy her hat on Amazon in two seconds. It's gonna be no friction. I'm gonna be watching the Jets on Amazon Prime and when a player, a new rookie makes a great play and I'm gonna buy his jersey on the spot. It's gonna be frictionless, frictionless. This book has built a$300 million company for me. In the book you talk a lot about of like this industry is very obsessed with yesterday and they're very obsessed with tomorrow.

0:36That's what's happened this week, right? This entire week, AI, AI, AI, tomorrow. Award winning work, the commercial, the award, yesterday. The amount of conversation in this town about social media creative is almost non-existent. I love sports. I learned very early in my life whether the crowd was booing or cheering, that had no impact on the outcome of the game. When teams went to New York and they were from Chicago and the whole crowd booed them, they still won if they were better. And when teams in New York went to Chicago and everybody was rooting for Chicago, it didn't make them win either.

1:09And so I think very early on, I understood that the noise had no variable on success and at the end of the day, the results would speak. Gary, thank you so much for letting me do this. Happy to do it. Thank you for switching us from a public beach to a private beach. It's awesome. That's mother nature. Yeah. I was hyped for the beach. It's awesome sitting on the jacuzzi in your yard, which is the best way to do this. I feel like this isn't even a real interview. It's just a fake dit to get on your yard, which has been awesome. This book is awesome. Thank you. I've listened to it and I've read it.

1:43By the way, it might be my favorite audiobook of all time because you kind of go off script. A lot. A lot. Every other line, you're like, wait, let me explain what this is, which is awesome. It feels like I'm in a lecture. Thank you. You're describing the book, you're reading the book, but then you're like, let me tell you about what I mean. in this thing. Thank you. Which is really just awesome. Thank you. And in a part of the book very early on you stop and you're like I have an idea. And I call Brandon? Yeah. And you do is that like kind of your process? You know I've gone off script in every audio book.

2:11That was this book itself is like one of the first I feel like I Jab Jab Jab Right Hook which was 10 years ago was the other time I did this where I let people into the depths of the cooking. You know it was like the recipes not just the theory of how to make good food. And so I'm affected by my own content in a weird way as well, right? I was saying something. It was contextual to something I was thinking about at the wine store. And so that's what's beautiful about the audio book. I went off script and called Brandon. I actually, I'm pumped with HarperCollins, my publisher. I wasn't even sure if they were going to keep that.

2:47That was like real. I was going off script, as you said. This was like third move. I was off script and actually doing something. You're briefing an ad in the middle of the audio book and you put it in. And you know, it's funny, the reason I even knew that, I kind of blank out a lot of times with the way I do things, is it has been the thing that has been most brought up to me this week by people reading the book. That one moment. Me going off script, not only describing what I'm talking about, but going even further and actually in the moment living the ad. Do you do that a lot? Do you brief, do you just have ideas for your ads for things?

3:20Oh yeah, yeah, all the time. Yeah, I think for my content, for the businesses that I run. And I think that's, you know, being at Cannes, where this is the ad world's week, the thing that I am most proud of by a country mile, professionally, currently in the job that I do, is I'm an actual practitioner of the craft that I'm the CEO of. And most of this town is run by CEOs that are executives and aren't of their craft. and I think there's a very big advantage in that and I think in general especially for all the youngsters that are watching this on the come up don't get high in your own supply. Like once you start getting up that's when you have to go you have to almost force yourself to do more of what people get very confused.

4:11They get to a point where there's an inflection point of growth and they think they have to do something different to get higher. The reality is you have to double down on the shit that got you there and people get very confused and get very egotistical and start to think there's somebody and it's a real mistake. Yeah, I actually want to roll back to that time where I started in the industry and I was a creative at the industry and I feel like you kind of found yourself in the industry because you were just so good at doing this and at that time, what did it feel like when you joined this industry?

4:43I felt like we were raised, I was raised by a group of creative directors that kind of didn't like you. yes that's right and what was that like I'm sure that was beautiful I loved that yeah I love if I we were like taught to hate you but we didn't know why yeah because I was poking yeah I was and I was poking and I think the smartest of the people that hated me realized I was poking and I wasn't gonna go away and I was gonna be right yeah the 99 % that weren't the smartest just didn't like that I was challenging I don't know should we be giving awards to commercials that nobody sees? I think that might be a problem.

5:25People will walk around here like they're winning an Oscar. The Oscars people know. There's no one in real life on earth of the eight billion people that are not part of the advertising industry, zero of them know what a Can Lion Award is. Zero. So what the fuck are we doing here? In your book you talk about, you're like, when advertisers think about Nike, they think about just do it. But normal people don't think about that. And ironically, normal people know that tagline, but they don't like delusionally put it on a pedestal. They like, they know, ironically, that's one of the taglines they actually all know.

5:58Like, I don't know if they, I don't know if the world knows Toyota's let's go places, even though they pound it on commercials. They don't really know it. But somebody buying sweatpants at a Nike outlet store in Oklahoma in the United States, they need to see a different ad than someone buying a$4 ,000 Air Force One off Stock X in an off-white collaboration. I don't think the industry is good at understanding context. And I also will say that the industry, back to why you were all taught to hate me, it's because the industry talks about creativity, but they're actually holding up a medium. They're holding up a form factor.

6:41This town is religious about something of yesterday. It's called the 30 second commercial. And when Don Draper was doing it, it was cool. He was, like that, Mad Men was a good show. Those dudes, predominantly unfortunately, and some women, yes they did, they were cool enough to go to Midtown and drink 18 bourbons. Like they were cool. They were making commercials that when they went to the country club, they're like, you made the seven up commercial? Holy shit. Nobody fucking says that at a country. That culture is not being done by this industry. and so you know as someone who passionately has communicated that for a long time I'm empathetic to why the classic creative didn't like me at first what's ironic and you're this is where I sense you were going is what's starting to happen now is interesting because now now we can't fake it anymore now that the walls have closed in now they're like no no I always I mean the amount there was a guy yesterday who I literally literally listened to shitting on me aggressively at the Carlton eight years ago who came up to me yesterday and was like, Gary, I gotta tell you, I always had your back.

7:49And I'm, you know, sometimes I'm my dad, sometimes I'm my mom. Last night I was my mom, so I was gracious, like, thanks, bro. But in my brain, I was like, but I know something that you don't know. And so, but honestly, all of that is just fodder. That's just silliness. That's just like fun of, that's like play, to me, all the back talk, that's sports. That's like trash talking when you play. I'm not disappointed when the industry's like pfft, but I'm also not thrilled when the industry's like, you're great. The noise is the noise. Where do you think that comes, behind your camera, with your family, where do you think that comes from?

8:26You talk about, you're like, I don't see myself as anything. Well, it's actually fun to have my parents here. When I get accolades, like you're the best, I think I'm the byproduct of. I'm the byproduct of I really my brain doesn't go to like I'm so great I'm like I had a lot of circumstances that went well for me DNA wise you know environment wise and then I was extremely well parented so I one of the reasons I enjoy getting accolades is I think it's roses to my parents right like and I know that even more now as I become a parent because when I think about one of my children being remarkable at school or one of my children being remarkable at basketball.

9:07I take a lot more credit for the basketball than the school, but the reality is that I think it comes from that, but it also comes from another place, which is the following. Whether you, I love sports. I learned very early in my life whether the crowd was booing or cheering, that had no impact on the outcome of the game. When teams went to New York and they were from Chicago and the whole crowd booed them, they still won if they were better. and when teams in New York went to Chicago and everybody was rooting for Chicago it didn't make them win either and so I think very early on I understood that the noise had no variable on success and at the end of the day the results would speak when to your point when you were growing up when I was growing up in this business Harriet like everybody said that I would be gone in a minute this is a fly by night this is a flash in a pan well that's not what happened we built the largest independent global media and creative agency in the world and that's whether they were right, I was right, that is what has become.

10:13And that tends to change the narrative. In the book you talk a lot about like, this industry is very obsessed with yesterday and they're very obsessed with tomorrow. That's what's happened this week, right? This entire week, AI, AI, AI, tomorrow. Award winning work. the commercial the award yesterday the amount of conversation in this town about social media creative is almost non-existent because it's happening now it completely people want it regulated banned it's so powerful that it's ruining our children's lives but it's not powerful enough to sell fucking sneakers the fuck is everyone talking about so the delusion between how people talk about it in social settings versus how they talk about it in business settings.

11:05And it comes down to, and this will make a lot of sense to you based on what I'm watching you're up to from afar, it's because people don't understand how to do it well. Yeah. Is it, do you have to? Can we stay on that point? Yes. It's because they don't understand how to do it well. The reason people aren't talking about it is they're scared because if it becomes more important, they become in trouble because they're not good at it. It's very easy to be good at coming up with an idea and convincing everyone it's a good idea when there's no ramifications, when there's no way to measure it. But on social media, you can't hide.

11:42You immediately know. Creatives don't like doing social by themselves for social because if it only gets 85 views, you've been exposed. It doesn't matter how many awards you've won. They're running away from merit. They're running away from truth. and they're going to have to pay the piper eventually because the sad story for all the creatives that want to run away from this is television's going that way. Netflix and Hulu and YouTube, their commercials are going to be measurable too because people are going to switch from YouTube to Hulu in the middle. People don't get it. NBC couldn't see that you were leaving the fucking show because the commercial was bad.

12:22But Hulu and Netflix and all of them can and that's how social works. social framework is gonna eat up television and then they're gonna have nowhere to hide. And I feel like that's what people didn't understand. You, it felt like you didn't, you were against these creative directors or against creative. It was the reverse. In your book you talk about, it is the time now where good creative will win. My keynote speech at the Pelé last year was, let these creatives be creative. The creative director, I actually, back to a very famous for me, canned story here, six or seven years ago at the Carlton at like two in the morning a creative director from a Gary Bowen comes up to me because I looked at his little badge and he goes Gary I don't like you I'm like okay I'm like why he goes you're not about the work he goes you're not about the work and for everybody in the back scenes that don't know what that means my parents that means you don't respect the craft that it takes to make a 30-cent video for a commercial.

13:26And I looked at him and said, brother, this was a very fun moment for me because he was very confused. He said, I said, I'm the only person here that is fighting for the work. This is politics and facade. What this is, is real life. And that's why so many brands and people have become famous in social because that's where the attention actually is. and it was funny. I give the guy credit. He was very caught off guard with the way I responded. We bantered for 30 minutes. Did you remember him this time? You know, the reason I bring up McGarry Bone is I actually don't remember the gentleman but I remember the company and I remember the conversation and it might have even been eight, ten years ago.

14:10I just remember everybody thinks

14:16at least with the Oscars, when you win an Oscar, we as humans see it. But the Oscar doesn't represent the movie that made the most money. It represents the subjective opinion of people that judge movies. But at least we all see it. And when it wins the Oscar, we then all go and watch it, even if we didn't want to see it. When somebody wins an award here for a bad commercial, nobody goes and watches the commercial. Nobody knows this exists. We have to accept that. Yeah. You, what I want to touch on, again, the future and the past thing, because it feels like the past is just, hey other people did it this way and that's like best practices.

14:53Tried and true. Yeah and AI feels like oh that's like three years away so let's just talk about it endlessly in a loop. Well because we have to also recognize that this is one big sales conference. Yeah. This isn't about creativity. Yeah. The fuck is everyone doing here? The platforms, the agencies are here to get the money of the brands. The brands are here to get awards to justify to their boards that it works? Like, what are we doing here? Like, who wants to talk about the truth? Half the people here are to drink rosé and fucking jerk off for a week. Like, what are we doing here? And meanwhile, businesses are losing market share.

15:31There's a reason CMOs get fired all the time. The board and the CO is pissed. That's bad. Like, I don't want that for this industry. I don't want that for... How many creatives love their job? Very few, I think. Very few. They come to work. they're trying to do creativity. The client's like, I don't like this. They're sad because they all want to actually be artists but they're often not good enough to be artists. Yeah. But do you, and they're not getting to, like you said, they're not really getting to be creative, right? That's my, they're just trying to pull out the work before they do the work.

16:04That little razz that I just said like, but you're not good enough to be an artist, I'm not doing that to upset people. I'm trying to do that to poke them, to inspire them to go be artists. Yeah. I love the creatives. I'm creative. I love creativity. but this is Madison Avenue. This is corporate. This isn't creative. And I think when you understand that, that actually gives you a chance to start the process of creative. But every single creative agency is owned by a bank. I don't think we talk about that enough. Right? A European bank owns all of them. Even the ones we think are independent, by the way.

16:45No shit. Are owned by somebody. Accenture owns Droga. Yeah. Accenture. Yeah, WP, wired plastic products. And by the way, let me be clear because I think people are often confused when I talk. I have a lot of admiration for the holding companies. You went around and M &A'd all these little companies and created a multi-billion dollar company? Good for you. But let's not sit around here. I heard on one pass by at a meeting, We're creating culture. Like, no, you're not. Culture's not being created by Madison Avenue. Nobody's seeing a television commercial and saying, like, that's, I mean, I don't know.

17:28Honestly, it's exhausting to see how big the delusion continues to be. And yeah, I'm sad because what I see on the other end, brother, is when creatives come to our shop. From Wyden, from 72 and Sunny, from Droga, from Crispin, from Gray, from all these iconic by the way I have a lot of respect for all these places it takes them like a year to almost like decompress unlearn it it's hard because they're used to especially at the senior level they're used to their opinion being lord and I'm like I tell them in the interview process I'm like humility is the only way to win here talk to me about and real quick thank you for that but I want to say this not humility of be humble humility of like you're gonna put your creative like you, Johnny and Susan as the senior creative, you're gonna make an ad and it's gonna go into social and when it gets 97 views you need to say I didn't hit it.

18:28Not the platform was wrong. Or my, somebody said to me my creativity is too advanced for humans, they don't get me yet. I'm like then you should quit because we're here to sell shit and if they don't get you then I'm gonna fire you anyway because they need to get you because we need to sell shit. Like, go be an artist if you're an artist. Don't take a corporate job and act like a fucking artist. Yeah, and that's a perfect segue to post creative strategy. I don't know if anybody in the company, holding company advertising world is talking about post creative strategy. It feels like we do strategy for months and months and months and months, we create a piece of content, we put it out there, we hope for the best, and we go kind of start that process again.

19:10You're saying a creative makes something, it gets 90 views, that's when post creative strategy comes. And more importantly, and yes, it also gets 100 comments. And when you read those comments from real life people, you can start understanding what the customer thinks. Right? I was trained in marketing in the trenches. Lemonade stands, baseball card shows, tables, and at my dad's liquor store. All I did was watch people. Why didn't they stop by my table and buy my baseball cards? And why did they stop at that guy's third table? and then I would go look at what that third table. When I was at my dad's store, may he rest in peace, Willie Barnett, he used to make the signs before I started in the liquor store.

19:53His signs sucked because he didn't really want to do it but if he didn't, my dad was going to yell at him so I started making the signs and my signs did better and then they got better and better and better. I was doing outdoor and print ads and in-store marketing. I learned how to make signs not by just writing what the price was but I would talk to customers. I would listen to I would watch what word I would say to them that made them buy the wine and then I would put that word on the sign I learned in the trenches I became a copywriter to make the thing happen not to be fancy and win an award so I the destiny of how I got into this industry I was born to win in it because I learned marketing to drive the business to be consumer truth not to be corporate and so humans it's human psychology You need to be a therapist.

20:44You need to be a psychiatrist. You need to be a guidance counselor, DNA, to be great at marketing, not a banker. Do you think a corporation is able to act like a person now? Because it is made by a lot of people. And you talk in your book a lot about your personality and it will find your audience. And when it's a corporation, it's a big team. How do you do that as a company? That's a really good question. Here's what I would say. people have many different versions of themselves. Gary Vee in Madison Avenue is obviously frustrated and trying to help change. Gary Vee at a Jets game is really frustrated, but not in control at all.

21:26Not in control. Gary Vee as a brother is a different animal. And when I'm speaking to college kids as an entrepreneur, different animal. So I actually have a lot of different versions. If you look at my content, many brands would struggle with it because it would feel off brand because I'm doing too many different things. I actually believe that's on brand because I'm meaning something to so many people that it creates scale. So the industry wants to sell vanilla to everybody and nobody wants it and I'm basking Robbins with every flavor for everyone and going up. That's the best analogy you could have done.

22:02You like that? Yeah, that's awesome. So basically what do I think? I think even when a brand has 87 different people all of them can contribute to their interpretation of Prada of Vans of Moet Hennessy right and I think those little nuances they'll be in the same general part because they all kind of know what they're up to right they know they're selling a handbag or a bottle of champagne I actually think all those nuances interpretations are good and to your point with the way the algorithms work now all those different pieces of content will find their audience and I think the biggest issue for brands growing their business forget about creativity, is they're not relevant enough to enough different consumer segmentations.

22:43When Vans, that your wonderful camera person is wearing right now, when that brand was only, only for surfer dudes in California, it had a business. When it crossed over to being cool in urban black America, its business grew. It now mattered to multiple people. Because everybody wants to be on brand, and because everybody, a creative lead wants to come up with a slogan and then wants to dictate to everyone exactly how it has to look how she or he sees it it keeps it very limited I really think about it in a little bit of a way this is really going to be an interesting analogy I've thought about it a bunch but probably having my folks behind the screen triggered it just now I actually think the way that the advertising industry wants to do marketing is like the Soviet Union they want to control everything from the beginning everyone's in jail stuck this is my way, dictatorship.

23:38And I think the way I see marketing is more like the USA, which is there's freedom until you fuck up and then you go into jail. I give my team plenty of freedom, but if all the ads don't do well, you're in trouble. It's called merit. Whereas the way everybody else was, I came up with this slogan and everything has to look like this and I'm gonna control it and then that's why junior and mid-tier creatives hate their job. Literally this industry that you lived in is I'm gonna eat shit for 25 years and get yelled out and get suppressed and get judged and all the bad shit just so I can get to the top so that I can do that to the people.

24:14Are you fucking kidding me? It's fucking generational trauma. 100 ,000 fuck... That's why there's so much insecurity in this business. That's why it's just generational trauma. It's so... Honestly, one of the reasons... I thought I was gonna be in this industry for like five minutes. I don't know if you know this. I thought I was coming here. Me and AJ, we're gonna build this little thing quickly build a marketing infrastructure and then I was gonna build a business on top of it and get the fuck out. I don't want clients. But two things happened. One, I realized I was gonna build a massive business because everybody's not good at it.

24:44And two, I hate how unhappy everyone is and I'm like, fuck it. If I build the biggest company in the whole industry and my people are actually happy, I can actually change the whole industry because everyone's gonna copy me. And to that point, to your last question, I was walking last night home, three kids who have a little agency in London with a camera roll up on me. I'm for that generation, right? They're mentioning we just hired a PCS. I smiled so hard. We're inventing new vernacular. And they're like, how do we get into this? This is the big guy. They're all about that. And they just were joyous.

25:22And they said to me, they're like, how do we break through to this? I'm like, by not even caring to break through. These people are going to die. Do not pander to them. Look, they're not going to die because corporate America and corporations are going to keep them alive. It's not that they're going to die. It's just I was trying to tell those kids, you don't want this. This is not what you think you want it. Because in the short term, you want the money. You even want the awards. But in the long term, you will not enjoy it. My favorite quote, by the way, in this book, and I've just said it to so many friends in the last few days, is before you can dunk a basketball, you have to walk.

26:00You have to learn to walk and not shit your pants. It's my favorite quote, maybe, of all time. And it's awesome. Which, you know, when we got rained out, we got canceled, and they were like, oh, we just got to pack this up. And I was like, before you can learn to dunk a basketball, you just got to learn to walk and not shit your pants. That's right. How do you, how does your, if we can switch from like brands to you, and your social media team is maybe the most dialed in thing I've ever seen. How does that work? What is that team like? What is that process like? You know, it's funny to see Dustin in the corner when you say that.

26:35This is the best part of the humility. We're dialed in, but Dustin knows. He knows where I'm about to answer. We're not at our apex right now. I'm very busy trying to build VaynerX. Like, very. I'm building VFriends in a really meaningful way because I'm really building that IP. I have a kid's book coming out in a couple weeks. I have cartoons coming out in the fall. I'm stretched. The Gary Vee brand, And by the way, I've been pretty active with, sign up for winetext.com. I've been very active in my dad's business more than like in the past. You know, it ebbs and flows like everything with me.