The Secret to Successful Content Creation

0:00There's 100 % rationale to what time you post and I'm talking not at night I'm talking you might be in a place on your platform where you need to be posting at 7.9. pan and most people are not going that far. I believe you have kind of a superpower to see how early technologies trends platforms will unfold and shape the future. Do you agree is a superpower and how important it was for you to become what you have become and like going forward you said that the 24 months will have like the most transformations over into the ten last

0:41Thank you, my friend. It's so nice to meet all of you. Congratulations to all of you, what you're doing. I do think it's a superpower, but I don't think it's a superpower that is not replicatable. What I said on stage about maybe is very important. One of my greatest strengths is curiosity. I'm curious. And I'm willing to waste time, and even though my time is valuable, to understand what's happening now. Too many people as they grow and achieve, they become complacent or they want other things. My hunger is to be great at my craft and my craft is to understand consumers. And to understand consumers, you must have no opinions.

1:25You must just be curious. And you must have humility, not audacity. I get a lot of credit for predicting things right and somebody will post and say, look what Gary Vee said in 2016, da da da. and sometimes comments will try to razz me and go, ah, you can get lucky if you're always predicting. And I always reply when I have time and I say, show me the video where I'm wrong, right? Because what I don't do is I don't guess. I'm not Nostradamus, I'm not a psychic. I tell you things that have already happened. When I, look what I did with AI. A lot of people are like, ah, AI. Every single person stood up.

2:02It's happened, but it's early. I and everybody else is still trying to understand everything about it. But nobody here can get away, especially at the size and the scale that everybody's playing here. You have a lot more to lose. You have a lot to lose when you have a successful business. For you to completely dismiss AI and not think how it might affect you, most people look at the negative. Ooh, am I in trouble? Will this hurt me? I look at it the positive. how do I use this to jump two spaces ahead? So, yeah, I do think my ability to understand what's happening has been fundamental to where I am today because it helps you do everything.

2:44It helped me build Gary Vee, it helped me build the agency, it helped me sell wine, it helped me build VeeFriends. You know, I'm gonna build one of the next Pokemons, one of the next Disneys, one of the next Marvel, and it's gonna happen because of that because you can't afford, no business can afford to overspend on things that don't work. every business can grow quite a bit if it spends on things that are climbing up. So I spend very, very serious time and attention on trying to be good at it. Cool. So, anyone has questions? So, he is in the relationship niche and they are building YouTube to internationalize their business going to another country in English and things like this.

3:24And the question is, what is the fundamentals to internationalize to get to go abroad? What should pay attention? and what is pretty well then? As technology starts to grow, all of our language, you know, I'm gonna come to this conference in four years and the way we translate me is gonna be totally different. The mic will use AI and smart technology and I will literally talk and it will literally be Portuguese. It's insane. We're already converting all of my content to every language and the voice, it's literally me speaking and it's 85 % there. It sounds like me, but not all the way. But it's me speaking French and German and Portuguese.

4:09It's insane. So first, the big hurdle was language. And now that that's gonna go away in the next two, three, four years, that's why there's so much disruption. Next will be culture. Culture is how you internationalize. To be relevant in India, you may need to know something about cricket right my football is not your football right these things matter now what we're seeing is even without the technology we're seeing a revolution of cross pollination of cultures Korean pop stars are now famous in America and Europe I don't have to tell anyone here what's going on with Bad Bunny it's crazy It's amazing to watch the world become more global because the internet is global.

5:01You know, when I was growing up, 15-year-old girls in the middle of America, MTV was not playing Bad Money or J Balvin. Today, they can find it on Spotify or on social media. So the world's changing. But the variable for you to cross over will be based on your ability to understand pop culture in every market and how to make your message fit the realities of what's happening. Best practices. That's a really interesting point. I think culture is really difficult to really understand. Even if you live there like two or three years, it's really, really difficult to really understand what is happening.

5:40How do you do that in some countries? Do you hire locals? Do you send people? What is... Both. Both. For me, what I'm very good at, the things that people clap at here, they clap at in Dubai, they clap at in Japan, They clap in America because one thing I spend a lot of time on is fundamental human truth. The truth about humans are at its simplest form, life is about confidence and insecurity. Right? That's true no matter where you are. But when I go to a country, if I'm giving that speech in San Francisco, instead of using popular footballers, I may use popular American footballers. I interstitial the culture into the context of the room.

6:28You do that by either being good at it yourself or by hiring people in market or sending people from your core team to go into market and absorb the culture. Yeah, we actually see this like on theaters and things like this and how is a local joke? 100%. If you don't have localized context, it doesn't land. Relevance is what everyone's looking for. or if you're making a joke or a reference, you know, the video you make on YouTube that gets 100 ,000 views in Brazil might be subtly on one little thing that's happening in Brazil right now that somebody in Chile or somebody in South Korea doesn't even understand, thus not being able.

7:10So that's where these things are gonna play out. Cool. Next question. I would like to ask you two questions. One more follow-up call, and the other one more to write the call. Your video, Manifesto 2017, is my most favorite video in the world. And I would like to know how does it work, the thing that you talked about, how pulling from the opposite directions nowadays is still the same thing. And talk a little bit about this concept. And the other thing is your strategy about the document instead of creating. Now you, you thought that it's changed the thing about what channel creates content and you can speak a little bit about it.

7:57First of all, thank you for knowing both those things. So let me break them down. In that video and back to what I just said about human truths, I believe balance is everything. But people don't understand balance. So for me, for example, my conviction and confidence and bravado is very high. I believe in myself. I don't even think I'm comfortable expressing how much I believe in myself. That's luck of DNA. That's my mother. There's a lot of things that went into it, but it's the truth. I truly believe that I am special and ultra capable in a world with 8 million people. On the flip side, the reason it works is because I think humility is the other thing that makes me work.

8:43As much as I think I'm special, I think there's been many special people. I think there's many special people right now. I think there's been millions of special people through the years of life. And I know that if God forbid I pass away tomorrow, that I will probably get a good 24 hours on social media. Everybody will share their favorite video. And if they met me, and this is another function, it's just in Brazil. And then everybody will move on. So I believe in being competitive, but being a sportsman. I believe in a lot of things that seemingly look opposite. The biggest one I believe in is in ambition and patience.

9:22Almost everybody who consumes my content when they hear patience, hears complacency, not patience. Right, so I go so hard every day. I mean, look at me, what I'm doing now. Midnight flight from New York, fly here. I'm literally going to the airport right now. Back to New York, banging up my body, going hard. But I believe in patience. It's slow, it will all come. And so the opposite directions, pulling hard, it's like a bridge. Bridges are so powerful. It's so hard to get across the ocean, but we built a bridge. Why? They're pulling hard. And I think for a lot of us, we're pulling from either one side or the other.

9:58And we don't have that balance. So it's very much still the same. As far as document don't create, I don't think that changes. So there was a period years ago where in YouTube you started to see people like Casey Neistat and others, they were vloggers, but they were videoing themselves. And I knew that I was not capable of that, but I knew that the medium of YouTube was important. And I also started to notice that people were talking about entrepreneurship like fantasy, not reality. And I thought that I could help. So I decided to have somebody start filming me, documenting me. So I was documenting my life, not sitting down and creating like an influencer or a creator.

10:43That is how I was able to scale and build my brand, by filming everything and then post-producing content. What I'm talking about now is the craft of being better in the distribution of the content. I still believe in documenting. The same content for every platform. In theory. Or content is specifically for each platform. Because in all those, in all those we feel like, in all those we feel like, I made a great content and then I split in every platform, it doesn't work as well as in the past. In all those, I feel like I have to make the video for the platform. Yeah. I think the way, I do not, but I do, yes and no.

11:28What I said up there of like how Instagram isn't as easy as it was a couple years ago, the reason it's not working as well as it did in the past is there's more competition. It's not that, you know, the stakes have been leveled higher. It's like anything else. I was the best tennis player when I was in fourth grade because I played with six people and I was in fourth grade. As the competition got to high school, I wasn't. And that's what's happening. You have to be much better at the post-production. It was so much easier. More things would go by because there was more attention and less supply.

12:02Now there's so much supply and the attention is staggered between YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram, right? So I think there is the potential to be very on platform and focus on TikTok and say I'm making a TikTok and people see success with that but it's because they gave a lot more thought to that piece of content. I still think that they can chop up pieces with best practices. It just requires more skill. We feel it. I feel it on my brand. We've got, like, my team knows, Dustin and Ruggum know, the last six months I've been on everyone, I'm like, things have changed. It's not as easy. We have to be better.

12:41We're hiring more analytics, more math. I'll give you a good one. There's 100 % rationale to what time you post. And I'm talking not at night. I'm talking you might be in a place on your platform where you need to be posting at 7.09 p.m. and most people are not going that far or that Instagram is now searching emojis for search. Like there's, it's such a complex game and it's getting more complex. Yeah, me too. Like, you know, and you're catching me in a funny time where, you know, you go and when I was talking up there about being complacent and six and three or 12, I'm talking to myself. I'm at a very high level, I want to continue to go.

13:32I got a lot of ambitions and I realized that we have to get better at the way we're doing it because what worked 18 months ago is not working now. First of all, thank you so much for your content. When I was hired in 2015 to work, to run ads for a big player in Brazil, part of my job was to learn English. So I have to listen to you. I was paid for this interview. That's unbelievable. I'm very humbled. And I started building my content on the internet. I build a community in Brazil. We are traffic players. We do ads for all kinds of business. I have a community with 40 ,000 people. We call suidos.

14:20We do see a lot of them. We are like a disease.

14:26I see myself as a teacher. I do weekly classes for two... I'm terrible with that. No problem.

14:43250 weeks. I'm doing live classes every week, non-stop. And I don't know exactly how to balance the brand with the selling. Because the selling is important to my business. I have to put the oxygen. Of course. More than work. But I love to create content. Yes. For creating. How do I do this? How do I balance the content versus the selling that I do? The more you can make it about the brand and less selling, the more likely you'll make more money. It's been very obvious watching everybody over the last 20 years. It just depends on where you are in your journey. Meaning, let's just talk percentages.

15:29A lot of people are 80 % selling 20 % brand. Some are 90 % selling 10 % brand. The great goal is that you're achieving the financial wants and needs and oxygen that you need. my ideal state is 80 % brand, 20 % selling. In time, in effort, in energy, in intent, in your soul, in the money you spend. But there is no right answer. Everyone's in different places. But the consumer on the other side, the data's very clear. The more you can get away with not selling, the more likely you'll sell. On this topic about build brand, brand building, I think a big discussion that we have in Brazil and a lot of people probably discuss this on other Hotmart events.

16:16When you think about building a brand, how important it is to detach the face of the creator to the brand versus using it a lot and in which part of the journey. I think the main question is to build a big, big, big company, should you start to detach it, your face, right, at some point? Or how do you see that? The good news is this has already been solved. The answer is both. We've seen some of the biggest brands in the world be very attached to a face. Ryan Reynolds builds very big brands in companies, right? In the alcohol business, The Rock uses this thing. And then, you know, then we have enormous brands that nobody knows, you know, Jose Cuervo, you know, like is a fictional character or the name of someone who started the brand, but we don't know that person.

17:07And so the good news is the answer is both, right? People ask me about VaynerMedia all the time. VaynerMedia is a$300 million business with 2 ,000 employees. It's a big business. And people are like, how? Because they assume that I'm servicing every client. I service no clients. I'm the CEO. So when, now I'm very well known, but when Nike or Reebok or Under Armour and Sneaker, if they come to me, the first thing I say to them is, this is VaynerMedia, we have an agency. Of course I'm involved. I can get on the back phone occasionally but I'm not servicing your account. I'm not creating the content.

17:45And so a lot of people are scared to build a big brand because of the person because they don't realize how they get away from detaching from the person. It's very easy. It's called being upfront and transparent to your clients. Very easy to use a face. Very easy to not use a face. Phil Knight did not use a space for Nike. He used other people's spaces. So, Ryan Reynolds has built three exits, major, using his face aggressively, complemented with other things. So, there's no right answer to this. Both work. And both don't work. Cool. Hi, Gary. Hi.

18:25No problem. No problem. So, Jean teaches people about how should we speak biblically and perform well at a stage and things like this. and she was talking about like you have attention and accountability Pedro told us about like enlightening a teacher and have all this AI revolution coming up how this will impact like how you differentiate your content your brand like everything will change how what's going to happen you know it's funny it's similar to what Pedro was talking about when we were just talking about and I was just talking about like differentiation is adjusting to the reality of the situation meaning the answer is nobody's really fully sure what AI's gonna do to all of this.

19:07We just know a lot of it's gonna impact it. Then we're gonna understand it, and then you have to adjust. I think of this like boxing, or MMA, like fighting. You have a plan. You spend four months knowing you're gonna fight each other. I watched every video of every fight. I know that he normally uses his left leg to do this. I also know that he knows I'm watching every single video of every one of his fights, and he might fake left and go right and I may get knocked the fuck out. That's how this is gonna work. I know that AI and new platforms and metaverse, it's all coming. I don't know exactly what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna have to adjust.

19:48And sometimes it changes everything. I'll give you an example. Influencers, influencers love that they become more famous than famous people, right? They think it's so cool that they're more famous and actors and actresses and footballers. Meanwhile, right now, as we sit here today, AI-generated characters, virtual characters, are streaming in Asia and becoming more famous than people. Literally robots, non-humans, are becoming more famous as streamers and content creators who are generating AI characters. They're gonna take their money. so the influencers have taken the money from marketing from athletes and actresses and they think they're the king and queen now and as we sit here today people are developing characters that are virtual who are vlogging and streaming and they're gonna take the money.

20:45The question becomes someone like me, someone like him, when you have the ability as a human to do it, okay, but here comes a character that can do it better maybe using AI so I'm gonna have to adjust. What do I do? Maybe I start a company that has characters that I use my platform to build up the character. What's amazing about business and the way the world works is there's only one option, to be prepared for the fight, and then the fight happens. Now we have the first round, and he did something different. Now I have three minutes or a minute before I go back out there to figure out what he was doing and why he was doing it, and then ding, ding, ding, and we got to fight.

21:22That's business. So I think the number one rule is to be mentally prepared that what we all do is always in trouble to changing. And number two, as it's happening, put in the work to come up with a new thing to do. I'll give you, you know, back to my public speaking career. In 2009, when I first hit the scene, 2007, when I first hit the scene, everybody said that I was not gonna be successful because I cursed and because I dressed casual. I, didn't want to wear a suit and not curse and I was willing to give up the money. I was willing to be myself. I didn't know the world was gonna get more casual.

22:05I didn't know the business world was gonna get more casual. Up until that point, business was, you know, people didn't wear off-whites. People didn't look, it wasn't, and now it became the world. It worked out for me and I started taking bigger speaking fees and became bigger of people who were wearing ties and cordial and boring. It just happened. But like I said, the keynote speaker of this conference in seven years might be a hologram. Man, I'm super curious about how this will be. So, lots of us here, we are leader of markets, different markets. So, looking at the future, in the next five years, what would you say that would be the the most important points that we have to keep in our minds to still be the leader of markets in the next five years.

22:59You know, what a beautiful way for this to end. I would argue the reason, knowing the makeup of those 8 ,000 people, I decided to frame my conversation up there for exactly what I believe here. It's just that everyone here is more advanced and has more to gain and more to lose. It's two things. everyone here has to continue on the path of attention. You have to. It's the game. You can't sell anything if nobody's listening. So where are they listening and where are they listening at a better price? People say to me, Gary, television commercials still work. I'm like, yes. Coca-Cola, you spent$10 million on that commercial.

23:36Of course you're gonna sell some Coca-Cola. But what if you spent$10 million on Mr. Beast and YouTube and TikTok? What if you sold more? and so we have to not only pay attention to where attention is, we have to understand where underpriced attention is and stay away from overpriced attention just because we used to do it. All those people, how many of you here do Google AdWords? Google, beautiful. Right. The day Google AdWords came out, I bought every name of every wine for my dad's wine store and was paying five cents a click. my customer acquisition on hundred dollar orders of wine was 39 cents I wasn't smart enough to know how good it was I should have spent every dollar my dad had in his life on it but I wasn't smart enough to know how good the underpriced attention was and I think back to that day every day the reason I've gone so hard at TikTok or the new stuff now is I don't want to make the same mistake I made at 22 All of us have today, no wine turn is five cents.

24:44You know, and that customer acquisition is so much more. So attention, and then accountability. The biggest vulnerability to everyone in this room, my friend, is their success. The biggest reason people will not be in this room in five years is they got too high on their own supply. They didn't keep fighting to innovate. They got complacent. They got comfortable. They became fulfilled financially and started, and it's okay. Some of you have sacrificed time with your family. Some of you have sacrificed your health, and you wanna be, that's okay. But it is the reason you wouldn't be as financially successful.

25:24If you're not constantly changing, and you're not realizing. The biggest thing I hear about in this group is them blaming their employees for their lack of success when all of you hired your employees and you can fire them. If you sit here today and are thinking about an employee and blaming them for something that's not working, you're deflecting responsibility. I always say in my company, everything is my fault because it is. Because if Dustin wasn't recording all day now and he forgot to hit record, I can understand how it sounds but I picked Dustin I have 4 ,000 people wanting to be filming me every day in my inbox every day I could have decided he's not as sharp or he's not into it so I think for a lot of you it's the accountability everything's on you you've got to constantly change to stay on top and everybody that works for you is your responsibility no matter how much you pay them or what you put them in charge of amazing so that was the last question Can you take a blow home?

26:30I'm heading back to New York. Okay, so, yeah. We can stand there and then go to work. Okay, but thank you a lot, Garrett. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, Victor. Thank you, everybody. I hope to see you more in Brazil.