Why Human-Centric Marketing Matters in 2025

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience. Hey everybody, before we start today's podcast, I put out a new deck. I know the pyramid deck changed everyone's life. Go to garyb.com slash attention. A free, how many pages is it Sid? A free 47 page deck that is free that will change your business, your life, your brand, your world. Go check it out. Now to the podcast. Let's not just pretend. What we do a lot in this industry is pretend. Let's get to the truth. For me, what is productive is I'm okay with losing. I'm okay with no. What I'm not okay with is being in meetings and acting. Let's just have real conversations.

0:43Look, I think accountability is a big part of this. I think we need to be very careful and take a step back on all this safety stuff and realize how in control we are. the institutions of society have done a very good job in making people feel helpless and feel like somebody else is going to do it for them. It becomes a very historical slippery slope. And so I think accountability is a very attractive word heading into 2025. I think it's crazy to be a human being and have the audacity to think that every other human being in our country should see the world exactly how you see it. Like, you know, we've gotten to this place of entitlement that is as if we're right.

1:30I think, you know, again, I put out a lot of stuff. I talk about a lot of stuff. But I don't think I'm right. I think that I'm passionate about it. And I hope that it brings value. But I think we've gotten, you know, back to leading. Leading, doing the right things, things of that nature, marketing, societal. it's exciting but you have to understand that humility is the great balance to it. You could have unbelievable conviction and passion and belief but you need to have the humility that not everyone's gonna agree with you and there's a beauty in that, not a negative and I think we're struggling with that collectively as an industry and as a society.

2:15You know, I was an atrocious student but there was one class I was always very good at and that was history. And I never really understood it until I got older and I realized that I liked history because it was actually helping me in business because pattern recognition and history and human behavior repeats itself under different contexts all the part. One of the things I most liked about history was this very weird thing called coup d 'etats which used to scare me. I'm like, am I a weird bad person? But now I understand. The reason I always was fascinated by coups was when I would study them, I was fascinated that when the army would go and go after the dictator or whoever they were trying to overthrow, they would also at the same exact time go to the TV station, the radio, and the newspaper.

3:00And I always found that interesting. And I'm talking about when I was 12, 15, 17. Now I understand why I found that interesting based on who I became professionally. The distribution of information is the variable of how society works. if you go way back in your history books once you realize that a stunning percentage of the first books ever written when the printing press was invented were religious books you start to understand why the world has religion as such a substantial currency when you look at the changes when you look back to elections when you understand and I know a lot of you studied this in high school when you understand the Nixon vs Kennedy election and Nixon dominates on radio and Kennedy dominates on television, you start to get fascinated on mediums.

3:51What's its impact? Social media is the foundation, is the infrastructure, is the pipes of what is dictating all societal truths. It is the dominant media force of consumption in the world. So its impact is staggering. Do you like this business? Do you like the media business? I love it, but I think it's incredibly interesting. The one thing I dislike about it is I think people are petty. I think the competition in this industry is a little funny. Like I like when we lose pitches because I think we deserve it. And so I think there's too much pettiness in the competition stuff. I also think a lot of people sell things they don't believe in in this industry more than I'm accustomed to.

4:43But I don't judge. I'm empathetic. People have mortgages, loans. But I used to think I was smart in the first three, four years that I ran VaynerMedia. But then I just learned that most of the marketing companies are part of holding companies which are publicly traded and they have to make decisions on every 30 days. I got older and understood that most people don't have risk tolerance in their stomach and are willing to jump and go backwards financially. So it started to become more obvious to me like why so many people believe in spending money on dumb shit because that's how it works for that org or that company.

5:25So I think the two things that stand out that are negatives because overall I love it. I mean the people, there's so many great people in the business but I do think the corporate life, I think corporations miss the mark on how they treat people. I really believe that. Now, I also don't think people are, you know, accountable enough. You know, if your company sucks, like, spend time on LinkedIn at night and make content and DM people to get out of there. You know, so it's this fine balance. But, no, I think the industry's really rad. I mean, it's an incredibly fun time to be in the industry because everything's changing.

6:04Right? Like, I think that the industry is flawed in its romance of yesterday. I think it's flawed in its obsession with tomorrow. I think it's flawed in its inability to be great at today. There's a reason a lot of startup brands are taking market share. They're outflanking the corporate marketing and corporation industries, but I like it. So do you think about things that we talk about here, like protecting brands, protecting brand, the brand might be your client, protecting your brand, making sure the ads run where they're supposed to run, protecting consumers. Do you think about those things?

6:42Of course. What do you think about them? I think about them quite a bit because, you know, at the end of the day, when you're in a service business, you need to provide service for the people that you work for. On the flip side, I do try to have thoughtful conversations with clients about what's happening. I think it is not lost on anybody here that many people have made decisions for their corporations based on their own personal beliefs, not on the truth of what's actually happening. And that becomes very complicated. You know, I also am fascinated because I spend more time on consumer only, not corporate.

7:16What I mean by that is I challenge some of the lazy beliefs around brand safety of how consumers react when they see ads in platform. I mean, what platform on earth is not pushing fear? You know, social media and mainstream media are really fun variable. Mainstream media, print, radio, television, humans decide in the corporation what's gonna be on TV. Social media is all humans in an empty vessel sharing what they put out. The algorithms are commercial algorithms. You know, and I'm all for a good conspiracy theory. My parents are fucking Soviets, you know. But of course I think about it, but I will say that I've been fascinated over the last 12 years in watching people speak emotionally without being practitioners of anything.

8:16We have too many people that live in ivory towers and boardrooms that don't know how the things work. And I think more education on the truth would be good. and then the hypocrisy is ridiculous. Like watching people stand on a soapbox and shit on something and then go get another job and then start stand on another soapbox because now they work on the other side of the argument. The hypocrisy has been enjoyable. How'd you get from the wine business to the media business? My father had a local liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey and I was born in the Soviet Union so it was a very immigrant kind of son of a merchant thing where I was working child labor in high school.

9:03You know, truly like really like kind of funny, like 12, 13, 14 hours a day when I'm 14, 15, 16. Prior to that, I had been really making a lot of money selling baseball cards as a kid. So I went from making$500,$1 ,000,$1 ,200 a weekend in the malls of New Jersey, which, you know, there's some youngsters in here, but like$1 ,000 when you're 14 in 1988 was like a fucking trillion dollars, you know? And it was awesome and I loved it. And now I get dragged to my dad's store and I'm gonna pay two bucks an hour to do like hard labor of like stocking shelves and bagging ice for seven hours a day. And it was a struggle at first, but then I realized people collected wine.

9:45And that connection of collecting sports cards and comic books to wine was the real thing that kind of seduced me into what happened next, which was at 16, 17, I learned everything about wine. I really, my dream at 14, 15, 16 was that I thought I had it, that I thought I was a good businessman, and it was very attractive to me to build my parents' business for them to a bigger place. And what came natural to me was marketing. It first started with signage in the store, like the signs that literally said how much a stack of wine would be were crappy they would just do it poorly and I put a lot of effort into it and some of my doodling skills that showed up in VFriends later I learned in the liquor store and so I first did that and then I launched winelibrary.com in 1997 we were one of the first five e-commerce wine businesses in America and between direct mail, local television outdoor billboards, building a website, email marketing, Google AdWords, YouTube, I did everything.

10:56So when I started VaynerMedia in 2009 to today, 15 years later, there's never been a day where I haven't been the actual practitioner of marketing behavior. Literally backstage right now, I just wrote the copy for the Instagram post that just posted on my account. I think, you know, to me, it's more ridiculous that I was a wine retailer than I went from wine retail to marketing because while I was a wine retailer, I was really a marketer for that business who happened to also be a retailer. I've heard you say that if the internet existed when you were a kid, you wouldn't even finish high school.

11:35My mom's favorite joke is she's just so thankful that the internet didn't come along a little bit earlier because we pretty much, we're pretty curious if I would have graduated middle school, let alone high school. So yeah, she's pretty thrilled that that happened. And so you took it in, you said, I'm gonna take this marketing thing. Yes. I'm gonna build a business. Just tell me a little bit about the kind of how it, do you have a, you set up shop, I'm gonna have an agency. It started backwards. I at that point already had Wine Library TV going and I'd amassed a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers in 2006 when no one had any.

12:12And so brands were starting to in 2007, 8, reach out to me and say, how are you doing this? Why is this happening? And so ESPN sent me an email, somebody at ESPN Marketing and said, would you come in and consult? And I said, sure. I wasn't even thinking about charging. And the next reply to me saying, sure, let's schedule. The email said, how much do you charge? And I was like, oh shit. And I was like sitting there and I was like, okay, what's like the most I can come up with to come in for an hour and tell ESPN how to do Twitter and Facebook? And I was like,$5 ,000. And they replied, no problem.

12:48And I said, fuck. They just replied too fast. I knew I left money on the table. But I went and did it. I enjoyed it tremendously. I called my brother. My brother was just about to graduate college and we knew we wanted to do something together. We were thinking about deal of the day, living social Groupon. We were thinking fantasy sports. We were very bullish on that. But ultimately, I said, you know, I was speaking for myself at the time, I said, long term, I wanna build one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, buy businesses, refurbish them. I love being an operator. I said, why don't we start a marketing company to learn?

13:24Because at that point, I had already invested in Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, and I'd really learned Silicon Valley. Obviously, I grew up in family business, SMB world. But Fortune 500 marketing, this world was incredibly foreign to me. I didn't understand it. So many things they were doing didn't make sense to me. And I said, you know what? Let me start this consultancy, which is how I thought about it at first. We'll get paid to learn, and then we'll do something else. And that was 15 years ago. Family business is so important to you, clearly. Yes. It's been part of your everything you talk about.

13:58I just listened to the podcast with Howard Leibnick. So tell me, what did you learn? Just tell me, give me the quick high level on it, and then tell me what you learned. Howard is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. For some of you in the room that were in this amazing city on 9-11, I was 26. Cantor Fitzgerald, ironically, was one of the biggest customers of my wine store. On September 14th, I deleted every single Cantor Fitzgerald email from our database because all the people died. For some of you that know the story, he famously never missed work, but it was his son's first day of kindergarten and he took his son to kindergarten.

14:38He lost his brother. He lost his best friends. He lost everybody in the company. So it's really intense stuff. So what did you learn about building a business from Africa? And how, you know, like, it's raw, right? So what did you, if you walk away from it, because, I mean, I'll tell you what I learned. I mean, and again, this is the sad part of the story. He hired only people he loved. He hired family and friends and then they were the people who... Yeah, I don't know if I, you know, obviously we just, this was the most intimate I got with his story. It's not that I learned anything since it just happened the other day and maybe there's things, the thing I took away from it has been the currency of my life, I think for the people here who've seen my content or have come across me, like I'm not unaware that I'm high energy and got a lot of things going on and I know how I communicate which is hyper and excited and passionate.

15:33But in real life, I'm incredibly simple. What I took away from it was I'm very grateful for the way I was parented and the DNA I was given and the luck of the draw of how my life played out because by the time I was 15, it was very clear to me that as long as my family was alive, none of this shit mattered. And I've lived that life for the last 30 plus years. and so that was another affirmation that leaning into gratitude, I don't think it's lost on anyone. We are incredibly good at complaining and being upset about things we don't control. I think envy and jealousy and fear have had a very good half decade of momentum and I just wish, I mean when I think about every person sitting in this room, the context of you sitting in this room at this exact moment in a world where there's 800 million people on earth that don't have access to clean water you know maybe there was something really lucky in the fact that I was born in a very shitty place and maybe there's something in the fact that my mom lost her mom at five and my dad lost his dad at 15 and I lived my entire childhood fearing that my parents would die.

16:51I don't know what it is but simplicity and gratitude have been the currency of my life. And what that interview did for me was created another reminder that all of us should be living that way. Because regardless of what the fuck you're worried about professionally right now, I promise you, if you got a frantic phone call from your family and something bad happened, you would not give a fuck. I'm going to ask you to stand up. Please. And I'm going to ask for questions from the audience. You're always the way I'm behind this, by the way. Please, questions from Gary. My question is this, I read somewhere that, and again, as a parent, I think about this all the time, 30 % of content is unfindable.

17:3230 % of content is unsafe. What's our job in that equation? I think our job is to build self-esteem. Like, you know, I think parenting in the last 30 years, from one man's humble point of view, has gotten to a place where we're trying to do too much. you know like think about it if that's true what are you fucking Sherlock Holmes and Batman like you're not gonna pull that off what I believe from my observations being almost 49 now living life is that the great anecdote if you want your children to be happy is actual self esteem cause that allows them to be able to deal with what they come across I think we've lost our way on that we've got parents going to school and fighting teachers for our kids.

18:22Like we are in our kids' shit. We need to get the fuck out of our kids' shit. Like we have gotten to a place where we built a generation of zoo animals. You know? I mean we're just like I think we should let our kids get into a fucking fist fight. Like I mean it. We say it but then we, whoa, do we not live it. I have 27 year olds that work for me that have fucking tracking devices on their phone because their parents know where they are. It's like, where the fuck are we? So I think what we can do is not obsess 24-7 on a losable game, which is we're not gonna find 30 % and 30%. What we can do is talk to our kids in real life and start teaching them that they need to be able to be capable because do you remember when we grew up and let's say we wanted to accomplish something in our 20s, like buy a home or something?

19:15and we would, remember borrowing money from parents? That's gone. Every 23 year old's like, just give me the fucking money. Like we're in a very, very, very, we have to understand that we are in so many years of overall financial prosperity that we are in a very entitled and very soft reality right now, which is why we've become so vulnerable to how much fear, fear has always been sold on us by politics and companies and parenting, but we've become very good at falling for it because we're not strong enough because we're insecure and anxious because our parents have shown us forever that they'll take care of everything which indicates to us that we can't do anything.

20:00I think we all can agree that you're a very authentic person and throughout your career, ESPN, everything that you do, authenticity is a thing. Yes. I think you probably do it better than anyone. That's very nice. I'm sure not, but thank you. You hear all of this brand safety, brand authenticity, or brand responsibility. Someone comes to you, they're coming to learn how to be authentic. How do you have that conversation? What do you say to brands from the other side? It's kind of similar to companies having to make political statements. Brands can't be authentic. Brands are not a human. What brands can do is be more consumer-centric.

20:41What I think brands are struggling, The concept, first of all, one of the things that's a challenge for all of us in marketing is who decides these things? I'm sure many of you have been plenty of frustrated if you've ever worked on this side of the business where you go in and you show them something creative and the person that's leading the brand goes, well, that's not on brand. And you're like, well, what part of it? Like the adjective, the color? Like what's not on brand, right? And then as you know, you finally spend six months doing straight bullshit to try to guess what the person likes.

21:15Then they get switched off to another brand and then Harry comes in and goes, this is not on brand. So same with authenticity. What is it? And who's the judge and jury on that? Is the CMO? Is the brand? And CMOs are fucking there for eight minutes these days. So they're constantly moving too. And so what we, you know, It's less that we talk about authenticity, though that's lovely. I think what we talk about is like, do you understand that no human being would like this video? You know, like the amount of marketing that is made that literally nobody on earth would ever make if they were trying to get people to give a shit about it, but because it's the industry we make, or when we run media, and you know those impressions are not getting achieved.

22:04Like this industry's obsessed properly with reach, it's imperative, but we're actually obsessed with potential reach, not actualized reach. Because this industry has done a remarkable job of deciding that common sense has no place in our industry. Like as if, I mean, do you know that you pay eight times circulation for a print ad? Do you know when you buy print, you pay eight times circ, the amount they make, in case somebody leaves the magazine on a bus and another person picks it up and gets to page 117 and sees your full page ad. Like there's, you know, like in a world where like every passenger is looking at their phone when they're in a car, why has outdoor gone up in price, not down?

22:48Why has print gone up, not down? In programmatic banner digital ads, like people looking at banner ads on dot coms below the fold? Like we have just become incredibly infatuated with those kind of things. So we focus on consumer-centric, which then inherently gets you a little more authentic. If you don't take yourself so seriously, if you don't put your logo or your tagline in every social media post, if you make social media posts that people actually want to watch, or a TV commercial that people would, a video people would want to watch, not what we all now deem as a commercial. And so I think the authenticity comes from an obsession of consumer-centricality.

23:29The reason VaynerMedia has built into a 2500 person global, one of the largest independent, is when people ask me, how'd you do that? It's 100 % we care about what consumers are doing. We've lost so much money, so much. We could be so much, I'm a good businessman. We could be much bigger if we sold shit that everybody else sells, but we don't do it because we don't believe it's gonna help the business. and I think being 100 % consumer centric is a wonderful way for me to end this. It would be good for you in your side hustle, in your career, for your own career if you went literally left here today and posted on LinkedIn your current thoughts on 2025 marketing that you actually believe.