Why the #1 Tool You Can Use for Your Business is Gemini

0:00This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. We are talking about the future of the internet, of publishing, and of personal branding with the one and only Gary Vaynerchuk. This is crazy, Gary. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Happy to be here, my friend. All right. So I want to jump into AEO, GEO to start with, because I've seen you talking a lot about search engine optimization for large language models, what people, you know, they're calling now generative engine optimization. And I'd like to ask how that's showing up inside of VaynerMedia, your agency. So is it like, has it changed the kinds of people that you're hiring, the way that teams are structured or how you think about client strategy?

0:48Definitely how we think about client strategy. Somewhat team structure because we've added people that we think have heavy expertise. But when we think there's a substantial marketing shift, we don't think about it as a department or a couple of experts. We think about it as a capability that many more people need to learn. Not everyone. Obviously, we're structured in a fairly classic way between creative and media and account and operations, project management and production. But there's depth, you know, anyone, for example, that has been inside of Vayner as someone who does SEO, for example, now she or he has to up level to understand how AEO, GEO is working.

1:37Otherwise, you know, they're in a declining field. and obviously growing up or having depth in SEO makes you conducive to thinking about how, you know, GEO or AEO is working. But there's people in media, there's people in strategy, there's people in creative who are also deeply now educating themselves and thinking about, all right, how are we going to create creative and social that may over-index for Anthropoc, Claude, right? or what are we doing with our own content, our sub stack, Reddit, things of that nature that may be conducive to showing up more organically. And then obviously, just like I grew up in SEO with Wine Library back in the late 90s, early 2000s, it goes from SEO to SEM pretty quickly.

2:35And so this is already going from AEO, GEO to whatever they're going to call it, AEM, GEM, whatever they end up calling it. You know, how do we think about marketing inside of these platforms from an ad standpoint, not just from an organic results standpoint? So yeah, it's, you know, to us, it's kind of like, once I deem, if we're talking about InterX, once I deem something as like, not a passing fad, or not something that may stick, but something that is clearly going to stick. And I think, you know, I couldn't imagine anyone that's paying attention to this, thinking that we're going to have a massive decline in end consumer searches on AI, you know, agents and bots and platforms, you know, I think this is just the beginning, because I think even everyone's websites are going to be more responsive.

3:39And I just think it's a whole different era we're about to go into. And so we take that very seriously and kind of put all chips in and, you know, create partnerships with people like Profound and others that are leading in the space. And so we, you know, this is, we're not taking this lightly at Vayner. Have you been in the weeds at all? Just like seeing what gets brand sighted, like what things are more likely to get brand sighted? Not yet. I, you know, you know, I don't want to bullshit you. Like there's certain things I'll go very head deep on. This one is, you know, again, this is what being a little older gives you some advantages around.

4:20The main reason I haven't gone real pen to paper and sat with the team and like really looked under the hood is my intuition six and 12 months ago was, oh, this is gonna be like the old days of Google where it's gonna be changing pretty rapidly. And so like every minute is crazy for me. Like I get it, like this matters. And so like the nerdom that I enjoy quite a bit of like how is Reddit weighted versus how is general websites that are 20 plus years weighted versus how is social creative weighted. Then I think one thing that people are gonna be very naive to is I think Meta and ByteDance are gonna be very big players in this.

5:04Really? Yeah, well, social search is huge. You know, I don't think people realize how many people, you know, I just went to Japan with my daughter, 100 % of her search for our trip was in TikTok. 100%. Wow. You know, like, wow, that's crazy. Place we went, everything. And, you know, they're going to have, you know, their results very affected by the content within. And it's more, you know, and, and they're getting their kind of like results, but then they're adding capability of going back and forth, no different than what you would do on Claude or OpenAI. And so like, you know, I've kind of got the pillars understood.

5:52It's really not my job per se these days to go in and help our client go from the fourth result to the first result by understanding of the nanosecond that Reddit this, TikTok content that, Substack this, LinkedIn that, Wikipedia this, you know, foodandwine.com that. But it is my job to hire people and create the architecture of it being a religion. And to your point that there will be a time, probably this holidays, my intuition is there'll be a day on December 28th when I'm bored enough while all the family's doing their own thing. And like, we've scratched that first week of holiday itch. And there'll be a pocket where there'll be three hours of downtime.

6:42And instead of watching a college football game or another Christmas movie, I'll probably ping one of my internal heroes and say, hey, you got, you know, I don't want to bother you in a holiday because I know who the psychos are and want to do this as well and be like, hey, two to five today, you want to really go in there with me. And that will probably be the first time I'll go a little deeper. I'll definitely get updated on, oh my God, Wikipedia has gained a lot of influence on Anthropic. Even as you hear me answering, you could tell that I'm not in some ivory tower completely lost of what's going on.

7:21But I also haven't spent the 10 or 30 hours that I inevitably will probably in 2020. It's not your job. Your job is to hire the right people. Yeah. But I think I'm making a point that I'm hopeful brings value to leaders, which is there will be 30 hours put in to like that nerdy because I do think one of the competitive advantages VaynerMedia has is I'm a practitioner as a CEO, which is incredibly unusual at the size and scale that we play out. I backed into it because of my personal brand and the family wine business and V friends. So I have these other businesses where I'm the, in essence, CMO and hands dirty marketer.

8:04And that's a serviced Vayner extremely well. Yeah, I was at I was at Dentsu earlier in my career. And when I was at Dentsu, we were look at Vayner and the things that you guys were doing. And we knew that like you were in the weeds and you guys were going hard. And it was just it was so cool to see because I'm like that type of person too. And actually, what I what I like about VaynerMedia is so on your homepage, it says on repeat, like literally at the top of the page, it says we put social at the center of everything that we do. And what's crazy is social media, those are some of the top ranking sites in Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and these get surfaced a ton, like the descriptions for the videos get surfaced a ton in AI.

8:52You can literally, you can actually see what ChatGPT searches the web with, which is crazy. It's called a query fanout. So like you can literally like have made like tons of viral videos about this. You can just like right click inspect and literally see the searches that ChatGPT is doing. And what is it coming across? It's coming across the descriptions for on social media. And in a way that is, you know, it's been interesting as you know, especially if you're at, what years were you at Densu? 2017. Right. So that was around the time where VaynerMedia in the ad land started to go from like a joke.

9:34And it's like, Gary, this crazy wine guy, like this is stupid to wait a minute, this might be something. And here we are almost 10 years later. And yet still, and you know, this the proper Madison Avenue holding company, Fortune 500 marketing world continues to underestimate social media. Yes, yes. And what's interesting is this AEO, GEO thing has not been underestimated by Fortune 500. To their credit, a lot of the 40, 50 year old leaders grew up watching SEO go from nothing to everything. And so this wasn't hard for them to say, you know, I think the lucky stars understood that social media was television, but fragmented television.

10:27And that was hard for people to make the connection in 2006. AEO, GEO connected to SEO. That doesn't take a rocket science degree. Everyone got it. To your point, we've had way more clients in the last six months take our social media creative production capability seriously

10:51because of the way they're indexing. No, because, yeah, exactly. Like I would argue there's a couple of clients who've read up for way more cost of social creative production strictly because they know of the collateral sawdust by-product value that it means for AEO, GEO while we're making these how-to or relevance videos for them in social. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

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12:10Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

12:15Do you think AI is going to kill the internet? So you've predicted a ton of changes in technology and content consumption. What do you think is going to happen to niche websites, to blogs, news sites, publishers, and the internet as a whole if more answers are happening inside AI tools instead of on websites? yeah i mean i mean one you know let's let's really nerd out for a second because i like the way you're thinking and asking questions i mean it's going to change the face of the internet right i mean the answers are coming from the internet ed yeah yeah so so you know it's it's not going to kill it in fact yes but but if you're a niche blogger and someone doesn't have to go to your blog to get their answer.

13:00They just get it from Chachi PG. Ed, is this 2009? That day has been over for a long time. Like if you're a niche blogger, at least when I grew up, maybe from my perspective in 2006, five, seven, eight, nine, those sites were doing work because that was pre-social media eating up the oxygen, right? Like, you know, I mean, between sub stack, let's call a spade a spade between between Substack, LinkedIn, and the social media networks, like that sportsdaily.com or like starwarsweekly.com, I don't think that's been the most, I mean, you've had it, like I have websites, but that has not been the primary source of your reality.

13:48It's been maybe, you know, one could argue if you structure your company a certain way, it's the moon, but all the planets around you, your sub stack your linkedin your social content you know i think ai is accelerating what social media started which is the yeah from going directly to the dot-com and that's a good way to look at it yeah yeah yeah because yeah if people a lot of people blame ai is like the death of niche blogs but you're right it was happening it was happening when people were going to social yeah let's talk about barstool let's just use that right because yeah like was was a niche blog that became big and I think people might know it, right?

14:27Like, you know, Barstool was a niche blog, you know, but really accelerated because of YouTube and Twitter and Instagram. I think every niche blog, you know. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. you know really runs on that currency today and like there's very few people that have a dot-com that is wildly successful or solidly successful where they do nothing on social media content you know and so there was a layer there was a layer built on top of the open internet called social that ate up a lot of the oxygen and became a layer no different than google search became a layer and then to your point and everyone's point this ai interface is going to be the next layer and it's going to consolidate that even more that's just that's a foregone conclusion you know what i think a lot of people are underestimating that's going to pull so far ahead in the next couple of years ahead of other llms gemini because gemini is the only llm that has access to YouTube transcripts.

15:46It's so crazy, Gary. Brother, if you, you know, maybe you've seen this for me because I've started to put out this content, but it's been more behind the walls. When I tell you YouTube shorts and YouTube has accelerated to the top of Vayner's strategy to clients where it was like shorts was like a distant fourth, you know, a year and a half ago. I couldn't agree more. Not only that, Ed, when you factor in the amount of human beings that use calendar and Gmail as meaningful, utilitarian, operational, functional, how they live their lives infrastructure. And the fact that Gemini is going to be able to pull from that Gemini is the actual only guaranteed winner in this era right now.

16:33That's a hot take. The only guaranteed, but you're right. You are right. It's the only guaranteed winner. I mean, obviously, I think we're all very impressed with Claude. You know, I think it's hard to underestimate Sam and OpenAI just because he's psycho and they had an advantage. But the only, like, you know, back to like not wanting to be wrong on the internet for me personally, it is the only guaranteed winner for me is Gemini because of the stack they came in with. Claude and OpenAI started from day one with nothing other than their incredible technologies. Gemini starts with the world is trapped in Google Calendar, in Gmail, and is stacked with unlimited information on YouTube and YouTube Shorts.

17:26That is an aggressive headstart. Yeah, and it's just like, if you want to get the best information and there are less niche bloggers now, because these LLMs still need to get their information from somewhere. And that's why social is going to win. And that's why I actually think men and by dance are very dark horse. Like, where is the content? Like, you're making a very important point. I keep making this point. I'm stunned by people's inability to understand this. Where's the content coming from? And the content that's being produced today, with all due respect to sub stack, and to blogs, and sub stacks of monster, but it's the scale that social has and the complexity, right?

18:08Video that gets transcribed into audio, like that gets transcribed into written, the depth of audio, video, and in word content that's coming from social, there's not a distant second. And then Ed, it begs the question, what happens if people decide to start putting up garden walls? What are you thinking? I always think about like, what are they thinking, right? and like you know like what is meta thinking like does it does meta sit around and say okay so we have all this info on our platform like what ramification and i don't this is above my pay grade legally you know i'm thinking from a corner i understand yeah i'm thinking purely from corporate well well google google literally did this google restricted so previously chat cheap open ai was looking at uh like a hundred pages of or a hundred results from google and then google actually restricted the it it this messed with all the seo tools but this was like an offensive measure from google to make it so you're only seeing like the top i think it was like the top 10 or 20 uh results from google because open ai was getting too much information And so it was like this parameter where you could...

19:28By the way, that was like, makes sense. We've seen this a million times, Toys R Us giving Amazon their infrastructure on commerce. In the early days of massive innovation, people are naive, people make deals, people aren't thinking all the way through, right? Now that we all know, now that it's July, 2026, and everyone kind of knows the new world order, here's a profound statement. I'd love to see the math of how much net new content is going to be produced in the next three years versus how much has been produced for the last 20. All right. So I got to ask you about this. So as long as I've known your brand, I've known your brand for a long time.

20:07I read Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook over 10 years ago. And so you've always been huge on posting a lot. And I'm also very huge on posting a lot. I made a video about how Mr. Beast was shocked by instant Bollywood posting a hundred times a day on Instagram, getting 9.2 billion views and that was crazy and but the thing is like with ai content flooding the internet now is volume still the strategy is there anything creators and businesses need to be careful about just because like yes like it's just so easy just is what is just reduce the filters get everything out post more or is there more to it well i think there's a couple things i think Like one, within the very narrow framework of volume on social content, I'd love to hear someone's counterpoint.

20:58When they set up, when people come to me and they're like, Gary, now with AI, I'm like, okay, so what are you gonna do, post less? Like it's completely counterintuitive. You know, I will use this analogy for people that know sports, Ed. You know, the modern athlete, like an NBA, a bench player in the NBA today, the 10th guy on the Memphis Grizzlies. If you picked him up and took him to 1957 and put him on the court, the exact version of who he is. He's going to dominate. He's the greatest player of all time. Yeah. It's called evolution. I just want, I'm using this incredible platform to say something that people may not know about me.

21:47I'm not excited that volume is a requirement. I wish this was 1957. Of all humans in advertising, I'd be the best Don Draper. I would have meetings, I'd be charming, I'd have a good idea, and we would fucking crush. We would sell lots of television commercials. That's just not where we're at. So couple things. Yes, I still think volume matters because the stakes are even higher and I think even more volume. And I'm sorry that it's 900 posts a day, not one every three days. I didn't make the rules. But I will say something is emerging that we're very serious about, which is the rise of analog. So one thing that is emerging with this extremity of output, I love how everyone's like, oh, all this AI slop.

22:39I'm like, the human slop was garbage too. It's true, yeah. 99.9 % of content. I've put out a lot of human slop. Me too. Me too. You know, you can't always nail it. And by the way, you and I are actually decent-ish. A lot of people just aren't good at it. And like all of the output they put out is not valuable to their audience. Do you believe that anybody can figure it out? I think it depends on how you define figuring out. I do believe everybody has the capacity to get better at making content that's more valuable to their audience if they practice and put in the work. But I think I can get a lot better at basketball if I went ham for a year and worked on every part of my game.

23:21But I don't think I'd become LeBron James. For sure. So it's natural talent. But you don't have to be LeBron James. No, I don't have to be. But I think when you say, can everyone figure it out? Sometimes people see that as, can I become Alex Cooper or Mr. Beast? And the answer is probably not because there's a lot of variables that go into those things. But can people go from getting 100 views per post for themselves or their family business or their business, their marketing to getting 100 ,000 views consistently? Yeah, I think people have the capacity if they get educated and put in the work and and get some dirt under their fingernails.

24:00Anyway, the rise of analogs got me very interested. You know, experiential marketing, event marketing, I'm very bullish on moving Vayner in that direction. And we've been in it historically through gallery media group and events, and we're going even harder at that. And I'm infatuated by that. I feel like we're going into this barbell era, extreme digitalization, robotics, AI, social, as like at scale kind of mainstream. And then on the other side, events, you know, just like, you know, just good old fashioned, you know, what you're seeing at sporting events, what you're seeing at music concerts, run clubs, people going out to dinner more, pop-ups, my daughter, for example, wants to stay in line for three hours to get a limited edition item.

24:51The three hours in line is enjoyable for her because she views that as a detachment from her Snapchat TikTok consumption. Yeah. And you know, it's also like the analog stuff that you just described is also huge for AEO and GEO because you're having people write about you and share things about you and you're getting all these brand mentions and you're getting backlinks, which is making your website do better. That's right. And the way we do it and the reason we're winning so many experiential scopes is we're doing the experiential event, but we're also fully filming the entire thing. And it's a production day for creative.

25:32Oh, that's huge. And you get all this content to make out of it. Oh my gosh. All right. So we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to ask about scaling a team. So I've posted short form video every day since November 1st, 2022. I've not missed a single day. I've done this daily podcast every day since July 5th, 2023, three have not missed a single day like literally no days missed I do it when I'm sick I do it when I have a headache I do it all the time and literally have not missed a single day and the next thing by the way I want I want to thank you you for that because part of the reason I do this is because I was so inspired by Casey Neistat's vlog run almost a decade ago and I believe you were an early investor in Beam and Casey Neistat was doing the daily vlogs because of Beam and so and like I'm trying to inspire people in the way that Casey inspired me and I'm like I'm from Brooklyn like I see Casey running in New York and I'm just trying I'm trying to do that for other people for you and I think I think I am it's amazing but so the next thing that I need to get better at is building a team around my personal brand yeah and so so that I'm not doing everything myself because I'm doing I have an I have an editor I have a thumbnail designer but I'm still doing so much myself.

26:46I have some other people. And so when you started hiring people to help with your personal brand, what mistakes did you make that creators, founders, or experts listening can avoid? One of my great flaws as an operator is I bring my charitable component of my life into my business at times. And I create nepotism and entitlement by carrying people that are underperforming because I have this belief that I can fix them. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

27:33Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group.

28:11The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

28:22Me too. And I would argue, Ed, that's probably why you inherently felt warm towards me from afar and why I, even in this short period of time, feel warm towards you. I find it similar to what parents do wrong when they create spoiled kids. It comes from a very good place, but everything in life is best when it finds the middle. You know, the reason there's so much anxiety in the world is politically we're pulling too hard from the left and the right, right? You know, like, and so everything's at its best using that analogy when it's purple. And I would say as you're building your team, you need to be purple.

29:02You need to be a leader that does actually care about your thumbnail designer, your editor, your writer. You should care about people. It makes you a better leader. At the same token, you have to be capable of telling your thumbnail designer or your new project manager that if she or he is underperforming by your subjective opinion, you have to have the capacity to kindly give feedback along the way and then also be prepared to exit them and find someone else. My great mistake was I would carry people an extra year or two when I long knew that they were not capable of performing well. And so the answer to your question directly that I really hope helps people is hire fast because sometimes people take 43 interviews and they think they're gonna be perfect at hiring someone.

29:49You never really know until they're in the building who they are. You'll never learn that in an interview process. Number two, fire faster. Like when you know, you know. There's a way to do it graciously. Make sure you give feedback. Don't stun people. And then finally, this is the most important one, Ed. Promote fastest. On the flip side, if you hire this next person, Ed, and they're like your kind of right-hand producer, and you're like, oh my God, Sally's incredible. Don't wait a year. Like give her an extra bump, sit her down, and be like, I see a lot in you similar to me. I'm gonna end with this because there's some agency people listening, and I think this will really stun them and maybe motivate leaders.