2025 Marketing Strategy That Will Revolutionize Your Ads

Summary

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The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode Summary: 2025 Marketing Strategy That Will Revolutionize Your Ads

Host: Gary Vaynerchuk
Date: September 19, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode centers on how marketing strategy must adapt for 2025 and beyond, emphasizing the centrality of creativity and the transformative power of social and organic media. Gary Vaynerchuk challenges legacy brand practices, critiques the overvaluation of traditional campaign-centric marketing, and shares actionable insights on leveraging modern platforms, consumer attention, and leadership with kindness. If you work in marketing, CPG, or leadership, this episode delivers a bold vision for the future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Brand Building Principles: Then vs. Now

• Legacy Assumptions Are Vulnerable:
  Traditional branding principles from the 1990s are no longer sufficient because distribution and consumer behavior have fundamentally shifted ([01:10]).

  “Us wanting everything to be matching luggage and on brand based on our subjective opinions has made us incredibly not relevant.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [01:24]

• Return to Common Sense:
  Marketing has grown overly complex and reliant on expensive measurement and reporting, fragmenting decision-making and diminishing effectiveness. Gary advocates bringing media and creative under one roof, echoing earlier industry structures ([02:50]).

  “The biggest elephant in the room is we’ve put common sense way back and we need to bring common sense back into companies.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [03:28]

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2. The Core Variable: Creative Execution

• Creative is the Deciding Factor:
  Regardless of targeting or data, creative is what actually converts consumers. Even with perfect data, without compelling creative, marketing fails ([05:17]).

  “The creative is the variable of this entire conversation. Even if you could target everybody everywhere... it still doesn’t mean I’m going to convert you.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [05:30]

• AI & Algorithms Have Remade Distribution:
  Social platforms’ algorithms now match creative to consumers proactively—thus, “creative finds you” rather than you seeking creative. Testing creative in native social environments is essential because that’s where actual attention lives ([07:30]).

  “All of creative testing in all of Fortune 500 marketing should be happening in native social media creative ads. Those analytics and that data and that AI is disproportionately the most powerful.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [08:18]

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3. Outflanked by Start-Ups: Why Big Brands Are Losing

• Startups Leverage Social Better:
  Large corporations are being outmaneuvered by startups who fully exploit consumer-centric and social-first marketing, often with radically smaller budgets ([09:45]).

  “Brands in this portfolio are getting outflanked by startup brands with a couple of million dollars of VC funding because they are winning in consumer-centric environments.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [10:03]

• Corporate Inertia and Outdated Mindsets:
  Internal KPIs, bonus structures, and adherence to legacy practices keep big brands from pivoting quickly even when they recognize what’s happening ([11:30], [12:10]).

  “We are operating not on what we most believe our money is spent on to drive sales. We’re doing what is accepted within the organization.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [11:16]

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4. Rethinking Brand Guidelines and Boardroom Debates

• Over-Engineering for Social:
  Old-school brand guidelines and creative review processes (e.g., debating fonts for social posts as if they’re Super Bowl ads) are wasteful and don’t harness social’s native strengths ([12:27]).

  “Are you really interested in sitting and debating for 31 minutes about a color or a font on an individual social media post like it's a Super Bowl ad? But we do it all day long.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [12:28]

• Letting Data Guide You:
  Brands should publish both their “on brand” creative and what their agency partners recommend, then let native platform analytics decide what works ([13:30]).

• Brand Positioning is Overrated vs. Relevance:
  Theoretical distinctions in brand positioning are less important; what matters is who finds an ad relevant enough to act ([15:15]).

  “No human on earth that buys our stuff thinks about brand positioning. They think about relevance.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [15:49]

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5. Social as the Crucible for Creative Experimentation

• Continuous Testing vs. High-Stakes Bets:
  Gary champions a “day trading attention” model—small, frequent tests in social that outperform the old model of banking on a big, once-a-year idea ([17:30]).

  “Being able to mitigate the risk of the creative I put in Super Bowl by doing marketing all year is exciting for me versus what… everyone does, which is they start with a brief, an agency comes up with an idea, and then you bet the farm on it at Super Bowl, and then you do matching luggage the rest of the year. We have it backwards.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [19:45]

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6. Leadership Philosophy: Kindness Over Fear

• Short-Term vs. Long-Term Motivation:
  Weaponized fear gets short-term results but kills long-term performance. Love, optimism, and kindness unlock the most from teams ([20:59]).

  “I don’t think leaders that sell on fear realize they’re just getting 7 out of 10 from people. The only way to get 11 out of 10 is love, period.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [22:28]

• Cultural Incentives Must Match Words:
  For behavioral change, KPIs, bonuses, and reporting must align with professed values (like kindness or social focus), or change will not happen ([32:59]).

  “If 50% of their bonus was based on them allocating 50% of their creative fees to social, I have a funny feeling every brand would allocate 50% of their fees.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [34:36]

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7. The Viral Video Myth and Reality

• Going Viral: Not Guaranteed, But More Possible:
  Agencies can’t promise viral videos, but increasing creative volume and at-bats raises the odds, especially as platform mechanics change ([28:37]).

  “The ability for a video to go viral as we sit in this conference room right now is dramatically higher than it’s ever been in the history of marketing.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [28:40]

• Case Studies:
  Gary retells examples of viral content driving real sellouts (Mango Gummy at Walgreens, Ocean Spray TikTok), underscoring that no TV ad has done that in decades ([30:00]).

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8. Closing Thoughts: The Social Disruption Every CPG Needs to Face

• Disruptors Are Coming for Every Category:
  Influencers and content creators are now launching brands across all CPG spaces, leveraging their native digital reach to outperform established giants ([36:42]).

  “Fortune 500 companies are getting outflanked by Fortune 10,000 companies. They have no money and they’re beating us up... In the CPG category, every brand is next.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [36:46]

• Mitigating Creative Risk on Social:
  Social media offers fast and inexpensive feedback, yet big brands frequently undervalue and underfund it.

  “Mitigating creative risk is the number one task at hand. Social media is sitting there willing to help you do it for free. But your disrespect and misunderstanding of it is putting you in a secondary spot.”
  — Gary Vaynerchuk [38:10]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We continue to debate in the boardroom as if the Internet doesn’t exist, as if these social networks don’t have unlimited analytics.” ([13:20])

• “The only way to build demand is relevance at scale.” ([16:48])

• “The algorithm is exposing who you are, not forcing you to be someone. And that’s a great misunderstanding.” ([22:05])

• “Change the bonus structure and you change the organization.” ([35:04])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:10] — How old branding principles are now vulnerable
• [05:17] — Creative as foundational in modern marketing
• [08:18] — Creative testing must be embedded in social
• [12:27] — Wastefulness of legacy creative review for social
• [15:49] — Brand positioning vs. real-world consumer relevance
• [19:45] — Why “day trading attention” outpaces yearly campaigns
• [22:28] — Love vs. fear in leadership
• [28:40] — Making viral video is now possible with scale
• [30:00] — Real-life viral examples crushing traditional ads
• [34:36] — Aligning incentive structures for real change
• [36:46] — How disruptors are steamrolling established CPG giants
• [38:10] — Social as risk-mitigation for creative

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Tone & Style

Gary brings his signature energy—direct, empathic, and optimistic—while combining hard truths with actionable advice. His approach mixes challenging industry norms, storytelling from his own career, and a call to arms for leaders to reexamine not just marketing tactics, but incentive structures, culture, and leadership itself.

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For Listeners Who Missed It

If you’re trying to future-proof your brand, maximize reach, or evolve as a leader, this episode is a must. Gary Vee delivers a roadmap for the next era of marketing and organizational change—one that demands speed, relevance, creative courage, and a social-first mindset. His advice: reallocate resources, challenge legacy rituals, and, above all, out-execute through relevance, experimentation, and data-driven creative.

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Contact Gary: Connect via LinkedIn (he welcomes outreach)
Book Mentioned: Day Trading Attention (NYT Best Seller)

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Transcript

[A]

Podcast nation. Before I get you into today's podcast, big announcement. As you probably heard at this point, because I had John from Stan on the show, I am an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan. Stan Store. I'm sending you right now to GaryVee.com, garyVee.com Stan, go check this out. We've done a GaryVee Stan store challenge, which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected honestly by my overall content. The tech stack, all these features and the minimal costs per month that Stan Store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that I envisioned when I wrote Crush it, when I wrote Crushing It. And this overall thing I'm thinking a lot about lately, which is the individual empire, right, this creator entrepreneur slash entrepreneur creator economy that I think is gonna eat up the oxygen. Very honestly, the thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet is you've got the strategy for me. You've got the ambition within yourself, but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it. And I believe you can find that at Stan Store. Stan Store. But specifically I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you. And plus there's a bunch of cool things. So if you want to go see those cool things, go to garyvee.com Stan S T A N Now to the podcast. This is the GaryVee audio experience. I choose optimism. Your old principles of building brands still stay true. Yes, but I think it's been the vulnerability of the industry of the last 30 years. You know, us wanting everything to be matching luggage and on brand based on our subjective opinions has made us incredibly not relevant. But I will say that How Brands grow written in 1991 and some of the stuff you learned in the 90s in college about building brands is vulnerable in 2024 because distribution is different, consumer behavior is different. And so to me, incredibly optimistic about the transformation that I think you're going through. Definitely have been, have been burned by companies that are going through transformation. In my 15 year career as an agency owner who's really trying to do consumer centric work, not corporate work, in that you need a lot of things to move to actually get this done. So you may feel it in an off site like this, but the next Thursday, if you're making a decision based on defense, you become in trouble. What I mean by that is it's all Rah, rah, rah and fun and games. But then if your numbers are down the last 90 days, what I notice is that you go back to tried and true, which actually means let's kill ourselves even faster. And so I been through a lot of transformations with all the Fortune 500 CPGs because it's my favorite category and everything gets going until it's a bad quarter or something else happens and then people go to fake math. I mean, our entire current. You know, one of the challenging things, when I looked at bullet point three, let's measure business results. Well then let's bring back media and creative under one roof. I mean, look what's happened in our industry last 30, 40 years. Media and creative used to sit under one agency and we held them accountable for our business. What we've done is we've separated media and creative since the 90s. And what that's done is made you spend a lot of money on reports to measure stuff for no reason. The biggest elephant in the room is we've put common sense way back and we need to bring common sense back into companies.

[B]

I appreciate that very much. You touched on a couple of these things on a few things that you said. So you just released yet another New York Times bestselling book, Day Trading Attention. Everyone's gonna get a copy of the book. By the way. I highly recommend it.

[A]

Once you do. By the way, just a side note, I got an email from an English teacher in high school. So I am a historical poor student. Mrs. Horvath gave me four Ds sophomore year and 3Ds and an F senior year. And in her email she said, this was an amazing email. I haven't talked to her in 30 years. She said, if you told me the student in my history that would have seven New York Times best selling books would be you, I would have laughed you out of the room. I saved that email. It's a good one. Your books cover a range of topics.

[B]

This one is more marketing focus and it underscores how to build brands and how to grow sales. We've had a lot of. You touched on how brands grow. We've had a lot of exposure to Byron Sharp and how brands grow. Could you just share a little bit more about the perspective from the book and how what it takes to actually. And you guys will see it. And the book actually is underlined how to actually grow brands.

[A]

Well, look, if I give the greatest speech of my life, it's in a forest and no one hears it. What did it actually Do I think the writing in theory or philosophy is a great idea? Because there's truth to that. I mean, some of my favorite stuff to think about is that. But I think where we've lost our way is an execution. The way to actually get a brand to grow is to win on relevance at scale with as many consumer segmentations as humanly possible so that every person on earth buys your stuff that could conceivably buy your stuff. The only way to do that is first to get the media to actually be consumed. When you are buying potential reach, like this company does, at scale versus actualized reach, you're already in a very vulnerable spot. I own one of the largest e commerce wine businesses in the country. I know everything about everybody I'm marketing to. But when the creative doesn't convert, you still lose. The creative is the variable of this entire conversation. Even if you could target everybody everywhere, if I knew every single person that I was talking to and everything about you, it still doesn't mean I'm going to convert you. Your partners that have all the leverage don't convert all the time too. But when I say that, here's what I mean. I mean that we all stink at marketing because it's hard. It is hard to make a picture and a video or written words that compels someone to switch over to you or to buy your stuff when we're competing with so many other things like convenience or prior history or a million other variables. So you know, for me, what I'm most passionate about is mitigating the risk of creative. What companies do? We start buying up fake reports to justify our creative. Right. We used to do animatics and things of that nature. But you all know this. You're in real life. The decision on creative is being made by three or four or two of you subjectively. And then we buy reports that are incredibly flawed to justify the creative effectiveness. Meanwhile, we're all infatuated with talking about AI. And the single most important AI in all of marketing sits currently in the seven social networks platforms in their algorithms. We are now living in a social media world where the creative is finding you, not you. Follow someone like I grew up with and you would get all their stuff. Now the creative finds you because the AI is that good. All of creative testing in all of Fortune 500 marketing should be happening in native social media creative ads. Because those analytics and that data and that AI is disproportionately the most powerful. It's also in the platform that's going to actually reach the consumer. You can get unlimited quantum quality information out of just being good at doing day to day advertising on social media. And not only is it disproportionately the best creative testing, but you're actually getting the testing by actually doing marketing. You're literally getting a two for one. You're advertising for the sake of better advertising. Yet we prefer to be corporate and what we are doing and the elephant in the industry is that we take organic social media as something that's a nice to have matching luggage number 16 on our list of importance to our big campaign idea when it is disproportionately the most important place of consumer attention and the mitigation of creative risk. And once you understand that, then we can start to compete. Thank you, Luke. I'm going to take this moment because I feel like I want all of you to hear this. This is a profoundly important conversation. Because of our subjective opinions of what social media is and our deep misunderstanding of what's happening there and because it's hard for holding companies and independent agencies to make a lot of money in it, we as Fortune 500 companies have disproportionately allowed startup brands to outflow on the single most important platform in marketing in the world, which is organic social media creative. And what has happened is in the last three to four years the platforms have completely changed to a for you page content finds you dynamic built on AI which is actually in our benefit because we're getting to test the creative in that environment. But the word test is banned at Vaynermedia because to me it's not a test, it's just a good ad that I'm making for someone to go to Target and buy my stuff that will give me feedback quantum qual to then make better ads going forward. And so you have to go consumer up the funnel, not boardroom idea down to matching luggage. We are getting outflanked. Brands in this portfolio are getting outflanked by startup brands with a couple of million dollars of VC funding because they are winning in consumer centric environments. And we are doing things in corporate corporate environments to appease our retail partners who are taking all of our money to private label us out and to appease our reports that we pay a lot of money for that are fake.

[B]

All right, you guys remember what Mike was saying about the power of constructed to be. I think we are seriously happy meal time.

[A]

How was the point? Well, the debate is starting to unravel for the counter because now we have things like prime energy drink And Poppy. And now we have unlimited brands that people can talk to. Liquid Death was started by a creative director at VaynerMedia. Started by day before, Mike is working at my company. Next day, he's like, gary, I'm leaving to start a bottled water company. Would you like to invest? Thank God my mom created a kind human being. So out of charity, I'm like, sure, Mike. I'll give you 10,000 bucks to get. I'm gonna make like $30 million on this shit, Luke. But he's executing the model. I don't understand. There's nobody here that is confused. There's nobody here. That's. That's. That was big. You know, Luke, that was the biggest eye opener being in this business. I came in thinking, like, I was smart. I was like, these people don't get it. You do get it. It's just, I'm empathetic that it's hard for you to change, because the rules, the bonuses, the way everything's measured and how. I get it. People have mortgages. People have goals and dreams. So we are operating not on what we most believe our money is spent on to drive sales. We're doing what is accepted within the organization. We must debate the internal KPIs. We must debate what's actually happening out there. Because I know you see it. You're too smart. You wouldn't be in the soft sight if you didn't see it.

[B]

Let's stay on this a little bit.

[A]

A little bit more, because in the.

[B]

Book, you also talk about. A mistake that many Fortune 500 companies make is to bring the traditional mindset, the TV and print mindset, into social, which forces brand guidelines into every single piece of.

[A]

Are you really interested in sitting and debating for 31 minutes about a color or a font on an individual social media post like it's a Super bowl ad? But we do it all day long, Luke. We do it all day long. And meanwhile, if you understood. So I'm sure all of you do social differently with different agencies. However you do, just please, if you remember anything from this talk, please remember this. Whatever thought you have subjectively on that creative, ask your agency partner to make that as well as let them post what they made for you and then let the data educate you on it. We continue to debate in the boardroom as if the Internet doesn't exist, as if these social networks don't have unlimited analytics. I'm empathetic that you have so many other. I mean, half the room is even in marketing. So I'm incredibly Empathetic that even for the people in marketing in this room, they're not so deep on these platforms that they understand what these platforms provide. But my friends, we are literally wasting ungodly amounts of dollars in boardrooms debating our opinions of what's on brand versus taking advantage of the quantum qual signals of the modern distribution platforms. Like my team asks me all the time, Nick will be like, what do you think about this? I'm like, I don't think like, meaning I've like, I don't know what to think. I'm not interested in my opinion about this 13 second video or this picture. What I think is have we done best practices to get the most amount of people to see it? What I think about is the first second of the video. What I think about is the thumbnail. What I think about is the copy. What I think about is as I sit here right now as a practitioner of the craft of marketing, not as an executive of it, that I know that a one second loop reel is over indexing on Instagram this nanosecond and for every brand in this portfolio, we would get hundreds of thousands of people to see it versus 800 people. I think about the craft not in the way you were all taught, which is like it's got high production value and the bougie creative director can romance you to think it's good. I mean the craft of the biggest conversation in marketing going forward, which is we can now measure if the creative is good. It is happening in the platforms, not in some SaaS software that you paid a lot of money for. Luke.

[B]

Well, I will not prefer more than.

[A]

That.

[B]

But can you talk a little bit then about how you see in that context? How do you see the role of the brand identity and understanding the brand.

[A]

And what the brand stands for? People are like, Gary, but you don't get it. We have like a brief or we have a brand guideline. Like it's important. I'm like, you know what else is important? The Constitution. The constitution's important. It's been written. I don't know if you've heard. Half of the country sees it one way and half sees it the other way. So what do I think about what the brand stand for?

[B]

It's.

[A]

What brand positioning in this portfolio do we want to talk about? First of all, all of your brand positioning, all of it is a vanilla sentence. So you can do anything. By nature, every brand position is very wide, empowering the everyday. I won this debate with Nick on a famous flight at Vaynermedia Cause I decided to ask my 12 executives who deeply disagreed with me that I decided to go for the jugular and said let's talk about just do it. You guys like brand positioning. Let's talk about just do it. I go to them. You're not allowed to talk to each other. All of you take out your phone and I want you to write yes or no in the notes pad of the phone. I'm about to ask you a question and I said just do it. Does that mean that that is relevant? Does just do it stand for a student going hard at homework every week to become a remarkable student? Reply yes or no, Luke? Can you guess how the 12 votes worked out? 6 and 6. Let's clap it up for Luke. Brand position of course brand positioning matters. And comma, no human on earth that buys our stuff thinks about brand positioning. They think about relevance. We have lost our way on academia dictating our behavior and gotten too far away of how humans work. The only thing that's going to save this company or any other CPG from what is just starting to really wake everyone up, which is this retail dynamic is a bigger deal than you think. It's just starting. 30 years ago Slotting fees were small. Now their shopper marketing's budget has gotten much bigger. Retail media. What are you going to do when a retailer represents 50% of your business and they ask you for another $20 million in retail media? You're going to say thank you very much. We must build demand to offset the toll booth. The only way to build demand is relevance at scale. So what do I think about brand positioning? I think it's wonderful. I also think the interpretation of it is much more fragmented than the ideology we hold about it. And so what I mean by that is keep doing it. Knock yourself out. But how you actually execute ads to the consumer is incredibly important. It starts with the stuff we talked about earlier. Publish the setup. Yes, you have to get in front of people and have as much information as you want. But good news, your direct competitors will always have the same ability to do the same. All big data and all AI at scale always become a commodity. What is not a commodity is an operating system to outflank on creating as many stories as possible that can motivate someone to buy your thing. That requires very different creative at scale because upon buying or anything like a Latina mom living in Texas who's 28 making 150,000 a year is a very different consumer than a 41 year old first time mother in Boston that loves the Celtics making 41,000 a year. And how on earth is the same video or picture going to convert them both? This is an incredible misunderstanding of the power of social and why that needs to be the beginning of your marketing journey. And then you go up and then you do socially informed campaigns, campaigns that have black and white quantum qual data that consumers actually care about the creative and it's dictating their behavior. And then you decide how to distribute it in places that are actually being consumed versus potentially being consumed. It's why I have always been a champion of Super Bowl. Super bowl is the cheapest and cheapest ad in marketing. It's the most expensive. But for $8 million, you get 130 million people to watch 30 seconds of a video. No matter how good you are at day trading attention, you will never pull that off. Right now the problem is if the creative isn't good, you're dead. Right? And now you just wasted 25. So to me, why I've become infatuated Luke with social is being able to mitigate the risk of the creative I put in super bowl by doing marketing all year is exciting for me versus what as you know, everyone does, which is they start with a brief, an agency comes up with an idea, and then you bet the farm on it at super bowl, and then you do matching luggage the rest of the year. We have it backwards.

[B]

I appreciate that. We're going to open up for questions from the audience in a second, so folks please have them start to get ready. I'm going to slight pivot one, please, and then we'll open it up slightly. You talk a lot about leadership and leading with empathy and kindness.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Could you just talk for a little bit about your leadership for philosophy and how you think it better at movables, performance and action transformation.

[A]

Weaponizing fear as a leader has unfortunately had tremendous short term results and often does in a corporation. It just doesn't have long term results. So I believe leadership styles are really the story of the tortoise and the hare. You have a lot of people that come out the gun with like, you got these numbers and so that. And there's unfortunately so many people that feel that fear is the right tactic, even when it's subtle and clever. They may not yell, but it's just a simple little comment of like, if we don't hit these numbers, you know, and I am empathetic to that. My father led with fear, so. So I understand it. I just think it's incredibly the wrong way to go about it. I think it is the reason we continue to do it. Politicians, parents. Think about your parenting. You'd be stunned if you recorded yourself for a year parenting. I mean you, you. I love when people in a corporate environment are like, yeah, yeah, screw fear. And I'm like, as a parent, they're like, damn, I'm straight pushing fe. Really though, no baloney. If you really think right now, whatever you're dealing with with your children, you'd be shocked how 97% of your tactics are fear based. I'm gonna take your phone. Da da da da da ba ba ba ba. Like it's just a short term weapon. But parents that parented their children only with fear paid the ramifications of that. When the kids become in their 20s, 30s and 40s. And the same way about corporations operations, it's not sustainable and you'll do it, but you're going to. I don't think leaders that sell on fear realize they're just getting 7 out of 10 from people. The only way to get 11 out of 10 is love, period. And unfortunately, and I'm sure especially with the political situation in our country, this is not confusing to anybody given where society is right this minute. Like, you know, love windows tend to be smaller. Love is hard. You know, optimism is a much harder game to play than cynicism. Somebody said to me the other day, gary, I'm just keeping it real. I'm like real negative. You know, in life, my friends, I'll just go very philosophical. Here is the biggest thing I believe in. And I for a living basically watch people behavior, which is why I'm early on stuff. It's just I see it early because I'm always looking for it. In life you find what you're looking for. If you want to be upset, I've got good news for you. You can open your phone and turn on your television, you can be upset 24 7. What people don't realize is if you want to be happy, you can't turn on your television, but you can turn on social media and be very happy. The algorithm is exposing who you are, not forcing you to be someone. And that's a great misunderstanding. I really do believe both in society and in marketing, we have a very deep, very naive point of view on social. And we also are incredibly not accountable humans. And definitely human Americans and definitely human Americans that sit in this kind of room, like myself and all of you, we've become remarkably good at pointing fingers, not thumbs up. I, because I talk a lot about Social media get confronted. I'm pumped. I didn't get. It was so early in LA this morning, but maybe on the way back now, Luke, I'll give you a preview of my life. I'm gonna go to o' Hare right now and somebody will come up to me like, gary, I like you, I like your stuff. But I gotta say, you're wrong about the social media stuff. It's a real problem. My 15 year old, I'm really worried about a china and this and that. And then I look and I'm like, so why are you yelling at me? I'm like, you're the parent. Somebody literally told me, like, this is the thing that they most fear is going to kill their child. And I said, so be a fucking parent and take the phone away. Like, if you're sitting so worried about social media that it's gonna cause all this great harm to your children, shouldn't you be a parent and take the social media off the kid's phone? Parenting's my next book, Luke. It is, by the way. It actually is. I'm writing a book called Perfectly Parented. And it talks about what I think my mom was able to do, which is find this purple in a world of red and blue. And that's how I think about bringing it back to marketing, brother. Back to this. I don't think everyone realizes how deeply traditional we are. You're way more traditional than you think. I'm on the inside. And I would challenge you to get dramatically more educated on how brands grow and sell in 2024. And I'll give you the answer to the quiz. It's called social media. And as long as you continue to disrespect it. And boy, do we disrespect it. And let me tell you how we disrespect it. There's a multibillion dollar company on the west coast in the apparel business. New CEO. I'm friendly with him. We're starting to talk. I. I brought him some information. This weekend there's a T shirt brand that's gone from zero to $100 million in revenue in the last five years. They spend $6.6 million a year in organic social fees. Agency Creative 6.6.6. This quadrillion dollar company for its brand spends. That's what's happening. We disrespect it because you don't allocate the right money to it, given its importance. You spend more on a fake report to measure your creative than you do on making creative.

[B]

I can't end with that.

[A]

It really is incredible. No bull crap. Like, it's wild to see how many of the elements are sitting in the room like I am. We're in a lot of buildings. The speed in which over the last 24 months, we've had productive conversations. Crossing T's looking at it like, I just. I don't want it. Before we go to Q and A, I want to say this. As you can see, I'm incredibly passionate about this, and I think we really have a huge opportunity. But it takes big girl, big boy decisions to get there. That being said, it shouldn't bury the lead that in the last 24 months, there's been significant progress on respecting the ability for that creative in social to be a meaningful force to above the line. And then obviously, the horror films are videos people actually want to watch. And so the other key is when you're in commercials, like, the way we see creative aor and the reason we've been eating up a lot of creative AOR scopes is we come from social at the center. We go social up the. The creative creates the brief that makes the ad. And that's powerful and it matters. And. And by the way, it's intuitive to everyone, ironically, guessing with four people on the brand side and the agency side, ironically, people realize, is a bad model.

[B]

All right, open up for questions from the audience. Ten years ago, our traditional agencies would say, would that be right in the brief to us? Please don't ask for a viral video. Yes, because what kind of brief is that? But it sounds like you know how.

[A]

To make a viral video.

[B]

How do you get it?

[A]

Yeah. So it's really funny you're asking me this at a very interesting time. We. Your agency was correct, and I would continue to say that, you know, a viral video. Let's break that down first. Let's start with this. The ability for a video to go viral as we sit in this conference room right now is dramatically higher than it's ever been in the history of marketing. So much so that you're catching me at an interesting time. I know my team smiling over there. Nick knows this. I'm about to unleash to the organization that on a daily basis. Because what's very unique about our creative agency is we are a production agency. We make every day. Right. So we're not just thinking of ideas. We think and make, which is a very big part of all of this. That one of the remits internally that I'm launching post Labor Day in is that on a daily basis. Cause we're making 5, 7, 12 ads a day. It's not like once a week that there is something called attempted virality. Now that is really important to break down for everyone here because a viral video was an impossible ask in the past. On the flip side, I want to take you to CPG land with me right now. How many people here. And this is going to require a child in a certain age, but show of hands please. How many people here are familiar with what happened with Walgreens and the Mango Gummy that's sold out in every Walgreens in America? Just raise your hand higher. I feel like some of you are embarrassed about it. This should be a pride. So the people that just raised their hands, I just want everybody to understand this. A single video, not done by the brand or the agency, by a human. A single video. So I think a lot of you are familiar with Nice, the private label brand because you've seen the peanuts. I'm sure at Walgreens they have a Mango Gummy under that private label. And a single video not only sold out all the products. If you would appease me if you have ebay on your phone right now, please go to it. You won't bother me that you're looking at it. Please go to ebay right now and type in Nice Mango Gummy. Not only did it sell out, people have sold it for five to seven to 20 times its cost on ebay. The Ocean Spray example, I think we all know, right, the TikTok that Ocean Spray sold out every bottle of Ocean Spray in America. I can sit here for the next three hours and tell you about individual videos on social media that sold out every single product at a retail store. Walgreens, Dollar General, Walmart, Target, Publix, H E B. All of it. And no one on earth can mention a single commercial that has done that in the last 25 years. Luke, think about. I really, I really need everyone to kumbaya with me on this. I can sit here and give you countless examples that have happened this year that have done that and we can't name one. And the price of an individual video on social media organically, I think, you know, is very different than paying for an AOR fee to come up with one idea, then go pay another agency to make that 30 second video, spend all the out of pocket and production fees and all the other testing and then put it into market on very expensive media that is based on GRPs, which is a laughable metric if you know what GRPs are.

[B]

Another question.

[A]

So the answer, my friend, is no, we, we do not know how to make a viral video. We just make a lot more than most people because we know the elements that are needed to and we, we make so much more advertising than anybody else in the world that we just have more at bats. It's hard to go viral when you bet the whole farm on one video on guessing based on one person's opinion.

[B]

I have another question. How then is being a potential create leverage of kindness that's driving destruction, innovation.

[A]

And it's a great question, John. Thank you so much. I use kindness as the lubricant. The reason I hate fear so much is I think it leads to slowness. The reason my companies have always been fast is because people aren't scared to lose the. I don't think. I think where you all are caught is measuring success. I believe the thing that will unlock John is what we're measuring. Right. Like I'm telling you, like the. To your point, one of the things that always made me want to work with this company for years, you know, was I always heard about the kindness. And that really speaks to me in a real way. Kindness, when it's too far isn't creating slowness. It creates entitlement. My big flaw in my career is I've created a lot of entit entitlement because we didn't have the candor to match the kindness because candor was viewed as a negative. That has been my great flaw as an operator and I've really worked on that. And both personally and professionally, everything that has not worked for me, it was my. You know, it's so funny on stage like this, candor is easy, as you can tell. But the more I know you and care about you and one on one, candor was my flaw. I. I'm literally the reverse verse of this, which is wild. But it was just, it's just the way I am and I've really worked on that over the last. So I don't think kindness is making us slow. I think we are not incentivizing our marketers to market the proper way. Somebody said so I really believe in this huge issue of allocation of creative fees to social. So I have a CEO and three of the four, three of the six board members who I've known for 15 years in one company who are like, take it. Help us. And they're like. And they like to blame their people. They're like. But they're not listening to us, Gary. We've been telling them to do the thing you're saying, I'm like, no, you haven't. I'm like, if you believe in what I'm saying, if 50% of their bonus was based on them allocating 50% of their creative fees to Social, I have a funny feeling every brand would allocate 50% of their fees. That I think at the top, the tippy top, we have to have the discussion of how we're scoring it because we will all go towards how it's scoring because that's how we justify our jobs, keep our jobs, get promoted. We've got to change and force the organization to spend accordingly to what we. If we believe these things, we have to do it that way. So I think kindness is your strength. I think how we justify success, what reports hold weight, what structures are we putting in to incentivize behavioral change? The best part of a corporation is if I bought this company tomorrow, I can make everyone change how they act. I just changed the bonus structure. I did that. My company nickel. And Katie will. Nick will tell you I. We put in both bonuses, or P and L did it. All of a sudden I wake up like last year. I'm like, my company is what I make fun of. I'm watching all of them completely make their decisions based on the P and L. So this year I'm like, that's scrapped. Now 100% of the bonuses is my subjective opinion. If you're doing it the way I want you to do it. Let me tell you what's amazing about that John Team. All of a sudden, the inner department, politics, the inner company, everything vanished. Because people know how much I value kindness. All of a sudden, funny thing happens. I think we can do that too. I know, I promise. But one more, Luke. I have to get one more in.

[B]

All right, one more, One more.

[A]

What Fortune 500 companies do you think are doing a good job at what you are talking? I think Wendy's touched on it. I think Slim Jim Jim, the brand in that portfolio touched on it. But this is the whole conversation. Fortune 500 companies are getting outflanked by Fortune 10,000 companies. They have no money and they're beating us up. I don't like especially bothers me because they're my friends. Like, like Logan Paul and KSI and. And definitely liquid, you know, death, as you can imagine. And Mr. Beast and Beastables, like all of a sudden, now Hershey's gives a shit, you know, and so what I would tell you. And by the way, I don't have to tell the Diapers team in here, stuff's brewing. And by the way, this is the most important thing I need you to hear. In the CPG category every brand is next. Every day an influencer with a lot of followers that has pure organic reach is trying to figure out cogs on what category they're going to go. And just like technology doesn't have any feelings, it just continues to evolve. And so unfortunately for people that had bookstores in the 80s and 70s and early 90s, they got unlucky that Jeff Bezos decided that's where he wanted to start but eventually got to everyone, right? And so we what I would say to people in this room is right and this, I do this for a living as an investor. There's not a CPG category that people aren't looking at to disrupt because you set up a shopify, we outflank you on social media with a million dollar budget to your $50 million budget and then we have the leverage with the retailer because they want new customers so they take your money and they give it to your customers competitor. They pay them to be in their stores. Do you know like you're watching, right? We have to get better at marketing. You can, you can have big data and tech stacks all you want. If the creatives wrong you will lose. Mitigating creative risk is the number one task at hand. Social media is sitting there willing to help you do it for free. But your disrespect and misunderstanding of it is putting you in a secondary spot. And I want to change that for anybody who's worth willing to listen to it. And I appreciate the opportunity to go on this journey with all of you. It's really been enjoyable and I, I'm on LinkedIn if anybody wants to say hi. I got a four hour flight back to LA right now. I'm happy to talk to you. So please connect and thank.