← The GaryVee Audio Experience
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- [00:00]
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 believe most of us on this call grew up in marketing and academia that taught us to be consistent and on message and on brand, which was proper for a different distribution world that existed from 1950 to 1990. But we live in a very different distribution landscape today. And disproportionately, the biggest concern I have for these iconic brands in this portfolio globally is that they're not winning on relevance at scale to actually drive sales.
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B
We all agree we want to build trusted brands. We want to be relevant for our consumers and to our audiences. What does it look like for brand lacquers to be irrelevant and to have this relevance in content leaning into the.
- [02:20]
A
Thing that scares everyone the most. And I'll use the most dynamic word to scare everyone, but. But I. I'm not really scaring. I'm just trying to really help everyone get there. Schizophrenia is an interesting word to talk about. I use it aggressively, but in a more mundane way. Every brand here needs to be relevant to 30 to 50 very distinct, different consumer Segmentations, which means most of the creative and marketing that every brand here needs to put out across the marketing landscape needs to look different, which is like, you know, Celine, I get it. That's like putting a knife through the hearts of marketers. But again, look at this. You know, we can't see the audience right now, but I can see the back of the screen, right? I see David, I see Eva, I see Juan, I see Syretta. I see you. It's impossible that one. If I wanted to sell all of you this cup of coffee, it's impossible that one message would get all six of you to buy this. It's impossible. And every one of us know that. So I need six different messages, potentially, potentially three, potentially four, slightly tweaked. And this should make everyone feel comfortable. It's all one message at the top, right? It's like, this is a delicious coffee and I think it's a good price. But how I communicate that in actual execution must be different. Our industry Fortune 500 marketing has taken on brand and consistency literally. We took it literally. And what that has done is it has forced us to make creative messaging that is vanilla, that is trying to be everything to everyone, which has led it to mean nothing to no one. It is being distributed in platforms that no longer have the mass attention of the consumer. We are overpaying for media distribution in these classic channels, both traditional and classic digital search, pre roll, banner, programmatic. And we are grossly under investing as an organization in creative production and we are overpaying for creative production of classic 30 second videos. And we just have a lot of work to do. But it's exciting. And here's the best part. It's exciting for all of us as human beings because we know it's true. It's not exciting for all of us on this call as executives because we know there's a lot of operational and political work to do to get us to become great at this.
- [05:01]
B
And how do you know what is resonating to me versus Dave or versus Eva or Sarita?
- [05:09]
A
Well, that's a very interesting question because I have to frame up something to be able to answer it. For the first time in marketing history, paid working media should come last, not first. So let me explain. I would not know what's resonating to all of you if I was to amplify every piece of creative that I put out into the world with paid media against a target. We are sitting in this exact second in the biggest opportunity in marketing history, which is called the social networks. The seven or eight of them LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Facebook proper, Twitter X they all are now running on an interest graph AI algorithm for the news feed. So that's a lot of words. I'm going to break it down. I grew up and got famous by investing in these companies you can see on my screen, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, those are stocks that I bought in 2007. So that worked for me. But I treated social media from 2006 to 2018 like email marketing. Get as many followers as possible and when I would post 20 to 30 to 40% of the people would see it like open rates. Right? Somewhere around 2017, 18 musical LY and TikTok started to change the game because when I would post it didn't matter that I had 15 million followers. The content would find the audience. The way I would know if a Midol post in India was resonating with who is by posting it organically on Instagram and seeing how many views it got and seeing who consumed the views and seeing how they commented consumer insights in the comments. And then Celine, if I felt good about that result, I would only then run working median to amplify it against the demo and consumer cohort that was most reacting positively. My next post might be about cricket. After playing cricket, take our over the counter medicine to not sneeze. And that might resonate with Juan more than it resonates with Eva. And if there's enough Juans in there now I'm running media to amplify against lots of Juans. The paid owned earned model has been flipped to owned which is your channels when you post then earned when it performs, it is earned the right to get paid. I'm going to say something humbly, respectfully, but without any hedge. This great iconic company is throwing money, 90% of its working media dollars globally directly in the trash. And it is because we are guessing up front of what to spend our working media dollars on. On what creative on the basis of three to four human beings, subjective opinion or very antiquated creative testing, guessing, focus groups, old technologies. And we must face this truth and because it is how we can outflank our four to five direct competitors. Listen, you know, you know I will say this and I think this will help. I know it's a lot and I know it's the other side. Literally I am asking the organization to completely flip what they do. And that requires a whole different mindset, a whole different process, agency, partner structure. For example, let me Just say one thing that should help save a lot of money, right? We can no longer pay creative agencies just to come up with ideas. They must be in production. I had a company wide meeting with my 2,500 employees two years ago and I said we are no longer a creative and media agency. We are a production agency that happens to do creative strategy and media. I have creative directors from Wieden and Kennedy, Anomaly Droga 5 who literally are accustomed to just coming in and pontificating a random idea and a slogan, who are now making creative with their hands and technology every single day on our clients behalf. But I want to say something. In 2000, if this meeting was with the hundred thousand plus employees of the Yellow Pages, which was the directory of how you found businesses in America for 50 years, I would be saying, listen, we're in trouble. These search engines are a problem, right? We must adjust. Maybe we should launch our own search engine today. If I was at Google Search doing an off call like this, I would be saying, hey team, we're in big trouble. I mean, I wish I could see the whole audience right now. Maybe actually you could all do this even though I can't see it. Please raise your hand and do this in the back screen. Juan, Eva, Sarita, David, appease me. Celine, raise your hand if you now use ChatGPT or some other AI bot to look up stuff instead of Google. Whereas two years ago you would have went to Google for that, but now you go to an AI bot, raise your hand that that is a big deal and will completely destroy the Google AdWords business. In fact, if you're a brand manager, I don't know who's watching right now around the world. If search is a substantial part of your spend or your conversion, you're in trouble. And I can tell you right now, this second, this second today, we at Bear Inc. Globally are grossly overpaying for our Google AdWords grossly. And because less demand will be there, the cost of the AdWords is about to explode because everyone's gonna be fighting for that little bit and all of a sudden sneezing is gonna cost $18 instead of $4 to even get one lead. And so I know that this may sound challenging, but I actually believe, and this has been my argument for big companies like yourselves putting pressure on your media agencies to buy better media and putting pressure on your creative agencies to no longer think in television first and no longer think in ideas first. Think in ideas plus production first for social and then Celine, the way it works for us is when creative validates with the consumer, not the boardroom in social. Then we go into do we want to turn that into a campaign through the consumer insights of it being successful or do we want to spend media dollars on it for performance? So this will make a lot of sense for every marketer. I am talking about the mid funnel organic social media is the mid funnel organic. When it performs, which is very low risk in the scheme of things. Organically, you can take it up to the other funnel and make it your brand campaign and positioning or you can take that creative and send it down to the lower funnel for performance on Amazon.com, right, tesco.com or run that creative on one mile radius of 3500 doors of Costco, Tesco, Albertson, you know, well, Walgreens, whatever. You know, it's a global audience, whatever the biggest retailers are. So the middle funnel organic social media to this entire audience is something they spend no time thinking about. And it is now the starting point and the disproportionately most important part of the marketing media mix. And it's super measurable as some people on this call know very early. Thank God, because it doesn't always happen very early. We had a remarkably viral post for midle in the US and how does that show up with no media dollars? The Amazon rank shows very strong clarity that there's enormous amounts of sales behind that single organic social post. Really helps the most cynical or the most practical people on this phone call start to wrap their head around why that medium matters.
- [13:31]
B
Very good. Let's go to Eva because she has a question for you on content production and content creation, please.
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C
Hi Gary, One thing that you said very interestingly is you can no longer be a creative agency. You now need to be able to create, produce, right? So it's like you now need to be like a full stop.
- [13:54]
A
That's right. Ava, sorry to interrupt, but just so. Cause I just wanna pinpoint it. I believed that there is no logic anymore to have a creative AOR and a separate production company. These are my competitors and I meet with them. Cause I'm a funny guy. I don't think somebody else winning takes from me. I've been meeting with agency and production owners for 18 months telling them that if you don't create the creative division production company, you're out of business. And I'm telling the creative agencies, if you do not create the production integration, you're out of business. And so yes, I am saying that any company that is only production or only creative and strategy is fundamentally dead man walking unless they adjust fully agree.
- [14:40]
C
Because we're already seeing this in apac, so. Right. And what to take it a step further, what we're also seeing here is especially with social, the agencies are not only just creating, producing, but they're also serving. And back to what you were saying, putting out 6, 8, 10, all personalized content and optimizing it in a very dynamic way. So there is no waste. So are you also doing the same in your side of the world?
- [15:06]
A
Eva? 15 years. I've been doing that for 15 years. My company even, you know, a lot of, as you know, a lot of people now over the last decade are like, wow, Asia live shopping Asia shows us the future. That's because the tech stack in Asia with ByteDance and WeChat, it's a, it's more integrated than it was. It was fragmented us. Because I built VaynerMedia for myself. My long term vision is to build a private equity firm on top of my agency to buy orphan brands from Fortune 500 CPGs. Because that has been my mission. I built media, creative and production in one stop, literally in 2009, if you understood social media, in 2009, 2015, 2020, there was no option to not do all of them under one roof.
- [15:52]
C
Fully agree. We're ready there.
- [15:54]
A
Good for you, good for you. And as you know, what's really fun about it is in this environment you can hold your agency partners accountable because in that scenario there's no pointing fingers. The biggest issue for all the people on this call, even that are not in that model is the media company blames the creative department company, the creative department blames the production agency. You know, everyone's blaming everyone when you have it under one throat to choke. I know that might be an aggressive analogy, but that's the old saying in the old days. And really, to be frank, one of the reasons we've grown to be one of the largest independent agencies in the world is the we want to be held accountable to business results at the end of the year. Not fake reports, not MMMs, not MMAs, not awards, not headlines in Ad Age or campaign magazine. We want to be held accountable to business results. But the only way for us to be held accountable to business results is to have media, creative and production held accountable with us.
- [16:52]
B
So you're talking about content creations now. We have creators. So not only us, you create content, but we have as well creators who create content for us. And I think they have been driven conversations, value and culture so far. And I Think Ron Carlos has also a question for you on creators.
- [17:14]
D
Hola, Gary. Look, it's undoubtedly the creators have a lot of attention of the public, but what's the best way to kind of interact with them in order to really build trust and not only kind of borrow attention, I mean we have found tricky sometimes to deal with creators.
- [17:34]
A
Sometimes it's very hard to deal with creators. Creators even. I mean my biggest issue with agencies is that they don't have aligned interests with their clients. That has been a huge reason we've grown because I'm an immigrant who grew up in a retail liquor store and the only thing I knew was customer first, customer second, customer third. And I brought that energy to agency land and it's really worked for us. Creators, Juan Carlos have even less alignment with you. They want their money from you real quick. They want to get away with posting it with as little oomph as possible and they want to move on to their next paycheck. Right? So the way we think about that is the following. We're very bullish on creators. This is interesting. Paid media, creative. And then if that wasn't enough integration, what we have inside of Vayner is something we call Kate, Creators, C A I T creators, affiliates. Right. Asia knows that. TikTok shop, all that. Creators, affiliates, influencers and talent. Right. We consider talent celebrities. We try hard to make sure our clients don't pay a million dollars for a celebrity. But you know, you characters have fun sometimes. Anyway, Juan Carlos, the way we think about Kate or all four of those people is we think of them as media distribution and creative. We have no emotion. Everything is underpriced or overpriced attention. Meaning I'm not trying to sign a five year deal with a creator to make them our ambassador. It's not going to work. It's going to be overpriced. We look at every single human that has potential to do a product integration or a piece of content for us and we look at it strictly as an unemotional financial transaction around the value we have against their endorsement, the creative they make and how much organic reach we anticipate that to get against which demos. I'll give you an example what that means. We may talk to a creator for a brand and they want $500 for the post and we may think that's overpriced. And we may talk to a creator who wants $133,000 for a single post and we may think that's underpriced. We think almost every famous person is grossly overpriced because they have agents who inflate their value. And we basically buy human beings in an unemotional media planning comms strategy at scale and use technology and humans to be very efficient at it. And that is it. So how do we think about it? We. We think that all of you need to keep the ideology on the shelf at home. Let's get out of the. Is this an authentic person to us or this? Of course it's not authentic. We're doing a business transaction. If it was authentic, they would just post your product in their feed naturally without us talking. So this concept with agencies and PR agencies and all you executives are like, well, we need an authentic relationship, Juan Carlos. It's not an authentic relationship. You're giving them money. It's already over. So we're unemotional and. And we're. But we're also like, there's so many mistakes brands make. Let me give you the first one. This will help people. Do not buy a single influencer ever in your life based on how many followers they have. Cause again, let me show you something, Juan Carlos. You'll find this interesting. I'll show it in real time. I am a creator. I get offered crazy dollars. I never do brand deals. But I have 15.1 million followers on TikTok now let me show you something. This post in the middle box got 55 million views. Yes. Yes. This post that I just posted right now got 7,000 followers are losing their value as an indicator to how much awareness the creative will create. You understand? Mm. So as you know around the world, all the people watching right now and their agency partners. 95% of the energy of how they pick an influencer is based on followers. 95% and. And yet it has very little value. You have to look at the consistency of what they make and what content. Like for example, if somebody was trying to target parents, Believe it or not, Gary Vee think about all the things Celine said in the upfront. The number one brand category that should reach out to me is people that are trying to reach parents. Because disproportionately my content on parenting over index and it's not even close. So you have to analyze carefully. It takes a lot of human work with AI tools. You can do a lot more efficient analyzing of creator and then you must buy creator unemotionally at scale. We view creator as an extension of this thing that Eva and I were talking about, a production, creative, strategic agency. We just buy them. It's no different than the fee. We are getting paid to do all those things. We take a percentage of that fee and we outsource it to creators if we think we can get more efficient awareness and relevance with those creators than what we're capable of doing by ourselves.
- [22:42]
E
Barry, if I can jump in? You know, we've gotten to know you and your team working together in the US on some of our high priority brands. So we've gotten to know a little bit your philosophy of going after underpriced attention and, and knowing that we're in a post follower era because of the way the algorithms work. But these algorithms, they're constantly changing. They're moving, evolving very fast. So we're curious on your thoughts for the future, like what might be the single biggest shift coming in the next two to three years and how can bear brands try to stay ahead of the curve?
- [23:21]
A
The biggest shifts are going to be live streaming. Not just live social shopping, but the most famous people in the world. Next are the people that are doing IRL streaming. Kick Twitch. This is incredibly important. I'm sure Eva's smiling because this has been playing heavy in Asia, but it's been playing heavy in the US Kai Senet iShowSpeed, Aiden Ross. These are some of the most famous people in the world. So IRL streaming will come to every category right now. Young men, men and women. But every one of you have seen this movie. Facebook started with young men and women. Now Facebook is your grandparents, right? So IRL streaming is something we need to think about. What does that look like? We start doing product placement like 1950s television of our products in kitchens of people that have lots of audiences, right? So that's something I have a real left field one. This is very left field. I'm curious to see who's affected by this. I have a very strong hypothesis that collecting as a cultural genre is something every CPG should be getting into. What I mean by that is trading cards, watches, sneakers, comic books. If you look at the history of consumer packaged goods, look at cereal as a category, little toys inside, right? You look at Pepsi, you even look at suntan lotion, other things. Almost every execution of a collectible being added to the CPG has been successful in acquiring short term sales and consideration of new audiences and long term value. It was pretty much the tried and true model of 1950s and 60s CPG marketing. It has completely gone away. Meanwhile, I'm sure it's not lost to anybody who's watching trading cards, cryptocurrencies, Labubu, Pop Martin. This is Very real. And so I know this may sound wild, but like if you're asking me three years from now do I believe one of the better executions somewhere globally is taking one of our OTC products and creating a jumbo pack that comes with a comic book or a collectible toy or a trading card or a sticker or a coin. So I think collect collectibles as I call it, collectibles as marketing. Similarly, I believe in fashion as marketing, doing collaborations with hoodies and hats. Because what we're trying to do is get more cultural relevance for our brands because we're commoditized, we can be private, labeled out. Right? We know this. So it's cultural relevance. And then finally we just talked about influencers. I mean the rise of AI influencers is going to be remarkable, right? These are influencers that are not human beings. And I believe that bears should start developing their own meaning that Bear Inc. Is in the intellectual property business. That you will start building out characters like your Disney, but these will be real human beings, not cartoon like characters and they will be your spokespeople. It's a progressive leap from what progressive does with flow or Jake from State Farm. They lock those humans into long term deals. I think Fortune 500 companies are going to start creating AI influencers and executing that.
- [26:31]
B
Jay, I think you have a question for Gary.
- [26:35]
D
You touched upon this a little bit on live shopping and influencers and selling live streaming. I think live shopping has picked up quite a bit in Asia. It's been there for a while. They sell everything from cat foods to cars. It's amazing how they do that. But also a lot of AI influencers actually also doing that in China. But that online kind of shopping, live shopping hasn't really picked up in in Europe or in US what's your perspective on is it cultural or is it just how the market is and what do you advise the brands in Europe and U.S. for example, should they wait, should they be leading that part or that boat has sailed because things have changed.
- [27:15]
A
I think it's crazy to be a marketer and not pay attention to what's happening in Asia. Like this has already happened. And by the way, good news for us and Europe and we're starting to see the early signs in Latam it's happening, it's not the scale. I mean In China it's 38% of all E commerce business. Do you know insane that is? China's not Sweden. It's a humongous market. But in the US it's growing very quickly. TikTok shop is growing very quickly. For context, Jay, you may see all these little toys behind me. This is Vee friends. These are trading cards. This is. This is my Pokemon and Marvel that I'm building. We're doing 50 to $100,000 a night on live streaming. I am very good at marketing, paid media, creative. Prior to live shopping, if we did $5,000 a week with best practice social, best practice performance, driving to our website, we were doing a good job. 5,000 a week, 50,000 a night. It's a much more significant emotional model of shopping. It's a sense of community. It's a sense of entertainment. There's a reason that the TV, you know, the QVCs and all these things have done well for so long. It is now here. And my recommendation for everyone around the world is to immediately do it. The problem is, Jay, and you know this, and this is what Eva and I were talking about. The agencies have not caught up around the rest of the world. And so one of the reasons everyone struggled with social the last decade is the Puisis and the WPPS and the Omnicoms weren't good at it. And so a lot of brands took it in house. So it became an efficiency play. The problem is all brands are bad at it too. So it was an efficient play, not an effective play. So. So, Jay, I think whether internally or externally, putting actual effort to find real partners, entrepreneurs, agencies, internal talent, whatever's required. You know, Asia's Asia, they know what they're doing. VaynerMedia, my company is tripling year over year because we're the option for big brands. Here we are getting copied by the nanosecond. Every new agency is building like we built. Every big holding company is trying to figure out how to reconfigure into. So in three years, Europe and Asia are doing this. But to your point, Jay, and I assume the purpose of this call is like, hey, let's not wait. Let's leapfrog our competitors. That requires a more entrepreneurial spirit and a little bit more pushing against the political machine that we are. Cause we're a corporation. And look, you're in a very challenging spot. You guys, I think this is right. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anybody. You guys just did a whole creative review, global review, and awarded your creative business globally to a couple of holding companies. That's a problem because those characters don't do this stuff. And a lot of money is getting sucked up in that model. So I'm empathetic to that. That's real life, that's corporate, that's real life. I'm not going to cry about that. I'm going to tell all of you with whatever little money you have left, you need to be very entrepreneurial about this.
- [30:28]
B
So what do you recommend to use.
- [30:29]
A
Our money left on everything we're talking about? What I know about the global holding company creative agencies is they're not going to dominate in social. You need to figure that out. First and foremost, organic social, the middle funnel. Organic social production is the business. So luckily in the US we've got microscope and so that's giving the example for the US team to like see it. And I think that should be replicated around the world, whether with us or somebody else or yourselves. Internally, you need to have a data point for everyone to see it because I can promise you and Syretta's probably gone through this. We have our number one saying internally, number one, our most religious internal saying, once they see it, they can't unsee it. And so once you are affected by mid funnel, proper execution, organic social at scale, once you're affected by it, you struggle to sit in meetings with the old way. So with whatever little money you've left in Latam, Amia, other parts, wherever that may be, India, we must find a way to be remarkable for our most significant brands at organic social Creative organic not paid paid hides. For 60 years working media paid has hid bad creative. What I talked about early in this was now working media should be used to amplify good creative. Good creative is not judged by awards or opinions in this room. Good creative is judged by getting organic reach because it's built on relevance and the consumer actually likes it.
- [32:09]
B
And we have a question. I will also move now to some question from our audience. There is one question in terms of how we could create some distinctive creative because we all want to be breakthrough, we all want to have great creative but at the same time we are more or less average. How do you create this amazing disruptive creative? Because we know as well sometimes the attention in TikTok is really short. So how do we create these attention and even more conversion afterwards?
- [32:44]
A
Every single day on TikTok globally, dozens of individual pieces of content over index massively and go quote unquote viral and drive significant sales every day. There is not one television commercial done globally in the last 10 years that has driven more sales, including super bowl spots than the most viral TikToks on a daily basis. Breakthrough work is work that sells product. The answer to this question is by Making dozens of ads every single day across social media that have an intent. Just so everybody knows this, I'm glad you brought this up. Celine. What I am talking about is not spray and pray, it is not throw against the wall and see what sticks. It is not even test and learn. As Syretta will tell you. We take a brand on and we find out what consumer segmentations we are trying to get. Now what we do well is we don't play in that old 18 to 35 or 50 year old female. We get much more distinct. Right. You go into interests, you go into age groups. For example, just to give you one 25 to 27 year old males on the east coast of America that play basketball, that would be a consumer segmentation against an over the counter drug. Right. So as you can imagine Celine, if that is the brief to my creative that they are making a video or a picture right now for a 25 to 27 year old new Yorker male who likes basketball, that is driving the creative we're going to make. We then post that on social Breakthrough work is not work that everybody on LinkedIn and ad age says that was beautiful. That's the problem, Celine. The definition of breakthrough work is broken in our industry. Breakthrough work is a video that gets 40 million views on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube shorts. And so how do you do that? You have many different consumer segmentations that are very narrow, which then forces the creative production team to make very poignant creative that has teeth to it. And then you post it and then you analyze it quantitatively and qualitatively. Some of the best work we've ever done, breakthrough work is because we put out four different pieces of creative that did not do well. But we read every comment on those posts to get the consumer insights that led to the fifth piece of creative that took in the consumer insights from social into account which then created the breakthrough work.
- [35:09]
E
Yeah, so maybe I'll share for the audience not to make this too much of a commercial, but just to share for the audience what we've been doing a little bit in the US So we're working with Gary stuff team on Miralax, on Claritin and on One a Day. And we take the culture, we take the strategy of the brands and that feeds into this micro segmentation that Gary's talking about, the cohorts and then the creative is generated against particular signals. So one of the post that Gary was referencing on Miralax is about roommates who are bestieing so hard that they start Tracking their poops together. And so this piece of creative was actually rooted in some cultural trends and that went viral. And it's so funny when marketers say go viral, but this, this spot, this social media ad had over 30 million views in a short amount of time with very little media spent against it. So that's just making it a little bit tangible what we're doing in the U.S. yeah.
- [36:29]
A
And again, we're very fortunate. And I want to give a shout out, actually, we've been doing this a long time. We're an agency. You know, when I'm growing all my other stuff, I have full control. We have no control. Right. We need significant dancing partners. Many people hire us to work with us and then after hearing all our spiel, which is super different than everything else, and on the first day we start working together, they want to treat us like 72 and Sonny or Ogilvy or WPP. We've been very fortunate in this scenario. This is why I said yes to this hour this morning. It's to give back to the relationship we're building in the US because without the dancing partners, we'd be, you know, 18 months in, 24. The amount of clients were 18 months in and haven't even gotten this close like we are here. It's very frustrating. And we have something internally called elephant meetings. Right. Address the elephant in the room and every. With those kind of clients every month or two, we'll have. And we're very direct about it. In fact, I resigned a significant piece of business to the other day because four elephant meetings led to nothing. I mean, you want to talk about shock everybody in my own company and everybody on the client side. I guess it's not very common for agencies just to resign the business because you can't do it the right way. But this is a big deal. And between what we're doing in the US and what is happening with EVA in Asia, this organization should not be going backwards. It should not. You have too many examples. We're just starting to flirt. EBA and team out there have a lot of things working in this direction. This is marketing. I don't know what else to tell you. And this is historic. Go use ChatGPT and ask about how many people fought television when the radio and print were the primary marketing. Television was fought heavily. And let me give you the preview of what happened in those 20 years. It completely reset who the biggest brands in the world were. And we cannot afford to be marketing like 10 years ago. And so, you know, look, I'd be lying. I already referenced it once. We must be thoughtful about our partners and how we work with our partners and what pressure we put on our partners. And again, you're global. There's politics. I'm empathetic. But all of you individually in your own markets must fight for some carve outs to do this stuff right or God willing, I hope whoever wins your global crime creative things are actually starting to move in this direction. I'm just not optimistic because I interview all of them every day and they're very far away.
- [38:59]
B
Very good. Maybe we take one or two more questions from the audience. So we have one question. How does this resonate with buyer guidelines? As for the smaller market, we don't have budget or resources to manage organic presence on social media.
- [39:14]
A
Sure you do.
- [39:15]
B
And therefore we rely on sporadic airports for through influencer and paid you do.
- [39:20]
A
I love when big companies cry poor. You have money, you're just wasting it on dumb shit. Let me give you an example. Somebody could counter me and say Gary you're wrong. Here's my P and L. I have no marketing dollars. Then I look under the hood. I'm like you do. You don't marketing dollars, you control. You have slotting fee and trade dollars. You have retail media dollars. Market we have to grow up and push against our distribution partners and take our money back and drive demand. It's somewhere. And if you don't have money, well then you don't have money. That's fair, right? Like if you don't have money, well at least that means you're not wasting money on something else. So either you really really really do not have money which what can I answer to that? The corporation decided not to fund the brand. Right. Or you say you don't have money because you've accepted all these other things that you spend money on without realizing that if you actually took back control and created demand, you could change the way this is going for you. It's my biggest concern, retail media. My number one concern is retail media.
- [40:27]
B
But I think the question behind as well is with organic business you also need to have a double conversation with your consumers. Say subscribe two ways dialogues. Because this is viral, there's impressions, there's posts, there's comments and everything. With our guidelines most of the time we disable comments on platforms because of pharmacovigilance issue. Because of compliance issues, we are not allowing people to comment on our Is there any limitation of doing this kind of things because you limit the conversation you could have with your audience from A direct perspective.
- [41:06]
A
Two things. My head of legal, because of my career and who we've done, is at the forefront, is literally consulted by the FTC for this area. Number two, your direct competitors are not doing the same exact thing as you are. I cannot fix the fact that you're at the highest levels. Your legal department has decided to go too far in correction and interpretation. Good news. Even though I'd like to change that, right? You will not be affected to the degree you're thinking. Meaning, Let me explain. If you disable comments, you're losing 10 to 12% of the magic on the community affinity building. You're losing 25% of the magic on consumer insights. But good news, you can get those consumer insights by reading the comments in different posts around social media, not on yours. So Celine, I'm not really in the business of like crying about it. I'm. You know, I grew up in the alcohol business in America, heavily regulated. I have financial services, I have toy companies and I have pharma clients. Everyone's regulated and then everyone's regulated by political correctness. Right? Everyone's scared all the time in corporate. Whatever. The reality is, is the reality. Us not being able to comment or closing comments doesn't take away the fact that us doing proper creative in channels that have actual consumer attention that are more underpriced than the channels of the classic is still a good marketing move.
- [42:44]
B
For us, I think. There's one question if, let me see, following up on your comment about building a media plan, putting social aside, how would you advise identifying the right platforms and creatives to leverage to drive awareness of our product and push people down the funnel?
- [43:06]
A
By being a consumer anthropologist strategist, which is a long winded way to say that's very easy for me, who spends all his time trying to pay attention to where the attention is. The reason I can bring up Twitch and I can bring up Kik, the reason I can bring up whatnot and TikTok shop, the reason I know what's going on on Facebook proper or WeChat or Line in Japan is because I spend my time paying attention to where consumers are. So the answer to that question is by being a modern comms planner. I mean there's really. Celine, there's no difference than me deciding which channels to go into today than in 1995 and 1975 by actually putting in effort. It's such a great call out though. You know what, I don't know if you see this Celine, you see the goosebumps. The reason I have goosebumps right now is the fact that that question's even being asked speaks to how poorly the holding company media model has become. We do not give enough effort to the comms planning. We're selling fake technology, we're selling fake reports. We're in such an awkward place in our industry and I wish we could get out of it. We've become students, we've become corporate, we've become Dex and big data and all this stuff. The answer to the question is by paying attention to the consumer.
- [44:26]
B
And I think it goes as well with the last question. Maybe some of our brands are highly relevant with our consumers but lack distinctiveness with our competitors. How do we solve this in creative by being relevant.
- [44:41]
A
She or he who that said that might say that they're highly relevant. Maybe from a use case, right? Like, or maybe there's only two ways to dissect that question without me following up with that person. If it's highly relevant, then it is by nature distinct from your competitor. Coca Cola and Pepsi are the same thing, but they're not, you know, like meaning like, you know, like let me use a better one than Coke and Pepsi because as a cola drinker they do taste different water brands. They're the same thing. And if you're actually relevant, that is the way you separate. So I don't know if the question is posed as like we're relevant to their day to day usage needs, right? Like obviously I need this thing to stop sneezing or whatever it might be, right? But this is my point. This company will be fully private labeled out of business unless it builds a relevance creative machine. And so the answer is the mid funnel. I don't know what else to tell you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you don't want it to be or you don't get it or you don't like it. It is the mid funnel. And the mid funnel by our standards and most modern marketers that are not in Fortune 500 land is organic, social, creative, which then allows you after the results, which are based on merit and modern AI technology to decide if you want to go up right with the middle viral post. We could decide to build an entire campaign around sisterhood in that demo or we could take that asset and spend millions of dollars to drive to Amazon.com or walgreens.com or walmart.com it is the middle funnel. And so as you go through this transition as a global age company around creative, we must put stress on whoever you choose to not do yesterday and to do tomorrow. And that will be an extremely hard challenge. But we must press it because you are not rfping production creative social, you're RFP ing creative shops. So all of you are about to get a bunch of decks with a bullshit slogan to do a television commercial and it is not gonna work. And Eva knows it. So I have to go and work on my job. But Eva knows it. So all of you can get to Eva. She works at your company. All of you should email Eva because she knows it. And guess what? A lot of you know it. Some of you have just not been put in markets where you could taste it as much as she has tasted it. But you know it. You know it. You just haven't seen it as often as she has. I've never seen anything but it for 20 years. I can't even comprehend doing a television commercial. Can't even comprehend. So it's an incredible time. There's a big opportunity. It's a little bit of a challenge. Cause of your global creative arf. You're gonna have to figure it out. But even if it goes very conservative and classic like I think it will, you still all individually in your markets can fight for a little more money. And all of that should go to mid funnel. That's the answer. That's the only thing I see you can do in 26. And by 27, you're going to realize that model didn't work and you're going to unwind it and then you can fund the mid funnel properly.