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Hey guys. This was a keynote I gave very, very recently in Vegas to the Franchisee association ifa, where tons of franchisee owners and franchisees and marketing professionals and service providers of franchisees got together. One of the better talks I've given in a while. Feedback was remarkable. A little bit niche to the franchisee industry, but I think it plays for everybody listening. And if you own a store of any sorts or thinking about it, this episode should bring a ton of. I don't roll in here as a podcaster or a vlogger. I have a lot of context for this business. I understand how Facebook or things of that nature can raise same store sales, memberships, cac, ltv long term value. Like this is a very clear picture for me. This is why I Woke up at 4 o' clock in the morning and wanted to do this talk today. Because there is an incredible crossroads that will happen in this room over the next decade. I think there's a massive naivete to, to where the actual attention of the end consumer is and how it plays out and the continuous game of the macro franchisee and the franchisors doing this about how the marketing dollars are spent and executed and who's right and who's wrong. It really is quite irrelevant because in the macro, in the macro, the elephant in this room is that whether it's the franchisor or the franchisees, there are 90 cents on the dollar in marketing budget in this entire room. In one man's point of view, going directly in the garbage. And to me, that is the exciting part of this. The only way you know how to grow a business from 3 to 60 million dollars in sales in such a short period of time is when you make every penny work like a dollar and you spend no dollar that works like a dime. And that's what I did over that period. Now, back then that was even having a website. Back then that was even having a newsletter that did email marketing. Back then that was buying AdWords on Google. Those were the things I executed, those were the things I did. Then YouTube comes along, I look at it and again, Spidey senses, intuition, goosebumps, whatever you want to call it. How many people here are familiar with Mariano Rivera, the Yankees closer? Just raise your hand. This is a sports baseball reference just for all the people here who don't know he's a pitcher that I think just went into the hall of Fame. And if you're really a hardcore baseball fan, you know he really only had one pitch, right? He was solid with everything else, but he literally threw a pitch for almost two decades that nobody in the league could hit Edgar Martinez, but nobody in the league could really hit. And really, that's what I think I am. I'm pretty one dimensional. I'm a solid operator. I've done a lot of good things. I was an early investor in Facebook and Twitter and Uber. So I have a good eye. I'm also rich, but you know, I have a good eye for trends. But it's all down to one thing. I'm so disproportionately unemotional about what got me somewhere. I'm not ideological about any tactic. I just trade attention on an everyday basis. Hey guys, before this goes any further, I know we're a minute or two into the podcast. Want to interrupt this podcast look for this insane moment about me asking about Netflix and how many people now only watch Netflix, not network tv puts the nail in the coffin in my television commercial debate today. I will talk for the next 33 minutes about social media in a practical sense. I can't wait to be sitting here in a decade making fun of Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. I don't care. I care about what's overpriced behavior and I care about what's underpriced behavior. And in that delta is how you can operate enormous growth or enormous decline. I believe right now that we are living through one of the biggest shifts in consumer attention. If you were a historian. Oh, by the way, this DNF student only got as and Bs in one course, history. And that interest in history has been foundational to me in how I've been successful in business. Because it's very easy for me to understand what's happening with this. What's happening with this is the same thing that happened in this amazing country when we transitioned from radio to television. Go look at the biggest 100 brands that dominated our world and our society during the era of radio that that we're not over investing in television and its transformation. And that is where you will see the rise of Procter and Gamble and Budweiser and many other brands who pot committed to this new medium called television. While back then many people said it wasn't as valuable as the tried and true newspaper and radio. All that's happening now is that the attention of the end consumer is shifting. You cannot possibly be sitting in this conference right now in 2019 and not understand what's actually happening in society. When you think about the sheer amount of money that this room is spending on television commercials in 2019, in a world where outside of super bowl, which I think is grossly underpriced, and if anybody can afford it here, should run super bowl next year, then the commercial has to be good. And that gets into a whole different conversation. But the sheer consumption is enormous. But the amount of human beings that consume an actual television commercial in 2019, in a world of Netflix, in a world of your cell phone sitting next to you is staggeringly low. Plenty of you look at reports in your marketing that shows how much viewership potential there is. But in actual, practical, common sense of 2019, I am stunned by, by how much money is being thrown directly in the trash. The world is moving. It doesn't mean that radio or print or outdoor television is dead, is terrible. It just means it's massively overpriced. When you start getting to the local level, which is a fascinating dynamic between this room and the franchisees in the trenches again. There's a major misconception, understanding of the cost of outdoor embedded billboards that are localized or direct mail, that is localized, versus what Facebook advertising in a 1 mile radius does for the sales. The problem we have in our marketing society right now is this room and the outside world is a bunch of headline readers. People read headlines. They're not actual practitioners. Everybody here has an opinion on Cambridge Analytica. None of you know what the hell you're talking about. And so to me, that becomes the interest. What happens when the collective staggering amount of marketing dollars in this room get deployed properly? In 2006, I saw YouTube come along. I jumped on, I started a wine show. Couple months later, it was watched by hundreds of thousands of people a day. It transformed our business. It was not marketing, it was content. Then I read a headline that Google bought YouTube for $1.8 billion. That changed my career. That was the point where I decided this intuition that I had I was going to deploy in a very different way. It was nice to sell a little bit more Bordeaux and Pinot Noir, but clearly I was sitting on something naturally that was stronger, better, could provide me more leverage in my quest to buy the New York Jets. And so I will. And so. And so over the next year and a half, I made three investments in a company called Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. They all did extremely well for me, obviously. And I wrote a book about my belief that influencer marketing and social media would grow. It did. On that foundation, I started a marketing company and continued to invest. What I've learned about in the last decade is why the decisions in this room are being made. Why these great logos, emerging brands, historic brands, why they are throwing so much money in the garbage, I didn't understand from afar. I came from entrepreneurial and then later Silicon Valley DNA traits. I didn't come from corporate environment. I never, ever would hitch my wagon to reports that showed one thing, but business results that showed a different thing. And in that delta, I've become enormously fascinated. We are living through a remarkable time in marketing right now. There's an enormous, enormous amount of opportunity to leverage our dollars in a way that are efficient. Yet what we have is we have an aging group of marketing executives that are holding on to the past. We have an emerging group of marketing executives that have a social or digital ideology but aren't grounded in practicality of actual business results. And in that Delta, we're struggling to kind of find that medium. The thing that I'm most excited about is a couple things. One, probably the most exciting thing for this room is that as technology goes, I kind of say to my team, guys, as we go, more Jetsons. The people that act like the Flintstones are gonna win. And I think in that analogy, if you understand it, if you're into 1970s and 80s cartoons like I am, you'll understand that as all this evolves, I have never believed in brand more. Brand has and always will be such a powerful leverage point. How brand is interpreted and marketed and contextualized and consumed is the delta that everybody in this room needs to think about. And by the way, that includes the suppliers in here for the franchisors. Because how you do B2B marketing and how you're making content, for example, on LinkedIn to acquire a customer is actually stunningly fascinating and unbelievably important. Yet people prefer to go to things that they did five or 10 years ago as a tactic to acquire companies or customers. Excuse me. And so, to me, brand is extraordinary. Let me actually paint you a picture. How many people here, by show of hands, have an Alexa or Google Home device in their home? Just raise your hands, raise them high, raise them really high so everybody can look around. So this is super interesting. Keep them up. Actually, I'm gonna go weird with you. Please don't get upset. Blood circulation's good. If you have an Alexa or a Google Home, please stand up real quick. I know you're lazy, but I just really don't. Don't not stand up if you have one. I just need people to see this. Okay, now look around. I think we can all agree that this is not Like a teenage crowd. Right? So. So we're looking around here. We have an enormous amount of people standing up. Now. I think we can all agree in early 2019, most people here are letting their kids or grandkids play with it. Or at best, you're asking it to play music. You can sit down. Right. Thank you. So you're asking it to play music. I want to remind everybody that one of the top iPhone apps in the first year of the iPhone was the app that made it look like you were drinking beer. So some of these things start a little slow. I hope that everybody. Actually, this is a good question. How many people here are retiring within the next decade? And I don't mean you're gonna crush it and sell it to a PE firm and go to Jamaica and smoke weed. I mean. I mean, you're old and finished. How many people here retiring in the next 10 years? Raise your hands. All right, 15. Okay, good. 3%. For the other 97%, I want to paint you a picture of exactly why brand over everything 10 years from today. And not that I'm in the Nostradamus business, but I'm in the watching behavior that's already been established and having intuitive understanding that then it's scales from there. In a decade, the stunning amount of things that humans do in America and globally will be done through voice devices. When a human has decided they're hungry or they want to do something and they say, hey, Alexa, send me a cheeseburger, they better not say, hey, Alexa, send me a cheeseburger. Because if you think Google Ads are expensive, wait till you see how much Amazon charges to be the first result for that. Or when Amazon. I love when people are naive. Or when Amazon decides to buy one QSR and make that the default. We are living through a heavy technology change. If we are not in the business of saying, hey, Alexa, send me a sonic shake, hey, Alexa, send me a big Mac. Hey, Alexa, book me an orange theory workout. If you are not in the business of building brand, and I mean yesterday, you are about to become disproportionately vulnerable in a world that is gonna be predicated by voice, not by visual text. So because of that little example, what I'm passionate about today is creating a much bigger dialogue between the board and the C suite and the executives in this hall today about what are they doing with their money. Are you happy to continue to be in meetings with your marketing agencies where they show you the GRPs or impressions or potential reach that don't map to your Actual business results? Or is it time to actually start layering a 2019 Common Sense Sensibility that whether you. You know what I love? I love when people like after talk like this and I know you're doing some Q and A and I'll put pull the questions from here. And I'm sure using an app or something, inevitably somebody's like, gary, I get it, but I don't like Facebook. Right. I'm like, that's nice, Fred. It's nice that you, Fred, don't like Facebook. Right? But hundreds of millions of people a day use it. Gary, Facebook's not cool. That's nice, Sally. But hundreds of millions of people a day use it. I ask. I spend almost a billion dollars worth of media on Facebook a year and watch it across tiny, small entrepreneurs all the way up to the biggest five companies in the world. To me, this is unemotional. I don't sit here. I could care less about Facebook. I just want to be historically correct. I'm here basically because I want to put this on film and look back at it in seven years and make fun of everybody in here who didn't take the advice to me. There's an enormous sense of accomplishment with that. I don't know why. I don't know. It's super fun. It's super fun because what I love about business is it's based on merit. I love when I lose. I love when my projects fail or some of my investments fail or some of my executions fail because I know it's my fault. That's the best part of this game. You pick the wrong locations and they don't do as well. It's on you. I love that. What I love most is the most practical thing to shift in a 2019 world for this group is marketing dollars. And I know that people don't build brand. They are so focused on sales transactions that they focus more on things that create short term sales results. Because I have empathy. You open a new location, you're an area you, you want to build sales. And sales is always a level of importance. However, the sophistication of the nuances of a 2019 marketing environment are far and few between. Especially in this macro space where I see enormous amount of money being wasted in every environment. I have people come up to me all the time. Gary, Good news. We're 60% digital. I go, okay. They're like, well, why aren't you excited? I'm like I said, because 90% of the people that are 60% digital in big companies are Wasting it on banner ads and programmatic. And just because they're paying the lowest cpm, they're driving no business results. The media agency says it's great, everybody's super pumped, but the business results aren't there. What's amazing about marketing is you can spend a penny and get a dollar, but you can spend a dollar and get a penny. And it isn't as simple as digital and social. As a matter of fact, I would argue one of my favorite that are emerging is drive time radio. Good old fashioned drive time radio. Mainly because the prices keep going down and to me as long as they keep coming down, I'm excited. I love buying remnant inventory billboards, the ones that they want 25,000 for. But when they don't have anybody for those six weeks, I can get for 2,000 thrilled. However, in buying radio on its decline and buying remnant outdoor, in buying super bowl which I think is disproportionately the cheapest attention in the game, there is nothing, and I mean nothing that compares for this room in February 2019 to spending money in a YouTube, Instagram and Facebook world. And it's not even close. Because unlike most channels, direct mail which is sales, billboard and television, which in theory should be building brand. What Facebook and Google have to their advantage is your ability to do both brand and sales. If you actually know how to use it, people raise their hands. Actually how many people here have run Facebook and it has not worked for their business? Raise your hands. Raise it. I'll raise it. I've had plenty of face. Raise your hands. If you run Facebook and it hasn't worked for your business. To me when I see those scattered hands out there, it's no different than the basketball. What's the ROI of a basketball? For me? Two torn meniscuses and a broken foot. Negative ROI for LeBron A Billion Facebook works. You just might not know how to use it. The big breakthrough for me in the last decade of Facebook is volume of content, the fact that you can target within one mile range. There has not been a QSR execution that we've had in the last five years where we have not significantly increased same store increase of traffic and higher receipt levels. Not because we're geniuses, but because when you target within a 1 mile radius of an address and you make contextual creative for who you're targeting and you understand the difference between something that's driving a transaction because it's a deal or building on equity, do you understand how many of your locations, if you just ran Facebook And Instagram ads congratulating the high school team for their accomplishment to the tune of $500. How much that can drive in brand equity, localized and the playbook that you're giving down to your franchisees. The amount of emotion and subjectiveness when an executive pops in and looks at one franchisee's execution on Facebook or Instagram and casts judgment without context, it is enormous vulnerability to this industry. It is ideological, subjective, creative decisioning on how one interprets the playbook in the trenches while not being sympathetic or compassionate to the fact that the franchisees within a five mile radius have disproportionate contextual understanding with what's going on in their business. It's one thing if they're doing something so egregious or against the law. It's another thing that you didn't like the adjective or the colors they used. This is happening every day. I'm watching it every single day. In the macro and in the micro, there's an enormous opportunity. And the other thing is it's a lack of education. We live in a world where Google search is enormously important. There is an ad product that Google allows you, which is somebody searches on Google something, But then on YouTube you have the ability to do a pre roll video based on what they search on Google, even if the two have nothing to do with each other. I could be searching how to order pizza or pizza delivery or how to work out or need a new gym membership on Google A week later, go to a Jets video or a skiing video or a cooking video. But the pre roll could be your company addressing them because we already know that this is what what their intent is. That conversion on that video product has been enormous. But the reality is 95% of people making decisions don't even know that exists as a capability. We are way too vanilla in our decisions about digital and traditional marketing. Everybody here is in blunt headline reading. Judgment calls like Facebook doesn't work or Facebook works, TV works or doesn't work. There is a stunning. You know, it's really interesting. As my depth of knowledge as a practitioner of all these things has grown over the last decade, I've stopped talking about almost everything else in society as I've become far more than a headline reader when it comes to wine, the New York jets and marketing. I've got no opinions anymore on healthcare, politics or anything else in that delta because of this moment. Because of how much money has been wasted between this and television screens. There is no bigger conversation for this room, my friends. What you Saw with Kraft Heinz in cost cutting versus growth, right? And I think they'll get themselves out of it because they've started getting away from the programmatic and the television things of that nature. But regardless, for all the private equity, you can't be efficient forever. You have to grow. You have to build a brand. Here's the problem. If you think that you're building a brand the way a brand was built 10 years ago, you're in delusion land. The attention of our consumer is moving so quickly. How many people here now mainly watch Netflix over regular television? Raise your hands. Raise your hands high. Jesus. Stand up. I'm sorry. Do it again. I'm sorry, but please do this for me. I need this. Hold on. This is staggering to me. This is the bomb of the whole conference. Ready? This is it. Everybody can go home after this moment. Don't even stay for the rest of the conference. Let me tell you why. Stay here. Stay standing. This 80% of this room, and I'm going to be nice here. With a medium age of 43, 80% of this room has just told me to my face that the majority of the television they watch is now Netflix. Not even regular television. And the amount of money being spent on television commercials in this room makes me vomit all over my face. 80% of you don't even have a chance. Thank you. And if I asked the rest of you how many here watch dvr, more would stand up. And if I asked you how many of you felt fast forward a commercial or when a commercial comes on, you grab your phone to do some work or to share your thoughts on social media. And then my TV people who always yell at me say, well, Gary, TV sports people still watch sports. Which I say, exactly. And then I counter with, if you look at Twitter and Instagram's activity, the biggest spike for them is during the commercials of big sporting events. Because everybody's got an opinion of Steph Curry and Tom Brady during the commercials. What are we doing here? Who here can't wait to be here for three days and then run home and carefully go through their direct mail? You are taking real money and you're throwing in the garbage. There's a reason why much bigger companies than yours have gone out of business. Because they philosophically misunderstood where the end consumer's attention is. And then even if they understood it, they weren't best in class in the execution of that craft. How many people here are familiar with Wish, the shopping app Wish? Raise your hands. Pretty good number. Much more than when I used to Ask this Wish for the people that don't know, which is about 80% of this room is a retail site that does 95% of its advertising on Facebook and has gone from zero to, depending on who you believe, 6 to 11 billion billion dollars in sales on the back of 98% Facebook advertising. With the only two big things they've done is they put the wish logo on the Lakers jersey and they did the Floyd Mayweather McGregor fight and they did the ring in the corners, which is brand. They built their brand and sales on Facebook. 6 to 12 billion on the back of that. My friends, I regret standing here and telling you that I was only able to grow my dad's business from a four to a $60 million business because the reality is I messed up. It's funny to say this in Vegas, I don't play poker. But there's one core thing I understand. When you mathematically understand because you know how to play the game, that you have the best hand, you strategically go all in. You can maybe goat them in, but nonetheless you go all in. From 2000, 2003 in marketing, I had the best hand. I knew something called Google AdWords existed. I was running ads on it for 5 and 10 cents a click for every wine word while every other wine store in the country still was making catalogs and didn't understand what happened. But I didn't put enough money into it. I staggered out my dollars into direct mail and local television and full page ads in the Star Ledger and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and it was great. And those things worked too. But I had the best hand. And I sit here with a lot of regret, which is why I stand in front of you today. Because Google was sales. It was intent based. You typed in cabernet. I showed up Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. It's brand. It's more like television. If you know who you're targeting, if you know you're targeting somebody who's single on January 1st to January 10th and you're running your ads and you want their gym membership, you know what customers copy to write and what image to show them because you have unlimited data of knowing their psychology, not just their demographics. And you know that the amount of consumption that's actually seen in your feeds on Facebook and Instagram is actually high. For now. For now. Over the next decade, we will get tired of these feeds because we get tired of everything. And we will treat them just like television commercials. I do not care about the future of these platforms. I care about the Attention of Americans and people around the globe today. Are there international people here? International. So international crew. All this propaganda coming out of my mouth. It's an even better deal outside the US because the sophistication of the media spend on Facebook and Instagram in Asia, South America, uk. I mean, I opened a London and a Singapore office because I just can't believe how underpriced it is to drive business results. This is the moment. This is the moment. And this is the cat's already out of the back. The gym sharks and the Fashion Novas and the Lolas, they've already started building enormous companies. Like we are now in the middle of this phenomenon on these platforms. We're only three, four, I don't know the exact timing. Two, four, six years away from this starting to decline. But the delta, the delta between where your marketing dollars are going to drive results versus this is staggering. And I sit up here not pontificating. I have multiple QSR clients where we do hardcore AB testing, where they run their traditional television and radio and outdoor, and we run our Facebook. We hold out stores, we hold out regions, and for three years in their face, we've been proving this is better. And still it's difficult for them to fully commit because humans don't like change. The humans in here, the most vulnerable, are the ones who have been doing well and are doing well. I'm most scared of the people sitting here saying, yeah, this sounds right ish, but we're doing great. I love when people are like, gary, that's all good, but we're up 13%. And I'm like, what's wrong with 40%, Dick? This is business. I laugh. I laugh at people holding up the past on a pedestal and demonizing the current. This is not tomorrow. There's trillions of dollars being exchanged through Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Trillions. Real economics and a massive naivete of the biggest companies in the world at a time where they can least afford it. It's creating friction in the trenches. And I highly recommend, I hope if even one group in here takes this audacity that I deploy on stage and uses it as seed to actually audit how they're marketing their business. Because I promise, if you miss the mark on branding over the next decade, the next platform is going to make you really pay. If you've lost on social voice is going to put you out. Because if you don't build brand in this next decade, when we make that transition, my friends, you're not naive. You know, there's kitchens, but being built under every building that's vacated. And people are building brands to compete with you with no storefronts and no overhead, and all they're gonna use is Uber Eats and Postmates and all the other stuff. Guys, this is not a joke. Please, please, please. We're gonna go from laughs to a much more serious subject in the next decade. You will be competing with more brands than you ever have because the startup costs are zero, the infrastructure costs are low, and the ability to get to a consumer's home or an office at no cost is going to be staggering. Please, please don't rest on the laurels that got you or the current strength of what's happening, because the speed of acceleration of the clear thing that's about to complete. I mean, guys, I literally stood here while I was in New Orleans. I stood in New Orleans seven years ago at the Black Car Limo service convention. I said, my friends, this Uber thing is real. And the excuses and audacity of why it wouldn't and regulation and we're going to kick plenty of money to Pennsylvania Avenue and all this, it doesn't work. The consumer wins in the end. This is not a strategy. So you might be thinking you're competing with everybody in this room. You're not. You're competing with a new infrastructure that is going to market properly to the end consumer using the infrastructure of the mobile web and the last mile infrastructure of the five biggest companies in the world. There has never been bigger disruption to gyms, to masseuses, to the food forget. I mean, how many people in the food business raise your hands. You need to be thinking very carefully where this is going. You know, there's a really great Russian saying. My mom used to always say, man plans and God laughs. And I've translated that in my head a little bit to. And technology laughs. This is coming. The number one way to win in this big of a disruptive shift of the next decade is to build an actual brand where they need you, where they have to have you. The way to do that is to be heard by the end consumer. The way to do that is to scrutinize every penny you spend and make sure you're not wasting it on. On where you think they are. And most of all, the big aha of this new world is that we now live in a world where the volume of content that you're putting out on these platforms is imperative because the context of that content to hit the cohorts of, you know, as you can imagine, no matter what your business is a 25 year old guy in an urban area is, is gonna probably have to see a different video and picture than a 48 year old housewife with two children, right? This is a demographic and psychographic world and it's far more complicated than the simplicity of the way we play in politics, which is left and right. There are 77058 meaningful cohorts to your business. You need to identify them and then you need to contextualize the creative to them. And then you need to empower your franchisees to have the luxury and the breathing room to contextualize it to their 5 to 10 mile radius without the subjective ideological scrutiny from an ivory tower somewhere in corporate while maintaining the brand equity that is the framework of the next half decade. I really, really thanks mom. I really, I really mean this. There are not a lot of talks I'm looking to do these days, but when this one came across my desk, I really wanted to be here because I really enjoy the framework of this model. As you can imagine, being an immigrant, there's so much of that DNA in New York. So many people have worked so hard. The heartbreak, and this is just real and this is very honest. Not that I think the extremity will, will happen in this space as much, but to watch the friends from the old country that my dad came with and we settled in New Jersey, but a lot of them settled in la and a lot of them went from riding a taxi to eventually owning five or six black cars. I don't know how many of you have spent meaningful time in LA or lived in la, but there was a lot of Russian and Polish and DNA in those car services. And to watch them spend their life's work right to the finish line. And to watch, I mean, I told them to sell their businesses, but when you're a proud old school guy, you don't do that. And to watch them now have to liquidate their assets for a penny to a nickel on the dollar of what those companies were worth just six years ago is devastating. I believe between Voice and Last Mile that there's a lot of optimism mixed with lack of education, mixed with naivete, that if we don't properly market our brands in the right channels over the next decade, that there'll be some significant business challenges. And I prefer you not have that, especially when it's so in your face. I love that people make business decisions when they put on their suit in the office, but when they come home, in their face is the end consumer behavior. And they live it two different ways. Start using your common sense. I mean, literally, this has been my life for the last two years. I'll sit with a 60 to 90 year old executive and they'll scold me for 40 minutes on how Facebook has ruined the American democracy. Right? That this thing Facebook has literally torn down or made vulnerable one of the most powerful things in the world, the American democracy. I then transfer the conversation to our business talk, and after I'm done pontificating, they look me dead in the face and tell me that Facebook and Instagram can't sell makeup or shoes or bread. And so I go, so let me get this straight. The platform's powerful enough to tear down our democracy, but you don't think it could sell a fucking burger? I came here with an agenda which is to inspire one or two people to actually audit where their marketing dollars go. I hope I've done that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, thank you. I got 15 more minutes. I'm going to answer some questions. Thank you. That was awesome. Standing O's always feel the best. Thank you. You know, it's funny, two of my friends have given the keynotes here the last couple years, and I have a lot of sense of them. And if you've been here, I know they can deliver great talks. But I was excited because I just, I have so much knowledge in this space. I'm really living it. I'm not. You know, I'm sure at conferences like this, whether it's politicians or authors or people fly in and it's some. You know, I'm sure everybody here has been to things and you get a nice macro thing. I'm telling you, I live this every day. I'm watching it. It's very, very real. In the most layman's terms, I believe that if you're running television outside of super bowl, you're getting back 5 cents on the dollar that you're spending. And that if you really know how to do, and this is important, it's not that easy. But if you really know how to do content on Instagram and Facebook, you can get $5 to $8 on your dollar. That's a big delta. Colt says, in an industry that is very old school. That's why most of you haven't heard of you. What is your best advice to increase brand engagement via social media? Cole. You know, it's funny. You'll appreciate this, Colt. I see how you framed it. I'm not super ideological about engagement either. Right. I'm sure anybody Here, who's even gotten a little half dangerous. You knew that at first. It was about how many followers, then you have. Then you started hearing buzzwords of engagement, which makes sense, right? Doesn't matter how many people see it, how many people are gonna act. What I think is most fascinating about social is, for example, specifically Facebook. Facebook consistently has massively raised same store traffic and percent of ticket sale, like higher receipts. It's just so black and white. So for me, I care about engagement, but I just want to remind everybody. You know, actually, I should go there. I was embarrassed to. I told you my first business was Lemonade Stan franchises. Here's the truth. A year before I started that business in Edison, I started a different business. I walked around the neighborhood and I ripped people's flowers out of their yards and I rang their doorbell and sold it back to them. Not my finest hour, but great business model. You didn't sit on the inventory very long like it was. So I want to remind everybody here in that last 30 minutes of foofy, foofy social talk, I'm not a scholar, I'm not a business philosopher, author. I'm a practitioner who's on a path to buy the New York Jets. I need money, and so I'm a businessman. This stuff is ROI positive, period. And if you. And it's brand building. It's not sales. This is not putting something in, you know, a direct mail pack, val pack, buy one, get one free or like 10% off membership. This is building brand. Not to razz on Valpak. I like Valpak, but it's fucking overpriced. Direct mail is overpriced. The end. Does it work? Of course. Do you know what the alternative is? When you run Facebook the same way you do direct mail? That's my question. If voice marketing is next, what's after that? And how do you recommend for us to figure it out? What? Ryan, I'm not Nostradamus. I have no idea. I do think voice is next, but I think voice is still a good 7, 6, 9. I can't really get a grasp, but I know it's not right now. I know that people are starting to do things again. Now that we're doing a little music, now that we're doing a little, you know, some people. How many people here have bought something off of Amazon using the Alexa? Raise your hand. It's a nice number. Like, so it's happening, but I think it's still 24 to 36 months away from it kind of mattering to me. Directly for this business. The cross section of brands being built that don't have physical footprints, that use last mile and mobile along with voice is what I'm most worried about. Because if your brand doesn't mean something in seven years, you're going to lose by the toll booth of Amazon, which is going to make the Google toll booth seem like a penny. What is your morning ritual like? Most successful people have a great routine. I'm curious what yours is, is Caleb. I grab my phone, I go take a poop and I run out the door as fast as possible. That's what I got. That's all I got. My man Ryan Franchising is often slow to adapt. Using your experience with your father, how did you convince him to adapt to traditional? That's such a great point. So Sasha Vaynerchuk was not super. Like, I remember him yelling at me like, get off the computer and get on the floor. What is amazing about growing up in such a family business environment where, you know, my biggest cynicism to corporate is that I grew up in an environment where the health of our business made our lives real. Like there was no. It wasn't like I was gonna jump from Little John's to Sonic, you know, like this was our lives. So all my marketing has always been like, life on the line, kids, health on the line. What convinced my dad was results. You know, the biggest reason more people aren't further along with social marketing strategy is most people have tried a small test and it failed because they haven't used enough money. You know, I love when people are like, gary, TV works for us, Social doesn't. I'm like, cool, break it down for me. I'm like, how much do you spend on TV? 9 million. How much do you spend on social? 100,000. Number two in their tests. Unfortunately, just like right now. Just like sports betting and cannabis and cryptocurrency. When social first popped a decade ago, you have a lot of fake wannabes who are opportunistic, who use a couple buzzwords nobody really understood. So they hired somebody. And they didn't have the skill set to drive business results. They talked about getting followers or likes, which doesn't translate to the results we care about in this room. So my dad responded to results. The first year I ran the business, we went from 4 to 10 million. That ended every fucking discussion ever again. When is. You can see some energy behind that one. When is email going to die? I hope it hurries up. What will replace it? Slack. I actually think email's still an incredible channel. You know, I think, look, I used to have 90% open rates on my email. It's down to 30. So it's died. Ish. You know, I think social has replaced a lot of that, but that even is declining. I mean, Facebook was a much better deal three years ago than it is today. It's just still such a better deal than the alternative that I continue to be behind it. I think email's still efficient. I do see one. Here's a little hot take. I think text messaging is about to explode. As a marketing channel, we have held as humans forget about us as business people. We have held our text messaging away from spam because we got so killed on email. But I am seeing consumer behavior that is starting to open up their cell number to marketing. And I think that everybody here should pay attention to that. I'm sure because you've seen other competitors in the space. I'm sure everybody has some level of an app strategy. They're either trying to make it better, they're trying to start it, but I think texting is gonna be quite powerful. So I would give that some thought. You talk about going for your passion, but how long do you keep that going before you have to step back for the lack of revenue and cash? Ryan, Ryan, listen, you know, you obviously probably know my content. For me, we've talked a lot of business in here. I don't know exactly where you're going with this, Ryan, but I will say this. If you ask me who the 15 most unhappy people I know are, 90% of them are, are unbelievably wealthy. And so you just have to be self aware. I think for me, I'm doing right now something that on the back of being early in Facebook, Twitter, Uber, I could have raised a $500 million fund and made two points and 20 in the back end and lived a cush life of making $10 million a year just taking meetings and have one hit again and change the course of my life. I just didn't want to be somebody who deployed capital. I wanted to operate. So, you know, to answer your question, I think happiness needs to become a much bigger part of our conversation in our society because I think there's a lot of anxiety, especially now that we all PR ourselves on social. And so listen, money is a great. If that's what makes you happy, mazel tov. But like, for me, there's always a fine line between patience and delusion. So I have empathy for that. But if you're actually happy, even though you haven't seen results. I think you, you just keep doing it and the second you're not, you shift it. Thank you. Joel, what are your thoughts of geo fencing platforms for local marketing? Joel I like it. I mean I think anybody here who targets high school kids for their business should be doing a ton more Snapchat advertising. Snapchat stock price has nothing to do with how many 15 to 22 year olds pay attention to it. And so there's a lot of localization. But even before you get into geofencing offers, I'm telling you, I'm gonna say it one more time. Instagram story ads, Instagram regular ads and Facebook ads in a 1 to 5 mile radius done with hundreds of pieces of different content, not just one will change 98% of the people's businesses in this room. It's the combination of television and direct mail in 1980 and you see the data in your face. The only thing that stops everybody here being pot committed to Facebook and Instagram is lack of education. And you read a couple of headlines and you made assumptions. The end. What does the day of life of Gary Vee look like? Curious to the community. You know Mary, I work a lot. You know, I'm activated basically from 9pm to 11pm on weekdays. I try to balance that with of a couple extreme being disconnected on the weekends and seven weeks of vacation. But I'm booked every minute. I will literally come off stage right now I gotta do this separate little thing. And even on the way to the airport, to my flight to la, multiple calls. Yeah, a thousand employees investing, you know, I put out content. I'm comfortable in chaos. That's my happy place. I always people are like how don't you drop balls? I'm like I drop a shitload of balls. Except I'm some people like to have two balls in the air and not drop them. I like to have 73 and drop 13. I like the net of that. And this and this goes back to my themes. I mean I become outrageously passionate about self awareness. You know, like there's just so much context that goes into the right advice. I just enjoy the chaos. What do you feel? What do you read? The to stay on top of understanding. Trent so this is interesting, Elizabeth asking what do I read and listen to? Nothing. I spend back to the day of my life. I probably spend three to four collective hours in a day, five minutes here on the flight for an hour just reading comments. Whoever's closest to the consumer wins. I'm far more human, anthropologist, psychologist, like observation of human behavior. Like I'm a consumer behavior guy with an overlay of like not holding anything on a pedestal and then being willing to have the humility of wasting time to test new things to put those three together to get insights. And my career and all this stuff that's gone well for me has been predicated on not knowing what's next or I see the future. It's been based on looking at the current, but having the humility and patience to be a practitioner in IT and understand its value to the end consumer. So I don't read blogs or listen to podcasts. I read comments from consumers on my content and other things that I would look at prepping for this. I read the comments on a lot of the brands in here, Instagram, and recognized that 90% of you don't even engage with those people. Like everybody should walk out of this hall right now and look at your Instagram of your brand and look at the last 10 posts and see that 90% of the people that commented on the photo weren't replied to by you because it speaks to lack of depth. We are so obsessed with cac. We spend such little time on ltv. And it's not something that I have to be confused by. I know it because I'm watching how you're engaging with the actual end consumer, which is also how the other end consumers can see how you're engaging with. There's new rules. Rules. There's new rules. That's why you're seeing so much growth and so much carnage. And by the way, craft or Netflix or this is all just a preview. This is the preview, my friends. Toys R Us is the preview. It's not the anomaly. And there's many smart people in here with the amount of cash that's in the system. God forbid when that dries up. This is my favorite question. Adam Gaze, yes or no for all you. So I'm gonna go on the record. Cause I know there's a lot of people here. Here's my prediction on Adam Gaze, who's the new New York jets coach who had three seasons in Miami, wasn't super successful. But if you look at the data of how he coached the quarterback and how many injuries he dealt with, I'm on the record that says Adam Gaze is going to be disproportionately successful and more of a Pete Carroll than somebody else. So I am super pro. Adam Gaze. AI will play huge. Christian, Great question. AI will play huge into content marketing. When AI and machine learning really gets There in next two decades. I'm asking everybody here to figure out how to drive down the cost of creative videos and pictures so that you can make 4,000 of them in six months instead of 48. As machine learning and AI growing, we will eventually be able to get to a place where I can get to every one of you based on the data that I know about you. For example, based on that last question, I will always stop if a New York jets reference is put in my content because that's emotionally important to me. And if you're selling a burger or a weight training program or massage, that will stop me. If you incorporate the jets, eventually AI and machine learning will get to enough scale where we can drive down the cost of making the content low enough that we can start targeting you on as close to an individual basis. And that's my thesis. Now, when we take on a client, my job is to figure out how many cohorts mean something to them and how many of them can I actually make content for against the media Spend until there's diminishing returns for the cost of the content in return for the short term and long term business goals. How should an entrepreneur handle the hostile efforts of the new wave of politicians and and regulators to seek and prevent success? Look, you're talking to somebody who was born in the Soviet Union. No matter how bad you think it is here, it's fucking amazing. So I have spent 0 seconds of my career worried about what city hall does. As long as every other entrepreneur has to play on that same platform playing field, nothing scares me. I grew up in a very regulated industry. I launched an E commerce wine business in 1996 when I couldn't ship to 90% of the states in the country. We have Chase as a client, we have Budweiser and Diageo as clients. So you know, I wouldn't overstress it. Your biggest worry is that somebody else who's competing against you is playing on a different playing field than you. As long as that's not the case, we're all playing by the same rules. I say it all the time. Obviously, taxes being talked a lot about. Now, as long as everybody else that has talent like me pays the same amount as me, I almost don't care about what the number is. That's what I focus on. And so there'll always be rules and regulations. To me, I just think I'm good enough to navigate through them. What do you think about the future of language learning? Do you think people will still attend language schools? No, I don't. I think everybody in 10 years will have EarPods that translate every language, no matter where you are. So literally, like, I wear my EarPods from Apple, which. Oh, by the way, as we know technology, they'll get smaller and smaller. And when I go to China and I speak to somebody who's speaking to me in Mandarin, I'm gonna hear English, she's gonna hear Mandarin. And so any parent in here, that's putting a lot of stress on their teenager to learn French, Cut that shit out. Information. Information is a commodity. Like, it's the disconnect between memorizing information. Like, what do you want to know? Who's the 17th president of the United States? I have no idea, but Siri does. Hey, Siri, who's the 17th president of the United States? I mean, every single piece of information is now on our fingertips. So technology is coming. How does a franchise break through online clutter to be found? What gets attention? A crowded landscape. What gets attention is contextual, creative. The end. If you're a parent that is passionate about your kids playing soccer and you have a picture in their Instagram feed that has a soccer ball and your shake and your burger, you will sell it. Having a system that creates enough content to do that and has the media capabilities to get in front of a person person and then to track it, both at a short term in store sale and a long term brand sale, that's where the discipline has to be put in. That's where it's 301. But it's context. It's context. All right, I'm at triple zero. I really appreciate your attention. Thank you for having me. Have a wonderful conference. Thank you. Hey, guys, hope you enjoyed that. Leave your comments, leave your reviews. Leave, leave, leave, leave, leave. Enjoy the day.