How to Measure Creative Success in 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary: The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode: "How to Measure Creative Success in 2026"

Date: January 12, 2026
Host: Gary Vaynerchuk

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Overview

In this forward-thinking episode, Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee) breaks down how the landscape of social media and marketing has irreversibly shifted from “social” to “interest” media. He challenges the room of practitioners, marketers, and agency professionals to embrace a new era where creative output, not just math and ad dollars, drives success. The discussion covers the evolution in how creative is measured, tactics for performance and brand building, the essential platforms for growth, and the increasing importance of feeding AI language models (LLMs) with original creative content.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Shift from Social Media to "Interest Media"

• Declining value of follower count:
  "Every hour that's going by how many followers you have is declining in importance...The creative is finding the audience." [00:00]
• Platforms like TikTok now serve content to people interested in the subject, not just followers, representing a "profound shift."
• This elevates organic social creative to the core of the marketing mix.

2. Measuring Creative Success

• Organic creative’s new primacy:
  It’s now possible to truly measure creative performance by posting content natively across platforms and evaluating its organic reach before ever paying to promote it.
• "You can actually measure creative and that's because you can post all of your content on the seven social networks. And the reach that that creative will get organically is something you can measure." [02:44]
• Stop using paid media to prop up poorly-performing creative.

3. Tension Between Math (Performance) and Art (Creative)

• Many marketers are addicted to quantitative measurement, fearful of investing in anything not instantly measurable, shifting them closer to being "salespeople" than marketers.
• Balance is key:
  "The math crew is...delusional cause they don't understand the value of the art... It's not red or blue, it's firmly purple. And you have to ask yourself where you're at." [10:49]
• The best results come from an “and” approach: strong creative validated by strong numbers.

4. Platform Prioritization for 2026

• Google Shorts: "In the last week I've decided for myself that Google Shorts has become the most important social platform for me." [05:14]
• TikTok holds the most advanced algorithm, but its landscape is changing rapidly.
• Don’t sleep on “Facebook Blue,” Snapchat Spotlight (for ages 15-25), and LinkedIn (especially for B2B/SaaS).
• Always be scanning platforms (even Pinterest) for new opportunities. "It's an everyday thing for me." [16:44]

5. The Emergence of LLMs & AI Search

• Feeding LLMs with your creative now directly impacts discoverability in future AI-driven search.
• "You have to start feeding these LLMs, these chatbots...every face I'm looking at right now should be posting three pieces of creative organically a day on Google Shorts just for the LLM in three years." [12:22]
• Prepare now for shifts comparable to what Google did to the Yellow Pages.

6. Creative Production and Agency Best Practices

• Invest disproportionately in creative output versus media spend.
  "If you have $2 million in marketing and only 80,000 go into the creative and the other one nine goes into media...if you're good at the creative...that will crush your 2 million at 100,000 1.9." [18:40]
• Use live social shopping as both a sales and creative-production tool.

7. Team Structures and Organizational Change

• Most have performance teams and brand teams, but the lines should be blurred; creative and media must operate holistically.
• "Everyone's got the performance team. And then if they are big enough, they have the brand team. Everybody has media and creative separate. It's all just one thing." [12:56]

8. Tactical Q&A and Actionable Guidance

Segmenting and Creating for Niche Audiences

• Target ever-narrower market segments for higher creative resonance. "The more narrow you go, the more when you think of the creative you're gonna make for it, the more that creative is gonna have teeth." [08:01]
• Repeated: Follower count doesn’t matter; it's about the creative being algorithmically matched with interests.

Scaling, Measuring, and Iterating

• Test everything organically before investing paid dollars.
  Moderator: "How do you scale paid social? You need to test everything organically first?...Launch new ads, launch new offers every day."
  GaryVee: "Yes, that's right. That's what you have to do." [29:10]
• Double down and scale what works; iterate for performance after organic validation.

Creative and AI

• Embrace all types: AI-generated images/videos, human content—do both and learn from the results.
  "The answer to that question is AI images. AI video. Human images. Human video. It's just always and." [32:13]

Budgeting For Marketing (Practical Example)

• For companies relying heavily on organic, invest more in creative, try live social shopping, and scale up spend on what shows organic results first.
  "Marketing to me is the offense of a business..." [30:10]

Agency Advice

• Agencies must own both creative and media for accountability.
• Performance marketers: creative is now measurable for the first time; use organic results to guide spend.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You're a salesperson, not a marketer. You must. By the way, I love selling...But sales is what you do and rely on when you're not good at branding." — Gary Vee [09:08]
• "It is fucking asinine to spend $1 of media to amplify a piece of creative that has not been validated by an AI algorithm in a social network." — Gary Vee [12:06]
• "The fact that we're measuring creative as an added value for just posting organically is bananas." — Gary Vee [24:43]
• “If your ad and creative isn't good, you're leaving the platform... I actually predict that these platforms won't even take our ad money if the creative's not good enough...That's how much they want to keep people on.” — Gary Vee [25:59]
• "Do not be in the convincing business. Be in the conviction business." — Gary Vee [38:33]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00 — Decline of follower importance; shift to interest media; measuring creative organically
• 03:44 — Moderator: Business needs ROI; GaryVee: Measuring creative, Google Ads getting expensive
• 07:40 — Moderator: Authentic content, iteration vs. big swings; GaryVee: Niche segmentation, interest media repeat
• 10:49 — Math vs. art; finding the "purple" middle; creative validation
• 12:56 — Agency/brand team setup; need for structural change
• 15:14 — Ranking platforms: Google Shorts, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn
• 17:55 — Agency advice: own both media and creative; budget allocation logic
• 21:03 — Audience Q&A: Ad structure, performance vs. marketing, and blending teams
• 27:35 — How to get better at the art side as a non-creative; learning or hiring
• 29:10 — Rapid fire: scale paid by organic testing; the value of competition
• 30:05 — Budgeting for small brands; live social shopping for services
• 32:13 — AI vs. human content: It's always "and"
• 35:18 — Expanding agency offerings; adaptation in the age of AI
• 35:26 — Reddit strategy; feeding LLMs; importance of Google Shorts
• 38:15 — Organic social’s ROI, conviction vs. convincing, actionable budget/creative allocation

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Takeaways

• Creative is now measurable at scale, and that measurability is changing the equation for marketers and agencies alike.
• Organic content’s role has exploded and should lead the strategy—use organic results to guide media spend, not the other way around.
• Interest media has replaced social media; content finds its own audience, not the follower count.
• Generative AI & LLMs require a feeding strategy: Content that performs today builds your brand’s future discoverability in AI-driven search.
• Invest in creative, test widely, iterate relentlessly, and stay agile—platform best practices change constantly.
• Hybridize teams, blur lines between creative and performance, and be ready to pivot. Embrace the “and.”

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Gary’s signature mix of bluntness, actionable strategy, and forward vision makes this episode a must-listen for marketers, founders, and agencies looking to thrive in a landscape where creative and data are more entwined than ever.

Transcript

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Every hour that's going by how many followers you have is declining in importance. I've spent 15 years building my world. It's collapsing. The creative is finding the audience. In fact, I would argue that we don't even live in social media anymore. We're firmly in something I call interest media. Like, the creative is finding the audience. If I make a video right now on TikTok about skateboarding, I've never made a single piece of content about skateboarding. The first 500 people that don't follow me that are gonna see that piece of content are into skateboarding. This is a very profound shift, and it has elevated organic social creative to the first thing in the marketing mix. Because if you do it well, you can cut your media spend, you can cut your overall marketing budget, and you'll have more effectiveness. That is what we're all looking for. The problem is so many people in this room have so been addicted for a decade of just math, math, math, math, math, that they're scared to even put their toe into something they can't measure from the first second, because you're not actually marketers, you're salespeople. This is the GaryVee audio experience. I'm in a funny part of my career where I'm not doing a lot of speaking, and I'm trying to be selective of which ones I go to. And I thought it'd be nice to tell you genuinely why I'm here. I have a lot of admiration for practitioners, and that seems to be the makeup of this audience. And it's funny because I build so much brand and personal brand that I'm aware that even many people in this audience might think I'm a motivational speaker or a mascot. But since 1996 to today, which is now, you know, quite a period of time, there's never been a day in the last 30 years where I am not on the hands of the wheel of a business or the marketing execution of that business. And so when I answer this question, it comes from my day to day on winetext or veefriends or all these things. And I think the most interesting thing that curious about in this room is where are you on the journey between brand and sales? Right. They're incredibly different. But I would argue that as we sit here today, the most exciting thing, probably for a lot of you in this room, if I'm reading my intuition right, is we are in a very interesting era in the last three years where we are dangerously close to putting a very significant math overlay on Art. So I would argue we are in the first era ever where you can actually measure creative and that's because you can post all of your content on the seven social networks. And the reach that that creative will get organically is something you can measure. If you do not use working media dollars to disguise your creative, you're able to actually measure the creative. And if you can measure the creative, you can fundamentally grow your business to the moon. And so what am I thinking about? I'm thinking that holy crap, Organic social media in a five year window has gone from a nice to have to I would argue for the most performance quant mathematical people in this room that organic social has become the most important thing. And I do not believe that most people believe that or realize it yet. Thus that motivates me to get on stages and talk about it. Thanks dad.

[Moderator]

It's hard to hear this because on one level like we have to make sure that the business survives and I need to measure my ROI on every dollar I'm spending.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Agreed.

[Moderator]

Happens all the time. Right?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I agree.

[Moderator]

And now if you have the measurement because a lot of the room is some agencies, marketers, et cetera, when you go to bat and argue it used to be I'm going to cookie, I'm going to follow you all around the Internet.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's right.

[Moderator]

And now it's the creation of I'm going to create the Persona that I'm going to attract the customer that is already into a specific thing because majority of the AI is happening on the major networks anyways.

[Hans Grabbard]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But I would argue that. Let me go a little further because this is a room of practitioners. Here's the punchline. I believe that if you cut down your working media dollars and I'm sure it's not lost actually how many people here use Google search and Google Ads as a meaningful part of your mix? Raise your hands, raise them high. I mean I'm sure every single person that just raised their hand is not delusional to the fact that that ecosystem is about to get very expensive because so much of the supply of the attention is going to GEO and aeo, AKA you know, AI search versus going to Google. And everything you've been buying is about to go up triple and quadruple in price because you and your direct competitors are going to be battling for less of the inventory that's there. Right. What I'm saying to everyone in this room is I believe that if you made a much more meaningful investment financially to organic social creative and measured it and the way you measure it is if it does better than your normal posts. You post organically, you normally get 1,000 views. I'm keeping it very like humble here. You now post something and it gets 100,000 views. If you then take that piece of creative back to the house, back to you and you slightly tweak it and you add performance elements to it, a free shipping code, a discount code, you change the copy and you rerun it in the platform. It went organically strong. You rerun it in Instagram or TikTok or Google shorts that it will outperform your best practices on AB Creative. And that is the punchline, thus rendering you not having to waste as much money on the working media dollars. And that once you get that flywheel working, you will see substantial growth because you're doing brand and you're doing conversion. And here's the biggest fucking l if in the room. You're starting to feed the future of the LLMs, my friends, you have to start feeding these LLMs, these chatbots. OpenAI what happens inside of Meta Gemini for sure, I could argue. In the last week I've decided for myself that Google Shorts has become the most important social platform for me, coming from fourth or fifth place because I'm fully aware that Gemini is going to eat on the back of the information on shorts. And I know that Gemini is going to have a very significant piece of the puzzle because Google can't afford for that to fail and they will put all pot committed to that. So again, I'm just ranting here for a second, but organic social creative has exploded in importance for the math kids. I think it's measurable, brother. I don't want to waste money. I don't fucking want to guess. I just don't know how people don't see what's happening and that's what I'm trying to suffocate. You can't just throw good working media dollars at bullshit creative. And look at your CAC and LTV and roas. All of you have played this game. The reason it worked for the last generation was the fucking Facebook ads were so cheap. This is what I was yelling about in 2017 and 16 and 15. Remember? They were so fucking underpriced you could be dog shit at the creative and it still worked. We're in a different era and you need to understand your mix. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast, they'll make my mom super happy.

[Moderator]

The relationship of authentic content from just paid to organic and then the inclusion of now iterations and volume. Andromeda came out with the update of like they want net new concept from a very specific way of content coming on meta. Is it iterate until you find what's happening or is it brand new big swing concepts across the board?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

For me it's who the fuck's gonna buy your shit? How many different consumer segmentations are there? There's probably 40, 50, 60 different segmentations, right? If I'm selling wine, the creative I'm gonna put against a 25 year old male who uses wine as an asset to their dating life is very different creative than I'm gonna put in front of a 48 to 52 year old female who's part of a wine club who's only been drinking too much Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay and Sancerre. And I want to show her there's other things to drink and that goes on forever whether you sell skateboards or T shirts or toothpaste. So for me it's who are the 30 to 40 different consumer segmentations and not the bullshit of yesterday, 18 to 35 or. Yeah, these big buckets make no sense. The more narrow you go, the more when you think of the creative you're gonna make for it, the more that creative is gonna have teeth. The more that creative has teeth and is more niche, the more the creative will find the audience. I hope it's not lost on you that every hour that's going by how many followers you have is declining in importance. I fucking spent 15 years building my world, it's collapsing. The creative is finding the audience. In fact, I would argue that we don't even live in social media anymore. We're firmly in something I call interest media. Like the creative is finding the audience. If I make a video right now on TikTok about skateboarding, I've never made a skateboard single piece of content about skateboarding. The first 500 people that don't follow me that are gonna see that piece of content are into skateboarding. This is a very profound shift and it is elevated organic, social, creative to the first thing in the marketing mix. Because if you do it well, you can cut your media spend, you can cut your overall marketing budget and you'll have more effectiveness. That is what we're all looking for. The problem is so many people in this room have so been addicted for a decade of just math, math, math, math, math. That they're scared to even put their toe into something they can't measure from the first second. Because you're not actually marketers, you're salespeople. That. That is a. I need you to put this through your pretty heads. You're a very attractive crew here in San Diego. Listen to me, when you do not believe in this, you're a salesperson, not a marketer. You must. By the way, I love selling. I'm obsessed with being a salesperson. In fact, my favorite other thing to talk about live social shopping. I love going live on whatnot and TikTok shop and being a 100% salesperson. It's my favorite. There's nothing wrong with sales. Sales is remarkable. But sales is what you do and rely on when you're not good at branding.

[Moderator]

Yeah, that's a model.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And so. But again, I'm as addicted to math as I am to art. To me, even this color scheme is not by accident. When I think about marketing, I think about math versus art. Meaning the math crew is like fucking math. And they get delusional cause they don't understand the value of the art. The art crew, where I spend a lot of my time in Fortune 500 marketing land, those fuckers are completely lost. They think their opinion on a 30 second commercial or on a picture is the end all be all. And they disrespect consumer truth. It's not red or blue, it's firmly purple. And you have to ask yourself where you're at. Are you one of these people that are obsessed with how the grid looks on your Instagram for brand but can't sell shit? You're too far on the art. Or are you just so mathed out that you don't believe in any. Any of the art? Then you're too far at math. You've got to find this middle. And now the art and it's been cycles. The math dominates for a while, then the art dominates. When I was writing some of those books, like when I wrote the yellow book, crushing it, I pounded Facebook ads. They were so underpriced I just said it. Literally. You could put any picture and video ab test a little bit. You found something that worked for your roas and you cooked vc. Money was pouring. You weren't really even building a real business. You were building a financial arbitrage machine that was just trying to get to the next fundraising round and it all fucking collapsed. Right now we're in a place where art has the value cause the art has math behind it. Now we are literally spending two, three billion dollars in media at VaynerMedia. Plus I've got all my own companies. I believe as I sit here today in San Diego with all of you, that it is fucking asinine to spend $1 of media to amplify a piece of creative that has not been validated by an AI algorithm in a social network.

[Moderator]

Right now, in the audience, how many of you guys, the way that your teams are set up, I know a lot of people, a lot of faces, a lot of brands. In this room, there is not a organic team or a marketing team. There's just like this team makes content. We put it behind ads. Is this how most of you guys are built this way? Anybody different where it's like, bro, everyone's different.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Everyone's got the performance team. And then if they are big enough, they have the brand team. Everybody has media and creative separate. It's all just one thing. But the no shit, dick. That's why I'm here. Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's the punchline. We need to understand that it changed three years ago. The tick tock ification of all social media media has changed everything. And again, I'm kind of bouncing here. Cause I'm excited. Cause I get excited because I'm like, oh, I know six people in here are gonna do something about what I'm saying and it's gonna fundamentally change everything. Not at first, right? You're gonna go back home, you're gonna take more money, hire and commit to creative. You're gonna post, and after a month, nothing's gonna do super well. And you'll be like, fucking Gary. Fuck him, right? But then month three, one video just hits for some unknown reason, you're gonna bring it back. You're gonna take your performance DNA and tweak it a little bit and you're gonna run ads and it's gonna be 3, 4, 5 dollars less than anything you've ever done in your career in your best performance. And there's gonna be room for it. Cause the crank, you know when you're like, you run out of time. This is such a big thing for this audience. The ad ran too much. There's no more roas on it. You blame the inventory. It's not the inventory, it's the creative. You're welcome. The amount of money that you can spend on an ad exponentially grows. If the fucking ad is good. How do you find a good ad? You definitely don't guess. You run creative at scale in these channels, but then this, this is my rant. I know a lot of you follow me and you know this is my rant where this rant got super crazy. Where we're going with AI bots. The fact that this creative is also gonna feed the LLMs, which is basically doing your 1990s version of SEO and not SEM SEO. It's a very big deal. And I, I mean every face I'm looking at right now should be posting three pieces of creative organically a day on Google Shorts just for the LLM in three years. Just that, let alone what it's actually doing day to day on marketing and relevance, consumer insights and conversion.

[Moderator]

If you were to rank, you said Google Shorts, what's the next platform where time and attention and effort should be from the brand side?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

TikTok's got the most advanced algo, as you all know, on a video getting 8 million views when you normally get 300,000. The problem is the reason I wrote a book called Day Trading. Attention is shit. Changes every day. I'm sure you're aware that TikTok's about to go through significant changes. I have a funny feeling that the algorithm's gonna be different and who the hell knows what the hell that thing's gonna do. Meta is a beast. Facebook, all of you know. In fact, another thing that I continue to watch and be baffled by is how little effort people are putting into Facebook Blue. You all know this. We've all become way too one dimensional with Instagram and TikTok, which means the opportunities sit in other places. So Facebook Blue is amazing. I'll give you one. Who here markets to 15 to 25? Raise your hands. You sell your stuff to 15 to 25 year olds or predominantly or a little bit. Alright, so for the three people that raised your hand, brother, Snapchat, Spotlight, which is like their TikTok. Obviously it's not the size of TikTok or Instagram, but there's a shitload of 15 to 25 year olds in there. But the good thing is nobody here is marketing inside of it. So it's just good old fashioned supply and demand for the B2B people in here. LinkedIn's remarkable. A lot of you have emotional feelings towards LinkedIn from a math standpoint because they have an artificially high CPM floor that isn't the same thing everywhere else. The problem is if you really want to, if anybody here B2B and sell SaaS products, I assume not that many. Oh, raise, raise, raise it high. Don't be shy, Raise it high for all of you. The issue is LinkedIn has got so much of the audience we want that if you get the creative right, you can even make their inflated floor on CPMs work for you because the audience is there. You can target people on LinkedIn who are CEOs, who are CIOs, who are CTOs. Their targeting capabilities is still kind of like 2016. Like. So the answer is everyone. You, you can't, you don't. Regardless of how good I am at this nanosecond, every platform's changing. I look at Pinterest once a week just to make sure I'm not missing something, you know, so like, it's an everyday thing for me.

[Moderator]

The sweet spot also is there's a lot of agencies that are needing to keep up and satisfy because a lot of on the brand side, there might be product people, but there's a grip of agencies in this room that provide creative must do more creative for all the platforms that they manage. You obviously have an incredible agency yourself. How are you informing the team? So make sure that they're sticking with and keeping up with what they need to be doing.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Who's an agency person here? Raise your hands, raise it high. So for this crew, I've got a very, very, very good piece of advice. Especially if you decide to go down the organic path like we have, you can't avoid measuring it. A lot of times us agency people are like, just trust me or it's good. Or of course you need to do it. If you are an agency and you don't do both creative and media, you're gonna be in trouble. And when you do creative and media, so again, My agency has $400 million in billings this year. Lot of revenue, right? Every one of those clients, when they ask me what the ROI is of the organic social creative, I tell them, if you don't let us do the media, you can't hold me accountable. If I don't do the media, how do you want me to like? Because the punchline is crush it organically. And then when you have winners, you go into a media spend and you convert it. And everybody here who loves measurement is then cooking, right? Everybody here will buy my thesis if you can spend. Everybody here, brother, just has a marketing budget. So if you have an 8 million dollar marketing budget, 2 million dollar marketing budget, you don't really give a shit if it's on the media, to the platform or if it's to make content. You just want business, right? What is confusing to everyone now is we all went so pendulum to spending a lot of it on the media. But the way to actually convert is to put more investment in the creative. So just very basic math. If you have $2 million in marketing and only 80,000 go or 100,000 go into the creative and the other one nine goes into media, I am telling you, and here's a very important caveat. If you're good at the creative, meaning you have a higher propensity to make videos and pictures that do do well. That if Your spend is 500,000 on the creative, your media spend can be a million. Now you're in for 1.5. It will crush your 2 million at 100,000 1 9. Because the creative is the variable. That is what you have to figure out in however you want to figure it out. I'm a big fan of live social shopping because I actually see a direct correlation. This might be something you guys can cook with that if you sell, even if you go on TikTok shop and you're not even selling that much stuff, like you sold 80 units, but you can see the data of where you sold 40 of the 80 units by one thing you said clip that and run that ad outperforms a lot of your best 80 stuff. So you're using the live social shopping as a selling day, but it's also a production day for the creative and you have black and white data that shows the words you said that made more people fucking buy it. I'm sure we can all figure out that that ad will do well and.

[Moderator]

Everybody wins there now. Okay there. The benefit of having someone that can speak to literally every other person in this room is an absolute blessing. I'm already starting to see some questions come through. David. We throw back up the slido scan QR code. Is there any questions from the audience that Gary can speak directly to? He's got a power to really jump into it. Keon, would you please share. Please share your name, the brand, to give him as much context as he needs.

[Hans Grabbard]

Hey everybody, my name is Hans Grabbard. Gary, great getting to be here. So I understand that there's a part of the math and there's a part of the art, but the argument that everybody's having right now is ad structure. Whereas people used to have ad structures on meta, whereas like have seven retargeting, re, interest, broad, all that kind of stuff. We're now seeing it being boiled down to two. Your AI shopping campaign and a testing campaign. And that's an argument that we're seeing. Where do you stand on that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Argument that that's an and that I'm fine with that. That's a fine structure to be part of the equation. What I'm saying is where's the live shopping of it all if you're selling something? What I'm saying is how much organic creative are you putting putting out? I think it's not lost on people here actually. By show of hands, how many of you are aware of either other businesses or direct competitors or maybe in your own life, how many of you were aware that a DTC brand had a TikTok at 10 million views and sell a fuckload of stuff? Raise your hands. Raise your hands. So to me, like I'm fine with that, but there's so many. To me, the thing that I struggle with in a room like this is we have this obsession with or as if there's one structure that's going to work, right? This is an and thing. I'm thrilled with that. You need everything. Literally. I spent 5% of my talk right now trying to make sure that everyone's producing enough content to be the first results when somebody types in what soap should I buy on OpenAI and on Gemini in three years. So it all depends on your life cycle. Half the people here, brother, don't give a shit for three years because they want to sell their company next 12 months. So they don't need to listen to that as much. But I think it's an and thing. But I will tell you, there's disproportionate returns on investment in a 36, 48 month window right now of really being thoughtful and giving lots of shits around your organic social creative.

[Hans Grabbard]

Thank you very much. And then the second question is we were just talking, we were asking somebody on our. Somebody thinks that like, you know, the blend between performance and art and marketing, that should be everybody. There shouldn't be an organic and there shouldn't be a paid person. Is that across all channels in your eyes or is that only on Meta? Only on Instagram.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think it should be all channels, but I think it should be creative and media, right? Not performance and marketing, just creative and media. But what I'm saying is, and this should make all the math people very happy. I can't believe we can measure Creative. I've spent 30 years marketing and I had to guess every time I put something up if that was going to work well. And I had to spend real money on Google and Meta and other platforms to see the early returns. Even when I got those, even when Meta got so good where I could spend $1,000 to get meaningful insights. It was still $1,000 times unlimited assets. The fact that I can just go organic, have the upside of what everyone just raised their hands about, which is get 10 million views and sell stuff, but then also have the ability to bring that home and go performance. So I think what has to happen is, who here is a media math performance marketer? Raise your hands. All of you know that you've been frustrated with the creative. You're at the mercy of the creative no matter how good your channel strategy is. And like you figured out that nobody knew about Snapchat, Spotlight and you're buying attention for 40 cents when everyone's spending a dollar on Meta. It still didn't matter if the creative fucking sucked. The fact that we're measuring creative as a added value for just posting organically is bananas. So I think it's creative and media people. There'll be lots of channels. We didn't even talk about CCTV, YouTube, TV, pre roll. Are you kidding me? There's so much opportunity, but the creative is the punchline. For example, this keynote, I have your attention, but if everything coming out of my mouth was 2015 best practices and stupid, this wouldn't be effective. The creative is the punchline. And so I need more people to understand that. And I understood why people didn't want to because it was all fugazi in the ether right now. It's not. You post, there's no hiding if you get 5,000 views. Because I don't know if you know this. All the AI algos that run the news feeds, they're all based on relevance. This is the first time that distribution is aligned with the advertiser. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal didn't care if you made a full page ad that sucked. They just wanted your money. NBC And CBS and ESPN didn't care if your 30 second commercial was good or bad. They were paying for your distribution, they were charging you. They just took your money. They could care less. Meta and TikTok and LinkedIn and Google Care a lot. Because if your ad and creative isn't good, you're leaving the platform and going to another platform. They're aligned to keep people on the platform. So they're showing, they're setting this up. They want to keep people on. That's why we've gone to interest, not social. How do you keep people on? You put stuff in front of them that they like. I actually predict that these platforms won't even take our ad money. If the creative's not good enough, you know how insane that is? Is that sick? Like, I literally think there's a day and age where they're gonna get so deep on knowing how valuable you staying on it is that you'll literally try to run ads against a piece of creative. It'll run for a few couple hundred bucks and it will stop you. That's how much they want to keep people on. So this is the era we're in. So creative people who are held accountable to the math are incredibly important. And then good media people that understand, okay, now I got some good assets. Where's the underpriced attention? Whether it's CTV, YouTube, Snapchat, Spotlight, Pinterest link, LinkedIn, Facebook, direct mail, outdoor, I could care less. What's the price? What's the value? But the creative is measurable. This is a big deal. And that was not the case 36 months ago.

[Moderator]

I feel like most of us are dealing with some terrible experience on on Meadow. Some things just won't spend.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's because everyone's doing the same shit. You're just letting the AI friends. If you're letting the AI do it and everyone's doing it, what the do you think think's gonna happen? Meta wins, you lose. Wake the up. Thank you.

[Moderator]

There's. So I'm gonna, we're gonna go couple on stage. This being upvoted again, if you have the questions, ask it. We'll, I'll, I'll hand the mic around, I promise. Can I go the other side this question, Gary, how do you get better at the art as a non creative person, how do you get better at the art?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

There's two ways. You're self aware enough to realize you're not the art person and you hire someone who is or you do what some of us in this room have done, which is you get into better shape, which is you go to the gym every day and you eat better. You either spend hours every day learning how to get better at the art by consuming content around how to get better at the art, or you have the funds or the humility or the self awareness to say, fuck it, I'm not the art person. Which is fine. I'm the business person, I'm the math person. Let me hire someone. Here's why all you math people are going to get so pumped about what's happening. You didn't know how to measure how good the art person was before. Right? You could do it after you spent a lot of money, but now when they Post organically on all the channels. Either they get views or they don't. And any brand here that is spending money on getting more views for a post, they post organically to make it look like it did better. So your grid looks good is completely out of their mind. You're literally spending ad money for the perception that the creative did well. Just archive it and do the next post.

[Moderator]

How do you scale paid social? You need to test everything organically first. When you have the move, that must fast. Launch new ads, launch new offers every day.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes, that's right. That's what you have to do.

[Moderator]

Done. Great question.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But to that question, you do all understand that we're competing against each other for money, Right. It should be hard.

[Moderator]

People forget that.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think so.

[Moderator]

I know so. Look at this room. They're trying to figure out what to do next.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, actually this room, to their credit, is actually part of the crew that actually can win. There's people that are team that are just laying in bed letting the AI do it and think it should be all okay.

[Moderator]

Hi.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Hi. My name's Chelsea. Hi, Chelsea.

[Sunny Road]

Called Sunny Road. My question is, I love this conversation and what you said about art and branding and sales is what you do when you're not good at branding. What do you recommend in terms of budget? As you're looking at next year and we're on the smaller side, how much.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Revenue do you do?

[Sunny Road]

6 million.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

How much do you spend on marketing this year?

[Sunny Road]

Not enough.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Three percent. Three? Yeah. So more than 3%. But again, I laugh because I'm so obsessed, because marketing to me is the offense of a business. Right. I don't laugh because I don't know your margins. I definitely don't know what your objectives are. So let's break it down because this might help people. So you're doing 6 million. You spend very little on marketing, which does that mean you're getting a lot of customers through organic.

[Sunny Road]

Yes.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So your personal organic content.

[Sunny Road]

Yes.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Makes sense. You sell a physical product.

[Sunny Road]

Yeah, we do design and dev CRO and retention. So we're organic on Shopify Premier Platform Partners.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Have you thought about live social shopping selling on those platforms?

[Sunny Road]

I don't know where to begin.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Okay, you go to Whatnot and you go to TikTok shop and you just go like. Meaning you just Google or chat GPT. How do I sell on whatnot? Enter. Right. By the way, every question is no longer valid because AI can answer it for you. Like, literally, there's no such thing as I don't know where to Go anymore. It's crazy. I'm not judging. This is like all of us, like it is ludicrous to have a question not answered anymore in the world we now live in. We just haven't, all me included, adapted fully yet. But in 24 months, that will never run through your mind again. Where to start is over a service, not a product. I get that. But you know what's crazy? You can literally make a product that you sell that comes with a service for free. So for everyone who sells a service, you can literally create if you want to. The reason I'm to going going down that path with her is she's personality. So I see an opportunity. Personal brand creates other opportunities. But I think the biggest thing for you is making unlimited content around the service organically across seven platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all that stuff. And when something does well, that's when you spend media dollars against it to amplify it for conversion. Here's a quick one for you.

[Moderator]

Generally AI video or image or real human nonsense.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes, fundamentally. You know, I turned 50 in November, which is insane. And I'm like, okay, I'm halfway home, you know, about to go up to halftime. What have I learned? I've learned that many things have factored into what's worked for me for 30 years. But disproportionately my obsession with and in a world where everyone's obsessed with or has been a huge competitive advantage. The answer to that question is AI images. AI video. Human images. Human video. It's just always and. And opportunity costs and all this. But what people dismiss is you learn. Well, Gary, I don't have time. Well, get the fuck out then, because somebody else is going to have time. Hey, Gary, how you doing? Good, brother. I own a Street. What's your name? I'm Josh. Josh. I'm actually best friends with Buster Scher. Oh, that's awesome. He's the best. Nice to meet you, man. Good to meet you too. I own a Street Interview ad company in New York City. Yes. Street Interview ads for consumer brands. Greaves are actually one of my first clients. Dropped out of college. Street reviewed every single day. 40,000 steps a day, built it up. We have 32 team members now. It's incredible. Good for you. We have actors and comedians. Do you train? Yep.

[Hans Grabbard]

For.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I totally get it. As I'm growing this business, we're moving to Santa Monica, Miami. We're really trying to productize treatment ads. How do you see D competing with us in the next two to three years? Favorably. Okay. I literally in 24 months I could be like, hey, I need a super attractive dude with blonde hair and you know, and I want him to be on a street in Tehran asking people about my, you know, porcupine nuts startup. Like, I mean, it's coming but, but that's nothing to get scared of because it's. And AI is a huge tidal wave. Either you're going to be like, fuck and put your head in the sand and here's your strategy that it doesn't happen, or you realize you need to be at the forefront of being someone who's great at doing the prompt engineering and have both because there will be room for both. Right. And you are a production company of creative. You need to get out of just the niche of that you need to add. And not just street interviews, but other kinds of productions, other niche, other content niches. That's right. If you come to me and you're like, hey, Gary, I do street videos, I'm like, that's great, cool, let's do a be friends thing. If you come and say I do street videos. We do podcast production as well. We also do green screen. As you start to add, you become a 360 production company. Obviously that was your look. VaynerMedia. For the first three years, all we did was community management. Literally, my company just replied to people in the comments on Twitter and Facebook fan pages over the last 12 years. We do everything now and I think that's what you have to think about. Thank you so much. Good luck, brother.

[Moderator]

About four minutes left of you here.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I can milk it a little bit. Let's do eight. There's more questions. LLM so much from Reddit.

[Moderator]

It seems everyone should have a Reddit strategy. What's your Reddit strategy?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

In the last several months, weeks. LLMs are starting to pull less from Reddit because so much of the Reddit content is AI generated day trading attention. So to me, Reddit is stand up, pay attention to what I said. Google Shorts. Why Gemini is real, why Google is going to lose an extraordinary amount of market share with search. As we all know, they're a monopoly in search. Nobody's fucking killing it on Bing. Maybe a couple people have figured it out, but Google has owned search. We're about to go to a new version of search. Right? What Google did to the Yellow Pages. AI bots are about to do to Google, right? Google isn't just sitting around saying, cool, let's get killed. They're desperate to win, they're smart. They know they're not going to have 95% of the market the way they did in classic search. But they want 50, 60. What does Google own? They own Android. There's more Androids than iPhones. I actually think you're not gonna be able to even open your Android in five years without them forcing you down, Gemini. That's how much they need to win. Where is that content gonna come from? It's going to come from YouTube and YouTube shorts. So Reddit is standalone over here. And yes, the early portions of LLMs models are grabbing a good amount of content from Reddit. If you look carefully over the last couple of updates, it's already starting to decline. How many people here are OG, OG, SEO people from the late 90s, early 2000s? Raise your hands. Just want to see this. Because actually, can you stand up? If you're one of those people, please just appease me, sir. You, ma', am, I saw you. Just look around, everyone. Look at these people's faces. They can tell you what's going to happen in LLMs. Thank you. They know that back in the day, we did lots of different things to show up on the first result of Google. But then there'd be an update, hurricane and tornado, like, every couple months, every couple years, shit would change and our best practices would change. Same thing's gonna happen here. So, yes, I think in Reddit, by the way, I love Reddit, and I think a good Reddit strategy is good. I just like the double benefit of doing marketing on social that drives sales now and. And it's contributing to your LLM. And I don't want to assume everyone here has unlimited resources, you know, because I know we don't, you know, 6 million, 3%. Like, I just know we don't have unlimited resources. So I'm trying to think about what is the pecking order. But if you can do everything, do everything.

[Hans Grabbard]

Hi, Gary.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Hi. Hi, Robin.

[Sunny Road]

I made a career out of Beano.

[Moderator]

Plenty.

[Sunny Road]

All over social channels.

[Hans Grabbard]

Yep.

[Sunny Road]

Driving millions of dollars in revenue.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Makes sense. Makes sense.

[Sunny Road]

And so the conversation where I always feel like I'm feeding my head into a wall is when I'm in a room with paid media people or performance advertisers because I can't speak in terms of dollars in versus dollars out.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well, you can. I just literally. I just literally gave. I'll tell you, I just literally. I get it. Which is why I'm yelling so hard about this. You're now in the game. You sit. If I'm a performance marketer, I'm sitting with you, and you're like organic. And I'm like, but what's the return on investment? You're like, very simple. When you invest, you say to me, very simple. Gary, how much are you spending 6 million on media? How much are you spending on organic social? Me? Nothing. We're just doing creative for the 6 million. You're like, Gary, if you give me 600,000, you're now at five point. If you post $600,000 worth in a year of organic social, the three to seven best performing creative organic videos and pictures, I'm going to tell you to then slightly tweak. So I'm giving you that. I'm down to 5, 4. If I run 5, 4 against 7 ads that you made that were organic, you made it organic. Ha ha ha. It's funny, it's pretty. I come back, I add a yellow banner at the end that says, here's free shipping. I change the copy, you say to me, your 5, 4 is going to outperform your 6 because the creative is the variable. Either I believe that or I don't, but that's it. And I would tell you, do not be in the convincing business. Be in the conviction business. Understand what I'm saying and show them examples of it. Like Walgreens sold out of every mango gummy candy by one organic ad. That's real life sales. That's why television work, that's why marketing works. So somebody might be so one dimensional that they don't care about anything but the math of it all. But more and more people are realizing what I'm talking about in rooms like this. What I just told you is the answer. You will out hack an LTV and ROAS on your 5, 4. Gary, if you give me 600,000 and you've got to give me the year to do it because I don't know when the viral hits or the over indexing hits. It's not just virality. If you're a brand that normally gets 800 views per video. If something gets 54,000, that's like a very big jump from what your norm is. And again, I can see by the faces you're catching what I'm putting down. Like you bring that video back, you slightly convert it, the imagery, the call to action, the first three seconds, definitely the copy. And you run the ad. And don't forget, you're, you're gonna have insights on who saw it organically. This is how you're gonna find new customer bases. You're like, shit, this ad did well in Texas organically. Let me run the ads in Texas against males. So you just got to explain to them that's and by the way, I'm telling you firmly that that's right. Now what I don't know, and this is why VaynerMedia doesn't win 100% of the time, is if you can't hit creative pay dirt with the 600,000 I gave you, then you're in trouble. But the thesis is right. Thank you everybody. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.