Transcript
Gary Vaynerchuk (0:00)
I would like to focus today's talk on the biggest opportunity in marketing, which is finding loose teeth in your house and selling it. I'm really happy to be here. Kudos to possible three years. Three years and already one of the most important conferences in our ecosystem. And so it's a real pleasure to be here. Yeah, we should clap that up. You know the format I'm taking with this talk, actually, and you could see a mic there and a mic there is to just go into Q and A. I think at this point. I've been fucking talking for 15 years about the same, literally about the same shit. And so I'd rather go into Q and A to see if there's anyone in the room that has a. A nuance underneath the thesis. So please start lining up because I'm gonna spend three to five minutes max right now to set up the conversation. But I'd love to jam with all of you, so please start lining up. The jam of the conversation for the ad folk in here is very simple, which is there's a couple things that stand out to me. Number one, I believe over the last 70 years of marketing, working media dollars have been used to disguise bad creative. And I believe that we are now living in the era of working media dollars being used to amplify good creative. And I do not believe our industry is actually doing that. And I want to talk about that and compel people to understand how real this is. It sits in a classic marketing framework which is a lot of people have been in the mindset of paid, owned, earned. And I believe we're actually living in the owned, earned, paid era. And so what that means, if I put it into English for some of the entrepreneurs here or salespeople, very simply put, very simply put, I believe any Fortune 5000 company that is not remarkably over investing in organic social media creative is making a fundamental strategic mistake. Because the way we sit today with these seven social networks is that when you put out creative, they are fully running a model that is based on relevance. And for the people that love the old school marketing books, good news. I agree with you. Relevance creates consideration. Consideration leads to people buying. The fact that we have at scale the biggest tech companies in the world. Google Shorts, Meta, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, ByteDance, TikTok. The biggest marketing companies in the world, the biggest tech infrastructures in the world have algos when we post on social that are desperate for that content to reach an audience that's actually interested in it so that you all stay on the platform so they can sell more ads is the greatest opportunity for marketers ever. Ever. For the first time in marketing history, the creative creates reach. That's insane. And it creates reach based on relevance. For 70 years we have been guessing in boardrooms through our egos and our politics on what the campaign or commercial should be and then spend an ungodly amount of money disguising that it was probably a piece of shit. And now we can post at scale with content that is relevant, see that human beings, not us in the industry, care about it and have the ability to amplify it or campaign on top of it. I believe a paid, owned, earned model is broken. In fact, every business that I own, the ones that are on that screen or anything that I'm the chairman of the board of or a very disproportionate investor in, has in 2025 gone to a model where we do not spend $1 of working media until it has been affirmed organically on social. There is actually, if I may, with all due respect, zero reason to spend media dollars amplifying any piece of creative that has not been affirmed with organic reach in 2025. Yet 99.9% of the brands represented here and agencies will do such. I don't know what else to say. It's black and white. The vc, the ecosystem of entrepreneurs in here, the companies that are going from zero to $50 million a year in revenue are only living in a social, organic first framework. And then there's us. I beg our industry. I know the financial reasons we're not doing this. I get it. I get the agency stuff, I get the brand stuff. I get the bullshit reports that justify all our behavior in this industry from the MMMs and the MMAs and everything else. I get it. But there is not one fucking person in here that has a half a brain that doesn't know that I'm 100% right and it is time we act as because for my fellow agency friends, I do not view us competing. I view us as an industry in a crisis where if we do not prove value, we will not exist. There's a reason shit's going in house. It's cause we fucking suck. Thank you everybody. I'll see you later. For the first, by the way, for the first time ever, brands, agency friends, we can measure creative. Creative does not get views in social if it is not good. I don't care what your opinion is or what color of fucking fuchsia you like or what adjective makes you get going or what's on brand from something written 100 years ago. If it doesn't get views, it is not good. Good is defined as views achieved organically, nothing else. We are here. I'm sorry to tell you. I am also mad. I also desperately wish that this was the Don Draper 1950s. I would drink tons of alcohol in midtown Manhattan. I'm charismatic as fuck and I can sell my ass off. I would have fucking crushed it. But we're not here. And the level of merit in creative that everybody is trying to run away from is. Is not going anywhere. So either we learn the new craft, which is knowing how to make creative that actually gets views, not the production value of an $800,000 video that nobody's going to watch, or we will die, both the agencies and the brands. And that is where we're at. And now I would like to open my Q and A. Thank you.