The #1 Metric Retailers Need to Master in the AI Era

Summary

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The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode: The #1 Metric Retailers Need to Master in the AI Era

Date: January 27, 2026
Host: Gary Vaynerchuk

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Gary Vaynerchuk dives into the transformation sweeping the retail and marketing landscape, focusing on the key metric retailers must prioritize in an AI-driven era. Using contemporary case studies and his trademark style, Gary explores the impact of interest-driven algorithms, the evolving nature of brand loyalty, the rise of live social shopping, and actionable advice for leveraging content and platforms. The conversation is packed with real-world insights and challenges the way traditional marketing is measured and executed in the age of AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Barnes & Noble vs. Retail Bankruptcies

• [00:18] The session opens with a discussion on Barnes & Noble's surprising growth (six or seven stores opened recently) despite tough times for many physical retailers.
• Gary's Advice:
  • Negotiate favorable leases.
  • Operate with a smart P&L.
  • Drive demand through up-to-date, contemporary marketing.

The True Retail Metrics in the AI Era

• [01:33] Question: What should retailers be measuring today?
• Gary:
  • Too many focus on "data reporting for the sake of reporting."
  • For retailers, results are simple: "It shows up at the cash register."
  • Key Metrics:
    • Track if "working media dollars + creative" (in one silo) drive short-term and long-term sales.
    • Focus on Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers to measure brand impact.

"[Retail] is uncomfortably simple to measure. Corporate is bad at it."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [02:55]

Rethinking Brand Loyalty

• [03:22] Question: Does brand loyalty survive in today's world?
• Gary:
  • Brand loyalty still matters and will explode as AI agents reorder for us.
  • Reorders will depend on brand relevance.
  • The flaw: Executives measure brand with "subjective opinions and silly reports."
• Challenging Conventional Wisdom:
  • Brand lift studies and polling are "always wrong."
  • It's as hard to quantify brand love as "how much you love your mom." [04:49]
  • True brand loyalty = repeat sales and measurable actions.

"We're trying to measure something that's not measurable and then we decide to waste a gadrillion dollars on it and sit in boardrooms and debate adjectives and hues of color."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [04:49]

Measuring Creative & the Rise of "Interest Media"

• [05:27] Social algorithms now enable real-time creative testing, letting brands measure the true effect of their messaging.
• Number one measurement:
  • Views achieved by creative, across all social networks, monthly, gross, and per post.
• Shift from social to "interest media":
  • It's not your follower count, but the relevance of your post that dictates reach.
  • Repeated relevant impressions create loyalty, just as personal relationships do.

"We are in complete relevance warfare."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [10:31]

Content Creation Strategy: Followers vs. Engagement

• [10:18] Is it better to build a following or focus on relevant content?
• Gary:
  • Content relevance trumps follower count.
  • Winning creative identified organically should be reused (with minimal tweaks) in performance marketing campaigns for superior results.

"The highest performing organic reached pieces of content... when you take that content back to the lab... it outperforms your best AB meta testing by a country mile. That’s the brain fuck right now."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [10:47]

Platform Prioritization for Retailers

• [12:06] Should brands be on all platforms?
• Gary:
  • Ideally, yes—reallocate wasted spend from programmatic ads to platforms with real attention.
  • LinkedIn is an underappreciated B2B goldmine.
  • For B2C, contextually relevant content on LinkedIn and other platforms is crucial.

The New Role of Creative in Paid Media

• [14:38] "We've lived in advertising... hiding bad creative. We're now in [the era of] amplifying and scaling good creative."
• "Good" creative is what gets real views, not what executives declare "on brand".

Live Social Shopping

• [15:15] Live shopping is already massive—$7-10B in GMV for Whatnot in a single year, yet barely recognized by industry leaders.
• Contrasts slow growth in US (11% penetration) with China’s mass adoption—cars, luxury, everything is sold via live.
• Every retailer should be developing a live shopping strategy, especially around TikTok Shop, Whatnot, Twitch, eBay Live, and District.
• Not just for low-priced “tchotchkas”—high-ticket items work too.

"Live shopping is attention... it’s easier than any other ecommerce. Every retailer here... not spending an enormous amount of time debating their live social shopping strategy... they are setting themselves up for very challenging 2027, 2028 realities."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [18:23]

AI's Impact on Retail, Brand & Influencer Marketing

• [19:37] The AI Era will bring "a decade of confusion."
• Gary doesn’t fear AI replacing influencers—sees it as industry evolution.
• AI will displace "B, C, D-list influencers" but it’s part of progress and brings enormous upsides to humanity, especially in medical tech.

Embracing AI & Attention Platforms as a New Creator

• [22:28] If starting today, Gary would embrace AI—but the fundamentals haven't changed: attention and value for the audience.
• You don’t need years to build a following—the right content can go viral instantly due to algorithms focused on interest, not relationships.

"We're in a profound opportunity... the level of merit and opportunity for the individual human because of where the algos are in social right now is profound. Profound. And I want more people to take advantage of it."
— Gary Vaynerchuk [24:04]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "Polling is always wrong." [04:44]
• "Go measure love... show me your report on how much you love your mom." [04:49]
• "The algorithm changed no one. The algorithm exposed everyone." [10:02]
• "I think this is social media all over again... this is attention. Consumers see something and they act on it." [18:03]

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• 00:18 — Barnes & Noble's retail resurgence
• 01:33 — The metrics retailers must measure
• 03:22 — Brand loyalty and its future with AI
• 05:27 — How social media algorithms really measure creative
• 07:09 — Shift from “social” to “interest media”
• 10:31 — Content relevance vs. follower count
• 11:03-11:55 — Organic content as a source for paid creative
• 13:02 — The value of LinkedIn as a platform
• 15:15 — The current state and future of live social shopping
• 19:37 — AI and the future of influencer marketing
• 22:28 — The opportunity for new creators, platforms, and attention

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Summary Takeaways for Retailers & Marketers

• Views Achieved is the #1 Key Metric: Track the actual reach and engagement your creative gets, not follower count or “vanity metrics.”
• Focus on LTV and Real Transactions: True brand value shows at the register and in repeat sales, not in subjective brand studies.
• Relevance is King: The only way to win is to make content people actively want to engage with—algorithms now reward interest, not relationships.
• Constantly Iterate Content: Use the best-performing organic content as paid ads for outsized performance.
• Be Platform-Agnostic but Contextual: Try to be everywhere, but ensure each piece of creative matches the mindset/context of the platform.
• Invest Early in Live Shopping & AI: Physical and digital retail alike must adapt to the coming wave of live commerce and intelligent automation.
• Embrace Change: AI will disrupt the influencer landscape, but also offers opportunity and value if you prioritize the end consumer’s interests.

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating retail, media, or digital marketing in the AI era, as Gary's candid insights and practical guidance cut through industry noise with clarity and real-world examples.

Transcript

[A]

I wanted to start by asking if anyone here, just of a show of hands, knows the significance of the number six, seven. Anybody? I'm making the gen zers cringe a little bit. Okay.

[B]

This is the GaryVee audio experience.

[A]

Six, seven is actually the number of stores that Barnes and Noble opened last year. And I say that because, to me, it is an amazing story, a bright spot in physical retail at a time when. When there are a lot of grim stories about physical retail. We all know about Rite Aid and Big Lots and joann fabrics and a number of them that went bankrupt. But there's Barnes and Noble did something right now, Barnes and Noble, about six years ago, they were taken private. And it wasn't a foregone conclusion that they would end up in this growth spurt that they're in now. What they did, one of the things that they did that really worked for them was take advantage of TikTok and the BookTok hashtag that the young kids, as they say, like to use. So my first question for Gary, since we're gonna start this on the physical retail is like, what do retailers need to do to be more like Barnes and Noble and less like Big Lots?

[B]

Get good deals on their leases and operate those stores with a smart P and L and create demand through contemporary marketing that allows it to be a viable store?

[A]

What do you think that. What are the metrics now? If you're talking about, say you're a legacy retailer and you are in. We're all in this world now where there's all this information coming at us. What are the real metrics that retailers need to be paying attention to that. That they might currently not be?

[B]

Well, I think for all businesses. Bless you. For all businesses. I think we. Especially when you get into the Fortune 5000 landscape, I think all of us are looking at metrics that are reporting and data for the sake of reporting and data. The great thing about being a retailer, unlike being a CPG or some other category, is it shows up at the cash register, right? One of the great mistakes of Fortune 500 land over the last 20 years was separating the media and the creative departments, both on the agency side and turnally, which allowed for a lot of fake reports to exist and doing a lot of this. You know, I grew up a retailer. You know, I vaynermedia. My entire career is based on how I did marketing at my father's liquor store. 20 minutes that way, over the river. I was never confused if my marketing was going well or not because I didn't have all the things that come along with the inertia and corporate realities you should be measuring. If the working media dollars along with the creative in one siloed environment is driving the short term sales that you're looking for, and you're looking at the ltv, the lifetime value of the customers you're attracting to understand if you're having a brand effect overall, it's uncomfortably simple to measure. Corporate is bad at it.

[A]

One of the talking points for this, for this panel, the panel description was something to the effect that brand loyalty is earned and lost in seconds. I'm curious if you think brand loyalty even exists anymore in this world.

[B]

Of course it does, in a very substantial way. In fact, I think we're all going to learn all about brand loyalty as we go over into this next decade of AI where your agents are reordering products for you without your intervention, you're going to see set that reorder mechanism around brand loyalty and the only thing that will stop you from getting that repeat order of your mundane everyday items will be a brand that affects you with relevance enough that you decide to go into your tech stack and change the settings. We're going into a profound explosion of actual brand value. The problem is we have a whole landscape of executives all over the world that want to measure brand in a bullshit way based on subjective opinions and silly reports.

[A]

You mean like consumer surveys?

[B]

Would that be brand lift studies? I mean, our whole industry is built on fake reports.

[A]

Yeah, well, I mean the polling I'm sure is accurate to some extent, but.

[B]

Polling is always wrong. But.

[A]

Or maybe it's not measured. Maybe they're not measuring the right things.

[B]

Well, but we also have to become more human and more common sense oriented. Like go measure love. I would like you all to show me your report on how much you love your mom. You know, like your belief in God, like brand affinity and loyalty. Like we're trying to measure something that's not measurable and then we decide to waste a gadrillion dollars on it and sit in boardrooms and debate adjectives and hues of color. We're, we're delusional.

[A]

Well, repeat sales are measurable. So if you have a returning customer that indicates some kind in a real way.

[B]

Chris, we're also living in a world where creative is measurable. The greatest thing about social media right now is that the AI algorithms are written based on relevance. Everybody in this room, if they've gone down some path of marketing in their lives, and in retail, it's marketing and sales, obviously there's so many other things, customer experience, but everybody knows that it's relevance to consideration to purchase that stays super true. So to your point, you know, repeat sales or first sale is incredibly measurable and we live in this world now where we can actually get true creative testing as a byproduct from a daily structured, strategic social creative at scale, production and creative engine. Every single retailer sitting in front of us right now needs to have that capability. Whether they build it internally, whether they have an agency partner do it, whether they do it in a jv. But we're living in a great time where we can finally measure brand AKA creative in a way that we haven't been able to. And I think everybody here, I'm just gonna go very practical with the hope that this brings someone value. Everybody here's number one measurement needs to be views achieved. Views achieved by the creative in your social output across the seven or eight social networks, monthly, gross and per post. That becomes the starting point to understand how your marketing mix can be successful.

[A]

I've heard you say a few times that you believe we're now not in the age of social media, but interest media. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

[B]

That's what I was just referring to. I've painstakingly worked really hard for the last 20 years to amass 50 plus million followers and I'm starting to on a daily basis lose the leverage that I've created for myself. Because we're now down to a place where the individual piece of creative gets the reach, not how many followers you have.

[A]

You are no longer back to the brand loyalty thing.

[B]

Well, relevance thing or relevance. This is important, right? It's the relevance thing. The creative gets views from the relevance. And to your point, if you see something that's relevant to you over and over and over again, now you start to create loyalty. Right now you're like, oh, this is a brand I like. They talk about things I like, this is things I like. And all of a sudden you've gone from acquaintance to friend and eventually family. That journey that we do as humans, we do that with brands like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's interesting again. That's interesting again. Now the product has to be great. Now you get the product, you like it enough or you like it a whole lot. And now you're into real brand loyalty.

[A]

So this is a relatively recent change with the way the algorithm. The algorithm prioritizes what it thinks you're interested in as opposed to who's in your friend. How did this come about?

[B]

Because the companies got smarter. It really was driven by TikTok for all the OGs in the room. It was originally done by Tumblr years ago. I was an early investor in Tumblr and I thought it was going to be bigger than Facebook and Twitter. Those were my first three investments. Thank God I wasn't making prediction videos back then because I would have definitely made that video. And it was because I believed. I knew that I loved the jets and wine and other things, that I would like them forever. I also knew that some high school friends, some former coworkers, some college friends would come in and out of my life. There was more consistency of what I was interested in than who my acquaintances or lightweight friends. Best friends can stick, they're family. And so I could already see when social exploded and I was very early on it, I was already 31, I wasn't 16 or 14. So I'd lived enough to see the social dynamics moved enough where I understood that social had some vulnerabilities if it was just based on who you followed. People change, interests change lifestyles, life journeys. But interests, the core interests we all have here, they stick. New ones join. And when they join, like for example, if I got into fishing right now, Chris, very quickly, all my social networks would be showing me fishing content because I would start to search and explore fishing content.

[A]

You only have to linger on that one video and then TikTok suddenly realizes it thinks you want like 50,000 of the same kind of video.

[B]

It does start to think you want that. We are in control to show the algorithms if we are interested in it. I laugh when people are like, oh, the algorithm changed me. The algorithm changed no one. The algorithm exposed everyone.

[A]

So for brands or retailers, starting now, like if you're starting your social game right now, should you be prioritizing, even building a following? Is it more about just creating content that you think people are going to really want to engage with?

[B]

Number two creates number one. We are in complete relevance warfare. And for all the math kids in the room, the greatest part of this is that if you get committed to organic social at scale to bring relevance and awareness, the highest performing organic reached pieces of content. When you take that content back to the lab, slightly tweak it and put it into your performance, it outperforms your best AB meta testing by a country mile. That's the brain fuck right now.

[A]

I want to talk a little bit about some of the.

[B]

One second before we move on.

[A]

Go for it.

[B]

That's the brain fuck Right now there's a lot of people in here who are doing performance marketing, which could I ask everyone, could we all just agree to change the term to performance selling? Because it's not marketing, it's performance selling for people that are doing performance. If you haven't gone down the rabbit hole of organic social re edited for performance, it's one of the greatest additions to your tool belt that will grow your business. The creative has been validated by the algo. People like that creative. You bring it back home and slap on free shipping. Two for one. You give it a performance element. Don't change it so much that you took the essence out of it that made it relevant. This is a huge addition to your game that I could not recommend all of you more. Sorry.

[A]

No, no, not at all. I want to actually talk about some of the. The platforms themselves. I heard you. You were asked once, which platforms should retailers be on? Should businesses be on? You said all of them.

[B]

Everybody, 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. It'll make my mom super happy.

[A]

Why? Why do we need to be on all these different platforms? Especially when you're a smaller company and you might not have the resources to.

[B]

Well, I think that's very fair. If your resources are super low, there is some prioritization. Again, the brands that are represented here are more interested in throwing unlimited money at programmatic garbage and so many other behaviors that bring no value. And so I want them to take those monies back and reallocate them to, you know, the places where the attention of the people that buy things is.

[A]

Actually, I've heard you mention LinkedIn as an underappreciated platform to build businesses. I'm curious, like, for people in the room who's using LinkedIn to build their business, actively raise your hands high just.

[B]

So people can see it around the room. You know, I think we would all agree that's probably more hands than we than many in the room anticipated and definitely more hands than would have gone up three years ago. I think what the hands in this room figured out that I've been on for quite a while is that yes, LinkedIn is a more. First of all, if you're a B2B company, for all the B2B people in here, if you're selling SaaS, if you're selling to the people in the room, that is your Facebook, TikTok, Instagram in one every B2B company should be pot committed to LinkedIn. That's one, two even for us B2 seers. You know, sure, we might be going in there to recruit or learn something about what happened here, but we're still human beings. So if you see a piece of creative that's relevant to you, you know you're going to consider it. And if you're smart in this room and you make the creative contextual to someone who's in LinkedIn, right? If your piece of content is about, hey, are you traveling all the time for work? All of us in LinkedIn are like, yeah, that's fucking me. And so that's gonna hook you. And then you can kind of convert where you wanna go with it, even if you're selling sandals or candles or wine. Oops, sorry. So, you know, I think the smartest marketers are obsessed with context, volume, relevance at all cost, humility around creative. Not leaning on your subjective opinion like your dom Draper in 1965, but understanding that we are in a distribution model now where we can create creative at scale and get consumer insights and data affirmation that then allows us to deploy paid media for. For another framework on this. Friends, I think we've lived in advertising for 70 to 80 years in a model that is let's use working media dollars to hide bad creative. I think we're now clearly in the era of let's use working media dollars only to amplify and scale good creative. And good is judged by did it actually achieve views? Not four executives in a room saying, that's on brand.

[A]

I'd love to talk a little bit about live social shopping. I've watched a few videos of you talking about live social shopping. Probably about a year ago you were talking a lot about this and saying it was going to be a really big thing here. I'm wondering if you think it's lived up to your expectations so far. This is the sort of buying stuff off of a social media website in a live situation like QVC style.

[B]

Friends. And please, I know it's early, but just please raise your hand if just so the room can get educated. How many people in this room are aware of what what not is the app? Raise your hands. Whatnot. Raise it high. Actually, can you stand up? I know that's a lot to ask, but please. I know, sir, but please, could everybody who knows what whatnot is stand up? Because I want people to get the context of the numbers. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

[A]

You can see it because I've never.

[B]

Used it what not. This is. This is nrf. We're at nrf. Whatnot is an independent app. You just saw that about 3% of the room even knows what it is. It did. $10 billion. 7 to 10 billion. We don't have the numbers. It's private. 7 to $10 billion in GMV last year. It's so gross merchandise value. It sold 7 to $10 billion worth of stuff. Nobody at NRF 26 knows what the fuck it is. Yes, it's lived up to my expectations. Okay, what's going on in live shopping? And listen, this, I apologize. If I may, I don't predict things. I don't think anything I'm saying right now is so, so cool. Like this has happened. Everyone knows what I'm about to say. This has been going on in China for a decade. Everybody here knows. I think.

[A]

Emarketer had a report in October saying it's a little bit, it's been a little bit slower to take off. In the United States, just 11% of Creator Driven shoppers have made a purchase on a creator's live Stream. So that's 11%. 11%, that's nothing. But it's not the mass critical mass that we've seen in China yet.

[B]

It was nothing 36 months ago.

[A]

Some of the success stories are interesting though. The Labubu dolls, the Pop Mart Loboo dolls, everyone probably knows what those dolls are. They've been hugely successful at selling stuff live and so has Ikea. Has done it on its own website, used its own website as a live streaming platform to sell things. I'm curious if you think like, are there certain use cases that it's just better than others?

[B]

Nope. I think this is social media all over again. A bunch of people in this room and a bunch of people in this industry 10 years ago said social is not for us. We're a high end brand, we're expensive, we have a higher AOV. This is all I heard in 2010. 17, 13, 12. Everything sells on social now. And everybody knows that live shopping is not built for tchotchkas like Labubu. In China, they sell cars at scale through live shop. Live shopping is attention. Consumers see something and they act on it. It's a frictionless environment. You're in your feed, it just shows up. You like purses, you buy a purse. It's easier than any other E commerce. Every single company here, every retailer here, if they are not spending an enormous amount of time debating their live social shopping strategy. And in the US that's predominantly TikTok Shop Whatnot is still predominantly collectibles with a little bit of clothing and like whatnot has not gone broad yet. TikTok Shop is the real player. Twitch just launched their shopping ebay lives product is very strong. There's an incredible app that you should all look into called District. It's like the shopify of live shopping. This ecosystem is building anyone here at a Fortune 5000 level that isn't spending an enormous time trying to figure out their live shopping strategy and figuring out their Geo and AEO strategy. If they're not doing that, they are setting themselves up for very challenging 2027, 2028 realities.

[A]

We're actually running a little bit low on time already and we barely talked about AI. The reason I want to bring it up is because you are an influencer as I don't know if you embrace that term or not, but you are an influencer. You also speak a lot about the idea that companies and brands should partner with influencers and in a way that gets their brand out there. Do you worry at all about what AI is going to do to the influencer economy and how we're moving into this world where you can't tell what's real and what's fake and how much easier it is now to create, you know, quote unquote virtual influencers? Does that concern you?

[B]

No, not at all.

[A]

Because I did I also have a quote here from you saying I think it's going to cause a decade of confusion. I think just talking about AI.

[B]

Yeah, just I just believe in human beings like so let's break it down. Nobody felt bad for the A list celebrities that the influencers have come along and taken money out of their pockets like you write. And so I don't feel bad for the people that create AI influencers and bring value to the end consumer. And if they start getting brand deals and they come out of the influencers pocket, I think this is evolution. I think this is just what happens, you know, listen, I'm like any other sane human being. Anytime there's profound technology you try to think through the good and the bad that can come along with it. Many inventions through the history of time are demonized up front. Electricity being my favorite historical story of how we tried to not accept it. We were big on candles back in the day and so you know, am I concerned? I'm not concerned in the macro. I believe in the human spirit. We've navigated atomic bomb invention, I think we'll navigate the AI invention. But do I think a Lot of B, C, D list influencers. If somebody was making a list on how much they make or how many followers or upper fun, do I think that they have a vulnerability on losing brand deals to AI influencers? I know they will.

[A]

Yeah, you can already see the use cases. I mean there's, there's. You can go to certain travel websites now and see that a lot of stuff clearly looks like it was created by AI.

[B]

Yeah. This is one of the profound inventions in the human race and we will all live through it. And there's many things that we can't even anticipate that they will create. But I would also argue, like when I look at this crowd, I get so happy knowing that so many people's parents, children, spouses and themselves will live 10 to 15 years longer because AI in medicine will detect a disease earlier than a D. Like, there's so much remarkable joy that's coming. Some business commerce reshaping I think is frivolous in comparison to the upside.

[A]

You were early to YouTube. You were blogging on YouTube in 2006, right? I mean, YouTube basically just started at that time. If you were just starting out now, would you be embracing AI in the way that you, you. That you embrace YouTube? And how would that look like if young Gary Vee starting out now and trying?

[B]

No, no different than old Gary vee, but.

[A]

Except YouTube is already well established and you can't just jump on there and make and get the attention that you. I'm not saying you're. It was.

[B]

I totally understand what you're saying. No, no, you're absolutely right. I think of attention like real estate. Right. If you bought beachfront Property in Malibu 39, 59, 63 years ago, you did better than someone buying it today. First mover advantage on platforms that have attention is always a good idea, but that doesn't mean that you can't get attention even though it's mature. There are people that are going to explode on YouTube, substack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and every other platform that are literally going to start tomorrow because they have figured out something of value that the end consumer is interested in. In fact, my friend, I would argue it is easier today to break out because when I was going, you had to amass followers. And so when I used to sit on a stage like this, 2006, it started in 2016, I would stand here and be like, hey, you got to start really making content. It's going to take three or four years. Now somebody here could literally make their first TikTok ever and it could be the start of the whole game. We're in a profound opportunity, the level of merit, an opportunity for the individual human because of where the algos are in social right now and for every business is profound, profound. And I want more people to take advantage of it.

[A]

Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. We are really low on time. Gary Vaynerchuk, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everyone for coming out for the first session this morning. I hope everyone enjoyed the conversation.

[B]

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.