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The GaryVee Audio Experience
Why YOUR Social Media Strategy Matters More Than Ever in 2025 | Dubai Keynote
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This is the GaryVee audio experience. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the GaryVee audio experience. I'm Mike from Team GaryVee and on today's episode of the podcast, we are sharing a keynote that Gary gave. In this one, he talks about the importance of communication, how marketing's changed over the years, as well as the importance of networking and so much more. I hope you all enjoy this episode. Thank you. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. I'm very excited to be here. Regardless of what everyone is trying to accomplish in this room in their careers right now, we are all required to try to achieve one very important thing, which is nobody, nobody here is going to be able to accomplish their goals unless they're able to communicate their message and get someone to do something. This is professionally and personally. If you are unable to communicate or have your information consumed, what you're trying to achieve is not going to happen. More importantly, if you are unable to do it, someone else is going to do it and they're going to charge you for it. The reason so many people outside are in an infrastructure of affiliate referral fees and rev share is because they've been uncapable or incapable of creating the demand themselves. Thus, they must pay to get a customer. This is something I think about constantly. This is why Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. It is a toll booth to get to a product because search is a utility in our society and allows people to find what they're looking for and thus they're able to refer fee. And this is something that I want to ground today's conversation in because for the people in this room that have not made the commitment to building a communications infrastructure for their business, this could be the single and most important conversation you can have. In plain English, what I'm saying is if you are not producing content information on an everyday basis at the highest level of output to your financial and creative capabilities, you are leaving opportunity on the table on a daily basis. There is a battle out there for attention and more importantly, the actual product and service because of the way technology is going is more of the commodity and the ability to get people to understand your product is more of the value prop. This is a humongous shift in consumer behavior and business from the last 50 years. The speed in which one can create a product, whether it's a physical or digital item that is on par with the competitive landscape, is staggering today compared to 25 years ago. The understanding to how to create demand for that product is the variable of current success. There are platforms outside that basically are enabling individuals to white label a game or a product overnight. There's a reason Shopify and WordPress and these platforms are very big companies. They commoditize what used to not be a commodity. In 1997, when I built winelibrary.com for my dad's liquor store, it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for something basic. Today, Shopify for a couple of dollars a month does 100 times what my website did 20 years ago. Outside in all those booths, there's unlimited platforms that commoditize the thing. Even today, 18 months after I launched Befriends, there's platforms that would allow me to mint and create an NFT project that cost a fraction in time and money to execute what I did 18 months ago. What we have to understand is technology. And don't even get me started on what's going on with artificial intelligence. Technology is moving faster than a lot of us. It's creating a very important conversation that everybody here has to leave with, which is the following. You can tell me how awesome your game is, you can tell me how epic your technology is, and I'll explain to you how in 12 months that advantage will be commoditized by a platform company if it hasn't already been. What I hope that everybody leaves this talk with today is understanding where the commodity is, not where there is an opportunity to build growth. And that is called modern branding. What outside of this tent is doing very well is math. There's a lot of good math out there. There's a lot of good math out there. What it's not able to do and what the world continues to struggle with is art. Art is different. Art is not as scale. Art is not black and white. The art that connects every person in this room, regardless of their agenda, as a need to grow in. Whatever your ambition is is the ability to produce pictures and videos and write written words to compel somebody who sees it to do whatever you want them to do. Sign up, buy, refer, expand your message. We are living through a time where most people do not understand how to actually do modern marketing or modern art properly. We're also living in a time where everyone is looking for scale and automation, which means sale but not debt. The amount of people that are actually committed to building meaningful relationships with their customers is almost non existent in the hyperbole of innovation, automation, technology. So what's interesting to me is the last 20 years it seemingly looked like the people that had the advantages were the Ones that invested in automation and scale and technology. And that's what we saw happen. What's happening now is because the cat is out of the bag and everybody understands that that starts to over time become the commodity. And the advantage becomes the things that are not automated, that are not technology based, they're human based. This will be accelerated dramatically with AI, dramatically. Soon everybody's white paper or presentations are going to look the same because they're all going to use the same technology. But the inputs from the human level become the variable. When I think about why in the world are the human beings that are sitting in front of me right now? Why are you even here? Why are you here? Majority are here to advance your professional life. You're here for your business to grow. You're here for you to grow within the company. You're here for advancement of your professional life. You would like it to be better. What fascinates me is that while we spend a lot of time on many things, the lack of commitment overall, on becoming great at making pictures and videos in written words, work on the seven to 10 platforms that have the world's attention fascinates me. The subconscious of this room thinking they're doing social media when they're not. What fascinates me? The companies outside that spend unbelievable amounts of marketing in math, but very little in art. In a world of referral fees and CAC customer acquisition costs, it is fascinating how many people don't invest at all in creating relevance or brand which would immediately drive down your cost of customer acquisition and affiliate. It would give you back leverage that you don't have to pay to an affiliate infrastructure that charges you 50% of the revenue. This is extremely important to this room. In this industry we are consistently underperforming and building brand, brand and social to then only pay more money to get customers every day. We are thrilled to spend dollars and split the vig with an affiliate or referral, but we won't take those same dollars and invest them into making four TikToks a day or six LinkedIn posts or take advantage of the fact that Facebook Facebook reels right now is grossly underpriced. And so what I want to leave this talk with is the following. A reframing of strategy for the influencers, the entrepreneurs, the startups and the big companies in this room, which is modern contemporary companies that are digitally focused like the ones outside here, which represent all of you, are incredibly strong at technology, technology and math, but are wildly under delivering on the current state of marketing in our world. And that variable added to what you already do well actually gives you the leverage you're looking for in a million different ways. If you're raising capital, it's a hell of a lot better that you have brand and are known or have some consumer demand, not just what your numbers look like on your Excel or pro forma. When you are doing very heavy math based marketing and converting, the more consumers that have actually heard of your business outside of the ad or the affiliate will convert at a much higher level, thus driving down your cost of customer acquisition. Taking a step back for everyone who's sitting here. Very simply put, no matter how big or small your company is in this room, I believe that most of the companies companies in this room need to be producing somewhere in the ballpark of 15 to 30 social media posts a day, 15 to 30 a day across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube shorts, and on and on. The reality is, the reason I believe this to be true is because of the single biggest elephant in the room right now, which is for the last decade. For the last decade, the amount of strategy that has gone into the pictures and videos that are posted daily by companies in social media has been very low. The reason so many people continue to underestimate social media is because most people that do it don't have a strong enough strategy to defend or define why it's valuable to a business. When you post good morning on Twitter, it's nice, but how overtly strategic is it? It's okay, but it can't be your post for the day. What we continue to have, similar to what we had in the 1960s with television, I'm going to give you a very good history lesson. Somewhere around the mid-1960s, there was a small group of very big companies in the US that realized there was a lot more opportunity on television if they were smarter about it. And if they ran those ads aggressively with thought mascots, taglines more often during shows that were watched more often, that their businesses would grow. Today, the biggest consumer products in the world continue to be brands that strategically invested properly on television from the 1960s to 1980s. We find ourselves in a very similar place with social media today. What excites me to no end is looking at all the faces in this room. This is literally as we sit here today, I'm very aware of how much negativity is in the world across the board. Yet as we sit here today, both for your businesses or your personal life, there has never been more opportunity for everyone in this room than There is, right this second. The reason is because so few people have figured out how to play this matrix of attention properly. There are still a shocking small amount of people on earth. Millions. But remember, there's 8 billion people on Earth. There are a couple of million people that have really figured out how to do media and creative on the eight social networks that have the world's attention to extract that attention and deploy it against their business needs. But this leaves still plenty of room for tens of millions of people and companies to come in and do it properly. We have another 10, 15, 20 years maybe, while the big companies continue to misunderstand what the opportunity is. This begs the question that I'm most interested in. To an audience like this in the sector that's out there, how many people in here have the bravery, or like I like to think, the common sense to instead do the easy and the lazy and continue to run the same blue based on affiliate and math and ads based on math? How many people are ready to make the jump to the art that is required for substantial growth? This is the question in this room. The question is, do people actually realize what I've been talking about for the last 15 minutes? How real is it to you? The problem is what I mentioned five minutes ago. Many of you have posted on social media daily. Many of you been around the last 15 years and have watched this all grow. Many of you posted for businesses or for yourself. The reality is, are you good at it? What's confusing to people is unlike many other things in our life, marketing, specifically social media marketing, confuses people where they think if they're doing it, they're doing it well. What's amazing about sports is nobody is confused that they're good or bad in basketball. You go play basketball and you know very quickly, I am not good at this sport. I am good at this sport. Just because you have a TikTok account and post once a day does not mean that you're good at it. And this is what I want to have this room leading with as we sit here today. The following platforms are completely underpriced in both their organic reach and their paid media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn. This is profound. All of the platforms are underpriced on their organic reach and their media. What does this mean? How many people here have now gone viral? On TikTok, you posted something and it got a million views. Raise your hand. Raise it. For the seven, 10 people here that raised their hand. They felt the impact of underpriced organic. They posted something. They had 20 followers, 100 followers, 1,000 followers. They posted something and they got a million views. That is an enormously important thing for this one to talk about. In the history of marketing, that was never possible. You did not buy a full page ad in the newspaper. You did not buy AdWords on Google. You did not buy a television ad on television. And they just miraculously gave you unlimited more awareness for more than you paid for. They didn't just give you 55 newspaper ads because you paid for one, they give you one. This is why this is so important. A lot of you, including myself, grew up in an era where you would amass followers and you would post and you would get a percentage of those followers to see it. It was more email marketing than it was social. We are now in the post TikTok of social media where you can absolutely get way more exposure than you've earned because you don't have to build a list or a community. You just have to make individual pieces of content strong. This has now penetrated every platform. YouTube Shorts is built on this. Maybe some of you saw that Elon posted the other day about you can follow an account with the Bell and see every one of their posts. Why is that happening? Because Twitter in the next year will go through the same thing where the majority of your users won't see the post. It's going to be based on the content and then many more could see it. Whether you have 3 million followers like I do or you have 670 followers, we're on even playing ground because the content becomes the variable, not your ability to build followers. The reason I'm harping on this in the early part of my talk here at so much scale is because I do not believe people have realized how important this is for their professional businesses. If you are able to leave this talk and start making a commitment to producing content that is valuable for the audience, not for your insecurities or egos. No more posting your watch, more posting things that actually bring value. It will change the dynamics of your business leverage. The more attention and intent to do something with you that you have, the more likely you have leverage with the people that you negotiate every day. Why that really matters to me in the context of this room is this industry outside of me right now, most of you are involved in is incredible based on who has the leverage of the consumer's attention. There's a reason that there's so much affiliate and cat and conversion in this business and there's A way for many of the smaller players in this room or the incumbents who charge for it to accelerate. But it does not look like the way we've done it for the last 15 years. When I talk about posting 15 to 30 times a day, think about what that means for, for small businesses in this room or two person teams, it's in theory a full time job. When in reality the issue at hand is if you do not do it, the technology or the person that does have the consumer will continue to charge you more. For example, I understand that outside the dynamics of affiliate are now 50, 50. My question is if the affiliate says tomorrow it's 75, 25 them, what the fuck are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? You're going to pay. You're right my friend, you're going to pay. And so the reason I stand here with a ton of passion is that's not a fun way to be in business. If you are sitting here today and you do not have a relationship with your audience, if you are not the person that they're interested in, then you are vulnerable because somebody's going to sit in between and charge you. And the people that are charging now are small compared to the people that could be charging today. We're playing, we're paying the people that are the biggest companies in there properly, they deserve it. They outflank, they built, they built attention. Most of them built on the back of Google and other platforms to get that attention. The question becomes as big tech companies continue to get pressure from the biggest governments in the world, they're going to have to find more and more profit. Who do you think is going to pay for that? You? Right now we are sitting in the crossroads of the way the Internet has worked for the last 20 years. The level of naivete that is running around this conference right now and not understanding that if they don't build their brand, if they don't build their relationship, if they don't build equity with the end user that they can no longer rely on the economics of the intermediary that gives them all their revenue is staggering to me. And I come here with deep passion in this keynote to get people to walk out of here scared because unfortunately, you know, it's unbelievable, it really pisses me off. But people tend to not react to anything other than fear or hope. And for me I sit here telling you both. I am very motivated by the fact that I could triple or 10x or 50x or 100x what I'm trying to achieve by walking out of here, leaving this conference and immediately making content on the seven platforms that matter. I'm just aware that that's a very small percentage of the people in this room. When I talk to you about how you make your money through somebody else sending you a customer and I tell you what's exactly going to happen over the next five to seven years and how fast you're going to get squeezed not only by the companies that are giving to you now, but by the companies that are giving the companies that are squeezing you their traffic. Now you must act on this. You must. This is very, very important. And so I hope people start taking what I'm talking about dramatically more serious. To me if I came here and said, hey, social media marketing, it really works, it's a good idea, that's one thing. I don't expect people here to go back home and reach recalibrate how much money they're spending against it. But when you start realizing it directly is going to impact your P and L, your profit margins, your day to day, it starts becoming a very different conversation. And all of a sudden the concept of investing in actual people that know how to write, know how to take photos, know how to make videos for these platforms becomes a much bigger conversation to me. Having internal capabilities or external partners producing 15, 30, 50 pieces of content a day for social media across seven platforms is no longer becoming a nice to have, is no longer becoming something you may want to consider. I would rather do that than be good at balancing my checkbook. That's how important this has become. And it is important for every brand in the world. But this industry, and when I say this industry, I mean really igaming globally and how the whole infrastructure works and how people are getting their customers. I think the clock is going to strike midnight faster than people think and I think the percentages of the allocation is going to go in the referrer's favor, not the commoditized games favor. And I think you have to move fast on this. And so it's a double edged sword because there's a lot of people who are on the affiliate side driving traffic. They've got to get better at their part too because it's just arbitrage. It's just arbitrage all the way through. And so what does this really all mean that's tangible? Couple things one understand and this is really interesting because it's such a global audience, the level of talent in the following places where the cost for that talent is Quite attractive. But the talent of knowing how to make the pictures, videos and written words for social are very strong are the following. I'm blown away by the talent in Eastern Europe as a whole for the ability to make creative for social apac. I think many parts of Southeast Asia, the cost of the talent in return for the video work and the pictures in the written word are incredible. Bless you for the people in this audience. If you are taking what I'm saying right now seriously before you go home and make a video. Understanding how you're going to do it sustainably, at scale long term is very important. What I believe all of you will face the second you go down that path is you're going to figure out how to afford it. How are you going to afford it? And the reason I bring up the talent around the world, because this is such a global audience, is because there are certain pockets of the world where the creative talent matches the average income and there are some real opportunities. And that is the place I would start first. However, for everyone in this room, whether you're a salesperson, whether you're in crypto, whether you do whatever you do, for you to personally take a step back and get educated on what this all means, this will continue to be more and more important because you do understand as AI comes into our world over the next 20 years, a lot of the making of this stuff will become commoditized. But the thinking of the ideas, the setting up of critical thinking of what you're going to make to make people jump in is incredibly important. I'm going to jump off of this topic for a second, but I'm going to touch on it with the next thing I'm going to say. When I think about what are the things that are needed to be successful in life, there's a lot of things that come to mind. A lot of what I think about is self esteem and genuinely being, you know, in a good place with yourself because you won't put yourself out there at the level you need to if you're insecure. And so I think a lot about self esteem and self love and a lot of other stuff. But the word that I want to talk about that has a lot to do with the first half of this keynote with everybody here is the word curiosity. The thing that I would ask so many people to ask themselves about where they are in their own journey of curiosity is very important because of what's looming in our society. What I just talked about was a very narrow thing in marketing that I know would impact every single person here, which is why I chose to speak about it, because I want this to be as valuable to every person here as possible. The mental human perspective that I would ask everybody to really lean into here and ask themselves where they are is the word curiosity. And let me tell you why I think everybody here can probably sense that this Web 3.0. Last year we defined Web 3.0 as crypto and NFTs. But I challenge that concept and I say let's take a step back and realize Web 3.0 probably encompasses a lot more things. For me personally, it encompasses ar. For me personally, it even encompasses something that's been around for a long time, like QR codes, because I think it's a new functionality in pipes that matters for everyone here. It definitely involves VR and we know that, and it clearly involves AI, which is going to be such a big deal. Why I'm very passionate for everyone to lean into curiosity here is by even being at this conference, every human here is much further along than where the world's going, than their contemporaries. However, we, me included, we're very stuck in what we're doing right now. Meanwhile, this is probably the biggest era of change coming up since the invention of the iPhone accelerated social media in a profound way. I have a feeling that a lot of people here, you're not sure exactly every aspect, none of us are. But I have a feeling everybody can feel here that the next 20 years shit's gonna look a little bit different. That between AI and AR and VR and decentralized serv, like it just feels like it's not the status quo that the last 15 years are in. That will be some of the biggest opportunities that you will ever see in your entire life in this next era. Like my life changed when it was changing with social media and the iPhone in that 2005, 6, 7, 89 era. It's very clear and I have a feeling a lot of people here can sense it, that these next six or seven years there's just to be a lot of opportunity, a lot of craziness. We saw it last year with NFT Land. You know, the first half of the year I'm like, yeah, yeah, yay. The second half of the year, all my videos were. 99% of these are going to zero because everybody got so crazy and they let greed take over. That still doesn't mean that decentralized servers aren't going to be a dramatic part of our lives. Just because the value of collectibles collapsed doesn't mean NFTs are not going to be and smart contracts are not going to be a meaningful part of our world. The same thing happened with Web 1.0. In 1997 and 1998, every Internet company that went public was worth a billion dollars. Zero revenue. All of those stocks collapsed. But it didn't mean that the Internet was not going to be one of the biggest inventions of our time. That's just blockchain. That's not even mentioning what's going on in AI. And in the last year, everybody here has been affected and blown away by Jasper mid journey or chat. All of us have tasted real AI, not fake AI like we were for the last seven years. And it really caught everyone's attention. These things are going to converge together at scale. And so I ask all of you, please do not leave this conference without asking yourself, how curious are you? You know how many of you here have opinions about AI, yet you've never spent 50 hours really using it? You know how many people here have opinions about everything that's going on in new technology, yet it's because your friend told you or you read two articles, you didn't have the curiosity to go all in. You lead with no, sometimes you lead with yes, but very few lead with maybe. If you leave with anything from this talk, given how young this audience is, if you can fall in love with the concept of maybe, when faced with somebody telling you something you've never heard about before or something new in your journey, which will be consistent for the rest of our lives with technology, if you meet that new genre, that new platform, that new technology, with the concept of maybe, you will have a much greater chance to get out of the world what you want. And so I argue at scale that one of the biggest things to lean into within your own body going into the next decade is finding out for yourself, with yourself. Where do you sit with curiosity? Are you a curious person or are you not? And how do you develop more curiosity? For me, the way I built more curiosity was I started surrounding myself with people that were more curious. And so I challenge you to really think about this because it will really matter. Tying this all back before we go into the Q and A here right now is a really important reality for everyone here, which is at a conference like this. The number one ROI is not a keynote like this. It is not the booth. The number one ROI of a conference like this is the people that are sitting to the left and right and front and back of you that you've never met in your life. When people ask me things like, hey, like break it down for me. Why did in worked for you? What worked? I think about a lot of things, work ethic, like a lot of stuff that I'm sure you've heard a million times. But one thing that always comes up that I don't think people think enough about is I did a very good job in this exact setting. When I was doing what you're doing right now in 2005, 6 and 7, when I wasn't on stage, when I was trying to come and learn, and I had the self confidence of being able to network because I love people and I wasn't offended if someone did not want to speak to me. I didn't have the ego, I had the humility to be able to have somebody say no or look at my badge and see, you know, back then my badge said wine library. So most people looked, they didn't say Google or Microsoft and they had no interest in talking to me. That was their fucking mistake. So I ask you, when I go on this little three minute rant and try to encourage all of you to get high value out of this conference, which is, I hope there was one to three things I said that might put you into action. Everything I said, I really believe in so much. And I do believe there are two of the most important things you could be thinking about right now. But I promise you, whether I started you on the path of curiosity, whether I said something compelling where you realize it's fucking time to finally get serious about social media, creative and media, neither will be as important as what I'm finishing with here is now, for as long as you decide to stay at this conference, for the rest of this conference. And I know a lot of you are introverted, I know a lot of you are introverted, I get it. But if you can push yourself to literally say hello to people. My random hellos led to me being an early investor in Twitter at South by Southwest. Hello to one person. You should know my person. And that's how I Met Blaine Cook. Four people deep. I knew nobody at south by Southwest 2006. No one. I said hello to someone. They were nice, we talked about Twitter, they said this. We met another guy, another gal, and she said, oh, my friend Blaine Cook is the CTO of Twitter. Do you want to go get tacos with him? And I said, fuck yes. And those tacos led to a relationship. And then when he left the company and he wanted to sell his shares, I was the first person he called. There's a million, trillion gadrillion versions of the story that I just told you. And I just. I just imperatively push you to get out of your comfort zone. Or more importantly, a lot of you are very extroverted. But much like content where you only post one a day, you may only say hello to one new face a day at this conference instead of 87. And so please, for this conference, which is clearly buzzing and very vibrant, and kudos to the organizers and every conference you do going forward, there is never anything on stage more interesting than the six relationships that you can leave the conference with. And so I implore you, after this talk, to meet as many people here as possible while you're here.