Today’s video is a conversation with Bayer all about the biggest shifts happening in marketing right now, and why most brands are wasting the majority of their ad dollars. I talk about live shopping, why AI influencers are coming faster than you think, and the single biggest mistake Fortune 500 brands are still making with their creative. Hope you enjoy!
00:00 - The next wave: livestreaming, IRL streaming & AI influencers 02:22 - Why one-size-fits-all creative is killing brand relevance 05:04 - Why working media should come last, not first 07:47 - How brands are throwing 90% of their ad spend in the trash 14:00 - Why agencies that separate “creative” and “production” are dead 17:27 - How to actually win with creators & influencers 20:03 - The #1 mistake brands make when choosing influencers 22:17 - The future of marketing in the next 2–3 years 26:13 - How live shopping went from $5K a week to $50K a night 30:25 - Why organic social is the single most underpriced opportunity 33:56 - What breakthrough creative really looks like
Known as "GaryVee," he is described as one of the most forward thinkers in business. He acutely recognizes trends and patterns early to help others understand how shifts in consumer attention impact the realities of the business world today. Gary's approach sits at the intersection of business and pop culture. He keenly understands how to bring brand relevance to the forefront. He is a prolific angel investor with early investments in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Venmo, Snapchat, Coinbase, and Uber.
Gary is an entrepreneur at heart – he builds businesses. Today, he helps Fortune 1000 brands leverage consumer attention through his full-service advertising agency, VaynerMedia, which has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok, Delhi, and Kuala Lumpur. VaynerMedia is part of the VaynerX holding company, which also includes Eva Nosidam Productions, Gallery Media Group, The Sasha Group, VaynerSpeakers, VaynerCommerce, and Tingley Lane Trading. Gary is the Co-Founder of VaynerSports, VCR Group, VaynerWatt, ArtOfficial, Resy, and Empathy Wines. He guided Resy and Empathy to successful exits -- which he later sold to American Express and Constellation Brands, respectively. He also owns a Major League Pickleball team called the 5s, is part owner of a Big3 basketball team, and is an investor in the revival of the SlamBall League.
In 2021, Gary created VeeFriends, an entertainment company that has become a rising powerhouse in modern entertainment and collectibles. Often described as Pokemon meets Sesame Street, the company leverages stories, games, events, collectibles, and technology to scale its character universe. Vaynerchuk also has negotiated partnerships with brand powerhouses such as Crocs, Fanatics, Macy’s/Toys “R” Us, Mattel’s UNO, Mattel’s Masters of the Universe, Moonbug Entertainment, Reebok, Squishmallows, Topps, and more.
Gary is also the founder and creator of VeeCon – a contemporary super conference that converges business and pop culture with innovation and technology. He is a six-time New York Times bestselling author, with titles including Crush It!, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Twelve and a Half and Day Trading Attention. In addition to running multiple businesses, Gary documents his daily life as a CEO through his social media channels, which have more than 45 million followers and garner more than 300 million monthly impressions/views across all platforms. His podcast, "The GaryVee Audio Experience," ranks among the top podcasts globally.
Gary serves on the board of MikMak, Bojangles Restaurants, Global Citizen Forum, The Paley Center, and Pencils of Promise. He is also a longtime Well Member of charity: water.
Gary's life ambition is to buy the New York Jets.
The biggest shifts are going to be live streaming,
not just live social shopping,
but the most famous people in the world next
are the people that are doing IRL streaming.
Kik, Twitch, this is incredibly important.
Kai Sinette, iShowSpeed, Aiden Ross.
IRL streaming is something we need to think about.
What does that look like?
We start doing product placement,
like 1950s television of our products in kitchens
of people that have lots of audiences.
Watches, sneakers, comic books.
And then finally, the rise of AI influencers
is going to be remarkable.
These are influencers that are not human beings,
that you will start building out characters
like you're Disney, but these will be real human beings,
not cartoon-like characters,
and they will be your spokespeople.
I think Fortune 500 companies
are gonna start creating AI influencers
and executing that.
Relevance leads to consideration,
and consideration leads to actually buying something, right?
I believe most of us on this call
grew up in marketing and academia
that taught us to be consistent
and on message and on brand,
which was proper for a different distribution world
that existed from 1950 to 1990.
But we live in a very different distribution landscape today.
And disproportionately, the biggest concern I have
for these iconic brands in this portfolio globally
is that they're not winning on relevance at scale
to actually drive sales.
We all agree we want to build trusted brands.
We want to be relevant for our consumers
and to our audiences.
What does it look like for brands like us to be relevant
and to have this relevance in content?
Leaning into the thing that scares everyone the most,
and I'll use the most dynamic word to scare everyone,
but I'm not really scaring.
I'm just trying to really help everyone get there.
Schizophrenia is an interesting word to talk about.
I use it aggressively, but in a more mundane way,
every brand here needs to be relevant
to 30 to 50 very distinct, different consumer segmentations,
which means most of the creative and marketing
that every brand here needs to put out
across the marketing landscape needs to look different.
Which is like, you know, Celine, I get it.
That's like putting a knife through the hearts of marketers.
But again, look at the, you know,
we can't see the audience right now,
but I can see the back of the screen, right?
I see David, I see Eva, I see Juan, I see Sarita, I see you.
It's impossible that one,
if I wanted to sell all of you this cup of coffee,
it's impossible that one message
would get all six of you to buy this.
It's impossible, and every one of us know that.
So I need six different messages,
potentially three, potentially four, slightly tweaked,
and this should make everyone feel comfortable.
It's all one message at the top, right?
It's like, this is a delicious coffee,
and I think it's a good price.
But how I communicate that in actual execution
must be different.
Our industry, Fortune 500 marketing,
has taken on brand inconsistency literally.
We took it literally.
And what that has done is it has forced us
to make creative messaging that is vanilla,
that is trying to be everything to everyone,
which has led it to mean nothing to no one.
It is being distributed in platforms
that no longer have the mass attention of the consumer.
We are overpaying for media distribution
in these classic channels,
both traditional and classic digital,
search, pre-roll, banner, programmatic.
And we are grossly under-investing as an organization
in creative production.
And we are overpaying for creative production
of classic 30-second videos.
And we just have a lot of work to do, but it's exciting.
And here's the best part.
It's exciting for all of us as human beings
because we know it's true.
It's not exciting for all of us on this call as executives
because we know there's a lot of operational
and political work to do to get us to become great at this.
And how do you know what is resonating to me
versus Dave or versus Eva or Sarita?
Well, that's a very interesting question
because I have to frame up something
to be able to answer it.
For the first time in marketing history,
paid working media should come last, not first.
So let me explain.
I would not know what's resonating to all of you
if I was to amplify every piece of creative
that I put out into the world
with paid media against a target.
We are sitting in this exact second
in the biggest opportunity in marketing history,
which is called the social networks,
the seven or eight of them, LinkedIn, YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok,
Facebook proper, Twitter X.
They all are now running on an interest graph AI algorithm
for the newsfeed.
So that's a lot of words.
I'm gonna break it down.
I grew up and got famous by investing in these companies.
You can see on my screen, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.
Those are stocks that I bought in 2007,
so that worked for me.
But I treated social media from 2006 to 2018
like email marketing.
Get as many followers as possible.
And when I would post, 20 to 30 to 40% of the people
would see it, like open rates, right?
Somewhere around 2017, 18,
Musical.ly and TikTok started to change the game
because when I would post,
it didn't matter that I had 15 million followers.
The content would find the audience.
The way I would know if a MyDoll post in India
was resonating with who is by posting it organically
on Instagram and seeing how many views it got
and seeing who consumed the views
and seeing how they commented consumer insights
in the comments.
And then, Celine, if I felt good about that result,
I would only then run working media to amplify it
against the demo and consumer cohort
that was most reacting positively.
My next post might be about cricket.
After playing cricket,
take our over-the-counter medicine to not sneeze.
And that might resonate with Juan
more than it resonates with Eva.
And if there's enough Juans in there,
now I'm running media to amplify against lots of Juans.
The paid, owned, earned model has been flipped to owned,
which is your channels when you post,
then earned, when it performs,
it is earned the right to get paid.
I'm gonna say something humbly, respectfully,
but without any hedge.
This great, iconic company is throwing 90%
of its working media dollars globally,
directly in the trash.
And it is because we are guessing upfront
of what to spend our working media dollars on,
on what creative, on the basis of three to four
human beings' subjective opinion
or very antiquated, creative testing,
guessing, focus groups, old technologies.
And we must face this truth
because it is how we can outflank
our four to five direct competitors.
Listen, I will say this, and I think this will help.
I know it's a lot, and I know it's the other side.
Literally, I am asking the organization
to completely flip what they do.
And that requires a whole different mindset,
a whole different process, agency partner structure.
For example, let me just say one thing
that should help save a lot of money.
We can no longer pay creative agencies
just to come up with ideas.
They must be in production.
I had a company-wide meeting
with my 2,500 employees two years ago,
and I said, we are no longer a creative and media agency.
We are a production agency that happens
to do creative strategy and media.
I have creative directors from Wieden and Kennedy,
Anomaly, Droga5, who literally are accustomed
to just coming in and pontificating a random idea
and a slogan, who are now making creative
with their hands and technology
every single day on our client's behalf.
But I wanna say something.
In 2000, if this meeting was with the 100,000-plus employees
of the Yellow Pages, which was the directory
of how you found businesses in America for 50 years,
I would be saying, listen, we're in trouble.
These search engines are a problem, right?
We must adjust.
Maybe we should launch our own search engine.
Today, if I was at Google Search doing a call like this,
I would be saying, hey, team, we're in big trouble.
I mean, I wish I could see the whole audience right now.
Maybe actually you could all do this,
even though I can't see it.
Please raise your hand and do this in the back screen.
Juan, Eva, Sarita, David, appease me, Celine.
Raise your hand if you now use ChatGPT
or some other AI bot to look up stuff instead of Google,
whereas two years ago, you would've went to Google for that
but now you go to an AI bot.
Raise your hand.
That, that is a big deal and will completely destroy
the Google AdWords business.
In fact, if you're a brand manager,
I don't know who's watching right now, around the world,
if search is a substantial part of your spend
or your conversion, you're in trouble.
And I can tell you right now, this second, this second,
today, we at Bear Inc. globally are grossly overpaying
for our Google AdWords, grossly.
And because less demand will be there,
the cost of the AdWords is about to explode
because everyone's gonna be fighting for that little bit
and all of a sudden, sneezing is gonna cost $18
instead of $4 to even get one lead.
And so, I know that this may sound challenging,
but I actually believe, and this has been my argument,
for big companies like yourselves,
putting pressure on your media agencies to buy better media
and putting pressure on your creative agencies
to no longer think in television first
and no longer think in ideas first,
think in ideas plus production first for social.
And then, Celine, the way it works for us
is when creative validates with the consumer,
not the boardroom, in social, then we go into,
do we wanna turn that into a campaign
through the consumer insights of it being successful?
Or do we want to spend media dollars on it for performance?
So, this will make a lot of sense for every marketer.
I am talking about the mid-funnel.
Organic social media is the mid-funnel.
When it performs, which is very low risk,
in the scheme of things, organically,
you can take it up to the other funnel
and make it your brand campaign and positioning,
or you can take that creative and send it down
to the lower funnel for performance on Amazon.com, right,
Tesco.com, or run that creative on one mile radius
of 3,500 doors of Costco, Tesco, Albertson,
well, Walgreens, whatever, it's a global audience,
whatever the biggest retailers are.
So, the middle funnel, organic social media,
to this entire audience,
is something they spend no time thinking about,
and it is now the starting point
and the disproportionately most important part
of the marketing-media mix.
And it's super measurable.
As some people on this call know,
very early, thank God, because it doesn't always happen,
very early, we had a remarkably viral post
from Idol in the US, and how does that show up?
With no media dollars,
the Amazon rank shows very strong clarity
that there's enormous amounts of sales
behind that single organic social post.
Really helps the most cynical
or the most practical people on this phone call
start to wrap their head around why that medium matters.
Very good.
Let's go to Eva, because she has a question for you
on content production and content creation.
Please.
Hi, Gary.
One thing that you said very interestingly
is you can no longer be a creative agency.
You now need to be able to create, produce, right?
So it's like, you now need to be like a full-stock company.
That's right.
I would, Eva, sorry to interrupt,
but just so, because I just want to pinpoint it,
I believe that there is no logic anymore
to have a creative AOR and a separate production company.
These are my competitors, and I meet with them,
because I'm a funny guy.
I don't think somebody else winning takes from me.
I've been meeting with agency and production owners
for 18 months telling them
that if you don't create
the creative division production company,
you're out of business.
And I'm telling the creative agencies,
if you do not create the production integration,
you're out of business.
And so, yes, I am saying that any company
that is only production or only creative and strategy
is fundamentally dead man walking unless they adjust.
Fully agree, because we're already seeing this in APAC.
So, right, and what, to take it a step further,
what we're also seeing here is, especially with social,
the agencies are not only just creating, producing,
but they're also serving.
And back to what you were saying,
putting out six, eight, 10, all personalized content
and optimizing it in a very dynamic way.
So there is no waste.
So are you also doing the same in your side of the world?
Eva, 15 years I've been doing that.
For 15 years, my company, even, you know, a lot of,
as you know, a lot of people now over the last decade
are like, wow, Asia, live shopping.
Asia shows us the future.
That's because the tech stack in Asia
with ByteDance and WeChat,
it's more integrated than it was.
It was fragmented US.
Because I built VaynerMedia for myself,
my long-term vision is to build a private equity firm
on top of my agency to buy orphan brands
from Fortune 500 CPGs.
Because that has been my mission,
I built media, creative and production in one stop,
literally in 2009.
If you understood social media in 2009, 2015, 2020,
there was no option to not do all of them under one roof.
Well, we agree.
We're ready there.
Good for you.
And as you know, what's really fun about it
is in this environment,
you can hold your agency partners accountable
because in that scenario, there's no pointing fingers.
The biggest issue for all the people on this call,
even that are not in that model,
is the media company blames the creative department company.
The creative department blames the production agency.
Everyone's blaming everyone.
And really, to be frank,
one of the reasons we've grown
to be one of the largest independent agencies in the world
is we wanna be held accountable to business results
at the end of the year.
Not fake reports, not MMMs, not MMAs, not awards,
not headlines in AdAge or Campaign Magazine.
We wanna be held accountable to business results.
But the only way for us to be held accountable
to business results is to have media, creative,
and production held accountable with us.
So you're talking about content creations.
Now we have creators as well.
So not only us, you create content,
but we have as well creators who create content for us.
And I think they have been driven conversations,
value, and culture so far.
And I think Ron Carlos has a question for you on creators.
Hola, Gary.
Look, it's undoubtedly the creators
have a lot of attention of the public,
but what's the best way to kind of interact with them
in order to really build trust
and not only kind of borrow attention?
I mean, we have found tricky sometimes
to deal with creators sometimes.
It's very hard to deal with creators.
I mean, my biggest issue with agencies
is that they don't have aligned interests with their clients.
That has been a huge reason we've grown
because I'm an immigrant who grew up
in a retail liquor store,
and the only thing I knew was customer first,
customer second, customer third.
And I brought that energy to agency land,
and it's really worked for us.
Creators, Ron Carlos, have even less alignment with you.
They want their money from you real quick.
They wanna get away with posting it
with as little oomph as possible,
and they wanna move on to their next paycheck, right?
Yeah.
So the way we think about that is the following.
We're very bullish on creators.
This is interesting.
Paid media creative,
and then if that wasn't enough integration,
what we have inside of Vayner is something we call C.A.I.T.
Creators, C-A-I-T.
Creators, affiliates, right?
Asia knows that, TikTok shop, all that.
Creators, affiliates, influencers, and talent, right?
We consider talent celebrities.
We try hard to make sure our clients
don't pay a million dollars for a celebrity,
but you know, you characters have fun sometimes.
Anyway, Ron Carlos, the way we think about C.A.I.T.
or all four of those people is we think of them
as media distribution and creative.
We have no emotion.
Everything is underpriced or overpriced attention,
meaning I'm not trying to sign a five-year deal
with a creator to make them our ambassador.
It's not gonna work.
It's gonna be overpriced.
We look at every single human that has potential
to do a product integration or a piece of content for us,
and we look at it strictly
as an unemotional financial transaction
around the value we have against their endorsement,
the creative they make,
and how much organic reach we anticipate that to get
against which demos.
I'll give you an example what that means.
We may talk to a creator for a brand,
and they want $500 for the post,
and we may think that's overpriced,
and we may talk to a creator who wants $133,000
for a single post, and we may think that's underpriced.
We think almost every famous person is grossly overpriced
because they have agents who inflate their value,
and we basically buy human beings
in an unemotional media planning comms strategy
at scale and use technology and humans
to be very efficient at it, and that is it.
So how do we think about it?
We think that all of you need to keep the ideology
on the shelf at home.
Let's get out of the, is this an authentic person to us?
Of course it's not authentic.
We're doing a business transaction.
If it was authentic, they would just post your product
in their feed naturally without us talking.
So this concept with agencies and PR agencies
and all you executives are like,
well, we need an authentic relationship.
Juan Carlos, it's not an authentic relationship.
You're giving them money.
It's already over.
So we're unemotional, but we're also like,
there's so many mistakes brands make.
Let me give you the first one.
This will help people.
Do not buy a single influencer ever in your life
based on how many followers they have.
Because again, let me show you something, Juan Carlos.
You'll find this interesting.
I'll show it in real time.
I am a creator.
I get offered crazy dollars.
I never do brand deals,
but I have 15.1 million followers on TikTok.
Now, let me show you something.
This post in the middle box got 55 million views.
Yes?
Yes.
This post that I just posted right now got 7,000.
Followers are losing their value as an indicator
to how much awareness the creative will create.
You understand?
So as you know, around the world,
all the people watching right now and their agency partners,
95% of the energy of how they pick an influencer
is based on followers.
95%.
And yet it has very little value.
You have to look at the consistency of what they make
and what content.
Like for example, if somebody was trying to target parents,
believe it or not, Gary V,
think about all the things Celine said in the upfront.
The number one brand category that should reach out to me
is people that are trying to reach parents
because disproportionately my content on parenting
over index and it's not even close.
So you have to analyze carefully.
It takes a lot of human work with AI tools.
You can do a lot more efficient analyzing of creator
and then you must buy creator unemotionally at scale.
We view creator as an extension of this thing
that Eva and I were talking about,
a production creative strategic agency.
We just buy them.
It's no different than the fee we are getting paid
to do all those things.
We take a percentage of that fee
and we outsource it to creators.
If we think we can get more efficient awareness
and relevance with those creators
than what we're capable of doing by ourselves.
Gary, if I can jump in,
we've gotten to know you and your team
working together in the US
on some of our high priority brands.
So we've gotten to know a little bit your philosophy
of going after underpriced attention
and knowing that we're in a post follower era
because of the way the algorithms work.
But these algorithms, they're constantly changing.
They're moving, evolving very fast.
So we're curious on your thoughts for the future.
Like what might be the single biggest shift
coming in the next two to three years
and how can bear brands try to stay ahead of the curve?
The biggest shifts are going to be live streaming,
not just live social shopping,
but the most famous people in the world next
are the people that are doing IRL streaming.
Kik, Twitch, this is incredibly important.
I'm sure Eva's smiling
because this has been playing heavy in Asia,
but it's been playing heavy in the US.
Kai Sinette, iShowSpeed, Aiden Ross,
these are some of the most famous people in the world.
So IRL streaming will come to every category.
Right now, young men and women,
but every one of you have seen this movie.
Facebook started with young men and women,
now Facebook is your grandparents, right?
So IRL streaming is something we need to think about.
What does that look like?
We start doing product placement like 1950s television
of our products in kitchens
of people that have lots of audiences, right?
So that's something.
I have a real left field one.
This is very left field.
I'm curious to see who's affected by this.
I have a very strong hypothesis
that collecting as a cultural genre
is something every CPG should be getting into.
What I mean by that is trading cards,
watches, sneakers, comic books.
If you look at the history of consumer packaged goods,
look at cereal as a category, little toys inside, right?
You look at Pepsi,
you even look at suntan lotion, other things.
Almost every execution of a collectible
being added to the CPG has been successful
in acquiring short-term sales
and consideration of new audiences
and long-term value.
It was pretty much the tried and true model
of 1950s and 60s CPG marketing.
It has completely gone away.
Meanwhile, I'm sure it's not lost on anybody who's watching,
trading cards, cryptocurrencies,
Lebubu, PopMart.
This is very real.
And so I know this may sound wild,
but if you're asking me three years from now,
do I believe one of the better executions
somewhere globally is taking one of our OTC products
and creating a jumbo pack that comes with a comic book
or a collectible toy or a trading card
or a sticker or a coin.
So I think collectibles as,
I call it collectibles as marketing.
Similarly, I believe in fashion as marketing.
Doing collaborations with hoodies and hats
because what we're trying to do
is get more cultural relevance for our brands
because we're commoditized.
We can be private labeled out, right?
We know this.
So it's cultural relevance.
And then finally, we just talked about influencers.
I mean, the rise of AI influencers
is going to be remarkable, right?
These are influencers that are not human beings.
And I believe that bears should start developing their own,
meaning that bear ink
is in the intellectual property business,
that you will start building out characters
like you're Disney,
but these will be real human beings,
not cartoon-like characters,
and they will be your spokespeople.
It's a progressive leap
from what Progressive does with Flow
or Jake from State Farm.
They lock those humans into long-term deals.
I think Fortune 500 companies
are gonna start creating AI influencers
and executing that.
Jay, I think you have a question for Gary.
Gary, you touched upon this a little bit
on live shopping and influencers
and selling live streaming.
I think live shopping has picked up quite a bit in Asia.
I mean, it's been there for a while.
They sell everything from cat foods to cars.
It's amazing how they do that.
But also a lot of AI influencers
actually also doing that in China.
But that online kind of shopping, live shopping,
hasn't really picked up in Europe or in US.
What's your perspective on, is it cultural
or is it just how the market is?
And what do you advise the brands in Europe and US,
for example, should they wait,
should they be leading that part
but both are the same?
What things have changed?
I think it's crazy to be a marketer
and not pay attention to what's happening in Asia.
Like, this has already happened.
And by the way, good news for US and Europe,
and we're starting to see the early signs in LATAM,
it's happening.
It's not the scale.
I mean, in China, it's 38% of all e-commerce business.
Do you know how insane that is?
China's not Sweden, it's a humongous market.
But in the US, it's growing very quickly.
TikTok shop is growing very quickly.
For context, Jay,
you may see all these little toys behind me.
This is VeeFriends, these are trading cards.
This is my Pokemon and Marvel that I'm building.
We're doing 50 to $100,000 a night on live streaming.
I am very good at marketing, paid media, creative.
Prior to live shopping,
if we did $5,000 a week with best practice social,
best practice performance, driving to our website,
we were doing a good job.
5,000 a week, 50,000 a night.
It's a much more significant emotional model of shopping.
It's a sense of community.
It's a sense of entertainment.
There's a reason that the TV,
you know, the QVCs and all these things
have done well for so long.
It is now here.
And my recommendation for everyone around the world
is to immediately do it.
The problem is, Jay, and you know this,
and this is what Eve and I were talking about,
the agencies have not caught up
around the rest of the world.
And so one of the reasons everyone
struggled with social the last decade
is the publicists and the WPPs and the Omnicoms
weren't good at it.
And so a lot of brands took it in-house.
So it became an efficiency play.
The problem is all brands are bad at it too.
So it was an efficient play, not an effective play.
So Jay, I think whether internally or externally,
putting actual effort to find real partners,
entrepreneurs, agencies, internal talent,
whatever is required, you know,
Asia's Asia, they know what they're doing.
VaynerMedia, my company, is tripling year over year
because we're the option for big brands here.
We're getting copied by the nanosecond.
Every new agency is building like we built.
Every big holding company is trying to figure out
how to reconfigure into it.
So in three years, Europe and Asia are doing this.
But to your point, Jay,
I assume the purpose of this call is like,
hey, let's not wait, let's leapfrog our competitors.
That requires a more entrepreneurial spirit
and a little bit more pushing against the political machine
that we are because we're a corporation.
And look, you're in a very challenging spot.
You guys, I think this is right.
Correct me if I'm wrong, anybody.
You guys just did a whole creative global review
and awarded your creative business globally
to a couple of holding companies.
That's a problem.
Because those characters don't do this stuff.
And a lot of money is getting sucked up in that model.
So I'm empathetic to that.
That's real life, that's corporate, that's real life.
I'm not going to cry about that.
I'm going to tell all of you
with whatever little money you have left,
you need to be very entrepreneurial about this.
So what do you recommend to use our money left?
On everything we're talking about.
What I know about the global holding company,
creative agencies, is they're not going
to dominate in social.
You need to figure that out, first and foremost.
Organic social, the middle funnel,
organic social production is the business.
So luckily in the US, we've got microscope.
And so that's giving the example
for the US team to like see it.
And I think that should be replicated around the world,
whether with us or somebody else or yourselves internally,
you need to have a data point for everyone to see it,
because I can promise you,
and Sarita's probably gone through this,
we have our number one saying internally,
number one, our most religious internal saying,
once they see it, they can't unsee it.
And so once you are affected by mid funnel,
proper execution, organic social at scale,
once you're affected by it,
you struggle to sit in meetings with the old way.
So with whatever little money you've left in LATAM,
AMIA, other parts, wherever that may be, India,
we must find a way to be remarkable
for our most significant brands
at organic social creative, organic,
not paid, paid hides.
For 60 years, working media paid has hid bad creative.
What I talked about early in this
was now working media should be used
to amplify good creative.
Good creative is not judged by awards
or opinions in this room.
Good creative is judged by getting organic reach,
because it's built on relevance
and the consumer actually likes it.
And we have a question,
I will also move now to some questions from our audience.
As there's one question in terms of
how we could create some distinctive creative,
because we all want to be grateful,
we all want to have great creative,
but at the same time, we are more or less average.
How do you create this amazing, disruptive creative?
Because we know that sometimes the attention
in TikTok is really short.
So how do we create this attention
and even more conversion afterwards?
Every single day on TikTok globally,
dozens of individual pieces of content
over index massively and go quote unquote viral
and drive significant sales every day.
There is not one television commercial done globally
in the last 10 years that has driven more sales,
including Super Bowl spots,
than the most viral TikToks on a daily basis.
Breakthrough work is work that sells product.
The answer to this question is by making dozens of ads
every single day across social media that have an intent.
Just so everybody knows this,
I'm glad you brought this up, Salim.
What I am talking about is not spray and pray,
it is not throw against the wall and see what sticks,
it is not even test and learn.
As Sarita will tell you, we take a brand on
and we find out what consumer segmentations
we are trying to get.
Now what we do well is we don't play in that old 18 to 35
or 50 year old female, we get much more distinct, right?
You go into interests, you go into age groups.
For example, just to give you one,
25 to 27 year old males on the East Coast of America
that play basketball.
That would be a consumer segmentation
against an over-the-counter drug, right?
So as you can imagine, Salim,
if that is the brief to my creative,
that they are making a video or a picture right now
for a 25 to 27 year old New Yorker male who likes basketball
that is driving the creative we're gonna make.
We then post that on social.
Breakthrough work is not work
that everybody on LinkedIn and Ad Age
says that was beautiful.
That's the problem, Salim.
The definition of breakthrough work
is broken in our industry.
Breakthrough work is a video that gets 40 million views
on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube Shorts.
And so how do you do that?
You have many different consumer segmentations
that are very narrow,
which then forces the creative production team
to make very poignant creative that has teeth to it.
And then you post it and then you analyze it
quantitatively and qualitatively.
Some of the best work we've ever done, breakthrough work,
is because we put out four different pieces of creative
that did not do well,
but we read every comment on those posts
to get the consumer insights
that led to the fifth piece of creative
that took in the consumer insights from social into account,
which then created the breakthrough work.
Yeah, so maybe I'll share for the audience,
not to make this too much of a commercial,
but just to share for the audience
what we've been doing a little bit in the US.
So we're working with Gary's team on Miralax,
on Claritin and on One A Day.
And we take the culture,
we take the strategy of the brands
and that feeds into this micro segmentation
that Gary's talking about, the cohorts.
And then the creative is generated
against particular signals.
So one of the posts that Gary was referencing on Miralax
is about roommates who are bestying so hard
that they start tracking their poops together.
And so this piece of creative
was actually rooted in some cultural trends
and that went viral.
And it's so funny when marketers say go viral,
but this spot, this social media ad
had over 30 million views in a short amount of time
with very little media spent against it.
So that's just making it a little bit tangible
what we're doing in the US.
Yeah, and again, we're very fortunate
and I wanna give a shout out actually,
we've been doing this a long time.
We're an agency.
You know, when I'm growing all my other stuff,
I have full control.
We have no control, right?
We need significant dancing partners.
Many people hire us to work with us
and then after hearing all our spiel,
which is super different than everything else,
and on the first day we start working together,
they wanna treat us like 72 and Sonny or Ogilvy or WPP.
We've been very fortunate in this scenario.
This is why I said yes to this hour this morning.
It's to give back to the relationship
we're building in the US
because without the dancing partners,
we'd be 18 months in, 24,
the amount of clients we're 18 months in
and haven't even gotten this close like we are here.
It's very frustrating
and we have something internally called elephant meetings,
right, address the elephant in the room.
And with those kind of clients,
every month or two we'll have,
and we're very direct about it.
In fact, I resigned a significant piece of business
the other day
because four elephant meetings led to enough.
I mean, you wanna talk about shock.
Everybody in my own company
and everybody on the client side,
I guess it's not very common for agencies
just to resign the business
because you can't do it the right way.
But this is a big deal
and between what we're doing in the US
and what is happening with Eva in Asia,
this organization should not be going backwards.
It should not.
You have too many examples.
We're just starting to flirt
even team out there
have a lot of things working in this direction.
This is marketing.
I don't know what else to tell you.
And this is historic.
Go use chat GPT and ask about
how many people bought television
when the radio and print were the primary marketing.
Television was fought heavily.
And let me give you the preview
of what happened in those 20 years.
It completely reset
who the biggest brands in the world were.
And we cannot afford to be marketing like 10 years ago.
And so, you know,
I'd be lying.
I already referenced it once.
We must be thoughtful about our partners
and how we work with our partners
and what pressure we put on our partners.
And again, you're global, there's politics.
I'm empathetic.
But all of you individually in your own markets
must fight for some carve outs to do this stuff right.
Or God willing, I hope whoever wins your global creative
things are actually starting to move in this direction.
I'm just not optimistic
because I interview all of them every day
and they're very far away.
Very good.
Maybe we take one or two more questions from the audience.
So we have one questions.
How does this resonate with buyer guidelines
as for the smaller market,
we don't have budget or resources
to manage organic presence on social media.
Sure you do.
And therefore, we rely on sporadic efforts
through influencer and page.
You do.
I love when big companies cry poor.
You have money.
You're just wasting it on dumb ----.
Let me give you an example.
Somebody could counter me and say, Gary, you're wrong.
Here's my P&L.
I have no marketing dollars.
Then I look under the hood.
I'm like, you do.
You don't marketing dollars, you control.
You have slotting fee and trade dollars.
You have retail media dollars.
We have to grow up and push against our distribution partners
and take our money back and drive demand.
It's somewhere.
And if you don't have money,
well, then you don't have money.
That's fair, right?
Like if you don't have money,
well, at least that means you're not wasting money
on something else.
So either you really, really, really do not have money,
which what can I answer to that?
The corporation decided not to fund the brand, right?
Or you say you don't have money
because you've accepted all these other things
that you spend money on without realizing
that if you actually took back control and created demand,
you could change the way this is going for you.
It's my biggest concern, retail media.
My number one concern is retail media.
But I think the question behind as well
is with organic business,
you also need to have a double conversation
with your consumers.
There's two ways to dialogue
because this is viral,
there's impressions, there's posts,
there's comments and everything.
With our guidelines,
most of the time we disable comments on platforms
because of market vigilance issue,
because of compliance issues.
We are not allowing people to comment on our ads.
Is there any limitation of doing this kind of things
because you limit the conversation you could have
with your audience from a direct perspective?
Two things, my head of legal,
because of my career and who we've done,
is that the forefront is literally consulted
by the FTC for this area.
Number two, your direct competitors
are not doing the same exact thing as you are.
I cannot fix the fact that you're at the highest levels.
Your legal department has decided to go too far
in correction and interpretation.
Good news, even though I'd like to change that, right?
You will not be affected to the degree you're thinking.
Meaning, let me explain.
If you disable comments,
you're losing 10 to 12% of the magic
on the community affinity building.
You're losing 25% of the magic on consumer insights,
but good news, you can get those consumer insights
by reading the comments in different posts
around social media, not on yours.
So, Celine, I'm not really in the business
of like crying about it.
I grew up in the alcohol business in America,
heavily regulated.
I have financial services, I have toy companies,
and I have pharma clients.
Everyone's regulated.
And then everyone's regulated by political correctness.
Everyone's scared all the time in corporate.
Whatever the reality is, is the reality.
Us not being able to comment or closing comments
doesn't take away the fact that us doing proper creative
in channels that have actual consumer attention
that are more underpriced than the channels of the classic
is still a good marketing move for us.
I think there's one question if, let me see.
Following up on your comment about building a media plan,
putting social aside, how would you advise
identifying the right platforms and Twitter
to leverage to drive awareness of our product
and push people down the funnel?
By being a consumer anthropologist strategist,
which is a long-winded way to say, that's very easy.
For me, who spends all this time trying to pay attention
to where the attention is,
the reason I can bring up Twitch and I can bring up Kik,
the reason I can bring up Whatnot and TikTok Shop,
the reason I know what's going on on Facebook proper
or WeChat or Line in Japan
is because I spend my time paying attention
to where consumers are.
So the answer to that question
is by being a modern comms planner.
I mean, there's really, Celine, there's no difference
than me deciding which channels to go into today
than in 1995 and 1975 by actually putting in effort.
It's such a great call-out, though.
You know what?
I don't know if you see this, Celine.
You see the goosebumps?
The reason I have goosebumps right now
is the fact that that question's even being asked
speaks to how poorly the holding company
media model has become.
We do not give enough effort to the comms planning.
We're selling fake technology.
We're selling fake reports.
We're in such an awkward place in our industry,
and I wish we could get out of it.
We've become students.
We've become corporate.
We've become Dex and big data and all this stuff.
The answer to the question
is by paying attention to the consumer.
And I think it goes as well with the last question, maybe.
Some of our brands are highly relevant with our consumers,
but lack effectiveness with our competitors.
How do we solve this in credit?
By being relevant.
She or he who that said that
might say that they're highly relevant
maybe from a use case, right?
Or maybe, there's only two ways to dissect that question
without me following up with that person.
If it's highly relevant,
then it is by nature distinct from your competitor.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi are the same thing, but they're not.
Let me use a better one than Coke and Pepsi,
because as a cola drinker, they do taste different.
Water brands, they're the same thing.
And if you're actually relevant,
that is the way you separate.
So I don't know if the question is posed as like,
we're relevant to their day-to-day usage needs, right?
Like, obviously I need this thing to stop sneezing
or whatever it might be, right?
But this is my point.
This company will be fully private labeled out of business
unless it builds a relevance creative machine.
And so the answer is the mid funnel.
I don't know what else to tell you.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry you don't want it to be,
or you don't get it, or you don't like it.
It is the mid funnel.
And the mid funnel by our standards
and most modern marketers that are not in Fortune 500 land
is organic social creative,
which then allows you after the results,
which are based on merit and modern AI technology
to decide if you want to go up, right?
With the Mydol viral post,
we could decide to build an entire campaign
around sisterhood in that demo,
or we could take that asset and spend millions of dollars
to drive to amazon.com or walgreens.com or walmart.com.
It is the middle funnel.
And so as you go through this transition
as a global age company around creative,
we must put stress on whoever you choose
to not do yesterday and to do tomorrow.
And that will be an extremely hard challenge,
but we must press it
because you're not RFPing production creative social,
you're RFPing creative shops.
So all of you are about to get a bunch of decks
with a bullshit slogan to do a television commercial
and it is not gonna work.
And Eva knows it.
So I have to go and work on my job, but Eva knows it.
So all of you can get to Eva, she works at your company.
All of you should email Eva because she knows it.
And guess what?
A lot of you know it.
Some of you have just not been put in markets
where you can taste it as much as she has tasted it,
but you know it.
You know it, you just haven't seen it as often as she has.
I've never seen anything but it for 20 years.
I can't even comprehend doing a television commercial.
Can't even comprehend.
So it's an incredible time.
There's a big opportunity.
It's a little bit of a challenge
because of your global creative RFP.
You're gonna have to figure it out,
but even if it goes very conservative and classic,
like I think it will,
you still all individually in your markets
can fight for a little more money
and all of that should go to mid-funnel.
That's the answer.
That's the only thing I see you can do in 26.
And by 27, you're gonna realize that model didn't work
and you're gonna unwind it
and then you can fund the mid-funnel properly.
Thank you, Gary.
I know you have an ad stop at 10.
I do, thank you.
You probably need to go.
Bye everyone.
It was a pleasure to have you.
You too.
Thank you so much.