Is Cannes Lions worth it? Ramp overwhelms Brex's marketing, Gary Vee: 'Advertising is a meritocracy'

I think Cannes Lions is still happening right now. A lot of people are there. I see a lot of these activations and the biggest companies are— Meta's doing like, there's all these panels and all this stuff and it looks like a very nice time. So the question is, if you're in advertising, is Cannes Lions actually worth it or not?

So my CEO used to be the president of iProspect, which I think now has more than 10,000 employees and Probably over a billion in revenue at this point, and iProspect is owned by one of the big holding companies called Dentsu. When he was at iProspect, it was smaller. I think it was still around like seven thousand employees, but they were still big in size. They're just bigger now because I think Dentsu combined Merkle with iProspect. Although I could be wrong, and he's tried out all the cans, lines, and stuff like that, or can. And what he found was. It costs a lot of money, good for branding, doesn't really drive much revenue. And we haven't tested it, but I also believe it depends what type of agency you are. See, the past agency he was at was a performance marketing agency. At NP Digital, sure, we do creative and stuff like that, and we bought a creative shop, but we are mainly first a performance marketing agency. If you look at a lot of the agencies that are at Cannes, They're not really performance marketing agencies. It's not the sexy type of marketing. But what's funny is it produces a lot of the ROI in marketing. And I just feel that Cannes is great if you want the branding and the notoriety and mingle with the who's who, but I don't think it drives tons of revenue, or maybe it just depends on the type of agency. I think for performance marketing shops, it doesn't drive too much. Maybe it does for creative shops. And I don't know anyone who has or has not tried it out for creative shops.

Yeah. I think Cannes is more for like a, like more of a branding, more of a creative type of thing. Because you see those big brands going and then, you know, you see Gary Vee there, right? Hanging out. I think you have a little thing on Gary Vee here we can talk about in a moment. But, you know, I see the Kelce brothers, Travis Kelce, Jason Kelce, like they have their football podcast. Like, you know, I saw something with them there. But it just looked like it was a really good time and people are partying and all that. And I would say my view on it, and both Neil and I haven't been to Cannes, right? Neil, you haven't been, right?

No.

So I would just say like we're speaking from kind of our observations. But I would say what would be worth it is if you have 5 or 10 business deals that are big business deals to get done over there and people are hanging out there, then yes, you go there and you try to get a couple of those deals done because in-person is always great. And people will often use these big events to try to get deals done. And in person often goes a long way. So that's the angle where I can see it working out. But other than that, I think it's, you know, you're probably better off. Most people listening to this probably better off just focusing on, you know, your business.

Now, before we go to the Gary Vee topic next, and I'll let you read it. Speaking of events, I found the best ROI in the boring, ugly conferences. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I love them. I think they're the best events. Like for example, I spoke at an event that was just on life insurance and everyone in there was trying to figure out how to do better marketing for life insurance companies. And majority of the businesses in there were either generating hundreds of millions, if not billions, or if they weren't already publicly traded, then they were worth, you know, $50, $100+ billion market caps, et cetera. And what I found is speaking at events like that, even though there's only 200 people in the room, You pick up a lot of revenue from people who have a high LTV and they can spend an arm and a leg on marketing versus just going to Cannes where you're competing with everyone because all the agencies are there. Well, when I was speaking at the life insurance event, I was the only agency and marketer in the room. And I was like fishing with dynamite and it was great.

By the way, speaking of events, I'm— so Neil's going to speak at this event. I'm hosting this YPO Global Marketing Summit in Miami next year. By the way, dates might change a little bit, Neil. I don't know. Look at your April 23rd to 25th. But here's the thing. So, what I'm doing and the reason I'm telling this to everyone is you don't necessarily need to be a YPO member because the way I've structured it is you can be a key associate of a YPO member. And then each YPO member can bring 2 key associates. So, if you want to come, you want to come hang out with amazing people, then find a YPO member and then ask them to register for the Global Marketing Summit and then figure something out there. But Neil's going to be there. I've got a bunch of other people that have confirmed. It's going to be amazing. And this is one of those things where everyone in the group, each YPO member, they have to have a business that is at a certain valuation or doing a certain amount of revenue. And it's often places like this where people just like, hey, they're here to learn. And it's very easy to get a deal done because these are people trying to just grow their businesses. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group So just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. You know Ramp, right? The credit card, and you know Brex?

Yeah.

So I think this one's interesting because Ramp is, it seems like they're much more of a product-oriented company and Brex is much more of a marketing and sales organization. And here's what I mean by that. So I'm going to share this and both of them raised a lot of money and these are corporate credit cards. They have the— and Ramp is like shipping a lot of product, right? So this tweet from Delian over here, he's a successful VC. He's based in Miami. So he said, Brex got Senra as a customer through marketing. So Brex, again, they're more of a sales marketing organization, right? Senra, which is a company, ultimately decided to— this is a customer of Brex— switch to Ramp because they had better software, enabled more automation in accounting, saving Senra time and money. So he says, billboards can get you revenue in the short term, but in the long term, smart CFOs choose Ramp. And obviously this guy invested in Ramp, but you can see over here, Senra Systems, right? Brex, Senra Systems. They're like, Brex is like celebrating that this is one of their customers and put it in their billboard. And I think this guy over here, these guys are one of the founders of— What is this?

Senra?

Co-founder. Yeah, these are the Senra co-founders, but it doesn't matter anymore because they switched over. And so at the end of the day, you can have good sales and marketing, but if your product isn't good enough or your service isn't good enough, people are still going to churn. They're still going to find a better solution. So let's not get it twisted. We talked about this a couple months ago that marketing is a subset of business. You got to get the product and service right. And it's naive to think that Marketing can overtake private equity, for example. But go ahead.

You're spot on. They think it can overtake private equity. They think it can solve all problems. But all marketing really does is it just drives you traffic. And if you're selling crap, you're selling crap and no one's going to care over time.

What did he call it, Neil? Polishing a turd, still a turd.

Yes, exactly. And it's funny, like I look at marketing, if you have a crap product, It just prolongs your death. You're still going to die. It's just going to prolong it and it's just giving you more time and you're better off not having the time and instead just, you know, cutting everything loose and moving on.

Yep. Stop kicking the can down the road. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. Let's go to the Gary Vee thing. So you put this in here, Neil. I actually don't know what you mean here. Gary Vaynerchuk says advertising is now a meritocracy. So go for it.

So he talked about this at Cannes in which he was breaking down how he's had, you know, a lot of followers, tens of millions of followers when you combine all his platforms combined, well over 10 million. And social media used to be like an email list. You and I have talked about this in which, you know, you send out something, all your followers see it and then boom. And Mark Cuban's even complained about this. But now social media has turned into discovery. You don't need any followers. If your content's good, you can just go viral and you can get more views than me or Gary or even a Kardashian, right? Like, just like that girl who said, I'm looking for a guy in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. She went viral. She doesn't have tons of followers. She went more viral than probably most of us will ever go viral in our lifetime. She then even created a song with David Guetta. Guetta.

Guetta. By the way, and can is pronounced like a can, just can.

Oh, okay. So it's like when you think about that, and then she created a follow-up one when then she was waving her hands, like doing the money sign, you know, like rubbing her fingers together. I was like, good for her. I don't think her song made a ton of money or people bought it on Spotify, or I don't know if it was for sale, but she went viral. And that's true. We've talked about this in social media. They're all discovery networks. TikTok has really pushed that hard. And they've learned that just show the engaging content and don't show the rest. And who cares if people follow that engaging content? If everyone loves it, chances are, You know, you're going to love it too.

I actually remember this now. So when he says advertising is now a meritocracy, he's really referring— he's what— so Gary Vee also, he always has a thing for the year. This year his thing is he's like, organic is the number one, organic social is the number one marketing opportunity right now. And the reason he says that is because yes, for example, Neil and I, we had a little exchange where we talked about Shake Shack and Chick-fil-A, and that video got over a million views. on Instagram, right? Which is pretty decent for 2 guys just nerding out on marketing. And so you just never know what's really going to hit, but the things that do, it's because people really like it. There's a certain way we talked about it. There's a certain way we interacted with each other and there's a cool story too, right? So I think it's good that it's a meritocracy. Who knows how long it's going to last like that? But I think the fact of the matter is before it was really about how many subscribers did you have? How many followers did you have? And now it's more based on the— they said it was like the social graph before, which is how many followers you have, right? And now it's just based on, no, how good is the video? And for example, that's why a TikTok can just pop off and get tens of millions of views. So that's what it is.

And what you'll find is— Go ahead.

Go ahead. You go ahead.

What you'll find is what works on one network won't always work on another, right? So like that girl who went viral about looking for a guy in finance, Went really viral on TikTok, did well on the other social networks but not as well. And you'll also find some of your videos will do better on one network than the other because people's preferences are different and the demographics that each network targets is very different. Ideally, each network wants everyone, but that's not realistic. And there's a big difference in age group and gender depending on the social network.

All right everyone, so that is it for today.

Please don't forget to rate, Make sure they go to marketingschool.io/agency.

I was going to do that. So please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe first. And then if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, go to marketingschool.io/agency. That's where we help agency owners grow faster. A lot of people have been saying the community has been great, that they've actually got a lot of resources, templates, and a lot of coaching that's helped them sidestep mistakes. So that's the group Neil and I have. Please join it if it seems like it's fit, and there's no long-term commitment. That's the cool thing about it. So that being said, we will see you tomorrow.