A short excerpt of Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about the balance of creative (art) and analytical (science) approaches in marketing, the primacy of time as an asset, and practical B2B marketing tactics—especially personalized creative and running social ads rather than relying on bulk outbound messages. The talk emphasizes practitioner-level execution, owning ad skills, and using targeted creative to reach decision-makers within specific companies.
Chapters
If you understand and start respecting both art and science, math and creative equally friction creating that diamond, you will be a successful marketer over the next decade. If you have not achieved what you want to professionally or in life, time is the number one thing you've got. You need to deploy as much of that as humanly possible. That is the asset. When you have not achieved the things that you want to happen in life and it is because of time that you haven't wanted to put into these platforms and worlds. That is a massive mistake. It's the one asset you have. Not everybody in this room has money. It's true for everybody in this room. You will sit back in 20, 30 years and regret if you didn't execute in this era. And by the way, I don't want to hear that this is for 20 and 30 year olds. 40, 50, 60, 70, it's an equal playing field. If you're willing to be a practitioner and understand the ecosystem that I've been speaking about. Tonight I'm spending so much time with 40 to 60 year old executives who, who are dwelling and are upset and tell me dumb shit like, but Gary, I didn't grow up with this shit. Neither did I. Alice, my friends, I want you to become historians of marketing. I want you to also understand what marketing is. We have confusion in the marketplace of marketing and branding versus sales. We have a lot of people in this room that are digital natives and they really understand sales, they understand optimization, ui, ux, they understand cost per click, they understand how you convert and change things and things of that nature. But what they don't do is actually brand and market. And if your business is growing, you have to have a healthy balance of marketing and sales and branding. If I had one plea for the collective room tonight from a marketing and branding and business standpoint, it is that we have to understand the following. And this is tough for the digital landscape, but very easy for the Madison Avenue landscape. Creative is the variable of success. The one thing that we all trade on in this room. No matter how and what you do, whether you're B2B or B2C, whether you sell sneakers or wine or books or your services, no matter what, we are all tied to attention. We are all battling for your attention. But once you have my attention, that creative is the variable. One amazing thing about B2B we and I'm in it now with VaynerMedia, we know the name of the customer, we know the businesses we want, we even know the decision maker we want. The problem is we suck we get real lazy and we send bulk fucking emails on Linked fucking in. Can we make a pledge tonight? Actually, you know what? Let's do this. If you're willing to pledge to no more bulk email horseshit spec email on LinkedIn. Stand up so I can clap for you personally. In 1997, I had a 200,000 person email newsletter for Wine Library and winelibrary.com that had 91.3% open rates. Not because I was a hero, but because email marketing hadn't existed yet. The thing that I'm most fascinated by is that I know as a marketer, and I'm a marketer. As a marketer, the number one thing, the thing that I know more than the sun will come up tomorrow, is that marketers ruin everything. You show me attention and I'll show you a place that I want to sell. And that's how it gets changed. If you're in a B2B environment, you have to run Facebook ads and you have to do it now. And first and foremost, you're not gonna outsource it to somebody else. You're not gonna find little Suzy that's 23 in the office and be like you. You're young. You know social media, you're not gonna do that. You're Gonna actually spend 10 hours and read and watch videos. It's crazy. You can learn anything. So many people are like, gary, but I don't know how to use the Instagram product. I'm like, I get it. YouTube. You go to Google and you search it, fuck face. Okay? That's what you do. It's not super complicated. It's crazy. Anything you don't know, you can search in two seconds. Everybody's crippled. Like they don't know it's fucking there. You become a practitioner. You actually deploy the Facebook ads yourself. So you have some ability and knowledge so somebody can't hose you. You need to be the person that knows it the best. One more time. B2B, raise your hands. You guys know who you're going after? I want you to target the employees of that company one by one. The employees. Now you take a step back. Now you know you're targeting 15, 17, 22 different businesses. If you want to get really crazy, you target them one by one and you make videos or pictures just for that company. But if you want scale, you can put them all in a bucket. And now you're going to make a video or a picture. You, you know, a billboard or print ad or a television commercial. And what you're going to do is you're going to make the creative start with, does your CFO know? Does your CTO know? Does your CIO know? You know exactly who in that organization, in that organization is the person that needs to see that content. And you're going to start the video or your picture with that statement. And I promise you, for hundreds of dollars, depending on the size of your business, sometimes for thousands of dollars, that person is going to get 12 to 25 to 100 people forwarding them that piece of content. And that piece of content will be the gateway drug to your sales team to convert and close. It works every time.
