Decoding The Fall Of Traditional Marketing In 10 Minutes ft. Gary Vee

Welcome to Marketing against the Grain. I got a special video for you today with our friend Gary Vaynerchuk, who is an amazing marketer creator, awesome at just framing ideas and he had an incredible 10 minutes on the state of marketing today. How Fortune 500 companies are messing up marketing. How Madison Avenue advertising agencies are some of the worst things that are happening in marketing. And he talks about the vision for the future and how marketing is going to change. I think it's a must watch for anyone building a business or interested in marketing. So I wanted to share this with you all today. Let's dive into the conversation with Gary.

This is the reality of marketing. It will forever change. What I struggle with is how NAive the Fortune 500 companies are of what's happening right now.

They should be terrified the CMOs.

If you're not in the craft and you don't know how things are changing unless your agency turns up one day and has a bad report because for the most part that's, that's all they look at. Right. Like you actually to really understand how things are changing in marketing, you have to be in the craft each and every day.

You just talked about the thing that bothers me. What bothers me is the agency landscape. I am flabbergasted. 15 years in how much agencies incentives do not align with their clients.

Agencies incentives are to make TV ads and try to win awards. And most companies don't need TV ads and, and awards are irrelevant.

And if you look even deeper, Kip, they sell things that they make margin on.

Oh, of course.

So it's not. They make money on upfront buying on tv for sure. They make a ton of money on creating television. If you're a creative agency for everybody that doesn't know what happens on Madison Avenue. If you're an iconic creative ovalv, let's use an iconic one. You get paid a full year millions and millions of dollars just to think of one commercial. You don't even make it. You outsource it to a production company literally to think make decks and present. And then even worse, Programmatic Digital. They make so much money in these black boxes justified by cpm. Like the whole ecosystem is really, really pissing me off. And it I believe that the reason I'm still building an agency is a little bit based on my superhero syndrome, which is a problem and I got to fix it because I that, you know, you go too far and you start building resentment. That's my personal life and my professional life. Like I, I, I really want to tear down Madison Avenue with VaynerMedia. And when I say tear down, I don't wish bad on anyone. I just believe that the interests don't align enough. And I'm hoping that I inspire a lot of kids that are coming out of ad school to build an independent agency and not sell to a holding company. Cause if you sell to a holding company, it goes back to what's happening. I'm not even mad at the holding companies. They're publicly traded companies and they, they care about their stock value, not about driving business results for their clients. And, and finally, it is the Coca Cola and BMW's fault. If you're writing the check, you're in control. So. So they are. They are feeding this bad ecosystem. They're the ones that can stop it. So, yeah, for everybody who's listening, knowing that there's a lot of people that might be considering getting into the marketing landscape, the Fortune 500 marketing thing is a major problem. It's built on a book called How Brands Grow that was written in 1991. It's the thesis of how companies still run, which is right in principle, but doesn't take into account the practitionership of 2024. Reach and frequency. And being consistent is beautiful. The problem is the world is fragmented. People's attention is 9,000 places now. And so you need to win on relevance at scale. That's how you stay consistent. And so that's why I wrote Day Trading Attention. I'm hoping, very selfishly, but also selflessly, that I might write the current bible of marketing. And that's the attempt I'm giving.

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I agree with you on the agency model being broken. Like, we work with you all at Vayner on social at HubSpot. Right, Brian? And folks on our team, we're killing it with you all. Thank you. But like, I can't imagine other agency moving and executing.

Thank you. And it's starting to go well. But you know, it takes like, I'm sure you've heard from your team, I'm reading the notes every week. It, when you're doing it different, it takes a few minutes to calibrate it. Like, it's not the easiest thing for a HubSpot or anybody else to make that transition because it's a different model.

Well, you have to move fast and.

Back to your point.

You have to be relevant at scale. And to be relevant at scale, you have to say interesting and different shit and it offends people and people are a little uncomfortable about it and they don't know how to act. And then you get some people who will send you DMs and be like, oh, I don't know if I like this. And you just have to be like, well, most people do. And the people I'm here for and the people I'm here to serve do. And that's ultimately what matters.

I'm not here to make everybody happy.

I'm here to make companies who are trying to grow and be the next Fortune 500 companies trying to make them happy 100%.

And you know, it's hard, it's hard for your most senior constituents. I know your founders very well. You know, maybe they've seen a post and like. But then by the way, it's hard for my team. I always tell my team, if we're asking for humility and yes. And culture from our clients, we have to be the same. I had to speak to a creative last week in Asia and said, you're doing to our clients what you cry about that our clients do to us. Because she was saying like my model, our model. The model is we need to win on relevance to many different consumers. When the client has an idea, we need to make that piece of creative with the same gusto as if it was our own idea. And so my team's at its worst when they're like, oh, client, you don't get it. No, no. Every client usually knows their business better than us. And then on a flip side, you know, sometimes it's a senior person, but then sometimes it's day to day people. Sometimes it's a 30 year old who says no to something we're making because it's not on brand. In their on brand is to the different constituents, not the subjective opinion of a human.

Right. The it's not on brand is like the most awful, horrible excuse not to do something.

I love you for this. This is not on brand is the great weapon of bad marketing, right?

Hell yes.

Because it's somebody invoking their political power on the meeting. Because this is not on brand would be like me saying that I, Gary, am universally correct in what attractive is great, right? Like I'm like every human on earth, attracted to certain things. I'm not attracted in other people and certain things. I'm very aware that many people are attracted to those things, including my best friends. Like I grew up with friends and they were attracted to certain girls and I was attracted differently. That's life, right? And then the audacity that you as a human, as a brand manager or somebody on the marketing team or social is the only person that knows what's on brand when in fact we are of the moment where we need to be more relevant to many different consumers than ever. We're not making a television commercial. I'm not interested in debating pink versus fuchsia. Let's post them both, right?

I mean, what we talk a lot about on this show is that with AI and AI tools gaining steam, the cost to ship ideas is approaching zero, right? Like if you, if you are obsessed about pixel perfect or the perfect idea, you're going to lose because somebody's just going to out test you and outship you.

I just don't understand how people don't understand what's going on. I really don't.

Listen, Gary, this show is listened to by hundreds of thousands of marketers and founders every month. You have the floor. What do you want them to change about how they think about marketing? Like if you could just give them the two minutes of like, shift your mind this way.

Here are many things that need to be digested which are hard to digest. Number one, quantity does not come at the expense of quality.

Hell yes.

Number two, if you do not understand how the first second of a video works per platform, you cannot be successful at social media. AKA how the first second of your video shows up in a TikTok versus how it shows up in an Instagram reel is already different. And I'm watching many of you not succeed in one or the other or both platforms because you have not understood the science of the art of the first second of a video. Number three, a comment on a social media post today. That's clever. What I call Cassie comments as creative is a more effective marketing execution than almost every banner ad, billboard, radio, spot and print ad in the world. Number four, if you do not market to 40 different 30 different. I'll let you get away with 20 different micro consumer segmentations every day. 19 to 23 year old Hispanic males that live in California that are into skateboarding, 40 to 45 year old moms in middle America that have teenage boys, 60 to 70 year old men who are in the last five years of their career that live in Florida that work in B2B SAS 21 to 25 year old women that only consume TikTok for health and beauty tips on the coasts, 150,000 to 300,000 income earning Asian males who are 30 and single that travel a lot. If you do not think in the way that I just talked about and have many of them for your coffee, for your SaaS business, for your automotive company, for your makeup brand, for your fortune 5005000 or local flower shop. If you do not think in cohorts. And then those cohorts are how you wake up in the morning and think about the 10 to 20 pieces of content you're going to put out on social media. You already are on your back foot and are losing market share without even realizing it.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa.

I can see the client's hold history, calls, support tickets, email, mails and cues of tasks from three days ago. I totally missed Hotspot Grow better.