January 28, 2021 • 34 mins
No one's story captures the spirit of the American Dream better than Gary Vaynerchuk. Fresh from the USSR, Gary’s earliest memories are of his family of eight crammed into a studio apartment in Queens. But he's been focused on turning lemons into literal lemonade from the very beginning: Gary launched his own lemonade stand at age seven—and he's been an entrepreneur ever since! From his early adventures selling wine on the internet, to the triumphs of VaynerMedia, learn why Gary sees Seinfeld's process as the key to better ad creative, what he'd go back and tell his 20-year old self, and why his mom remains his hero. Plus, Gary tells Bob what he's planning for next … including why he might buy the New York Jets!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I Heart Radio.
They did not own a computer in my first eighteen
years of my life. Within the first twenty five minutes
of me hearing Cuckoo Cooch, within twenty five minutes of
being on a O l in, I just knew that
(00:23):
this thing that I was sitting in front of was
going to change the world. Hi, am Bob Pittman. Welcome
to this episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the
Frontiers and Marketing. Today. We have someone who knows a
lot about those frontiers. He lives on the leading edge.
He is not afraid of risk, and he breaks through
again and again. Best Selling author, entrepreneurs, ceo, marketer, thinker, speaker, podcaster,
(00:48):
and video star Gary Vayner Chuck. Gary was born in
the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U S when
he was young and watched his family build success in
a new country. He went from Queens to New Jersey
and made his mark as a successful child entrepreneur selling
(01:10):
flowers back to his neighbor lemonade stands, baseball cards, shoveling snow,
and working at his dad's liquor and wine store. Throughout
college and after college, he helped transform the family business
from a two million dollar a year revenue business to
a sixty million dollar a year revenue business, in the
process developing his online marketing Chops, which led to his
(01:33):
current empire anchored by Vainer Media. He's the quickest guy
on his feet and always has valuable insights, and he's
a good guy. Gary, Welcome. I really appreciate that, Bob Happy.
It's really great to be with you before we dig
into the meet, Gary, I want to do you in
sixty seconds. You ready to go early Riser or night owl,
(01:56):
l New York or New Jersey, New York Mets or Yankees,
Android or iPhone, call or text, text, coffee or tea coffee,
baseball or basketball, basketball, red wine or white wine, white wine,
chocolate or vanilla, vanilla, Cats or Dogs, Cats, g I
(02:16):
Joe or baseball cards, baseball cards. It's about to get
a little harder, smartest person you know, My mom. Childhood
a hero A mix between Macho Man, Randy Savage, Don
Mattingley and Patrick Ewing. Favorite podcast I'm gonna say Tim
Ferris is because it was the one that emerged in
that early era as a real cultural impact and started
(02:41):
creating the possibilities of how big the genre could be.
For me first job, the only job I really had
was working my dad's liquor store. But I always think
of my first job is selling lemonade, even though I
was self employed. Favorite food English peas secret talent. I
can draw really well and nobody knows that last one.
What's your guilty pleasure? Candy bars? Specifically, what the McCall
(03:04):
it's though? Kit cats and butter fingers and stickers and
candy bars? For sure. Let's get going, Let's get into
the media things. You have had one of the most
successful startups and the ad agency business and a world
in which it's hard. How did you manage to break through?
First of all, thank you for saying that, because it
(03:25):
means a lot coming from you. And I think I
broke through because I'm a good businessman. My thesis of
consumer behavior was right, and I knew nothing about Madison Avenue.
And I think those are three incredibly intriguing ingredients, and
if I'm being self assessing, I'll bring them down quickly
with the hope that somebody can use it as courage
(03:48):
to jump into doing something that they feel like they
want to do, and they believe that they're capable of doing,
but maybe on paper it doesn't look like it. I
was a good operator, as you referenced earlier. You know,
I built my dad's business. It was about a three
point eight million dollar year business and what the sixty
million about seven or eight years. I thought it was
a retailer. I thought I was a businessman. But when
I really started self assess, I realized that was extremely
(04:11):
good at marketing. And I was very strong and operating
and c e owing, but this talent of just genuinely
understanding where the attention is going and how culture works.
And I thought starting an agency would be a way
to get paid to learn why the Fortune five hundreds
were not doing what I saw was brewing on Netflix, Facebook,
(04:32):
Amazon and YouTube. So a my timing was great. I
started a social media agency right as people were starting
to consider we needed this behavior, and they did not
believe the creative agencies that they were working with understood it,
nor did the Grays or b B d os even
care about it. It was an afterthought. And to be
very frank, Bob, and you know this, for the biggest
(04:54):
creative agencies in the world today, the great ones, it's
still an afterthought, which is perplexing to me, but understandable
knowing the margins and the ecosystem. So a my timing
was good be I'm a good businessman. A lot of
times artists or people that see things can't operate. So
I was able to stay afloat those first three years
(05:15):
when it was difficult to get clients, and then see
the bet ended up being ridiculously right, no different than
the incredible things that have happened in your career. If
you're good enough to get by in the first four
thirty six months of innovation and stay alive, if you
end up being right, you're in a position to catch
all the opportunity. And then I evolved, you know, we
(05:36):
evolved from just doing community management on social too, the intermedia.
New York did the most Super Bowl spots un last year.
Super Bowl is a creative agency. We have three spots,
so we've evolved into a full service creative and media.
And I've continued to innovate, whether it's podcasting or influencing
influencers or being best in class on TikTok. Communications changing,
and I'm sure if we look in the history of
(05:58):
the people that want television we were transitioning from radio
or which agencies razor Fish A, k q A won
the Internet when we were transitioning into that world. You know,
this is a historic story of Madison Avenue, who's the
man or woman that comes along that understands the next
communication change best and she and he capable of building
(06:19):
an organization around it. And I think I'm going to
get a lot of credit one day historically about being
that person for this social media O T T kind
of like big shift in the maturity of the Internet
and how it affected advertising. It's interesting you say that
because A Mathew Magic We've talked some about those moments
in time, and I was there for some of them.
When the cable networks became a viable advertising medium in
(06:43):
the late nineteen eighties, and I was there when the
Internet sort of broke through. And when I went to
A O L in nine six, I think we had
a couple of million dollars of advertising. We left, we
had two or three billion of advertising. So it all
happened in the nineties. And you're right, the established players
don't really jump on the new very quickly, and creates
a huge opportunity. And you've been that so let's talk
(07:04):
a second about that. At the heart of that is
really having an open mind and also thinking about creativity
in a very new way. When you look at creativity,
which clearly you did when you you built this, what
do most people get wrong about creativity? I think that
most people get wrong in giving freedom to actually be creative. Ultimately,
(07:30):
creativity is best when it's free and allows the end
consumer to judge and everything that happens in between it
debating politics, subjective opinions treated as truth reporting, and other
math trying to be deployed against it to be a
(07:50):
benchmarking system. Creativity is it's a process of finding right,
far more than a process of being right. And I
think modern advertising rise to be right and pushed down.
A friend of mine hit me up the other day
and let's listening to Jerry Seinfeld talk about how he
creates this set. And he's like, oh my god, Gary,
he does your volume model. He goes around and does
(08:11):
small clubs, testing material, gets a feel of what humans
react to. Bubbles up, bubbles up, bubbles up. That's been
my entire career in an internet fast world. Perfection is
the enemy. Subjective perfection is the cancer. When you think
about the new forms Facebook, TikTok, etcetera. How do you
(08:32):
think about risk in that world and how do you
think they're different from the risk and advertising prior. I
think there's a stunning amount of risk with coming up
with a brief, having a strategist come up with a strategy,
handing it to a creative team internally them coming up
with subjective ideas, then pitching it to a CMO or
a brand manager, and making a six to seven figure
(08:56):
creative output, and then having no clean feedback loop of
any say whatsoever, and then all of your digital assets
usually become matching luggage to this creative piece that you've made.
I think it's the highest risk, most ludicrous process in world.
When I think about social and digital and even O
(09:20):
T T commercials that give you so much more data,
I think about driving down the cost of creative to
allow you to have far more opportunities to be much
more relevant to many different constituents instead of the vanilla
thirty second video. There is nothing more risky on earth
today than being a fortune five thousand company that spends
money on making a commercial and putting it out into
the world. In your world, how do you put that
(09:42):
commercial out and cut all that out of the process,
so you go much more from idea to consumer. The
way we mitigate it is if you're let's just use
kick Cats, you don't work with them. It's a candy company.
We referenced it earlier. I believe what kit Cats needs
to do is create a conversation around addressable customer what
I call cohorts. They need to create ten to fifteen
(10:04):
to twenty of them, because as you can imagine, Bob,
you and I with a couple of gray hairs, if
we're still kind of fancying a little kickcap are once
in a while, they're gonna need to talk to us
in a very different manner than they're trying to achieve
with an eighteen year old Latino woman on the West
coast right. And what brands and companies are not doing
well is contextualizing in multiple places to create a bigger brand. Instead,
(10:28):
what they do is get very narrow. The thought that
kit cat is going to spend eighty percent of its
money on its t v C and then digital banners
that support that campaign and it's brand positioning, to me
is nuts because first of all, the distribution most people
are not consuming actually with any of the tension and
intent a t v C. And that it goes to
be equally true, if not slightly more for banner ads
(10:50):
on the Internet. To me, the way you do it
is you take advantage of social media in its current form,
which is a media and creative place. You create the
fifteen cohorts fifty five year old males on the East
Coast from a nostalgic place, baseball enthusiasts, Latino males in
Texas blackmails into surfing in California. What these cohorts allow
(11:12):
you to do is have much more teeth around the
creative and then you run them in a social media
environment because the ads run in the feed and are
more native and feel less disruptive and feel more in
place of what you're consuming in your feed. And if
you know you're targeting the black mail surfing enthusiasts in California,
(11:33):
you can imagine what that Instagram post for kit Cat
looks like. That's going to give people relevance and consideration.
They're gonna consider kit Cats because they're gonna see themselves
in that video picture. If you're a brand as big
as kit Cat, it's about making fifty pieces of creative
a week, three to four per cohort and looking at
the quantum quality feedback against depletion reports at seven eleven.
(11:57):
And you know bulk sales on box, Dot M or
Amazon or Walmart. So use business feedback loops, look at
the qualitative feedback of the comments. Use the post creative
strategist as I call it, to read all those comments
to inform better content the next week. Everything I just
said is the polar opposite of what's being done in
measurability and distribution and where the money is being spent.
(12:20):
And I'm just much more common sense, practical business oriented.
This is not how the big six holding companies navigate
or the Fortune five hundred biggest brands navigate. I'm going
to add to your story Gary, you know we're in
the business. At my heart, we happen to have eight
d and fifty radio stations a hundred and fifty markets.
It's always surprised me that advertisers think we can have
(12:41):
one voice, one sound, that there's somehow this national code
words that people respond to, as opposed to understanding that
actually every city, every region. In addition to the culture,
the diversity of people ideas and culture even within those cities.
And of course the biggest problem for so many years
was the cost of producing advertising. But as you point
(13:02):
out today, with the costs going down, the rules probably
can change because I think everyone recognizes they should. We
did something years and years ago with American Express Small
Business Saturday. We did three hundred and fifty different pieces
of creative. So we found the small business person in
every city, and they talked in their language, with their accent,
with the slang they used for their city. What you
(13:25):
just talked about with context at scale. Scale is going
to come now from five thousand jelly beans instead of
one super jelly bean, and most brands and definitely every
agency is not built for that. And I have empathy
for the agencies. They're publicly traded companies and they need
to drive margin, and they are completely built upside down
(13:45):
to be able to deliver on the amount of creative
needed to be a successful brand. They have all their
most expensive people at the top and they build against that,
and they need to have all their people at the
bottom and make against that. That is a transformation that
is going to be very fascinating to watch The biggest
(14:06):
advertising firms in the world go through well, you know,
the content companies went through this many many years ago.
When we started MTV in the early eighties. TV before
that always tried to make every show look like it
was in Middle America. So there's sort of a quote
unquote typical American family, typical American fashion. If you go
back and look in the early eighties, fashion just blew
(14:27):
up because suddenly the mass the people around the country
saw something other than a TV programmers idea of what
the typical American family should look like. And I think
what you're arguing for is that's accelerating and accelerating and
advertising even more. What you were part of was the
revolution of going from thirteen to thirty six channels, right,
(14:48):
sounded like a lot back then. I remember there was
thirty six channels exactly on my first cable package. That
gave the freedom to show more. So many more hours
had been added to the ecosystem and led to the
iconic executions of the eighties of MTV, ESPN and CNN
and some others. Of course, on demand has made that
(15:11):
even more possible. I don't have to join in progress
CNN schedule. I can get exactly what I want when
I want it. But it was certainly the first step
along that way, and it all revolves around one thing
with consumers, convenience. They want control. They want what they
want when they want it. If you can say people time,
they'll pay you money for it. We'll be right back
(15:33):
with more math and magic after this quick break. Welcome
back to math and Magic and now more for my
conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, let's go back in time some.
I want to get a little context on you. You
were born in Belarus and came to the US when
(15:55):
you were four. How has that immigrant experience helped you succeed?
I think accountability and gratitude are the two foundational blocks
that make me who I am, and they came directly
because of the circumstances of my life. I came over
when I was three and a half. We lived in
the studio apartment in Queens with eight family members. My mom,
(16:16):
by nature, is frugal. I just grew up in an
environment where materialistic things had no value. It shaped me.
If I wanted things, I had to get my own money.
I grew up as a shmata son of a merchant.
I want Nintendo everybody has it. Well, my mom looks
at me and says, get it. This is what led
me to lemonade shoveling snows. My work ethic is extraordinary
(16:40):
because I like it, but I was also trained to
do it. I think there's something that comes along with
lack of entitlement and lack of spoilage. I really like
accountability because when you get to the top, whether it's
a three person team or you build a huge business
or life or career, accountability is an incredible gateway to happiness.
(17:00):
I'm very grateful for everything I have, Bob every day.
Being an immigrant has an incredible starting point to allow
you to have a lot of privileges that being born
on third base does not necessarily always give you the
same advantages. Not that I haven't seen people born on
third base realized self awareness and gratitude, but it's just
a lot easier when you come from dirt to appreciate caviare.
(17:24):
This provides a lot of context on who you are. Gary.
You talk a lot about the New York Jets. They
seem to play a pivotal role in your americanization. How
did that happen and why I was picked on as
a kid for not speaking the language. And then I
moved to Edison. My friends there they took me in.
They didn't pick on me or make fun of me
(17:45):
for my accent or at that point I was just
starting to really get the English language down. They took
me in and their great passion was football and the
New York Jets, and I started watching in that a
two season. They go on to the a f C
championship game, the game each order Super Bowl. It was
a lot of fun. It was a common bond. My
friends all had Jets jerseys, and I asked my mom
for once. She said no, And then at night, when
(18:09):
I was sleeping, she knitted me a Jet sweater that
looked like a jersey out of yarn. It was my
prize possession. I wore it almost every day. I have
it in a safety deposit box and a fireproof setting
right now because it's the most important thing to me
in my life. And I haven't stopped watching. I've watched
every play, every snap of every game since then. In
(18:29):
third grade or fourth grade, was the first time I
said I was going to buy the New York Jets,
and I just kept saying it, and then it just
kind of became this beautiful fairy tale. My great enjoyment
is the chase, the thrill of the hunt to see
if I'm capable of achieving a child who wasn't able
(18:49):
to afford owning a jet jersey, buying the New York
Jets and hanging that sweater as a nod to my hero,
my mom and my dad. America's got plenty of shortcomings,
as does everything, but what a country like I couldn't
afford jets jersey. I am now the CEO, chairman and
(19:10):
owner of the New York Jets. The attempt to try
to buy the New York Jets is my great love.
It makes a hell of a story too. Let's make
the transition to you as the business person you are today.
You said that thanks to some college dorm mates, you
discovered the Internet, which led you to building a website
for your dad's store, And at that point there were
(19:32):
very few liquor stores nationwide websites. What did you see
that made you think your dad's store needed one? At
that point, I did not own a computer in my
first eighteen years of my life. I just knew Bob
within the first twenty five minutes of me hearing COUCKU couch.
Within twenty five minutes of being on a O l in,
(19:55):
I just knew that this thing that I was sitting
in front of was going to change the world. My
dad should sell line on this thing, and that became
the starting point of me transforming my dad's life and business.
When you were going through this process, you had quite
a success with your dad's store. Did you think it
the whole time I'm in the internet marketing business, or
(20:15):
did you think you were actually in the wine spirits business.
I thought it was in the wine spirits business all
the way up until two thousand and five. I thought
it was a retailer businessman. I had one on email marketing.
I was early open rates in the mid to late nineties.
I was on Google Adwards day one, killing it on that.
I advertised on the early iteration of blogs in two
thousand three, doing quite well with banner click throughs. But
(20:38):
it was YouTube coming out. Me starting a YouTube show,
wine Library TV in two thousand six. Less than a
year after it came out, and within the first year
that I was on YouTube, Google bought YouTube for one
point seven billion dollars. That one point seven billion for
something that was around for a year, like YouTube. You
remember seeing that number and thing in geez right. I
mean it seemed crazy at the time. Today it seems
(21:02):
like such a deal and such a steal. When Facebook
but Instagram. I went on Piers Morgan on CNN and
said they stole it for a billion dollars. It was
five fifty years old, and I think that's gonna end
up going down as one of the great full time
M and A deals ever. And it's because of what
I learned with YouTube. It's pattern recognition. The podcast shift
with my heart like, it's just pattern recognition, being agnostic
(21:24):
and unemotional, just being religious about consumer attention. I think
one of the problems you see when something's new is
not seeing how big it actually can be. When Viacom
bought MTV Networks, we tried to buy it in a
management buyout. Viacom got it. I've said I'd go along
with it, signed a new five year deal, and I
did a five year plan for him. I didn't stay
the five years. About five years later, I'm doing something else.
(21:47):
I get an envelope and I opened it up and
it's from Jerry Lebourne, who was running Nickelodeon, and she
circled the last year of the five year plan and
the note said, what you didn't believe? I have put
down numbers that five years out. The Viacom guys thought
I was crazy. Five years later it was too small.
(22:08):
And that was the first time it really hit me.
And of course, whether it was a oh well or
as you say, Facebook, TikTok, etcetera, our biggest mistake usually
is we underestimate how big it's going to be. You
were very smart, you made some very early investments. I
think you put your entire savings in two thousand and
six into a few companies Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. Do you
(22:30):
think you're seeing size that others don't see? I know
that Oculus and Google Home or Alexa or whoever wins
the battle of VR or in home AI voice devices
that dominate consumer behavior. Oh my god. In fifteen years,
I'm going to be sixty, a young man with unlimited
(22:51):
fire and ambition, and I'm going to have the last
forty years of pattern recognition. And when I bet my
farm like I did in two thousands six on social well,
I'm gonna have more money, more impact, more leverage. This
is why I built van Ormedia and vain X. My
entire agency and publishing ecosystem is completely predicated for me
(23:12):
to own it in perpetuity and deployed against my other
business buying behavior. So I've been playing very long. I'm
a high energy guy that you know seems hyper and
over the top for people, But my business behaviors have
been extremely turtle esque, very calculated and slow. And I'm plotting,
and I'm being thoughtful, and i already concede things that
(23:34):
are going to happen, not might happen, and I'm putting
down the foundations to take advantage of that. Probably the
biggest issue you've got as you age, I certainly did,
is that although our pattern recognition gets a whole lot better,
if we're not careful, and I think most people aren't careful,
our world begins to narrow as to what we've been
(23:54):
and where we've been. But I think you have to
begin to do some things that are a shock to
the system, push you to see things you haven't seen,
to keep the blinders from coming on. You don't want
to lose this open mindedness you've got that's caused you
to see all this. I think that people when they
start putting real success on the board, do a poor
job deploying humility and curiosity and leaning into youth culture
(24:19):
because the answers are in those three ingredients. And for
me at I've never been more humble, never been more curious,
and never been more youthful. And that's why I feel
more enthusiastic of my ability to be good at the
things I've been even though I'm no longer in the
kid land, I'm kind of in that middle land. In
my experience, is very hard to teach anybody curiosity either
(24:41):
have it or they don't. But what I do think
happens sometimes is people get afraid to use their curiosity
once they get a little successful. They're embarrassed they don't
know something. They're embarrassed to ask the stupid question. And
I think you're exactly right. Not only is it great
for business, but it's also great for a sense of
self fulfillment and as sense of accomplishment and keeping you stimulated.
(25:02):
When I was able to convert into the man I
am today who doesn't nod his head and say yeah
when he doesn't know something, like I did in my
twenties and even into my thirties, but now says, Hey,
I don't know what that acronym stands for, or what
do you mean there, or hey, I'm actually a little
bit under educated on that, even though I have the
profile that I have. When you get to that place
in your life that you're able to deploy that you
(25:23):
become happier because the anxiety of faking the funk or
any version of it, it's just not worth it. Gary,
I want to jump a minute because this is about podcasting,
and obviously I heart Is is a company built on audio.
Audio is really hot down finally, and you were preaching
it really early. Why did you see that caused you
to know that people were maybe running out of time
(25:45):
for their eyes but have plenty of time for their ears,
or that they really liked conversations and wanted to hear
about it, That people go to dinner parties and enjoy
it to know end that people go to conferences and
get a table of eight and shoot the ship, and
that time and friction are the things that customers thought about.
You said a brilliant thing that I'm sure has been
foundational in your career, which is if you give them time,
(26:06):
they'll give you money. It became very obvious to me
that the remote control of our society is the phone.
Oh my god, the experience of audio consumption now because
of these three to four major players is so remarkable.
We're busier than ever, multitasking more than ever. I love
the idea of running, walking the dog, commuting, and consuming
(26:28):
what we want Allah the internet, not what they give
us allaw radio forcing us or allah television forcing us
into some limitations. Unlimited choice will always win. And oh
my god, it's so low cost for personalities to get
in here and do things. And oh, look at the
good job that Tim Ferris or Pat Flynn or others
are doing here. It's just gonna happen. I know it.
(26:50):
I have conviction. And so then when I have conviction,
I go and taste it. I start my own top
one podcast. I pay attention to the other people that
are popping in it. I start building those shows mom
bringing the CMO podcast with Stengel. I'm a practitioner, not
just a hypothesis guy. And so that's where expertise comes in.
So you have this quick hypothesis, I see things early.
(27:12):
I then have no fear in the value of attacking it. Immediately.
I'm not scared to lose the money if I'm wrong,
because the learnings will be too valuable in the long term.
I then learn now I'm speaking with triple conviction, and
you've then become a thought leader and executor of modern
consumer behavior. Why are marketers so hooked on the video
(27:33):
form when they know it's the conversation that sells. They
know it's the dinner party, they know it's the best
friend telling you something. Why does video still rule the
roost in terms of add dollars because the six holding
companies that deploy most of their capital to your platform
and many others make more margins in television commercials. There's
(27:54):
nothing less based on the truth of what customers are
doing than what the fortune five companies are spending in
their media dollars on. I say that with respect and
understanding and compassion of how it got there, But it
is my greatest belief. If you are Hershey's and you
want to sell chocolate, the allocation that I Heart and
its four major competitors get in consumer behavior world versus
(28:18):
how much money Bravo or ESPN or Fox gets in
television commercial distribution is so lacking common sense and business acuum.
It's unbearable to me, but it's just the truth. You know,
the whole world is talking about politics, this election cyclic center.
I don't want to talk about it from that angle,
(28:40):
but looking at this election cycle, what does that tell
us about marketing? There's a lot there um Is there
any confusion how the former president United States built leverage
with the end consumer? He went direct the consumer. This
is something that I've soy pioneered and spoke about and
(29:01):
wrote a book in two that came out of No.
Nine that spoke about this exact phenomenon, the ability for
people to start their own podcasts. Even by the way,
you don't even need Amazon, Apple and Facebook. You can
get your own servers. You can make your websites and
your apps mobile centric. Like what society is asking big
(29:24):
tech companies to regulate. The Internet has independent u r
l s and proxies all day long. There's message boards unlimited,
there's websites unlimited. There will be millions of live stream
and live audio and audio and video platforms that pop
up on top of the Internet all the time that
have different points of view. The Internet is the middleman.
(29:47):
Once people get off the bandwagon, of Facebook and social
media and realize Internet It's gonna be really interesting because
I think people that are looking for democracy, happiness good
may find themselves in an place where they're asking government
to regulate Internet in a much more aggressive way like
they do in China and Russia. And it's all fine
and dandy when you like the leader of your country
(30:09):
regulating at the time. But in America's case, four eight
years later, do you like that? I mean, we're going
through major societal changes up and I think we're having
very basic conversations based on Netflix Social Dilemma documentary and
the political nature of where we are, and I find
them to be very surface level debates that lack accountability
(30:32):
around parenting and what you do in your own home,
and lack of deep understanding of how the tech stacks
are actually built and where this is all really, really
really going, and even the capabilities of restricting communication on
an overlay of the Internet. There's a lot of chess
moves that are happening. But ultimately, to answer your question,
(30:54):
it means that people and companies and organizations need to
realize the way to get people to be interested in
you is to have a far more contemporary Internet centric
communication structure, which I think sits in podcasting, in O
T T commercials, and definitely in social media. Let me
go back to you. You're pretty self aware guy. If
(31:16):
you could give your twenty one year old self some
good advice, what would that advice be? Don't run away
from Canador just because your father delivered it in a
very negative way, and it's actually the final ingredient that
you need for you as a man and a communicator
that will take you to where you want to go.
I hope your next career is as a therapist. Carre,
you do this very well. We're coming to an end
(31:38):
that we end each episode with a shout out to
the grates of math and magic, because I believe marketing
is that combination of the analytics understand what's going on,
who's where and what, and then the magic, which is
the sheer creativity. Okay, I got them, I know where
they are, but I gotta tell them something that's going
to motivate them. In most cases to separate skill sets,
(32:00):
some people have both, but very rare. Who would be
your vote for the best in math in the analytics
of the marketing and advertising world, or even business world.
I'm very fond of Wish, the retail shopping app, and
those individuals. I think they most understood my thesis and
built a multibillion dollar retailer that most people still don't
even realize exists, completely based on incredible math centric art
(32:26):
that allowed them to be the biggest of them all.
That really stands out. Talk to me about magic. Who
gets your vote for the best magic? I'm going to
give you somebody who's emerging in magic. For me, there's
an influencer by the name of Mr Beast who I
think is subtly building some of the most interesting magic
and the way he's layering business and fun and entertainment
(32:50):
over himself. I believe that if I was a full
time influencer the way he is and not spending fifteen
hours a day being an operator, that I would have
some of the nuance is that he's got. And so
it's very obvious when you see your own and I
think he's going to be put on a pedestal in
the next fifteen years in a way that he isn't today.
I hope we can invest in him. Gary, You're a
(33:10):
legend and you always make for great conversations and have
wonderful insights. Thanks for the time today. Here are four
takeaways from my conversation with Gary. One Gary believes the
best creative ideas come through testing and iteration. Just like Seinfeld,
Gary tests and refines his ideas with new audiences over time.
(33:33):
Two Gary believes advertising should be relevant in multiple context
with a low cost for creative. Brands are missing an
opportunity when they don't target different consumers in different ways.
Three even if you're successful now, stay humble and stay curious.
You'll need those skills to stay relevant in the future.
(33:54):
And four, if you see a trend early, go for it.
As Gary says, even if you're wrong, what you learn
will be valuable. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
(34:16):
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat Nikki Etre for pulling research, Bill Plax
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel Noel Mango, and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I Heart Radio.
They did not own a computer in my first eighteen
years of my life. Within the first twenty five minutes
of me hearing Cuckoo Cooch, within twenty five minutes of
being on a O l in, I just knew that
(00:23):
this thing that I was sitting in front of was
going to change the world. Hi, am Bob Pittman. Welcome
to this episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the
Frontiers and Marketing. Today. We have someone who knows a
lot about those frontiers. He lives on the leading edge.
He is not afraid of risk, and he breaks through
again and again. Best Selling author, entrepreneurs, ceo, marketer, thinker, speaker, podcaster,
(00:48):
and video star Gary Vayner Chuck. Gary was born in
the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U S when
he was young and watched his family build success in
a new country. He went from Queens to New Jersey
and made his mark as a successful child entrepreneur selling
(01:10):
flowers back to his neighbor lemonade stands, baseball cards, shoveling snow,
and working at his dad's liquor and wine store. Throughout
college and after college, he helped transform the family business
from a two million dollar a year revenue business to
a sixty million dollar a year revenue business, in the
process developing his online marketing Chops, which led to his
(01:33):
current empire anchored by Vainer Media. He's the quickest guy
on his feet and always has valuable insights, and he's
a good guy. Gary, Welcome. I really appreciate that, Bob Happy.
It's really great to be with you before we dig
into the meet, Gary, I want to do you in
sixty seconds. You ready to go early Riser or night owl,
(01:56):
l New York or New Jersey, New York Mets or Yankees,
Android or iPhone, call or text, text, coffee or tea coffee,
baseball or basketball, basketball, red wine or white wine, white wine,
chocolate or vanilla, vanilla, Cats or Dogs, Cats, g I
(02:16):
Joe or baseball cards, baseball cards. It's about to get
a little harder, smartest person you know, My mom. Childhood
a hero A mix between Macho Man, Randy Savage, Don
Mattingley and Patrick Ewing. Favorite podcast I'm gonna say Tim
Ferris is because it was the one that emerged in
that early era as a real cultural impact and started
(02:41):
creating the possibilities of how big the genre could be.
For me first job, the only job I really had
was working my dad's liquor store. But I always think
of my first job is selling lemonade, even though I
was self employed. Favorite food English peas secret talent. I
can draw really well and nobody knows that last one.
What's your guilty pleasure? Candy bars? Specifically, what the McCall
(03:04):
it's though? Kit cats and butter fingers and stickers and
candy bars? For sure. Let's get going, Let's get into
the media things. You have had one of the most
successful startups and the ad agency business and a world
in which it's hard. How did you manage to break through?
First of all, thank you for saying that, because it
(03:25):
means a lot coming from you. And I think I
broke through because I'm a good businessman. My thesis of
consumer behavior was right, and I knew nothing about Madison Avenue.
And I think those are three incredibly intriguing ingredients, and
if I'm being self assessing, I'll bring them down quickly
with the hope that somebody can use it as courage
(03:48):
to jump into doing something that they feel like they
want to do, and they believe that they're capable of doing,
but maybe on paper it doesn't look like it. I
was a good operator, as you referenced earlier. You know,
I built my dad's business. It was about a three
point eight million dollar year business and what the sixty
million about seven or eight years. I thought it was
a retailer. I thought I was a businessman. But when
I really started self assess, I realized that was extremely
(04:11):
good at marketing. And I was very strong and operating
and c e owing, but this talent of just genuinely
understanding where the attention is going and how culture works.
And I thought starting an agency would be a way
to get paid to learn why the Fortune five hundreds
were not doing what I saw was brewing on Netflix, Facebook,
(04:32):
Amazon and YouTube. So a my timing was great. I
started a social media agency right as people were starting
to consider we needed this behavior, and they did not
believe the creative agencies that they were working with understood it,
nor did the Grays or b B d os even
care about it. It was an afterthought. And to be
very frank, Bob, and you know this, for the biggest
(04:54):
creative agencies in the world today, the great ones, it's
still an afterthought, which is perplexing to me, but understandable
knowing the margins and the ecosystem. So a my timing
was good be I'm a good businessman. A lot of
times artists or people that see things can't operate. So
I was able to stay afloat those first three years
(05:15):
when it was difficult to get clients, and then see
the bet ended up being ridiculously right, no different than
the incredible things that have happened in your career. If
you're good enough to get by in the first four
thirty six months of innovation and stay alive, if you
end up being right, you're in a position to catch
all the opportunity. And then I evolved, you know, we
(05:36):
evolved from just doing community management on social too, the intermedia.
New York did the most Super Bowl spots un last year.
Super Bowl is a creative agency. We have three spots,
so we've evolved into a full service creative and media.
And I've continued to innovate, whether it's podcasting or influencing
influencers or being best in class on TikTok. Communications changing,
and I'm sure if we look in the history of
(05:58):
the people that want television we were transitioning from radio
or which agencies razor Fish A, k q A won
the Internet when we were transitioning into that world. You know,
this is a historic story of Madison Avenue, who's the
man or woman that comes along that understands the next
communication change best and she and he capable of building
(06:19):
an organization around it. And I think I'm going to
get a lot of credit one day historically about being
that person for this social media O T T kind
of like big shift in the maturity of the Internet
and how it affected advertising. It's interesting you say that
because A Mathew Magic We've talked some about those moments
in time, and I was there for some of them.
When the cable networks became a viable advertising medium in
(06:43):
the late nineteen eighties, and I was there when the
Internet sort of broke through. And when I went to
A O L in nine six, I think we had
a couple of million dollars of advertising. We left, we
had two or three billion of advertising. So it all
happened in the nineties. And you're right, the established players
don't really jump on the new very quickly, and creates
a huge opportunity. And you've been that so let's talk
(07:04):
a second about that. At the heart of that is
really having an open mind and also thinking about creativity
in a very new way. When you look at creativity,
which clearly you did when you you built this, what
do most people get wrong about creativity? I think that
most people get wrong in giving freedom to actually be creative. Ultimately,
(07:30):
creativity is best when it's free and allows the end
consumer to judge and everything that happens in between it
debating politics, subjective opinions treated as truth reporting, and other
math trying to be deployed against it to be a
(07:50):
benchmarking system. Creativity is it's a process of finding right,
far more than a process of being right. And I
think modern advertising rise to be right and pushed down.
A friend of mine hit me up the other day
and let's listening to Jerry Seinfeld talk about how he
creates this set. And he's like, oh my god, Gary,
he does your volume model. He goes around and does
(08:11):
small clubs, testing material, gets a feel of what humans
react to. Bubbles up, bubbles up, bubbles up. That's been
my entire career in an internet fast world. Perfection is
the enemy. Subjective perfection is the cancer. When you think
about the new forms Facebook, TikTok, etcetera. How do you
(08:32):
think about risk in that world and how do you
think they're different from the risk and advertising prior. I
think there's a stunning amount of risk with coming up
with a brief, having a strategist come up with a strategy,
handing it to a creative team internally them coming up
with subjective ideas, then pitching it to a CMO or
a brand manager, and making a six to seven figure
(08:56):
creative output, and then having no clean feedback loop of
any say whatsoever, and then all of your digital assets
usually become matching luggage to this creative piece that you've made.
I think it's the highest risk, most ludicrous process in world.
When I think about social and digital and even O
(09:20):
T T commercials that give you so much more data,
I think about driving down the cost of creative to
allow you to have far more opportunities to be much
more relevant to many different constituents instead of the vanilla
thirty second video. There is nothing more risky on earth
today than being a fortune five thousand company that spends
money on making a commercial and putting it out into
the world. In your world, how do you put that
(09:42):
commercial out and cut all that out of the process,
so you go much more from idea to consumer. The
way we mitigate it is if you're let's just use
kick Cats, you don't work with them. It's a candy company.
We referenced it earlier. I believe what kit Cats needs
to do is create a conversation around addressable customer what
I call cohorts. They need to create ten to fifteen
(10:04):
to twenty of them, because as you can imagine, Bob,
you and I with a couple of gray hairs, if
we're still kind of fancying a little kickcap are once
in a while, they're gonna need to talk to us
in a very different manner than they're trying to achieve
with an eighteen year old Latino woman on the West
coast right. And what brands and companies are not doing
well is contextualizing in multiple places to create a bigger brand. Instead,
(10:28):
what they do is get very narrow. The thought that
kit cat is going to spend eighty percent of its
money on its t v C and then digital banners
that support that campaign and it's brand positioning, to me
is nuts because first of all, the distribution most people
are not consuming actually with any of the tension and
intent a t v C. And that it goes to
be equally true, if not slightly more for banner ads
(10:50):
on the Internet. To me, the way you do it
is you take advantage of social media in its current form,
which is a media and creative place. You create the
fifteen cohorts fifty five year old males on the East
Coast from a nostalgic place, baseball enthusiasts, Latino males in
Texas blackmails into surfing in California. What these cohorts allow
(11:12):
you to do is have much more teeth around the
creative and then you run them in a social media
environment because the ads run in the feed and are
more native and feel less disruptive and feel more in
place of what you're consuming in your feed. And if
you know you're targeting the black mail surfing enthusiasts in California,
(11:33):
you can imagine what that Instagram post for kit Cat
looks like. That's going to give people relevance and consideration.
They're gonna consider kit Cats because they're gonna see themselves
in that video picture. If you're a brand as big
as kit Cat, it's about making fifty pieces of creative
a week, three to four per cohort and looking at
the quantum quality feedback against depletion reports at seven eleven.
(11:57):
And you know bulk sales on box, Dot M or
Amazon or Walmart. So use business feedback loops, look at
the qualitative feedback of the comments. Use the post creative
strategist as I call it, to read all those comments
to inform better content the next week. Everything I just
said is the polar opposite of what's being done in
measurability and distribution and where the money is being spent.
(12:20):
And I'm just much more common sense, practical business oriented.
This is not how the big six holding companies navigate
or the Fortune five hundred biggest brands navigate. I'm going
to add to your story Gary, you know we're in
the business. At my heart, we happen to have eight
d and fifty radio stations a hundred and fifty markets.
It's always surprised me that advertisers think we can have
(12:41):
one voice, one sound, that there's somehow this national code
words that people respond to, as opposed to understanding that
actually every city, every region. In addition to the culture,
the diversity of people ideas and culture even within those cities.
And of course the biggest problem for so many years
was the cost of producing advertising. But as you point
(13:02):
out today, with the costs going down, the rules probably
can change because I think everyone recognizes they should. We
did something years and years ago with American Express Small
Business Saturday. We did three hundred and fifty different pieces
of creative. So we found the small business person in
every city, and they talked in their language, with their accent,
with the slang they used for their city. What you
(13:25):
just talked about with context at scale. Scale is going
to come now from five thousand jelly beans instead of
one super jelly bean, and most brands and definitely every
agency is not built for that. And I have empathy
for the agencies. They're publicly traded companies and they need
to drive margin, and they are completely built upside down
(13:45):
to be able to deliver on the amount of creative
needed to be a successful brand. They have all their
most expensive people at the top and they build against that,
and they need to have all their people at the
bottom and make against that. That is a transformation that
is going to be very fascinating to watch The biggest
(14:06):
advertising firms in the world go through well, you know,
the content companies went through this many many years ago.
When we started MTV in the early eighties. TV before
that always tried to make every show look like it
was in Middle America. So there's sort of a quote
unquote typical American family, typical American fashion. If you go
back and look in the early eighties, fashion just blew
(14:27):
up because suddenly the mass the people around the country
saw something other than a TV programmers idea of what
the typical American family should look like. And I think
what you're arguing for is that's accelerating and accelerating and
advertising even more. What you were part of was the
revolution of going from thirteen to thirty six channels, right,
(14:48):
sounded like a lot back then. I remember there was
thirty six channels exactly on my first cable package. That
gave the freedom to show more. So many more hours
had been added to the ecosystem and led to the
iconic executions of the eighties of MTV, ESPN and CNN
and some others. Of course, on demand has made that
(15:11):
even more possible. I don't have to join in progress
CNN schedule. I can get exactly what I want when
I want it. But it was certainly the first step
along that way, and it all revolves around one thing
with consumers, convenience. They want control. They want what they
want when they want it. If you can say people time,
they'll pay you money for it. We'll be right back
(15:33):
with more math and magic after this quick break. Welcome
back to math and Magic and now more for my
conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, let's go back in time some.
I want to get a little context on you. You
were born in Belarus and came to the US when
(15:55):
you were four. How has that immigrant experience helped you succeed?
I think accountability and gratitude are the two foundational blocks
that make me who I am, and they came directly
because of the circumstances of my life. I came over
when I was three and a half. We lived in
the studio apartment in Queens with eight family members. My mom,
(16:16):
by nature, is frugal. I just grew up in an
environment where materialistic things had no value. It shaped me.
If I wanted things, I had to get my own money.
I grew up as a shmata son of a merchant.
I want Nintendo everybody has it. Well, my mom looks
at me and says, get it. This is what led
me to lemonade shoveling snows. My work ethic is extraordinary
(16:40):
because I like it, but I was also trained to
do it. I think there's something that comes along with
lack of entitlement and lack of spoilage. I really like
accountability because when you get to the top, whether it's
a three person team or you build a huge business
or life or career, accountability is an incredible gateway to happiness.
(17:00):
I'm very grateful for everything I have, Bob every day.
Being an immigrant has an incredible starting point to allow
you to have a lot of privileges that being born
on third base does not necessarily always give you the
same advantages. Not that I haven't seen people born on
third base realized self awareness and gratitude, but it's just
a lot easier when you come from dirt to appreciate caviare.
(17:24):
This provides a lot of context on who you are. Gary.
You talk a lot about the New York Jets. They
seem to play a pivotal role in your americanization. How
did that happen and why I was picked on as
a kid for not speaking the language. And then I
moved to Edison. My friends there they took me in.
They didn't pick on me or make fun of me
(17:45):
for my accent or at that point I was just
starting to really get the English language down. They took
me in and their great passion was football and the
New York Jets, and I started watching in that a
two season. They go on to the a f C
championship game, the game each order Super Bowl. It was
a lot of fun. It was a common bond. My
friends all had Jets jerseys, and I asked my mom
for once. She said no, And then at night, when
(18:09):
I was sleeping, she knitted me a Jet sweater that
looked like a jersey out of yarn. It was my
prize possession. I wore it almost every day. I have
it in a safety deposit box and a fireproof setting
right now because it's the most important thing to me
in my life. And I haven't stopped watching. I've watched
every play, every snap of every game since then. In
(18:29):
third grade or fourth grade, was the first time I
said I was going to buy the New York Jets,
and I just kept saying it, and then it just
kind of became this beautiful fairy tale. My great enjoyment
is the chase, the thrill of the hunt to see
if I'm capable of achieving a child who wasn't able
(18:49):
to afford owning a jet jersey, buying the New York
Jets and hanging that sweater as a nod to my hero,
my mom and my dad. America's got plenty of shortcomings,
as does everything, but what a country like I couldn't
afford jets jersey. I am now the CEO, chairman and
(19:10):
owner of the New York Jets. The attempt to try
to buy the New York Jets is my great love.
It makes a hell of a story too. Let's make
the transition to you as the business person you are today.
You said that thanks to some college dorm mates, you
discovered the Internet, which led you to building a website
for your dad's store, And at that point there were
(19:32):
very few liquor stores nationwide websites. What did you see
that made you think your dad's store needed one? At
that point, I did not own a computer in my
first eighteen years of my life. I just knew Bob
within the first twenty five minutes of me hearing COUCKU couch.
Within twenty five minutes of being on a O l in,
(19:55):
I just knew that this thing that I was sitting
in front of was going to change the world. My
dad should sell line on this thing, and that became
the starting point of me transforming my dad's life and business.
When you were going through this process, you had quite
a success with your dad's store. Did you think it
the whole time I'm in the internet marketing business, or
(20:15):
did you think you were actually in the wine spirits business.
I thought it was in the wine spirits business all
the way up until two thousand and five. I thought
it was a retailer businessman. I had one on email marketing.
I was early open rates in the mid to late nineties.
I was on Google Adwards day one, killing it on that.
I advertised on the early iteration of blogs in two
thousand three, doing quite well with banner click throughs. But
(20:38):
it was YouTube coming out. Me starting a YouTube show,
wine Library TV in two thousand six. Less than a
year after it came out, and within the first year
that I was on YouTube, Google bought YouTube for one
point seven billion dollars. That one point seven billion for
something that was around for a year, like YouTube. You
remember seeing that number and thing in geez right. I
mean it seemed crazy at the time. Today it seems
(21:02):
like such a deal and such a steal. When Facebook
but Instagram. I went on Piers Morgan on CNN and
said they stole it for a billion dollars. It was
five fifty years old, and I think that's gonna end
up going down as one of the great full time
M and A deals ever. And it's because of what
I learned with YouTube. It's pattern recognition. The podcast shift
with my heart like, it's just pattern recognition, being agnostic
(21:24):
and unemotional, just being religious about consumer attention. I think
one of the problems you see when something's new is
not seeing how big it actually can be. When Viacom
bought MTV Networks, we tried to buy it in a
management buyout. Viacom got it. I've said I'd go along
with it, signed a new five year deal, and I
did a five year plan for him. I didn't stay
the five years. About five years later, I'm doing something else.
(21:47):
I get an envelope and I opened it up and
it's from Jerry Lebourne, who was running Nickelodeon, and she
circled the last year of the five year plan and
the note said, what you didn't believe? I have put
down numbers that five years out. The Viacom guys thought
I was crazy. Five years later it was too small.
(22:08):
And that was the first time it really hit me.
And of course, whether it was a oh well or
as you say, Facebook, TikTok, etcetera, our biggest mistake usually
is we underestimate how big it's going to be. You
were very smart, you made some very early investments. I
think you put your entire savings in two thousand and
six into a few companies Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. Do you
(22:30):
think you're seeing size that others don't see? I know
that Oculus and Google Home or Alexa or whoever wins
the battle of VR or in home AI voice devices
that dominate consumer behavior. Oh my god. In fifteen years,
I'm going to be sixty, a young man with unlimited
(22:51):
fire and ambition, and I'm going to have the last
forty years of pattern recognition. And when I bet my
farm like I did in two thousands six on social well,
I'm gonna have more money, more impact, more leverage. This
is why I built van Ormedia and vain X. My
entire agency and publishing ecosystem is completely predicated for me
(23:12):
to own it in perpetuity and deployed against my other
business buying behavior. So I've been playing very long. I'm
a high energy guy that you know seems hyper and
over the top for people, But my business behaviors have
been extremely turtle esque, very calculated and slow. And I'm plotting,
and I'm being thoughtful, and i already concede things that
(23:34):
are going to happen, not might happen, and I'm putting
down the foundations to take advantage of that. Probably the
biggest issue you've got as you age, I certainly did,
is that although our pattern recognition gets a whole lot better,
if we're not careful, and I think most people aren't careful,
our world begins to narrow as to what we've been
(23:54):
and where we've been. But I think you have to
begin to do some things that are a shock to
the system, push you to see things you haven't seen,
to keep the blinders from coming on. You don't want
to lose this open mindedness you've got that's caused you
to see all this. I think that people when they
start putting real success on the board, do a poor
job deploying humility and curiosity and leaning into youth culture
(24:19):
because the answers are in those three ingredients. And for
me at I've never been more humble, never been more curious,
and never been more youthful. And that's why I feel
more enthusiastic of my ability to be good at the
things I've been even though I'm no longer in the
kid land, I'm kind of in that middle land. In
my experience, is very hard to teach anybody curiosity either
(24:41):
have it or they don't. But what I do think
happens sometimes is people get afraid to use their curiosity
once they get a little successful. They're embarrassed they don't
know something. They're embarrassed to ask the stupid question. And
I think you're exactly right. Not only is it great
for business, but it's also great for a sense of
self fulfillment and as sense of accomplishment and keeping you stimulated.
(25:02):
When I was able to convert into the man I
am today who doesn't nod his head and say yeah
when he doesn't know something, like I did in my
twenties and even into my thirties, but now says, Hey,
I don't know what that acronym stands for, or what
do you mean there, or hey, I'm actually a little
bit under educated on that, even though I have the
profile that I have. When you get to that place
in your life that you're able to deploy that you
(25:23):
become happier because the anxiety of faking the funk or
any version of it, it's just not worth it. Gary,
I want to jump a minute because this is about podcasting,
and obviously I heart Is is a company built on audio.
Audio is really hot down finally, and you were preaching
it really early. Why did you see that caused you
to know that people were maybe running out of time
(25:45):
for their eyes but have plenty of time for their ears,
or that they really liked conversations and wanted to hear
about it, That people go to dinner parties and enjoy
it to know end that people go to conferences and
get a table of eight and shoot the ship, and
that time and friction are the things that customers thought about.
You said a brilliant thing that I'm sure has been
foundational in your career, which is if you give them time,
(26:06):
they'll give you money. It became very obvious to me
that the remote control of our society is the phone.
Oh my god, the experience of audio consumption now because
of these three to four major players is so remarkable.
We're busier than ever, multitasking more than ever. I love
the idea of running, walking the dog, commuting, and consuming
(26:28):
what we want Allah the internet, not what they give
us allaw radio forcing us or allah television forcing us
into some limitations. Unlimited choice will always win. And oh
my god, it's so low cost for personalities to get
in here and do things. And oh, look at the
good job that Tim Ferris or Pat Flynn or others
are doing here. It's just gonna happen. I know it.
(26:50):
I have conviction. And so then when I have conviction,
I go and taste it. I start my own top
one podcast. I pay attention to the other people that
are popping in it. I start building those shows mom
bringing the CMO podcast with Stengel. I'm a practitioner, not
just a hypothesis guy. And so that's where expertise comes in.
So you have this quick hypothesis, I see things early.
(27:12):
I then have no fear in the value of attacking it. Immediately.
I'm not scared to lose the money if I'm wrong,
because the learnings will be too valuable in the long term.
I then learn now I'm speaking with triple conviction, and
you've then become a thought leader and executor of modern
consumer behavior. Why are marketers so hooked on the video
(27:33):
form when they know it's the conversation that sells. They
know it's the dinner party, they know it's the best
friend telling you something. Why does video still rule the
roost in terms of add dollars because the six holding
companies that deploy most of their capital to your platform
and many others make more margins in television commercials. There's
(27:54):
nothing less based on the truth of what customers are
doing than what the fortune five companies are spending in
their media dollars on. I say that with respect and
understanding and compassion of how it got there, But it
is my greatest belief. If you are Hershey's and you
want to sell chocolate, the allocation that I Heart and
its four major competitors get in consumer behavior world versus
(28:18):
how much money Bravo or ESPN or Fox gets in
television commercial distribution is so lacking common sense and business acuum.
It's unbearable to me, but it's just the truth. You know,
the whole world is talking about politics, this election cyclic center.
I don't want to talk about it from that angle,
(28:40):
but looking at this election cycle, what does that tell
us about marketing? There's a lot there um Is there
any confusion how the former president United States built leverage
with the end consumer? He went direct the consumer. This
is something that I've soy pioneered and spoke about and
(29:01):
wrote a book in two that came out of No.
Nine that spoke about this exact phenomenon, the ability for
people to start their own podcasts. Even by the way,
you don't even need Amazon, Apple and Facebook. You can
get your own servers. You can make your websites and
your apps mobile centric. Like what society is asking big
(29:24):
tech companies to regulate. The Internet has independent u r
l s and proxies all day long. There's message boards unlimited,
there's websites unlimited. There will be millions of live stream
and live audio and audio and video platforms that pop
up on top of the Internet all the time that
have different points of view. The Internet is the middleman.
(29:47):
Once people get off the bandwagon, of Facebook and social
media and realize Internet It's gonna be really interesting because
I think people that are looking for democracy, happiness good
may find themselves in an place where they're asking government
to regulate Internet in a much more aggressive way like
they do in China and Russia. And it's all fine
and dandy when you like the leader of your country
(30:09):
regulating at the time. But in America's case, four eight
years later, do you like that? I mean, we're going
through major societal changes up and I think we're having
very basic conversations based on Netflix Social Dilemma documentary and
the political nature of where we are, and I find
them to be very surface level debates that lack accountability
(30:32):
around parenting and what you do in your own home,
and lack of deep understanding of how the tech stacks
are actually built and where this is all really, really
really going, and even the capabilities of restricting communication on
an overlay of the Internet. There's a lot of chess
moves that are happening. But ultimately, to answer your question,
(30:54):
it means that people and companies and organizations need to
realize the way to get people to be interested in
you is to have a far more contemporary Internet centric
communication structure, which I think sits in podcasting, in O
T T commercials, and definitely in social media. Let me
go back to you. You're pretty self aware guy. If
(31:16):
you could give your twenty one year old self some
good advice, what would that advice be? Don't run away
from Canador just because your father delivered it in a
very negative way, and it's actually the final ingredient that
you need for you as a man and a communicator
that will take you to where you want to go.
I hope your next career is as a therapist. Carre,
you do this very well. We're coming to an end
(31:38):
that we end each episode with a shout out to
the grates of math and magic, because I believe marketing
is that combination of the analytics understand what's going on,
who's where and what, and then the magic, which is
the sheer creativity. Okay, I got them, I know where
they are, but I gotta tell them something that's going
to motivate them. In most cases to separate skill sets,
(32:00):
some people have both, but very rare. Who would be
your vote for the best in math in the analytics
of the marketing and advertising world, or even business world.
I'm very fond of Wish, the retail shopping app, and
those individuals. I think they most understood my thesis and
built a multibillion dollar retailer that most people still don't
even realize exists, completely based on incredible math centric art
(32:26):
that allowed them to be the biggest of them all.
That really stands out. Talk to me about magic. Who
gets your vote for the best magic? I'm going to
give you somebody who's emerging in magic. For me, there's
an influencer by the name of Mr Beast who I
think is subtly building some of the most interesting magic
and the way he's layering business and fun and entertainment
(32:50):
over himself. I believe that if I was a full
time influencer the way he is and not spending fifteen
hours a day being an operator, that I would have
some of the nuance is that he's got. And so
it's very obvious when you see your own and I
think he's going to be put on a pedestal in
the next fifteen years in a way that he isn't today.
I hope we can invest in him. Gary, You're a
(33:10):
legend and you always make for great conversations and have
wonderful insights. Thanks for the time today. Here are four
takeaways from my conversation with Gary. One Gary believes the
best creative ideas come through testing and iteration. Just like Seinfeld,
Gary tests and refines his ideas with new audiences over time.
(33:33):
Two Gary believes advertising should be relevant in multiple context
with a low cost for creative. Brands are missing an
opportunity when they don't target different consumers in different ways.
Three even if you're successful now, stay humble and stay curious.
You'll need those skills to stay relevant in the future.
(33:54):
And four, if you see a trend early, go for it.
As Gary says, even if you're wrong, what you learn
will be valuable. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
(34:16):
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat Nikki Etre for pulling research, Bill Plax
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel Noel Mango, and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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