What i would call contemporary marketing - i see it as the thing that everybody in this room should spend the majority of their time on. I think we need to start having an advanced dramatically different conversation on what team, building and leadership actually is. Marketing is incredibly confused with sales. We call vaynermedia the honey empire, but the word empire is not a soft word.

We're trying to build the biggest company of all time, three to four linkedin ads a day, all different videos, pictures or words all run as ads disproportionately. This has been the thing that i've been most emailed about as a substantial game changer for b2b companies. To me, marketing is a conversation of ambition with all due respect. I just want you to know one thing: we are the best marketing company in the world, which means the only thing that's about to happen is we're gon na speed up the world.

Knowing that your product's a piece of crap, you cannot hire your 23 year old niece to do it, meaning actually starting a podcast or youtube show around the expertise of the business that you're in the idea of becoming the publisher, not the marketer right. Most people are in sales, we are sales organizations and that's great. I love sales, but marketing is the second framework much stronger than sales in the medium and long term. The third thing that i'm talking to you about right now is the concept of becoming the media company.

What i've done with my career, this last tactic, because i've thrown this out in my content, different interviews and such has been a major win for some small b2b mid-sized b2b companies, and i would highly highly recommend the people in this room that have a little gift Of gab feel like they can do this, please push yourself, it really works. Remember when you promised you would never get a facebook account in 2012. Humans say no many of you when you heard about bitcoin. No, the blockchain is here every contract in the world.

In 15 years is gon na be on the blockchain. It's how you're gon na do business. So what are you gon na do the same thing you did with the internet, which is fight it until you succumbed to it and left all that opportunity on the table. You don't like money, you don't want your family to be more stable.

You don't want your business to grow. You may not want to dance on tick tock, but i'm not asking you to dance. The internet is where the real world is. We spend everyone's like the metaverse and the vr and all this crazy stuff we're living there now do you know how many hours are spent looking at this, and that's the point of this talk today, which is a lot's happening, it's nice to be back on stage.

There's two core things that i'm spending a ton of time on right now and they're, pretty opposite um. One is incredibly in the weeds and very tactical and very in the dirt, which is what i would call contemporary marketing, whether you're in this room as b2b or b2c, including things that wouldn't make maybe sense to a lot of people within the industry of what they Should be doing on linkedin or tick tock or things of that nature, they fascinate me mainly because i'm a businessman right, you know i am, since i was 14 years old, i've been involved in a family business, my own business, my whole life, so everything comes from The standpoint of oxygen to pay the bills you know i was born in the soviet union - grew up in a very immigrant family um. My dad had a liquor store and from may 18th to that may 18. 1998.

Until this, second, that i'm standing, i've had the responsibility to make the payroll every two weeks of every day of my life. So my framework, when it comes to marketing, is actually extremely grounded in the practicality of actually building a business and as i'm getting the gray hairs and getting a little more mature, i'm realizing how many people don't see marketing the way i see it. I see it as oxygen. I see it as the thing that everybody in this room should spend the majority of their time on, and most people when i give this talk or have a meeting or have navigated last 25 years are trying to find time to get to marketing.

I'd rather be great at contemporary marketing than know how to balance my p l, that's how my brain thinks about it, and so, as i'm going to go into this right now, there's only one thing that i know that can double a person's business without them. Making a significant change in their product or service or having some fortune like their local competitor, decided to retire like there's. Only one thing, and that is marketing and marketing, is incredibly confused with sales, and i see it every day and i think people have incredible comfort with sales because they know what the roi is in the very immediate, the conversations and the keynotes and the books that I wrote you know seven ten years ago about hey print and radio and television. The things that i use to build my wine business they're, declining in value you've got to look at google, adwords or email, or you know, youtube that's becoming a non-conversation.

I think i struggled to think that people don't realize that digital is a real, serious form of marketing. What what is happening, though, is, as people have gone through, that transition, the land of navigating digital marketing, is incredibly vast and ridiculously up and down. You can waste an ungodly amount of money, doing digital marketing and get nothing in return, or you could spend a stunningly low amount of dollars and get very high upside and it just comes down to the tactics and just understanding it, and i want to. I want to spend some time on that.

The other thing that i want to spend time on is is today, is today's 16th tuesday yeah. So today was supposed to be the day my new book came out. If you guys can flash my screen one more time. So today was supposed to be the day that my new book came out: uh 12 and a half leveraging the emotional ingredients for business success.

I did a nft promotion in august that if you bought 12 copies, i would airdrop you an nft and sold 1.2 million copies, which for context makes it the most successful book of all time, um or at least one of the top ten and um. And so they had to push it by two weeks and it'll be coming out in two weeks, but it's just really fun timing that today was supposed to be the day, because it's really the other thing i desperately want to talk to you about, which is my My navigating not only my own career, but i was an early investor in facebook and twitter in uber in coinbase uh. You know i run an agency, that's a you, know: 1800 person, global company that works with a ton of businesses, and something has really become very clear to me again in this older state, which is in business. We don't really talk about kindness or empathy or compassion or accountability, or we don't talk about soft skills as a core.

We talk about it as like a side dish as a nice to have, and i think, if you're very thoughtful about what's going on in the world right now - and i don't mean the over coddling and entitlement and that stuff i mean people having options as employees. You know creating continuity and actually building something very big instead of kind of okay or solid. I think we need to start having an advanced dramatically different conversation on what team, building and leadership actually is and again i don't come from a foofy place. The way i call the way this book was built was how i built my company internally.

We call vaynermedia the honey empire right, honey over vinegar, but the word empire is not a soft word. We're trying to build the biggest company of all time and i think to do that. You need continuity based on optimism and growth, not based on fear, you know, and so those are two things i really want to double click on. Let's start with the marketing thing, because it's incredibly practical for this room, how many people buy show of hands because i'm going to navigate because i have a feel of the mix? How many people by show of hands please raise them, are in the b to b business, raise your hands.

Please hi! Please thank you and, b to c great, so predominantly b2b i'll jump on both so b to b how many people here are running linkedin ads for their b2b business, and i mean ads in the feed, not email, things that nature raise your hands just curious. Great. Thank you. So let's talk about linkedin ads this one.

This room is majority b2b. I i couldn't employ. If, if nothing from this talk, nothing from this talk, you remember except this one part. I hope this lands every company, hence person in this room - needs to be running three to four original pieces of creative as ads on linkedin a day three to four linkedin ads a day, all different videos, pictures or words all run as ads.

Not your page and you post and you organically, just get whatever linkedin puts it into the ethos. I mean you actually target employees of companies or people's titles, and you pay linkedin money in ad form to convert the business goal that you want disproportionately in the last 18 months. The number one thing that i get emails about with the content that i put out around this disproportionately. This has been the thing that i've been most emailed about as a substantial game changer for b2b companies, a couple things that are important about this number one as we go through this conversation or if we get into q and a and go deeper and you sit There and say you know what screw it i'm gon na follow, i'm gon na.

Do it actually, first and foremost, you cannot hire your 23 year old niece to do it. You can't hire a small agency. One person that you find you, the human in this room must, if you want the success from it, but you don't need to do anything like just to really create the context, but if you would like your business to grow through an arbitrage, that is incredibly obvious. That will close linkedin ads are not as good right now as they were 24 months ago.

When i started this conversation because more people have come in and i'm sure everybody here is going to understand the simple concept of supply and demand. It's the same rodeo since myspace thing happens: myspace facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, snapchat, tick, tock, linkedin, you, it's all the same game thing gets established. People come on board the early movers, no different than real estate development. Just with content make content.

They extract the biggest audiences. The big companies that i work with the pepsi, the budweiser's, the fords they wait, they got to get their laws down, they got to figure it out, they're scared of it. They wait eventually, three years in they get comfortable, they start throwing money at it. It starts working, they start throwing real money at it.

All of a sudden smbs mid-market companies like ourselves don't get as much real estate for free organically or the ads cost too much against what we used to spend for it. It's the same show every single time. The number one advertiser on television in the first 10 years of television was procter gamble. That's why it's the biggest consumer brands company in the world.

The number one advertiser on google adwords from 2001 to 2005 was amazon. It's why it's who it is when there is an arbitrage of attention the world changes. The only thing that connects every one of our businesses here is the attempt to get attention to tell somebody what we want or what we have and then hope the thing happens. That's how the world works all the things that are happening, geopolitically and politically in our country in the world.

It's just because attention has gone from mainstream media to social and new dynamics happen, the reason back to being a soviet boy. The reason when there's a coup in a country that at the same time they go after the palace they go to the newspaper and radio and television station is because communication and the ability to talk to somebody and get their attention and make the thing that you Want to happen is literally the only thing that matters, and so the thought that so many people in this room don't think about that. As the first thing you do, even in parallel with the quality of your product, though i did have a meeting last week where i was very, very, very, very, very underwhelmed with the product and the person was very aggressive that they needed my agency to be hired. Probably because he subconsciously knew how bad the product was, and it finally pushed me into the corner - and i said, sir, with all due respect - i just want you to know one thing: we are the best marketing company in the world, which means the only thing that's About to happen is we're gon na speed up the world, knowing that your product's a piece of crap, so i'm like, i think we should fix it first and then we'll mark it.

So look when i say it's the only thing that matters. Of course, the quality of your product, of course, when i look around this room, there's a ton of you that have substantial long-term relationships and reputation in a bmv environment that is absolutely driving your core business. My question is why people like to leave upside on the table when i get into these combos one on one or on stage you know they're like gary, i'm good. I don't need linkedin, i'm like the king of dayton, ohio, i'm like that's nice, carl, i'm like how much do you business? Do you do 7 million i'm like what's wrong with 16? To me, marketing is a conversation of ambition.

I understand that people don't want to learn this. I understand that you don't want to spend 11 hours running ads on linkedin tasting it watching a bunch of videos reading a bunch of stuff so that you can then hire the person internally and know how to judge. If they're good at it the biggest reason most companies don't continue to do social media, it's because they hired somebody that sucks at it and they don't know how to judge it, and then they decide it doesn't work. You know what else doesn't work.

A basketball, a basketball does not work. For me, the roi of a basketball for me has been about negative ten thousand dollars, because i've torn both my meniscus, the roi of a basketball for lebron james, is a billion dollars. Social marketing works at scale to trillions of dollars. We just might have not figured out how to make it work for ourselves.

So for me, for this room there are two core things that really stand out. One is linkedin and you need to go pot committed because again, what i've seen with the way ads are being spent and the way the organic reach is going down. How many people here use linkedin and know what i'm talking about, how it went from just a recruiting tool to now? There's information content in there just raise your hands, i'm just curious, so you have a sense if you even sit for a second think about if you've even transacted or been affected by a piece of content in linkedin. Just reverse engineer yourself: it's there at scale for this room, the other thing that i think a lot of people need to debate, and this is for the more ambitious and hungry the the more on the offense, the concept of becoming the media platform.

Instead of just an advertiser, meaning actually starting a podcast or youtube show around the expertise of the business that you're in now, this gets really foofy for a lot of people, but it is absolutely, in my opinion, the place that creates the most guaranteed stability and growth Of a business, the idea of becoming the publisher, not the marketer right there's, i was just with several people in the back room and i was like look here's the framework i live in. I think most people in this room and when i say this room i mean america, and i mean the eight billion people on earth and whatever percentage of those people are in business, most people are in sales, there's sales, there's sales organizations, i'm sure. If we're being honest, i could just see what you see by some of those light head nods. We are sales organizations and that's great.

I love sales. When i was five years old sales was my first business. I walked around edison new jersey. I went into people's yards ripped their flowers out of the yard, ringed their doorbell and tried to sell them back the flowers.

I love sales. That's me at five, i love sales, there's remarkable sales. It's called marketing. It's super hard because spending money on something that just branding doesn't feel natural to an smb, mid-market company and even big companies, don't love it even though they allocate for it, because wall street makes them branding super important marketing.

It's the whole actual game. It's the thing that i want you to get advanced at in linkedin. It will completely change your business for real 20. 40 80 growth.

It will it can it does if you get good at it. The problem is most people. A lot of hands went up. I feel like if this was a class where we went through all the ads without even knowing and a lot of hands went up just because i know 98 of what i see on linkedin is this, so i'm making the assumption that the math scales in this Room the marketing is actually just sales videos or a sales flyer.

Most people want to go to marketing or really just doing sales. None of you want to see that nobody wants an infomercial in their news feed. It's not value ad period, but marketing is the second framework much stronger than sales in the medium and long term harder to judge for people in the short term, which is why almost nobody does it? Definitely not in the size, companies that are in this room for real. Do i love linkedin so much when i force my dad to do it and buy newspaper ads or radio or direct mail was expensive.

You can do linkedin for six thousand bucks and get a real taste, not make a thirty thousand dollar commitment to a full page ad newspaper, so marketing. The third thing that i'm talking to you about right now is the concept of becoming the media company. What i've done with my career, the shows, the content, the vlogs, i don't make content. I just live my life, we film it and then we produce marketing for it, and so the concept of you actually i'll give you a great example.

One more time plea. Please me please, b to b company raise your hand, this is um. This is my like number one starting a podcast in your very narrow niche. Even maybe your town like you, could talk about concrete in a state or a town narrow we're not trying to be.

The letterman show here you're not trying to win an emmy you're trying to get business starting a podcast where you interview the potential buyers that you're trying to get business from. So this has been a monster hit for a lot of people that have taken me up on this. You start a show: that's a podcast where you talk about things in general, but the people that you email on linkedin or on email to be guests are the people that you actually want to buy your product. This is really interesting.

Human psychology, the people, you're emailing or calling or trying to play golf with or have fake dinner with or hitting up on, linkedin to do business with are often not interested in what you're trying to do and won't respond or say no, that same person when you're Saying you know so: you're trying to hit up barry barry want to go golfing barry. Let me introduce you to my guy barry. Can we get together? Barry's not interested. Barry has his supplier.

When you email, barry and say barry. Would you come on and talk about? Your amazing career of the last 30 years on my podcast barry's moonwalking to your office. This last tactic, because i've thrown this out in my content. Different interviews and such has been a major win for some small b2b mid-sized b2b companies, and i would highly highly recommend the people in this room that have a little gift of gab feel like they can do this to really push themselves.

I'm aware very aware, a very introverted dad you know like well, actually he's not he's come out of a shell, but my mom's introverted um in a lot of ways. I know that that last thing isn't for everybody. I know that you don't want to put yourself on camera feels uncomfortable. It doesn't come natural, but please, if you happen to be one of the several dozens of people in here, that the thought of what i just said is intriguing.

Please push yourself. It really works. The the world is changing, i don't have to tell a single person here. What i'm trying to get everybody to understand is take your real life and put it into your business life.

Here's what i mean by that remember, remember how many of you promised me that you would never get an iphone, because your blackberry was so awesome and you needed to feel the buttons just curious. How many people here have a blackberry right now remember when you promised you would never get a facebook account in 2012. 11 10.. We promise even for some of the old school there's, some old school cats - and here i see you my favorite one was when the cell phone started getting traction in the late 90s.

All of my i've got a beeper. I don't need a cell phone people in this room. This is what we do, even people that are progressive. I spent the last three years trying to convince people that made real money and changed their life on instagram to get tick-tock accounts they're 26 and they said no humans say no many of you when you heard about bitcoin.

No many of you when you're hearing about nfts right now. No, it's just all no it's exhausting and it makes no sense if you're a business person no is poison in business. Quick question: how many people here are retiring in the next 10 years and before you raise your hand, i don't mean you're going to have a huge year next year and buy an island. I mean you're, old and you're finished.

Raise your hands, raise it high. All right, four and you're: definitely not in that crowd! You just wanted to raise your hand four, my friends, almost everything that dominates our society right now, netflix most of the social networks, none of them existed 10 years ago. What i'm really trying to tell you in this talk and by the way, we're starting to get that place? So if you have any question of every anywhere, i'm going or anything, you know about me that you want to ask questions. Please line up now because i want to get into the q a please do that, while i'm wrapping up here um my friends, i'm trying to prepare you for.

What's coming, you guys hear about nfts and people selling for 69 million dollars and you're like scam, beanie babies this and that the blockchain is here. Every contract in the world in 15 years is gon na be on the blockchain. It's how you're gon na do business. So what are you gon na do the same thing you did with the internet, which is fight it until you succumbed to it and left all that opportunity on the table like how do we not see the patterns? It was one thing when the internet came and we didn't have that, and so the world was one way, and so it was very empathetic in 96, 97.

98. 99. Do you understand? 1996 90 of my conversations was trying to convince somebody. Somebody would buy anything on the internet.

50 of my conversations were trying to convince people that the internet wasn't a fad. Do you remember some of you if you paid attention to this, when the stock market crashed in 2000 with internet stocks and every article was see the internet's a fad people don't like change, they don't like it. We don't like it. The problem is, you can do anything you want in your personal life.

I like when people like gary, i just don't get facebook. I go. That's nice stan. I understand that you don't get it.

How about the fact that five trillion people do like? I love when people make decisions that are ideological on their human level and then deploy them in their business life. You don't like money, you don't want your family to be more stable. You don't want your business to grow. You don't want somebody to come along and use this stuff and put you out of business.

All of those things i have a funny feeling you are interested in. You may not want to dance on tick tock, but i'm not asking you to dance. I'm asking you to pay attention to what's actually happening here and we're just starting technology. Doesn't care about your feelings or how hard you worked to build your little moat locally on reputation.

It just comes along and destroys. I spoke at a conference ironically in orlando seven years ago i was an early investor in uber and ironically, got booked. They didn't know for the limo and taxi conference convention center to speak, but it was early uber. It hadn't really done its thing yet and i stood there and i said my friends, i don't know if you know about this and it started, it was happening in san francisco, it just opened in new york, it was early and i was like my friends.

I don't know if you're paying attention, but there's this thing called uber. You know like, i really think you might want to like. I think it's going to be pretty disruptive. I compared it to amazon and bookstores.

This room laughed me off the stage. First, guy on the mic goes gary. Do you know what politics is i'm like? I sure do he goes. We've got the audacious.

We've got these local authorities by the balls. We have our medallions, we contribute i'm like that's nice, i'm like do you know what venture capital is. I'm like uber's gon na raise a billion dollars in cash, and i have a funny feeling, that's more than you have john and i don't have to explain to all of you what happened there, no matter what you think your moat is, and why not. I promise you there's one incredibly important thing that i want to leave with and then please please line up, because i want questions.

Otherwise, i'm gon na have drock run around with the mic. Your business has a target on it. Every entrepreneur is looking at every localized business and trying to think about scale and they're going to use modern marketing to create a moat. Just like zillow did just like amazon did just like.

I did with rezzy the restaurant app and open table. It's all going to be the same game. The internet is where the real world is. We spend everyone's like the metaverse and the vr, and all this crazy stuff we're living there now do you know how many hours are spent.

Looking at this, do you understand? We live there now. This has happened, whether you like it or not, you've decided to be an entrepreneur and a business owner or a senior executive. You decided. So that means you have to play on the field in sports, it's obvious when the greats i will never forget, even though i hated them, because i'm a knicks fan but paul pierce said something in some interview and i loved it.

He said something like they asked him when he knew it was over right when he had to retire, and he said something like it was interesting. It was just one random game and this scrub got by me and i realized this guy would have never gotten by me ever ever ever before, and i can't believe he dominated me like that, and i knew it was over and it stuck with me in sports. It's obvious in business: it's not it's like whatever that gas is that is coming out of your car and then you just die in the garage, because you didn't know that thing. That's business! It's happening to you right now, but you just don't realize it and that's because the technology lever, especially now with what's going on with the blockchain, you have a blockchain and internet happening at the same time.

And what makes me sad is you can harness it or you can put your head in the sand. It's just a very binary game and i just don't know why you wouldn't - and so that's that i didn't really get to the culture part as much as i want to, but i'm going to sneak a little bit of it in all of that is fine and Dandy, if you land three awesome people to run your linkedin or one, it's all fine and dandy. If you don't know how to manage in 2021, you're gon na lose the options are ridiculous: every 17 year old that i know - and i know a drilling of them. I have 10 million followers on tick tock.

Every one of them have no interest in going to college or working for anyone, because they can make a hundred thousand dollars a year on tick tock. This isn't about these gen zers and millennials being spoiled. This is called options: they're, not lazy. They just don't want to work for you like it's very important what this is probably more important than what i spent the most of my time on.

If you don't realize that kindness and empathy and compassion and all those things your grandma tried to teach, you are actually becoming the core things. You're gon na need in your business to succeed. I love this new thing going on the great resignation right and everyone's blaming the government, rightfully so like if you pay people to stay home, they're gon na stay home like we understand that game, but let there be no confusion, there's a much more dangerous thing going On in there, because that check is gon na stop. What's underneath, there is options right, and i see a lot of head shaking i'll.

Tell you why many of you have been baffled by your kid or your kid's friend, making real money on tick, tock and they're. 14 and you're like what the hell is going on, this is happening, and so look when i talk like this, i always laugh because i can always hear my dad or other people's voices in the crowd, like i'm very empathetic, to somebody sitting listening to me right Now and saying you know what i'm retired, i get it because it's changing so fast and hard. It's like do i. You know i've gone hard for 50 years.

Do i really want a 30 year? Do i really that's on you, but it doesn't mean it's not happening and that's the point of this talk today, which is a lot's happening and i'd love to get into details, so i'll leave a lot more for q a, but thank you for having me. Thank you. So i think a lot of people are going to be very, very motivated to start their own podcast, there's, probably a handful of people that try it there's going to be a handful of people that are really really good at it, and then there's going to be A bunch of people that probably struggle. That's right! That's right! That's right! At what point do you have to realize that you're approaching it wrong? Have you had that about that spider sense? To figure out, i need to change my message.

How do i? Because you know you need to keep doing it? It's just about happening. It's a really tough stick here, we'll go back and forth. It's a really tough question for me. People always ask like you know, because i'm so infatuated with tenacity and patience infatuated like patience, you know for all my high energy patience has been the foundation of my career, so i i'm always scared to give a general answer to this question, because it's you know, Because i know that there are many people that gave up on their podcast and youtube show, one month before they were destined to click, it's happened, and so i i think the question is results and time allocation right.

There's gon na be people here. If i'm looking at this crowd, i think i'm gon na get four people to give it an at-bat. One of those four people is just gon na genuinely like it and by the way, on the podcast front. Think about your interests.

I went very narrow. Think about something like a podcast called golf and business, because you just love golf and the show is just interviewing people about how they do business in golf. Golf business so like you could like we're gon na play here a little bit and go a little more detailed but like if somebody did it. Somebody heard that and delilah that's actually perfect for me and they do golf and business with sally thompson.

She might just like it so much that it's almost doesn't matter. It's my entrepreneurial career. What you know when i was making 48 000 a year at 29, you know like or what i'm doing now it all is the same, because i'm just in it for the game and so for some people. The podcast is just gon na be an enjoyable hour of their week and they won't even care if it's business development for other people of those four they're gon na do two episodes.

They're not gon na get a lead and they're gon na look at one of their teammates and be like that gary he was full of crap and just give up in two seconds and then everything in between. So you know, i think, it's a very personal answer, but i can tell you this the biggest reason people fail with their podcast when they hear what i say is because they use it as a sales engine and not just content and let the karma and the Brand fall where it may. I do a lot of business, because the first thing you said to me back, there is hey, i'm a jets fan too because of the way i do my content people connect with me about my jets fandom. They connect with me about my jersey, kind of roots, shoveling snow lemonade, my baseball cards, my sneaker stuff, you know just like because i'm giving them a lot of things to connect with, because i'm very comfortable in putting certain things out there.

Other things, i'm not. You know this, i don't put out any my personal life, you know if i have 12 and 9 year old nobody's ever seen them in their lives, so you're in control of what you put out, but the podcast doesn't have to be. It can be incredibly narrow, but, as you just saw with the idea, i had and again some of you care about sailing some of you care about wine. Some of you can you can really interject some of that by just we're at literally tennis and business sailing and like it's very strategical, but traction momentum, always matters.

You know like i promise somebody here. Does it and the fourth guest is somebody they've been trying to open as an account and they do the podcast and they're gon na get a beer afterwards and on the way out that person looks at them from the bar and says you know what? Let's talk? Next week about the actual business, then they're going to go in a car and say goddammit that gary's a genius so either i'm the worst or i'm the best. But that's going to be based on the variable of how good you are at it. I know it works.

I have too many examples of it and when just so you know what the way my career works from investing and operating a marketing company, i'm talking about hundreds of thousands, not like three people, there's no focus group of one. I would never tarnish my reputation or my personal brand by pontificating thesis on the focus group of one or six. This is scaled results. You.