Once you grasp how to be good at AI it's the critical thinking and the creative thinking input that people are going to put into these platforms into these search bars. And I think it's going to create really Dynamic work and so I think at first people are going to meet it with fear they did that with the internet. they did that with social media. They did that with the iPhone.

But I think over the next three or five years we'll have a more healthy view on it that I find will be balanced. Meaning there'll be some pros and there'll be some cons. Like everything a lot of people have been talking about capacity efficiency. You know? it's been a really interesting theme for the last several years of me trying to dissect what I see Works in our organization and other organizations.

Um, are there any common themes and I genuinely do believe that one of the things that hurts a lot of people is meetings run long and meetings have too many people in them. I Think you know I think all of us are striving for good work cultures for our employees and there's a lot of things one can do. But I really do think helping educate like the value of a two-hour meeting with 21 people. If that meeting happened to be, you know, 45 minutes with seven people.

Miraculously, a lot of hours are freed up for people to be able to achieve what they need to in a day and so just spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to eliminate anxiousness, lack of productivity. and I do think meetings is one of the big culprits out there I mean literally. The meeting I had right before this was 15 minutes but only took seven. you know like I think I do think a good 15-minute meeting, especially when you have capable Executives you can get right into it I mean I'm I'm thrilled for banter and jokes and I love all that stuff too quite a bit.

I probably am a culprit of making meetings go too long with a little bit of like the side dish or bringing some of the emotion to it, but you know I I really like to get to the heart of the matter. um I think that's important and I think a lot of times, even in the context of our industry Sometimes the best ideas for a campaign or a marketing uh, execution sometimes have in the first 30 minutes I find a lot of fresh ideas or the first take or the intuition of the most capable creative people I think they sometimes talk themselves out of stuff the longer they stay and stuff and so yeah. I mean it runs the gamut, you know I think one of the biggest elephants in the room in our industry is reach in frequency is something I believe in heavily as well. It's just that I think our industry speaks about reaching frequency as if it's actually being consumed.

As if the reach is actually being consumed My brain vayner's point of view is that there's potential reach and there's actualized reach. and I believe that the Super Bowl is disproportionately the strongest actualized reach advertising that we have in America And so look, it's a huge ticket, you know I don't I don't laugh at seven million dollars or sneeze at it. But when you can get a hundred million Americans to actually pay attention and actually consume it, you know it's very different than the Oscars That's very different than the NBA Finals that's very different than anything you can do on digital. It's just I feel like when you really get to the matter and we're not robots yet.

AI has not been implanted in us and all this other stuff. so we don't know the actualized consumption of all the reach that we do in all platforms. but I think everyone in our industry can absolutely agree that Super Bowl's actually being consumed. The problem is, you have to make the creative land right.

The creative is still the variable so you can blow it. But the media planning. The cons of it. The planning of the media I think is the strongest in the industry.

Yeah, I mean first of all, I'm always in a tricky spot because I'm not watching at home I'm usually at the game because I'm an avid football fan. so I didn't consume the commercials this year. but I Thought the 2B commercial really caught my attention because I'm big on breaking patterns I Think it's you know this world is noisy. You know this, You, you and your contemporaries do such a great job covering this industry and you're taking in on a daily basis.

a drillion campaigns just on a daily basis. Think about what how that plays out over the course of the year. So to break through to these 300 million Americans or even more importantly, 8 billion people Global it's hard. So I thought what they did was very clever because they played the utility of the whole thing.

They shocked everyone. They made them stop and they made them pay attention and that you know I think that's that was really really well done and so that one kind of took the cake for me because it wasn't about like oh cool, there's this cool actor in it or oh cool that was funny or silly or emotional. it was functional and I thought that was very clever. The point I was making in that talk and and really My overall passion of being in this industry is layering Common Sense against pricing against actual consumer behavior.

And so my point with print is and listen: I was a heavy print Advertiser in the late 90s early 2000s and I would argue that print along with Google Adwords is how I built my dad's wine retail business. But when I look at what print is asking for full page ads and top Publications today versus its current circulation versus the common sense of are people actually consuming that ad in the print format or are they consuming the information I think it's a real challenge to justify the rates when you can be doing I mean I would argue outdoor is a stronger Roi even though a lot of people are looking at their phone in the car now and that's got its own challenges. look I'm not just blindly digital I think a lot of digital advertising is really bad and overpriced I think a lot of pre-roll I think a lot of banner ads I think a lot of the programmatic digital ads are just there to spray, pray, and disrupt and I don't believe they're being consumed. but I Just yeah.

I'm not super fond of the costs associated with print ads as a whole. There's always places where you can find pockets of value. I think if you're really thinking about traditional means I think Drive Time Radio Com is is a more interesting dollar spent and so yeah, that's that. That was the point I was making and it was also contextual I was talking to an industry that spends quite a bit of money a lot of money there and I think underspend in some of the Contemporary social aspects where I think they would get more relevance and actual consumption I look at Web3 a lot I've done a lot of work in it, but I I Don't believe that humans are in VR devices yet at any kind of scale that anybody in the ad age audience would be interested in.

I think the adage audience is a little over romantic about the past and values the past a little too much. Some group of us in Fortune 5000 marketing Fortune 500 Marketing we get overzealous of the future and we do things in VR and things as such and you know our hypothesis is that there's an underestimation and an undervaluing of today and I think today you know it's funny sometimes I always you know I have a funny thing that I like dream up what would I call the company if if I knew it better when I called it vaynermedia and one of the things I think about I would call my agency is today because I think I realize a lot of our growth over the last 13 years and what I think is making us sustainable and keeping our clients and what's working is we do have a deep Obsession about today. uh I'll give you a good one that's probably on a lot of our minds. You can't imagine how many times Garrett a day I get text, emailed or dm'd about what happens if Tick Tock gets banned.

My answer is nothing and everything. What I mean by that we follow attention. If Tick Tock is banned, that's above my pay grade that's you know, a US Government decision. We then realize the next day you're talking about hundreds of millions of people's attention is going to be reallocated.

So what happens the next day? We triple down on shorts. We triple down on Spotlight on snap. we triple down on Instagram reels. We quadruple down on Facebook reels which we're finding a lot of winning with right now.

So you know to me we focus on today. We keep an eye on tomorrow because we want to be ready for AI at scale. We want to be ready for VR at scale. We want to be ready for AR at scale.

And then we challenge for a common sense consumer debate around yesterday Is the production cost to this commercial that's going to run on television? Is that really Roi Positive against the attention and consideration that it would create. And so I'm not social media doubt I'm not digital doubt I Mentioned my Affinity for Drive Time radio earlier in this interview. I'm off the charts on Super Bowl I Think influencer marketing is incredibly underpriced and or overpriced if you don't know how to do it. We try to stay unemotional, but we try to focus on today and we try to focus on brand building and driving sales or results today.

I For a living, pay attention where consumer attention is and I try to figure out where that is and I figure out how to bring value to that attention through written form, audio, video, and pictures. If tick tocks off the board, that attention goes. Like we said earlier to a lot of new places and it will be mine and my agency's job to understand. CTV Fast TV Social Traditional.

You know, digital 1.0 linear Like where is that got? Where is that attention gone And how do we fill that with compelling messaging to create relevance and consideration for the outcomes that we want right now? I'm very focused on this thing we call pack Platforms and culture. We believe the way to win in Social is to be great at understanding the platforms, the algorithms, the features, what filters work, What are you able to do on them? Is it a carousel? This is it. A reel over an infeed and then the culture. What's happening in pop culture? Who are the most interesting musicians? Uh, what meals are emerging? What restaurants? What regions in America Is fishing culture doing this? You know? What's the summer? Anthem Going to be what's like culture If you do those two things extremely well.

the output of the creative you do in Social can be affected by that. If you do that well, the consumer insights both Quantum qual that you can get out of that kind of work really can feed your above the line and brand building. You know I Think Brands need to make the decisions for themselves. You know we're You know, as an agency, we're always in support of what brands make decisions and we follow that lead.

Look I Don't think we can avoid angst or negativity. Period. There's angst and negativity in traditional media. There's angst and negativity on websites.

There's anxiety negativity on literally every platform. From Tick Tock to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat I you know these platforms are empty and humans are filling them. And I think that there's just a lot of angst in general in society and that's showing up uh, on these platforms just like when there was optimism and Euphoria when these platforms showed up 15 20 years ago. I Think that's just the bell curve.

I Think humans are being exposed I think that a lot of people have to work on gratitude and accountability and and putting things into perspective. but I'm very empathetic to why there is so much angst. you know. I think as far as brands, if brands are being honest and not Hypocrites they will see angst and negativity on every single platform that they do marketing on.

and you know that's up to Brands to make decisions on where they want to be and where they don't want to be in. Vayner Right now, we're being cautious. I Think One of the things that we recognize is we don't know the source of the information. So as you can imagine: Garrett we're trying to be very thoughtful of like copyright and trademark.

Those are things we need to be very careful of. so we're kind of quote unquote, staying away from it right now. other than using it internally and trying to get a sense of it, make sure we're not behind the bell curve, you know. I Think it's going to make the world more interesting I think it's going to commoditize some things that is going to change the landscape no different than the tractor did for farming so.

but I Also think it's going to help the critical thinkers and the most creative in our industry. I Think once you grasp how to be good at AI it's the critical thinking and the creative thinking input that people are going to put into these Algos into these platforms into these search bars and I think it's going to create really Dynamic work. and so I think at first people are going to meet it with fear they did that with the internet. they did that with social media.

they did that with the iPhone but I think over the next three to five years we'll have a more healthy view on it that I find will be balanced. Meaning there'll be some pros and there'll be some cons like everything but I Think for our industry I Believe the most creative people in our industry are going to flourish in an AI world because she or he is going to be able to input so many different creative takes into these Ai infrastructures and they're going to get output that's going to be meaningful and they're going to be able to build on that. and I I'm actually pretty excited what it's going to be for the creative class foreign.