2026 Marketing Playbook: From Organic Social to Live Shopping

When a piece of content gets 3 million views, that video becomes the commercial you run on connected TV with black lines on the left and right and everything in between Gillette, which we work on. They created from social as TVC was outperforming, even their best performing TVC that we created at for 12 years. It just became obvious to me I'm like, oh wow, now when we make social media organic posts, we're always thinking about making a 15 and 30 version of it just in case it organically crushes to make it more feasible to go up the funnel. This is the GaryVee audio experience. (whooshing) - Viral and attachment is slang for social media first marketing structure. And what has been fascinating over the last 15 years for me is watching this transition. It's funny I started my marketing firm because I read a book about 3G Capital and how they were buying some of the most iconic brands and I really did a deep dive and at the end of it, even though Warren Buffett and many other people thought this Brazilian PE firm was the next great coming, I couldn't get this feeling out of my stomach that they had it wrong, that cost-cutting in perpetuity. And I like a good CFL, I like running an actual business, but cost-cutting in perpetuity on iconic brands was eventually gonna have a problem. And as you can imagine, you might have heard it in the intro, it was also the same time that the first three investments I made in my life in the private sector were Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. And so I have this belief that there's a new media attention landscape coming. The only two public stocks that I bought with my own money were Amazon and Netflix. And I'm watching the corporate Fortune 500 CPG land double down on how brands grow a book written in 1991 and cost-cutting. And then when I got under the hood in 2009, when I started the firm, by 2012 answers to questions that seemed very, I got very fortunate, I came from the outside and I started to ask very basic questions that continuously would not get answered. Things like, can you please explain to me how you're actually doing your MMM or your MMA? Or can you explain to me what a GRP actually is or how Nielsen's ratings actually work? All of this kind of combined with a decade of incredible change at the consumer level. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. They'll make my mom super happy. One of the books that I have not written, but I've started two or three times, and I don't think I'm gonna get to it. But as very nerdy to this world, is I was starting to write a book called The Channel Conflict Wars, which was a book about retailers versus the companies like yourselves that sell them product. And what I thought was gonna play out, and it has played out. I'm sure it's lost on none of you in this room. An extraordinary amount of your money is going to Walmart and Amazon to pay a tax for just being there. And live shopping is happening. Influencer is happening. I believe we're in the era where we do not need to waste working media dollars anymore. We can get into that. And I think we have a very big confusion of where we spend our money on creative fees for ideas, production cost or ludicrous in our industry versus the outside world. And there's just a lot going on. And I think a lot of us know that. I think the way a lot of us got trained is in conflict to the reality of the consumer. And this is all without even talking about AI, and all the other things that are happening. And definitely not lost on any of you. Every brand in this incredible portfolio, I have talked to an influencer with 50 million followers that is debating entering the space because the cat's out of the bag that influencers with 50 million followers can compete with the biggest brands in the world. Because in an Amazon and Walmart 3PL and in a TikTok Instagram social media world, our moat of television and retail shelves has been commoditized. That may sound crappy, but I think it's phenomenal. I think everything I just said is actually the opportunity. I think the question becomes, when will big brands decide to market in a consumer-centric reality versus a corporate-centric reality? And that is my passion, what I think about. And that's my framework. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me. (audience applauding) - Okay, I'm gonna start with a question from Daniel. 15 years ago when I started my MBA, I read your book, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook. - Thank you. - And at the time, it challenged a lot of traditional marketing thinking and put me on a path into digital marketing. Thank you for that. - Very humble. - On the theme of challenging marketing thinking, what's your most contrarian bet about commerce over the next 24 months? That most executives here would disagree with you on? - Next 24 months? I think 24 months from 10 a, if this amazing company is committed to live social shopping, it could actually impact the PNL in a way that I think most people would struggle to believe in this room. They would think that the sales volume wouldn't be big enough to really impact us in the way we would want. And I would argue if you were actually committed to it, that you could make that meaningful. So that would probably stand out the most. I would say the other thing in commerce is, I would not spend one dollar on lower funnel conversion on any creative that hadn't been validated by getting organic views first. So I would say the other thing that I think most people like where are you going with that Gary? 'Cause we have a model for our AB testing row as CACL TV. What are you saying? I think that would probably be the other big debate that I believe we are done spending working media dollars on creative that we're guessing in boardrooms. And I think that's the only way Fortune 500 companies are doing it right now. You're welcome. Also I'm looking for a little bit of a bonus kickback for your career's impact. (laughing) No problem. Check's in the mail. It's a pleasure meeting you. All right, I've actually got the next question. Okay, nice. I have a eight year old who has really big plans to make a fortune with a lemonade stand. I love. So curious, one piece of advice. He asked me for a lot of advice, and then immediately rejects it. So knowing your followers on YouTube, he'll be much more likely to follow your advice. So any advice, and what's the number one lesson that you would like a young person to learn in their first kind of entry into business? You know what's so funny? I'm actually gonna be able to take this question, make it very important to this room, even though it sounds like it might not connect. My, this is real. And it took me about 10 years into my public speaking career. I actually look back at the video once I'll, in an improv setting like this, I recalled something I'd forgotten my whole life, which was literally the second time I ever made lemonade. I tricked my friend Robbie Ternick to stand behind the lemonade stand all day, so that I could walk up and down Tingly Lane, in Addison, New Jersey, and pay attention to how the cars were driving in all the intersections to figure out where to put my sign for my lemonade stand. And I'm literally getting goosebumps right now. I would tell your son that his lemonade flavor and how good it is is gonna be subjective. But where he puts his signs is gonna impact how many cups he actually sells. And I would argue, this is my biggest argument with all of you, that I believe big companies have scoring mechanisms internally for reporting that justify potential reach, not actualized reach. And that intuitively as a child, I knew that attention was the only asset that mattered. So much so that without even knowing what I was doing, I was literally trying to figure out what literally watch cars drive by and be like, "Wait, that tree's better than that pole." And that's where I put my sign. That's basically how I've thought about marketing for the next 42 years as well. Where is the underpriced attention? Where is the overpriced attention? That's first and foremost equally important to the other variable, which is the creative gonna make that person buy my lemonade, right? And so I would tell him to focus on the trees and the poles. Thank you. All right, next we have Dana. - My question is, are leveraging AI marketing? Just really wanna know, I guess what's the smart way for brands to leverage AI marketing while maintaining that authenticity and human touch? - You know, I think this is not lost on any of you. We're probably still a good 24 to 36 months, 18 months of the stigma of an AI ad. Because the reason McDonald's and others got roasted for it is in the subconscious of humanity, we're all petrified of losing our jobs to AI. So we're going to be very vocal when big companies do things 'cause we're gonna try to hold off as long as possible. That stigma will only last for so long, right? I compare it to, remember online dating? Remember like in 2003 or four or five if somebody met on like match.com, they made pretend they met at a bar, there was so much stigma and now it's normal. I would say first and foremost it should be starting to scale internally. I'd hate to think that we're still fighting it for the internal usage cases. So as much as AI for strategy and project management and creating internal decks, like creating any internal deck should be done in AI 'cause it'd be done in seconds. And really no one here is gonna, in the next decade it's not about losing your job to AI, it's losing your job to someone who knows how to use AI, right? So I think my encouragement from the top would be like, If you're going to be scared of them, put your head in the sand, the wave's going to get you. So how do you start using it? Eventually, I don't know the timing. My intuition is it's definitely within the next five years. The commercials, the creative is AI-made. And so I think right now the way to weaponize it is in strategy, like consumer insights, things of that nature. It's incredibly useful. Internal tasks, you know, like, I mean, the concept of someone taking notes in a meeting right now blows my mind. Yet it happens eight trillion times a day. But that should all be recorded. And, you know, some of those little things, it's kind of like, hey, we all know we're going to have to run the marathon. You can't run the New York City marathon cold and not train for it ever. And so like anything we can be doing to get on the treadmill, to get us ready for the race would be good. Even the most mundane little things just to get you to start tasting it. And this is going to make sense for many of you given how your career is played out from when you were a kid to here. Like, this is the same movie over and over. This is the typewriter that everybody was scared of. This is the computer. This is the internet. This is mobile. Like, this is what this is. And it's bigger than those things. This is a very big technology. And it's going to really matter because it's doing something we've never seen before. But us hoping it doesn't take our job is not going to be a good strategy. All right. Carmel, I think a lot of us here experienced, but still a little scared in new ways. So where in your life do you still feel like a beginner? And how do you lean into that discomfort? I would say the only place I truly feel like a beginner is more on the human side, not on the professional side. On the human side, you know, having teenage children feels like a beginner. You like that one? It's real life stuff, right? You're trying to, you know, my daughter. I was an atrocious student at an entrepreneur the whole time. My daughter is like touring Duke and Harvard. I feel very much like a beginner. You know, like those kind of things. And then aging parents, you know, my parents have at their early 70s and, you know, all of us will go through this transition where you can like feel like, oh, you know, especially, you know, I was born in the Soviet Union. We're real immigrant family. Like my parents have done everything. You know, since they've worked since they were 10 years old, let alone 30. And so to start to see the early stages of a transition there feels very much like a beginner professionally, I'm different than a lot of people in this room. I'm entrepreneur my whole life. I had to make payroll every day of my life. Everything has been on my neck since I was 18 years old. I was running the business. And so for me, like scary things are normal. Everything is like my comfort zone is that level of pressure. You know, like, like AI to me. I've built a business from zero to 400 million in revenue selling something. No one in this world is believed in social first. And now I've hit this apex. And AI is in its face looking at me with the potential to disrupt everything. I don't get scared of that. Like I've already started to build all the analog capabilities of our firm, you know, experiential, which I think is a big opportunity for this firm. Sampling and trial, another opportunity. Like, you know, to me, I'm like, there's no crying in baseball. And there's definitely no crying in running a business. Like it is what it is. And so to me, that's my comfort zone. Nothing. And everything new is like where I play. My concern is what you're doing day to day. What I'm scared of is like actually believing a television ad can work. My question's around the underdog mindset. So at what point do you feel that the underdog mindset becomes more of a liability rather than a advantage? When you start making too much money and you stop being an underdog, the underdog mindset to me translates in a corporate environment like this of being more thoughtful about every penny and deploying common sense and business truth, not marketing jargon. I think it's always a good time to spend your money wisely. Underdog is good if you're deferring it the way I think you are, which is again, looking at your M&A strategy, looking at what you've done, looking at the whole industry of every Fortune 500 brand. We are living in a very obvious haves versus have not world. The haves are incredibly social first, spend working media dollars on creative that's been validated by the AI algorithms for relevance. And the have nots are still in rooms thinking about brand positioning and campaigns and pushing down. And so to me, underdog mindset is just spending your money as wisely as possible and not being romantic of how you got there. A lot of the brands that you'll M&A, you know, my world is really funny. Unilever is a client and they won't listen to what I'm trying to get them to do. And then I'm an investor in liquid IV and instead they just buy it for a billion dollars. You know, my great preference is for you to do far less M&A if I had it my way, I wish that you were just so remarkable in contemporary marketing that you could just spring up and build things yourselves. Your dog's always good. If it's slang for, let's not waste good money based on a book written in 1991 on reports that none of you can explain to me. And you post game it because it was rainy this weekend. So let's give it more of a lift. All right, we got Jim. Curious to get your thoughts on this. So we've obviously got a range of experience levels in the room here. So looking for your best advice for those that are maybe at the earlier part of their career and then also for those kind of mid-career as well. I mean, for both of you, at least from my lens and I'm, you know, take away supply chain and many other aspects. I'm really thinking about demand creation and gaining market share versus losing it. My number one thing for both mid and young that I highly recommend. I want you to listen very carefully to this. This could be the single best deposit I leave here today. Please die on your own sword. Let me explain this. I am talking right now and I'm saying certain things and I'm watching people's reactions. And there are many people here who agree with what I'm saying but are living in boardrooms and saying something else because they know that the internal way that everything is scored in here is a different way than I'm speaking and they are conforming to the reality of our infrastructure versus what they actually believe as a marketer or business person. Brother, I'm telling everyone here to die on their sword. There is a respectful way for even the most junior person here if they believe that we are wasting money on programmatic black box banner ads or guessing on a 30-second vanilla TBC and buying reminent TV ads or overspending on slotting fees or retail media if they actually have a different point of view of how to build a brand or they've had the luxury of studying some of the things we've emanated and watched how they actually did it. I need them to bring that to the room instead of just nodding their head to their superiors. Nicely, I get to say it not nicely because I own my own business and if I blow it I just go home and be like fuck I blew it. Your world is different. I respect that. I'm empathetic to that. But I promise you we are going through the biggest transition in marketing history over the next five to ten years and many of you are going to lose professionally by saying things you didn't even believe in your heart. And that breaks my heart. I don't want you to lose when you knew and you sat on your words because it wasn't politically correct. Does that make sense? So I would say to both groups that you just mentioned, I'd like to think all of you are living in society. If you're living in society I think you understand that this is eaten up the attention of the end consumer. The seven platforms from LinkedIn to Snapchat and everything in between TikTok and Scrant Facebook has a shocking percentage of the attention. The media in here if you don't run it like television, aka buy for region frequency but you spend it against creative that one is the best marketing tool for growth. The CPCG on earth right now that is going from zero dollars in sales to a hundred million in revenue in 36 months is doing a social first play. Every brand that is massively losing market share, some of your direct competitors are questioning their entire television and programmatic black box digital spend. We have to ask ourselves where we sit on this. So is mass adoption of AI in crypto? Is it a technology problem or a human behavior problem and what needs to change from mass adoption amongst every day people? Yeah, it's come up a bit in this conversation. It's just time. I mean, again, you heard in the video the kooch, like when I was selling wine on the internet in 1996, most people were not buying wine on the internet in 1996. But because I put the foundations of work down from 96 to 2002, my business exploded. You know, when you're at this size and scale, you have to worry about every quarter, every day, I get that. But building brand in a contemporary way and setting yourself up is incredibly important. important. So when I think about AI or crypto, the first question I was asked, when I think about live social shopping, right, I'm looking for timing. If I was here 24 months ago, I was paying attention to China live social shopping nine years ago. It wouldn't have been my answer. It wasn't close enough and I would have been wrong. But how many people are familiar with what not the shopping app? Raise your hands. It's okay if you're not. Pretty good. Raise it high if you're familiar with what not. Great. So 30, 40% of the room is familiar with what not, which is very impressive. By the way, let's have people with Pokemon collecting in your family. 70% of this room is not familiar with what not, which feels appropriate. Just for context, what not did $11 billion in GMV last year? $11 billion of gross merchandise value was sold on what not. So for me, I know when the timing, that's been my career, right? Get the timing right. So I don't worry. Like, I don't, Chris, you might find this interesting. I wish nothing ever changed. I had 85% open rates on email in 1997. Like, I was buying Google AdWords. The day it came out, I bought the word wine and everything you could ever think of. Silver Oak, Kameh, Chateau Lafitte, Pina Nawar, Cabernet. I bought every term on Google AdWords. The day Google AdWords came out, they were five cents a click. It was about seven months and then 10 cents became the floor. I crushed and then things changed. I am just not romantic about how I made my money yesterday because that's a good way to go out of business. And so to me, I'm not excited about things changing. I've spent 100 hours studying substack for the last 12 months. I didn't want to, but I want to be the person I am as an operator and on stage. It's shocking to me what substack could mean for these brands. I'm pretty sure substack is not top of mind of the execution for these brands yet. So I just look for timing. Like, middle America, Europe, third world countries, I don't care for it to be true. I don't think you all should care when that happens. I think you need to care when it's happening and how it impacts your brands. Like water pick on live shopping sales and we should understand that. Before someone else understands it and takes up too much market share, uses the live shopping as a production day, starts running creative and social at scale with media behind it on a conversion that then becomes a problem for us. We've been in PepsiCo. You might have saw a mountain do up there for 13 years. I've been talking like this for 13 years, but it was when prime energy drink, poppy and liquid death started to take meaningful market share that they finally leaned into us. This is important. Your categories are next. You will not be immune to this. And so whether it's influencers that do it or whether it's other companies that figure out how to market like the influencers, this is all real. And you all know it. I literally know you know it. The question is, when are we going to talk about it in a way that allows us to let that conflict the way we internally score or what we're comfortable with or what we're used to? Thank you, brother. My question is about decision making. I think in our earlier session, we talked a lot about part of church and white secret sauce is our ability to collect the facts and act quickly. So for you, I'm just curious how you decide when to move quickly even if something's imperfect versus slowing down to really focus on building a foundation that's strong enough to sustain growth. I make a subjective call in no different than all of you. I'm again, when you're the CEO of an independent company that's not public nor has a board, I'm going to be much faster. Because if I'm wrong, the ramifications for me are just the reality of the merit of my business. So we're uncomfortably fast. I'm literally like, I decided last summer that we're a production company now, not an agency that just happens to media, creative and strategy that was implemented to 4,000 people globally very quickly. Because I'm also comfortable talking to the company a year later and be like, we're not a production company. You know, the ability to change my mind is real. We operate as an agency, almost more like an operating technology system. We constantly change our points of view, which is incredibly difficult for my gen pop, like everybody that works for me. The problem is we just have no choice. If we're not bringing value, we will not be partners with people. And so for me, I don't even know what this concept of perfect already is always subjective anyway. So for me, I'm always going to lean towards faster because the time you do it is not subjective. Like if you're doing three months, it's three months, if you're doing nine months, it's nine months. That's not subjective. Is it perfect? That's completely subjective based on everyone here. It becomes what your risk tolerance is. It becomes what the culture the ELT creates to make you feel safe, to move 60 days sooner than you might have somewhere else or here before. That becomes a cultural thing, a scoring thing. But you know, I make a subjective decision always, always closer to faster. You know, I love sports and I think business is the closest thing to sports. And in sports speed kills and in business speed kills. And big companies are bad at fast. Like if I'm being incredibly transparent, when you read your question and you said, our ability to gather is our advantage to move fast, I definitely like laughed inside. You know, and I'm empathetic because I know what's defined as fast here, but it's not fast at all. Hey Gary, top three principles for sustaining cultural relevance and social forest models as you scale. What would be your advice to us? Thank you. This is definitely the most operationally important answer I'm going to give today. The number, if I bought the company tomorrow, if I was lucky enough to do that, this and this was my opening meeting. My opening meeting on marketing principles, slide one would say we now spend 20% of our entire marketing budget, not the creative side, the entire marketing budget. So literally I buy it. I'm like, what's oxy spend again? Whatever the number is, 20% and I'm talking about all of it. Don't carve out some weird thing. Be like, oh, that's for retail media. I'm talking the whole thing. Okay. Thank you for laughing because you know how you guys do this bullshit. Like you hide all this stuff. I'm talking the whole PNL, CFO life, the whole PNL, 20% of every PNL of every brand here now spends its money on organic social media creative production. I'm going to break this down for you. So this is creative that is made for posting on social organically. So oxy's Facebook account, Twitter account, Instagram account, right? Breeds Instagram, YouTube shorts. Here's why. Everything I talk about in marketing is booed by CMOs. They like canned lions. They like MMMs. They like ad age saying it's good. I like business. The people that like my model are CFOs because when I break down this 20% what you will see is if you only use working media dollars to amplify creative that organically got viewed. And I need to take a step back three years ago social changed forever. We do not live in social media anymore. We live in interest media. All of you when you opened up your Instagram or TikTok this morning or Facebook did not get posts from your cousin or your eighth grade classmates. You got content around things you've recently been interested in. The Olympics, politics, maybe your skiing now I don't know, but I know how they work. These platforms AI algorithms before we worry about any AI. The AI this company needs to understand is the AI that powers the seven news feeds of social networks. They are written stick with me here. Who's a marketer in here? Raise your hands. Stick with me here. These algorithms are written for one core thing relevance. They want to keep you on the platform. When I open up my phone I see New York Jets content. I see wine content. I see business content. I see comic books and trading cards. They want to keep me on. They keep me on. They make money. For the first time ever the marketing media platform that we're marketing on has the same interest we have. Aligned interests. We are looking for relevance to lead to consideration to lead to purchase. These algorithms are written in four relevance. When every brand here do you know ask me how many individual organic social media posts I think hero should post today. Ask me. This is a quote. Yes so to break it down to take a step back I believe every brand here should be on seven platforms. Seven every day. Facebook, Instagram, threads, TikTok, YouTube shorts. I'll get into that because shorts is feeding the LLM's on Gemini. The content you make today on YouTube shorts will protect you in 24 months to show up on a gentick AI results. I could argue, this is radical, but I could argue that 20% of your overall marketing budget on all these brands literally should only be for YouTube shorts. That's how important showing up on Gemini when people say what should I use for XYZ is going to be for this business in 24 months. 20% - 7 platforms, including multiple handles. So not just that, what the official thing here, but by creating more handles because you do not need followers anymore to get views. Creating more handles allows you to stop debating the bull crap you're debating in your room about, is this on brand or is the color right or is this what water pick stands for. It gives creativity the ability to breathe to try to win on relevance with more different consumer segmentations to get consideration. And more importantly, the reason the CFO will like it, when you put working media dollars against creative that's been validated, it works harder for you. We must stop talking about efficiencies with our media agencies of record that becomes profit centers for them and not effective marketing for us. We don't like when people buy private labels of the products you make, you claim that's worth stuff, but that's how you buy your media. You buy the lowest cost stuff, which is the worst stuff. So back to your question. I'll answer your question by telling you how many pieces of content my personal brand posted on Friday. >> Can you also write it down? >> I will. >> First, first. >> Mm-hm. >> I sure will. Question on Mighty Patch. I posted for Gary V. My personal brand, 430 pieces of creative on Friday. There are brands in this room that will not post 430 pieces of creative organically this year, because you treat them like a super bowl ad or like a print ad. You literally have four hour meetings debating an Instagram post that's going to get 90 views. And I mean 90 views. You're going to boost it and spend media on it to say it got 150,000 views, but it's going to sell you no product. Because you're treating social like television. Working media can only be introduced once creative showed you that consumers found it relevant. And then when it is brought, this is called the middle funnel. Organic social is the middle funnel. The middle funnel has become the most important funnel in marketing, while the marketing world only talks upper and lower. Let's do some TV or a campaign or some bull crap like it's 1957 and Don Draper still around. And then let's go down here and pay tax to Google and Walmart and Amazon and Metta for conversion. You were saying break down? >> Oh yes, social. Let's take you more for more media over static. They just hear what is being used. Maybe. >> As far as creative, written word, sub-stack. Picture. >> Yes. >> Video. Seven second video, two minute video. Completely agnostic. Fidelity. Agnostic. Production value. Agnostic. For the first time in marketing history, we can measure creative for relevance. So to me, for example, at Vayner, we do something called premium SMS, social media ads that are premium. $150,000 productions to post something organically and if it does not get views, we do not put media behind it. That's insane for our world. You know what's more insane? Sitting in a boardroom and guessing on a 30 second video that is pure vanilla because you're trying to reach everyone with it, which means you're reaching no one with it and then spending $234 million amplifying it and betting your home marketing campaign on a subjective call of four people. That's insane. And that's what every Fortune 500 company still does and that is the biggest opportunity to outflank the competitive set. But that's a very different model than we all grew up with. But when we always say this internally, once they see it, they can't unsee it. So it's what, which one of these nice little signs has the ability to go there to teach the rest of the company? Well, companies want to do as a pilot and they do it half pregnant. And then when you do that, that doesn't end up with the result. And so a brand has to make a commitment. I think the biggest mistakes big companies are making is the death of the creative AORs here to pay a company to think of ideas and make decks to then only have another company actually make the video is insanity. You cannot pay someone to come up with ideas. In positioning, I can do that in chat, GPT for every brand here and give you basically what you probably got. You need to be in production mindset. How do you make 430 pieces of content a day? You have 30, 40 people making content all day. Perfection's out the window. You're just trying to be relevant to as many different consumer segmentations. Look at this audience right now. This diversity of gender, race, income levels, interests. How the hell are we going to sell a lot of this product unless we're relevant to as many of you as possible that can only be done in the model I'm telling you. When you mitigate the risk of creative by guessing and doing it classic and becoming a social creative production firm that actually makes a lot of different content to be relevant and only give the media to the things that worked, you will fundamentally see your company change. And that 80% that's left the whole by the way. The way that is effective compared to the 100 you're spending now isn't even close. It's marketing. And I think you all know it if you know it. And now the question becomes how do we get such a big organization to move fast in changing? >> I think something that matters. >> Real quick. >> Yeah. >> I hope we never leave the vibe we just were in. >> Okay. >> That last five minutes. >> I hope you all rewatch that seven minutes one more thousand times. But go ahead. >> How do strong organizations lead through turnover, pressure and significant change while still delivering results? How do leaders drive success under pressure and business demands? They maintain their integrity and humility and invest in people and career building. >> God, you really, there's only one reason I have a meaningful company. It's everything you just said. And this is where I'm deeply empathetic. When you are held accountable every 90 days. When you are not fully in control. There is going to be pressures that come in that are harder than what I had to deal with because I was in an insular bubble and so are most entrepreneurs until they sell or go public. My point of view if I had the luxury of operating this is as much a elimination of fear as humanly possible. I will tell you in my company where we went awry was all of our coddling and warm feelings created entitlement. So we stood up a term. Please use it if it works for you. Whoever is in HR or leadership. I'm very passionate about this. We stood up a term five years ago that changed the course of our company. It was called kind candor. So we had an issue too far left. My mom's my hero. This is all cuddle. Even though I might be very passionate about my points of view. Something for me is warmth and love and kind and empathy and sympathy. I believe in emotional intelligence especially in the AI era even more than ever. I think kind candor ironically was what we needed. So that really allowed people to nicely communicate their subjective opinion to their partners if they were off or not. I think every leader in here is number one. Number one requirement is to eliminate fear. Fear is the problem. Now eliminating fear that creates entitlement and passiveness around hitting the business goals can become a very substantial problem. I lived it. So I think it's finding purple in a world of red and blue that I think every organization needs to find. But I do think the way you eliminate fear is by creating the kind of conversation I'm trying to create right now. Which is like can we talk about real life for a minute? And within talking about real life you might start to create a very different culture. And by the way I might strategically see marketing and the business world right now different than leadership or leaders in here. But the biggest job is to create a common sense lack of fear of communication portal. And then to answer your question it has to come up with action. And my company, the big watershed moment was when somebody we were working on Mondalees we still do. And somebody was signed in to the Oreo account. But they thought they were on their account. And this 25 year old kid who got out of a meeting where in the IAT the other agency was being very rude to them literally tweeted out from their account. Fuck 360 eye. The problem was it wasn't her account it was Oreos. Oreos called me to Midtown Manhattan that night to have a meeting. We sat down and she told me that I needed to fire that person. And I told her politely, truly politely that I respect that I understand. But that she's not going to be able to tell me who I fire and hire. That's my company. She can decide to not work. with our company, but that's on me and her. They decided to continue with us, which is really good, 'cause now they're one of our biggest clients, nine years later. But when I addressed the whole company of what happened, that was a moment where I had to decide, and by the way, for context, we were doing $8 million in revenue, we were a very small company. They were 29% of our annual revenue. I made that decision. That became communicated internally, people knew, and that became a watershed moment where I got to stand on my business in a way that mattered to the organization. Again, I had the luxury of doing that. I can't ask everyone here to be able to do that. But these are the things I think about, 'cause what you're asking me is real life. You either are or you aren't. Either you're eliminating fear and motivating through offense, or you're doing what most of the world is doing right now, which is weaponizing fear to get people to do things. And that is happening on a parenting level, and unfortunately, it's happening on a corporate level a lot as well. - All right, and then the-- - If a legacy CBG brand had a cut digital budget tomorrow, what would you protect, and what would you let go? - If I worked at a legacy company like this that was cutting digital out of reallocating it to traditional, or just our business sucks, and we needed to drop to the bottom line. - Yeah, so typically-- (laughing) I think there's a lot of variables that go into this, but because we have so many brands we manage, the reality is not all brands get to have maximum budgets. - Of course. - Curious how it's not specifically on a CBG lens. - Yeah, let me give you some real life. I'm probably sharing something I'm not supposed to, but they've put it out enough. Mug root beer, brand of Pepsi. I'm really into root beer. Fought like hell for it. It was an orphan brand didn't get budget. I got $1 million from them. All of it went into organic social. Creative creates the reach now. I'm gonna say that one more time. You're literally spending, I know, 'cause I'm paying attention. You, this is not there anymore. You are spending working media dollars against potential reach, not actual reach. And there are brands that can outflank you by doing just creative and no working because the creative creates the reach. To answer your question, the last thing I would protect at all costs. Number one, over any other tactic in the world is organic social creative production to put out for free on social networks. You're all paying attention. You guys know that Walgreens has a private label gummy called Nice that one video on TikTok sold out the product nationally, and bags were selling for twice the price on eBay. That was a single organic TikTok with no working media that sold out a candy in every Walgreens in the country. And there was so much demand that it was sold as a secondary item on eBay. You also know that Chili's 60% of their Q3 revenue last year came from an organic social media post of a woman doing a triple cheese quesadilla or something. I have hundreds of examples of an organic piece of social media content massively driving sales on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and off-steel shelves. You have none with television commercials. Do you know the difference of cost of a $9 TikTok post versus a full-pledge campaign, television, matching the luggage on digital and POS strategy? This is the punchline. I'm comfortable converting 100% of your marketing budget into organic social production, and I believe your business would be up. That's a raw mat. And that's not because I want it to be that. That's because something changed four years ago of my beloved social media. It still has the attention. It has actually more than it did four years ago. We went to interest media where creative can now get unlimited reach if it's actually relevant. Whether it's relevant in the way that you wanted it to be relevant for Arm and Hammer or Oxy in the board room is a different story. You will lose if you uphold a brand positioning that was made up by three humans to stop you from making content that's relevant to consumers. That is your vulnerability. And by the way, on the record, so there's no confusion, I believe in brand over everything. I just believe in the way that we try to measure brand in corporate America is incredibly flawed. So what would I say? Protect the organic social creative budget at all costs. And I'm an e-commerce kid. I'm talking about sales. Obviously I want you to have working media to amplify the winners because then you really cook with gas. But that's what I would protect. And I would tell you the biggest thing is you do not have anywhere close to enough money allocated for that. We will literally pay a PR company, a retainer, to put out press releases faster than we'll fund organic social production properly in 2026. - All right, we got 10 minutes left. - Yeah. - Change is something a little bit different. You've talked quite a bit lately about physical collectibles. - Yes. - I think that's something that our brands have not considered across a lot of them. So curious your thoughts on how a brand should think about a physical collectible strategy in 2026. - Man, I'm really excited you asked this. So this is probably, might have probably been the answer I should have made for 24 months from now. Here's a good one. I believe in five years, most companies that look like this will have a collectible marketing division, the way they have a sports marketing division, if they have one. I know the brands here may not be as conducive for that than other portfolios. Collectibles drive incredible amount of trial and sampling. It is stunning what's going on between Pokemon, LeBoubou, vintage clothing in the female space, handbags, shoes, watches, sneakers, comic books, trading cards. I mean, it is very clear to me what's happening. As the world goes more digital, there's the emergence of what's needed in the analog. Collectible creates communities. People are lonely. Go to Comic Con, go to a trade show, go to a vintage clothing pop up right now. People are swarming because it creates a sense of community. I believe that if you added collectible stickers, coins, little things, you look at what's going on. It's all about execution, right? There's a ton going on right now, where people are renting IP from Marvel or other places. They slap it on the box and they think that's it. It's not it. You have real thoughtfulness of like, you know, the golden ticket of it all, the rarity scales of it. There's a lot of collectible strategy that needs to put in. But when I look at these incredible brands around me, I know that this room doesn't naturally feel conducive that it's a perfect match the way maybe an Oreo cookie or something like that is. But to me, if you told me which consumer was buying it, if you had clean enough data, standing up what collectible to put on the packaging inside the packaging, co-packaging would be very easy to understand. And I will tell you, because you're right, I have been talking about it publicly. It's shocking to me how much of the imbound I'm getting is from Betenville and Minnesota from Sam's Club in Costco. They already see it. And you know, your retailers have the advantage over you because they're closer to the consumer. So yeah, it's something definitely worth debating Trojan. You put a collectible in with a condom, those dudes will fucking buy. [LAUGHTER] For sure. They're the demo. That's exactly right, actually. Now I'm like, I'm applying to Toronto now for I'm on the board of Spinmaster toy company, public toy company. And like, literally, I can already-- I just knew. And I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to think about the Trojan collectible, the whole flight. Let the ELT submit questions before. So-- ELT, you want any of this? Anybody have-- You have a sense of what the company is. We fight against giants every day. And you're right. We're not fast. Relatives of the giants were faster than they are. Right? It's everything in life's relative. I would love you to go a little bit deeper on some practical next steps for the group on going from idea to implementation on, hey, guys, on Thursday, go move 20% of your marketing into social creative content. And here are the two or three brands I'd start with. By show of hands, and please do not appease me, because I do not think ever, actually, that I'm right. I'm just trying to react to what I'm seeing. How many people here are buyers of the social creative production being 20% of your marketing budget? Raise your hands. Raise them high. Raise them. Stand up, actually. Please. No, I mean it. Stand up. Please. If you really believe it, don't if you don't, or you may not know, it's awful. OK. Sir, the entire company believes it. You can all sit. So here's where I'm passionate. I actually don't think it's on them. It's either on you, the CFO, the CMO. Like I don't know who-- I don't know. Every company's got a little bit of a different triangle of who controls the reporting. But this is all about bonuses. This is all about scoring. This is all about promotions. If this whole company believes it, well, then it should be done tomorrow. I'm empathetic to y'all. And to them, somebody has to make a decision that we no longer grade success. [BLANK_AUDIO] based on some bullshit brand health study, some antiquated MMMA, some media efficiency KPI. Somebody's gonna have to make that call. My intuition is it's more likely gonna happen here than them. So the practical step is, and I'm gonna break it down. And by the way, I said yes to this for a reason, and thank you so much for the invite, my dear. (audience laughing) (laughing) You working makes me happy by the way. (audience laughing) We don't do RFPs or RFIs, but we do something called capes as consulting, and we do it purely out of karma while recognizing it leads to opportunity. Kaelin, my chief business officer in the corner, reflined a Toronto to work a little bit. Like happy to do a follow up with anybody that wants to sit through one or a bunch of people to save us some efficiency, no expectations of business on the other side. We wanna keep showing the details to your point. There's a three hour meeting underneath here that shows the details. But if there's this much intuition that this is the right way, I think it creates a leadership offsite, a mix of leaders and people in the trenches of like, okay, if Gary's talk was right, if we actually believe in this, if we're not just pandering to him or ourselves, what needs to become true? Here are the things that I know, 'cause we've gone through a lot of digital and marketing and operational transformation. One, you have to make a commitment to stop paying creative AORs to come up with ideas and decks. That has to happen right away. Two, you have to measure marketing. This is very radical on business results. (audience laughs) The reason you'll be able to do that is when you do back to more like black and white, if you actually spend the kind of money I'm talking about in creative social, when something gets a lot of great views, when you bring it to the lower funnel and put working media against it, against performance, everybody in the performance and commerce team is gonna tell you it's working. The thing that has been stunning to fanatics, Chase, some of our most quant customers, is they have MIT kids and AB testing frameworks that they think they're ironclad. And then we have one piece of organic social, get three million views. We refurbish it a little bit for performance and send it down and it outcacks and row as is their best practices and they're baffled. See the art marketing kids in this room, OGs, they kind of know that coming up with a campaign is flawed. It's obvious. The math kids in here are the ones that are baffled by this model because what they haven't realized is the AI algorithms will never be beaten by your best AB testing protocol that you've created. That protocol you created from Facebook seven years ago is no longer real. Plus for all of us as marketers and business people, we're building much more brand when we're doing it this way than just performance. So I think there's a couple things here. I don't know who the media agency of record is. That's a big conversation as a principle because they now have to supply media in real time hands-on keyboards every day at scale that they're not accustomed to. They like with all due respect, a good upfront or I mean, more. Just a very archaic system to what's going on. All media should be post-game hands-on keyboards at scale, very different model and empathetics. So that structure needs to be attacked being empathetic to the media agency, what they're being rewarded on and their variable comp can no longer be efficiency and needs to be effectiveness. There's some things. But there are things that I think people understand here. And definitely because you've made some really smart M&A moves and because you are a little bit deeper in e-com. You've got the elements to get there. I think it takes courage to pick one to three of the brands and just do it. But in a world, if it's true that 80% of the people actually believe in it, well, we're clearly aligned religiously because I promise you when I did this seven years ago, I got three people that stood up and they were texts they me after saying, am I looking for any new employees? So if we're really here, now it's corporate inertia. And I think you can at least from watching this incredible company from afar, especially with the new energy, I feel like it's something that's winnable. It just has the combo has to be had. Yes. - For a person like you who's been so in on the early trends, right from Tumblr to even, you know, I am surprised you speaking to threads, right? And that can be a different conversation. What has been your hypothesis in the last two to four years that you believed passionately and then you disproved it? Because one learning we know as destructors is, we want to be radically convinced about something at the same time, new data that tells us something different, we should be able to pivot. - 12 months ago if I was here, I would have told you when something does incredibly well organically in as a three million views, right, for hero on something, that you would then take that video as a brand team and a digital team and you would analyze the quantum and you would use that as the brief to the campaign that you should make. We call that sick, socially informed campaigns. It was what our company was built on last year's growth. I completely disagree with it now. When a piece of content gets three million views on Arm and Hammer or WaterPig, that video becomes the commercial you run on connected TV. With black lines on the left and right and everything in between, because what we were doing was we were winning in social and creating the, and we had a better brief, our brief was better. It was better than a strategist coming up with something randomly that they read on Reddit. But once you looked at the creative, you still were getting strategists and creatives and brand people to make a subjective call on something that was similar-ish. But I kind of just had this aha analyzing the data 'cause I get to sit on top of $3 billion in media spent. Like all we measure is results. Oh, I didn't say this for the ALT and everybody else. The reason I started the marketing firm was to build a private equity firm, to buy orphan brands from Fortune 500 companies. So the whole machine was reverse engineered for the business results, not for the agency Ibadah. Continues to be that way. So I kept analyzing the results and I was like, and I would see things like Gillette, which we work on. Like the creative from social as TBC was outperforming, even their best performing TBC that we created after Gray did it for 12 years. It just became obvious to me. Like, oh wow, our own philosophy that we just created that's so contemporary is wrong. So now when we make social media organic posts, we may make a minute 30, we may make 29 second 15 second, we make all sorts of numbers. But we're always thinking about making a 15 and 30 version of it just in case it organically crushes to make it more feasible to go up the funnel. Let me say something else about media spend, this company should be spending an ungodly amount of money on working media, on Amazon Prime, against first party data of people buying on Amazon competitive products to you. That's a high cost CPM that normally doesn't get spent because it's not the framework. But think about that, you were buying on Amazon Prime, where a lot of TV is now being consumed, especially with all the sports they have, with basketball and football, and you were only targeting people that are buying things that you're competing with. If you then put creative, that actually got a million or 500,000 or 300,000 views, and you know it's relevant, and you put it in there, you will be flabbergasted by your growth. We know this 'cause I've unlimited examples of it. So that's the scoop, that was the biggest, that's the most recent change. I know I didn't get to touch on it, but please have an offsite or create a little crew to really investigate live social shopping. I cannot tell you how much I believe you can double waterpicks business on TikTok shop, through affiliate and QBC like content, and then you clip the live shopping show for pieces of content for social, and then when it does well organically, you spend media against it. It will blow your mind. You're basically turning a live shopping day that creates sales into the production day for more effective creative, and if you build this mid funnel framework, you will crush that product, especially. Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention, and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.