The speaker argues that most companies fail at social media because they hire unskilled people and lack judgment, then wrongly conclude it doesn't work. He emphasizes that perspective shapes outcomes: optimism can drive success, but it must be paired with practical, hard work. Marketing, he asserts, is the single most powerful lever for doubling a business without changing the product or service, yet it's often undervalued compared to sales. Digital marketing, while volatile, offers immense opportunity if executed with the right tactics. For B2B firms, he recommends running three to four original LinkedIn ads daily, targeted and created by leadership, not delegated to novices. The core principle is to identify where customers spend their attention and penetrate it with valuable, selfless content—giving before asking. Businesses must become media companies, producing content in the formats their audience prefers (written, audio, video). Finally, he stresses that soft skills—kindness, empathy, accountability—are essential for building resilient teams and long-term success, not mere niceties. The talk concludes that marketing is fundamentally about ambition and attention, and those who embrace it fully will outpace competitors who remain in a sales-only mindset.
The biggest reason most companies don't continue to do social media is 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. This is the GaryVee audio experience. It's unbelievable that life is as basic as how do you see it. For me, I've been saying a lot lately and have always been to a lot of people close to me, a statement that says you find what you're looking for. If you're looking for negativity, it's very easy to find. If you're looking for positivity, it's very easy to find. If you think it's going to be successful, you start to see signals that lead to that and if you think it's going to fail, you'll see that. If you're cynical and a pessimist, that's what you see. If you're optimistic and positive, that's what you're going to see. And really, the vulnerability to the way I roll, which is optimistic and positivity, is you could become delusional. It's not practical. You think you can just dream it into success. You don't understand the requirements and the costs and the sacrifices that are needed to actually get somewhere. There's two core things that I'm spending a ton of time on right now and they're pretty opposite. 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 TikTok or things of that nature, they fascinate me mainly because I'm a businessman. I was 14 years old. I've been involved in a family business, business my whole life. So everything comes from the standpoint of oxygen to pay the bills. I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in a very immigrant family. My dad had a liquor store. And from May 18th, 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 great 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 the 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. There's only one thing and that is marketing. 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 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 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 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 can spend a stunning low amount of dollars and get very high upside. It just comes down to the tactics and just understanding it. I want to spend some time on that. The other thing that I want to spend time on is my navigating, not only my own career, but I was an early investor in Facebook and Twitter, in Uber, in Coinbase. I run an agency that's a 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. We don't talk about soft skills as a core. We talk about it as a side dish, as a nice to have. I think if you're very thoughtful about what's going on in the world right now, and I don't mean the over-cottling and entitlement and that stuff, I mean people having options as employees, 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 this book was built was how I've 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. 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 by show of hands, because I'm going to navigate, because I have a field in the mix, how many people by show of hands please raise them are in the B2B business. Raise your hands, please. Hi, please. Thank you. And B2C. Great. So predominantly B2B, I'll jump on both. So B2B. 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. So let's talk about LinkedIn ads. This room is majority B2B. I couldn't implo- 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 are 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. This proportionately, 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 gain changer for B2B companies. Couple things that are important about this. Number one, as we go through this conversation, if we get into Q&A and go deeper and you sit and say, you know what? Screw it. I'm going to do it. Actually, first and foremost, you cannot hire your 23 year old niece to do. 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. 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. There's 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, TikTok, LinkedIn. 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, may content. They extract the biggest audiences. The big companies that I work with, the Pepsi's, the Budweiser's, the Ford's. 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. And I want to remind everybody here. We have lived through a decade now of economic growth and prosperity across the world. We are in a bubble. There's so much money and opportunity in the system that this is not sustainable. There will be a day of reckoning, just like there was in 2007-08, just like there was in 2001 and '95. And for people that have lived through some down cycles, you think it's hard now when all the money dries up. It gets real hard. Let me say it very basically. If you don't have a successful company.
right now and you've been operating for the last two years, you suck. And I mean that. And I'm not saying that I'm not trying to raz. I'm not trying to come hard. I need you to understand how many people here run a company or an entrepreneur start up? Just raise your hands. Raise it high. I need you to understand if you're running a company right now in the globe. This is the easiest time in the history of humans to run a company. So if you're not doing well, you need to really recognize that. You do. And so I'm unbelievably optimistic because this thing is that special. I'm this optimistic because the little piece of business advice in practical terms that I slipped in five minutes ago. I'm going to say one more time nice and slow. It will legitimately work for 80% of this audience. The biggest reason people don't succeed in running ads on social networks and platforms is because they don't make enough content. And they don't make the content for the audience they're trying to reach. They make one piece of content and try to reach everybody. Contextual creative at scale is the game. It's really interesting. I've been really watching a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs navigate the last year or so. And what's really become interesting to me is the themes that play over and over and over again. In its most basic, the biggest thing that everybody has to leave here with is the following thing. The only thing that you should spend all your time on to really disproportionately grow your business is to figure out where the customer that you're trying to reach spends all of their time. Once you understand where they spend all of their time, all you should ever do is try to figure out how your brand, your personal brand, your business can penetrate that attention in the form of organic content or in the form of ads. It's that basic. When I look at the data in Singapore and I don't know if some of you heard but VaynerMedia's opening an office here in a couple of months, the reason we're coming to the entire region is that everything that I've used to build up my personal brand to build business results, all of that works better in this market than it even does in Europe and in the US where we've been doing that marketing. For me, the quicker everybody here can become a media company, the quicker they can become successful. The quicker you think of yourself, not as a salesperson, but as somebody who produces content that provides value to the end user, the quicker you will get results. The reason most people struggle with social media marketing or digital marketing or marketing or communications is because they're salespeople, they're not marketers. The difference is very simple. When you look and I did, a lot of people tagged this event, tweeted at me, so I looked at 20 or 30 of the accounts here over the last 12 hours. When I look at your accounts, everything is selfish. Everything is about what you're selling, what you want them to do for you. All the content is there to get more likes, to get more followers for somebody to buy your product, go into your funnel, create a capture of data at the top so you can remark it to it. It's 100% selfish. That is exactly what all of you don't want in your normal life from the other people you consume. But it's exactly what the farm majority of people are doing with their own content for their own business. This is one big game of being over selfish instead of being selfless. One of the reasons the biggest book I ever wrote was called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook was it helped so many people understand a different framework which is you have to give, you have to give, you have to give, and then you can ask for something. The problem is when people ask they expect. The disproportionate reason that I see businesses be successful and definitely personalities be successful are the ones that give without expectation because the content when they give is not loaded with intent to be selfish. There's a lot of people that give, but it's a half-give, it's actually an ask disguised as a give. What's happened is there's so much content now on the internet. There's so much supply of information as remarkable as these channels are. What's amazing is that every one of you can be in it. The problem is every one of you can be in it. So what happens is the cream rises to the top. So what's happening is it's very hard to break through if you're being selfish because somebody else is being selfless. This is how life has always been. The maturity has now hit this device. A couple of things. I want to talk about before I go into Q&A. Number one, you have to figure out as a person, as a business, how you communicate to the world. There are three ways. Written word, audio, and video. Too many people are trying to do video when they're not capable of it. Too many people are not realizing written word is remarkable and they're getting caught up in pictures because Instagram's popping. So the number one thing that would really matter to me as a data point is the following. I believe the more content that you put out, the more likely you'll be successful. I believe that you have to reverse engineer the end consumer. That you have to bring as much valuable content to them as possible. I think that you also need to eliminate friction between your message and the customer. What that means is you have to show up everywhere to the best of your ability in the way they want to consume it. The number one advertiser on television in the first 10 years of television was proctor and gamble. 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. It'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. 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 the 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 going to speed up the world knowing that your products are piece of crap. So I'm like, I think we should fix it first and then we'll market. 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 B&B 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 101 or in stage or you know, they're like, "Gary, I'm good. I don't need LinkedIn. I'm like the king of state in Ohio. I'm like, that's a nice carl. I'm like, how much do you do? Seven million. I'm like, what's wrong with sixteen? 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. 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 $10,000 because I've torn both my meniscuses. The ROI of a basketball for LeBron James is $1 billion. Social marketing works at scale to trillions of dollars. We just might have not figured out how to make it work for ourselves. Hey everybody, 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. So for me, for this room, there are two four 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 and 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 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 8 billion people on earth and whatever percentage of those people are in business, most people are in sales. They're sales. They're sales organizations. I'm sure if we're being honest, I can just see, really, see by some of the lay 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 at a sin in 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. I 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 and LinkedIn. It will completely change your business. For real. 20, 40, 80% growth, they 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 a lot of hands went up just because I know 90% of what I say on LinkedIn is this. 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 and we're really just doing sales. None of you want to see that. Nobody wants an infomercial in their new speed. 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 of companies that are in this room for real. I love LinkedIn so much. When I forced my dad to do it and buy newspaper ads or radio or direct mail is expensive. You can do LinkedIn for $6,000 and get a real taste. Not make a $30,000 commitment to a full-page ad and newspaper. 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 blogs. I don't make content. I just live my life. We film it and then we produce marketing for it. The concept of you actually, I'll give you a great example. One more time, please, please, please be the company. Raise your hand. This is my life number one. Starting a podcast in your very narrow niche, even maybe your town. Like you can talk about concrete in a state or a town. Narrow. We're not trying to be the letterman's 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. 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 a Barry, Barry. Wanna go golfing? Barry. Let me introduce you to my guy. Barry. 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 moon walking 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. I have very introverted dad, you know, like, well, actually he's not. He's come out of a shell, but my mom's introverted 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. It 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 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 in 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 TikTok 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. 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 everywhere I'm going or anything you know about me that you want to ask question, please line up now because I want to get into the Q&A. Please do that while I'm wrapping up here. My friends, I'm trying to prepare you for what's coming. 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 I was very empathetic in 96, 97, 98, 99. Do you understand in 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 fat. 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 fat? 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 are 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 5 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 TikTok, 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 Limbo 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, "But friends, I don't know if you know about this." And it started. It was happening in San Francisco, 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. I really think you might want to. I think it's going to be pretty disruptive. I compared it to Amazon and bookstores. This wound laughed me off the stage. First guy on the mic goes, "Gary, do you know what politics is?" I'm like a sure-do. He goes, "We've got the. dacious. 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 going to raise a billion dollars in cash. And I have a funny feeling that's more than you have, John." [LAUGHTER] 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 line up because I want questions. Otherwise, I'm going to have D-Rock 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 Rezzi, 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 a commeter, versus a 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'd like it or not, you've decided to be an entrepreneur and a business owner or a senior executive. You've decided. So that means you have to play on the field. In sports, it's obvious. When the greats-- I will never forget-- even I hated them because I'm a nixpan-- the Paul Pierce said something in some interview. And I loved it. He said something like, they asked him when he knew it was over, when he had a retire. And he said something like, it was interesting. It was just one random game in 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 business, it's not. It's like whatever that gas 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, 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 going to 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 TikTok. Every one of them have no interest in going to college or working for anyone because they can make $100,000 a year on TikTok. This isn't about these gen zeros 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. This is probably more important than what I've 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 going to 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. If you pay people, stay home. They're going to 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 going to 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 TikTok 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. I'm very empathetic to somebody sitting listening to me right now and saying, you know what? I'm retarded. I get it. Because it's changing so fast and hard. It's like, ugh. 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 and A. But thank you for having me. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So I think a lot of people are very, very motivated to start their own on the past. It's probably the handful of people that try it. And the handful of people that are really, really good at it. And then there's going to be a bunch of people that probably struggle thinking they're going to have a content-- That's right. --back to you with that. That's right. At what point do you have to realize that you're approaching a wrong path? Have you have that little bit spider sense to figure out? I can change my message. And like, because you don't even keep doing it. It's just bad. It's a really tough-- stick here. We'll go back to fourth. It's a really tough question for me. People always ask, because I'm so infatuated with tenacity and patience. Infatuated. For all my high energy, patience has been the foundation of my career. So I'm always scared to give a general answer to this question, 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 think the question is results and time allocation. There's going to be people here. If I'm looking at this crowd, I think I'm going to get four people to give it a net bet. One of those four people is just going to 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 and golf, golf, business. So we're going to play here a little bit and go a little more detailed. But if somebody heard that and go, I love that's actually perfect for me. And they do golf and business with Sally Thompson. She might just like it so much that it almost doesn't matter. It's my entrepreneurial career. When I was making $48,000 a year at $29, 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 going to be an enjoyable hour of their week. And they wouldn't even care if it's business development. For other people of those four, they're going to do two episodes. They're not going to get a lead. And they're going to 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 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, 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. I don't put out any of my personal life. No, if I have 12 and 9, you're all 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 what the idea I had, and again, some of you care about sailing, some of you care about wine, some of you-- you can really interject some of that by just word-- literally, tennis and business sailing. And it's very strategical. But traction, momentum always matters. So 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 going to get a beer afterwards. And on the way out, that person looks at them from the barn and says, you know what? Let's talk week about the actual business. Then they're going to go in a car and say, god damn it, 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 just so you know what the way my career works from investing and operating in marketing company, I'm talking about hundreds and 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. 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.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Success in social media depends on perspective
Marketing is the single most effective way to double a business without changing product or service; it should be seen as essential "oxygen," not an afterthought.
Digital marketing offers high variance
For B2B companies, running 3-4 original LinkedIn ads daily, with targeted creative, is a proven high-ROI strategy that requires direct involvement from leadership.
The key to marketing success is creating abundant, selfless content that provides value to the target audience, rather than selfish sales pitches.
Businesses should become media companies, producing content (written, audio, video) tailored to where customers spend their time, and eliminate friction between message and consumer.
Soft skills like kindness, empathy, and accountability are critical for building strong teams and long-term business continuity, not just optional extras.
Summary:
The speaker argues that most companies fail at social media because they hire unskilled people and lack judgment, then wrongly conclude it doesn't work. He emphasizes that perspective shapes outcomes: optimism can drive success, but it must be paired with practical, hard work. Marketing, he asserts, is the single most powerful lever for doubling a business without changing the product or service, yet it's often undervalued compared to sales.
Digital marketing, while volatile, offers immense opportunity if executed with the right tactics. For B2B firms, he recommends running three to four original LinkedIn ads daily, targeted and created by leadership, not delegated to novices. The core principle is to identify where customers spend their attention and penetrate it with valuable, selfless content—giving before asking.
Businesses must become media companies, producing content in the formats their audience prefers (written, audio, video). Finally, he stresses that soft skills—kindness, empathy, accountability—are essential for building resilient teams and long-term success, not mere niceties. The talk concludes that marketing is fundamentally about ambition and attention, and those who embrace it fully will outpace competitors who remain in a sales-only mindset.
FAQs
They hire someone who is not skilled at it and lack the ability to judge performance, leading them to conclude it doesn't work.
Run three to four original pieces of creative as ads on LinkedIn daily, targeting specific companies or titles, and pay LinkedIn to convert business goals.
Make a high volume of content tailored to the specific audience you want to reach, rather than one piece for everyone.
Salespeople produce selfish content focused on selling, while marketers provide valuable, selfless content that gives before asking for anything.
Thinking of yourself as a content producer who provides value to the end user leads to better results than focusing solely on sales.
Creating many pieces of content that are specifically designed for the audience you're targeting, rather than generic content for everyone.
Chat with AI
Loading...
Pro features
Go deeper with this episode
Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.