Top Marketing Strategies That Will Help Your Business Get Attention | RD Summit 2019

Introduction and Background

This is funny, I didn’t do it on this trip, but sometimes when I fly and I have to fill out custom forms, when it says occupation, I write fire fighter. That’s how I feel an entrepreneur is, you’re always ready for another fire. Whether it’s two o’clock in the morning or nine 30, you have to be ready. And I don’t struggle with that because I’ve been practicing it my whole life, which is why I fear when people try to become entrepreneurs because it’s cool. Now I worried about that because it’s very hard every single day I lose. And unless you’re good at that, you will not like entrepreneurship.

Event Introduction

[Upbeat Music] – [A Man] You got your perspective. [Upbeat music] – [A Man] Happy. Don’t you want to be happy? [Upbeat Music]

Addressing the Audience

• Brazil, how are you? – [Crowd] Good. So I’m gonna do about 40 minutes up here. Then I’m going to actually, I asked them if we could do some Q and a. So we’ll do some questions and then we’re going to do a fireside chat. So first of all, I’m just very flattered to be here. Thank you for having me. For the people in this room that don’t know who I am.

Background and Early Life

I was born in the Soviet union, came to America when I was a three-year-old child, a very tough upbringing. We were very poor when we first came to America. I lived in a one studio apartment with seven of my family members, my parents, my dad worked all the time and so it was a very rough upbringing, not a lot of entitlement, didn’t have a lot of stuff. My natural state was to be an entrepreneur. Even at six, seven years old, I was already shoveling snow, washing people’s cars, selling juice and lemonade and candy. It was always to do a hustle.

Early Ventures

Somewhere along that time in New Jersey, sports cards became a very big thing in America, baseball cards, American football cards, and I started collecting them and by the time I was 13, 14 years old, I was making one to $3,000 a weekend as a 13-year-old child, which you can imagine, feels like you’re a millionaire. Eventually my dad worked very hard and saved all his money and he bought a small liquor store in New Jersey. I was forced to work in that store. And that is really where I started my real career. I fell in love with the idea of knowing that a lot of people in America collected wine, and that was what kind of connected me to my family business.

Building with Limited Resources

The part of the story that gets interesting for this room is what happens next. Knowing that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs in here knowing there’s a lot of small businesses, a lot of small business agencies, what really enables me, the great flattering nature to be in this room is the fact that my entire career was based on how do I build something with not a lot of money. You know, we live in a world right now where a lot of people and how many by show of hands, how many people in this room are entrepreneurs and have their own business? Raise your hands, raise it high. Thank you.

The Importance of Patience

So if we can keep the lights on, that’d be amazing. I love that. So for me, what’s interesting about all those hands that are up is I’m older, I’m 43 about to be 44 next week and when I grew up, the idea of raising capital was extremely foreign. One of the most interesting things being an American businessman when I travel nationally, internationally and other places in the world is everybody is so caught up with raising money for their startup. This has become an entire generation of hands in the air that think about raising capital and appeasing venture capitalists and investors, not actually building a business and not having the focus there. And to me, this is very interesting because it’s led to a lot of very different behavior. For me, everything was always about how do you make money and that’s what you invest back into your business, not how do you raise capital.

Starting VaynerMedia

When I started my current company, Vayner Media, which is an advertising agency, I started it in the conference room of another company because I had no money and I wasn’t going to raise money for the business. I was just going to find my first client. Use those dollars and just keep reinvesting. It took longer but longer was it strength? I think one of the most important words for me to communicate in this talk today by far is patience. I promise you, no matter what you’re doing in this room, and especially as I look around this room, first of all, everyone’s uncomfortably attractive and number two, but more importantly, this is quite a young audience and I think the reality is the thing that I spend most of my time on is trying to get people to understand that patience is a very important variable of success and more importantly that I believe the far majority of people in this room do not have a great relationship with time.

The Misconception of Time

I am fascinated by people in this room who are stressed at the ages of 18 and 22 and 25 and 29 like they’re running out of time. How many people by show of hands are under 30 years old? So for me, as you can imagine, when I see all those hands go up, you can put your hand down. Yeah, you’re good. Okay, good. When I see all those hands go up and I know in my mind what the way that modern medicine and technology is going, that the farm majority of this room is going to live for another 80 years. It really gets me excited slash concerned when people want their business to be huge next year. The quicker you want it, the more vulnerable you are, the quicker you want it, the more vulnerable you are.

Business Actions and Organic Reach

And what has been very fascinating for me is even though on YouTube and Instagram and maybe some of the places you guys see me, maybe my energy is high, maybe my style of communication is fast, but my business actions are extremely slow and so what business actions that lead to slowness lead to is a couple things. One, the far majority of my career I had no money so I had to always look for places where you could get a lot more for less. What I look for in the digital world. This world is organic reach. When I think about organic reach and when I think about organic attention as my slide says up here, I day trade attention for me every day I look at the data both in the analytics and in the culture conversations to try to figure out where should I market.

The Importance of Attention

I promise you one thing, my friends, no matter what you do in this audience, no matter what your ambition is, the one thing that combines all of us, whether we’re starting tomorrow, whether we’re an employee, whether we have a huge company or haven’t even started and are starting next year, the one requirement for all of us is to have somebody’s attention. Before you can sell anything, you need somebody’s attention. Then what you say in the written word, in audio or in video becomes the variable if you are successful. The reason I follow attention is if there was nobody in here right now and I was giving this talk, I would have no potential to achieve what I want. At the same token with all of you in this room. What I talk about for the next hour and a half is the burial of my success. There are many of you here that don’t know who I am. You’ll leave with an opinion. There’s many people who do know who I am and you’re either going to like me more or like me, less completely predicated on the content that I put out. I spend my life in a very basic mind frame.

The Power of Mobile Devices

and if you look at the politics of your country, my country, if you look at the businesses, it’s all one very simple game. Do you understand where the people are and they’re consuming and do you understand how to do the written words, the audio or the video to put in those platforms? This is how it’s always been. Television, radio, print, outdoor billboards. It’s always been the same game. Where is the attention, the eyes and the ears and what is our capability to put content in it? Now here’s where it gets different. This thing is bleep crazy. This thing is unbelievably underestimated. We in this room, take this for granted. The power of a phone in today’s world is remarkable. The fact that every one of us are sitting here with the internet in our hands right now is actually remarkable. For somebody like me at 43 years old when I was 28 I could not leave the office or my home and have the internet in my hand when I was 30 you have to understand how big of a deal that is. You have to understand how quickly this is all happening, whether it’s WhatsApp or YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter. The fact that these platforms sit on top of this device and they’re accessible right now. The fact that there are tons of people right now with a phone recording this talk and then have the ability to post it. My friends from Brazil to New York to London to Shanghai, the human race has not quantified how substantial this shift of the internet has become. And I tell you this and I start my talk here today with this cause. Here’s the real honest truth about how the game of life and definitely business is played. The quickest way to be happy in life, let alone business, is to be 100% accountable. The quickest way to be unhappy is to blame. If you really understood the last five to seven minutes of what I just said, the fact that how many people here have a cell phone raise your hands. Good. Every single person here fundamentally is not allowed to have an excuse because the power of what’s in your hand. Of course there’s family dynamics. Of course there’s tragedies. Of course there’s government involvements. Of course there’s a million reasons, but the reality is we have never lived through a time where people at scale had so much opportunity.

The Untapped Potential of Online Platforms

When I do the homework on the Brazilian market and I see the cost for a YouTube ad or an Instagram ad and I see how low it is, when I see how much still unbelievable untapped potential on LinkedIn and TikTok and other platforms are for organic reach where you have to spend no money, none, and you can get awareness.

The fact that podcasting is exploding in this country and the cost to start a podcast is to just record it on your phone and upload it. The thing that I’ve become unbelievably fascinated by is I know in this room the single reason whatever is not happening for you is your ability to say no before you’ve tried. That to me is unbelievable. What’s unbelievable to me is it’s as simple as this. If you are capable of writing words, recording videos on your phone or recording your thoughts in audio on your phone, your business can grow. Your idea can be flourished. Your personal brand is an influencer, your advertising shop, trying to get more customers, whatever you want to be. The governor, you want to be a YouTube celebrity.

The reality is the cost is zero. The mindset is the tricky part. 90% of this audience does not post as often as they should on these platforms because they worry about the judgment of their family or strangers. This is a very, very, very fascinating dilemma in our society. There are people who are not posting. I mean, look how many people here follow my content. Give me a sense. Raise your hands. Thank you. So for the hands that went up, you know what you’re going to get from me today. I’m very consistent. You can, I’m sure you’re in your head knowing every word I’m about to say. As I start a sentence, I’m incapable of talking about something I don’t believe in. The nuances are different. Obviously Twitter doesn’t play in this country the same way it does in the U S right. TikTok’s moving quicker in Asia and the U S than it is in other places. LinkedIn’s acting a little bit different here. What’s up has higher growth here than it does in the U S there’s nuance differences, but my friends, this is not about America or Brazil.

This is about human beings. In America, in Brazil, in China, people worry about their parents’ opinion. In America, in Brazil, in China, people care about strangers making fun of them. In the comments in America, in Brazil, in China, the opportunity to build your business or your personal brand has never been easier.

Overcoming Impatience and Entitlement

Easier. People see more people doing it and they think they’re too late. The real answer is 99% of the people in here do not have the patience and stomach to actually achieve it. They want it so fast. My friends, I did wine library TV on YouTube in 2006, excuse me, 2007 to 2010 for 35 minutes a day, five days a week. I would stay up and work on Twitter for four or five hours looking for people who were talking about wine and for three years, every day, very little happened for me. Very little. People now start an Instagram account, post for six weeks and give up because they’re not getting enough followers. We’ve become remarkably impatient. We’ve become remarkably entitled. And so the reality is, is the following tactically, tactically, how many people here are B2B companies? They have an agency servicing clients or some of them major. You’re in a B2B business. Raise your hands for everybody that raised your hand.

You must. You must do one of two things consistently, starting tomorrow. Number one, start a podcast in your industry. You must start a podcast, go on LinkedIn, go into your inbox and email 25-50 people and ask them to be guests on your show. And number two, you must attack LinkedIn more. I think people very much underestimate how much is happening there in this market. I did the homework, it’s there. It, people don’t see it because not that many people are doing it, which is the reason it’s most interesting. It’s, so funny when I speak at these events, people always fall into two groups. Number one, they don’t want to do it cause it’s new and they want to see other people do it before they do it. Or number two, other people are doing it so they think they’re too late so they didn’t want to do it.

People are split up in two places of not doing. We live in a world, a world where everybody has a reason for, no, I can’t do it because of this. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the team. My industry doesn’t want to do it. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. The fundamental difference in the game today is the people that say yes blindly versus the people that say no blindly. The only unique leverage you have in this room is you yourself. There’s so much information now you’re not coming up with any new idea. There’s nothing I say that is a new idea.

People have been around too long. I’m not the first person to talk about kindness or gratitude or empathy or hard work or context. I’m really not. I’m just doing it my way in the way, my perspective, my words on my platform and for me is the real conversation today to me is today gonna be the conference. Is today going to be the time that you finally understand…

The Importance of Being a Communicator

that it is time to put it out. It is time to tell your story at scale contextually across all platforms, recognizing that a lot of people did not raise their hand and this may be the first time that a lot of you are seeing me. I’m just going to take one more step back. I believe that what the internet is doing is eliminating the middle. It’s eliminating the middle, the distribution. When you look at Uber or Amazon or if you look at Netflix, what it’s really doing is separating out the middle and it’s leaping it to one of two places. The product, the story, the service, and your ability to tell that story. I believe this is very important because this is not even for the youngsters in this room. This is not the world we necessarily grew up with. A world where the entire middle of distribution has been commoditized because the internet has become the middle and the focus on not just the quality of the product, but more importantly, the deep focus on the ability to communicate has never become greater. The ability to be a communicator in 2020 has now become disproportionally more powerful than even the quality of your product. And that may be confusing and it’s a very interesting debate, but the reality is a product is a subjective product. One more time. B2B, who does services raise it high? I just want to get a sense higher. All of you that just raised your hands. You know what? I know sometimes you think the product’s great but your client thinks that shit. Other times you kind of know that the product is shitty, but the client thinks it’s great. The work is subjective based on the queen or the King on the other side who gets to this side your ability to be a phenomenal communicator. How many people see it where and how is less subjective? The content in it is subjective, but the results are there through the leads, through the results that come through it. I believe today that if you’re in the business world that the ability to be a communicator, a content producer at the height of the scale for your product has become more important than any other variable. I would rather be great at YouTube and podcasting and LinkedIn and Instagram. Then be great at balancing my checkbook that I can hire an for. This skill is emerging and accelerating at scale, so here’s how this game breaks down for me. One, I think everybody here has to take a step back and figure out what kind of communicator are they individually. Even if you sit here today and do not believe it is your job within the organization to communicate up eventually, especially at the age level that everybody here is. Eventually this skill set will become important to you whether it’s now later in your career, within your family dynamics and definitely over the next 20-30-40 years as communication rises in importance not declines. Thus my great ask, my great ambition to fly down here, three flights to get here and flying right back home. The reason for me to be here is very focused on the notion of can I get five people? There’s a lot of people here. Can I get five people in here to start tomorrow or Monday? If you want to take the weekend off to start making content. The world is very simple. The world is breaking into a very simple game, ideas and making, do you have ideas? Can you make them? But it requires an incredible sense of self-awareness. I’m very passionate for many people in this room who are introverted and who would be scared to give this speech or who feel uncomfortable in front of a camera to understand that if you are a remarkable writer, there’s an incredible world for you. For those who are scared to be in front of the camera because they’re scared of how they look or they’re just uncomfortable. That recording your ideas or what you’re about in audio is an incredible time to be alive and there’s an incredible world to you. It’s a matter of fact, even more interesting to me if you’re somebody that likes to doodle to draw some of the most exciting things that I’m seeing in my content is when we’re doing cartoons on LinkedIn and Instagram. That might be the way that you communicate when you figure out how you communicate. Written word, audio, video. The next part is definitely the most challenging. If you ask me why over the last 10 years I have been given the great fortune to be here. It’s very simple. I spend almost all of my time and all of my content trying to bring value with no expectation in return. If you look at the content that most people and companies and organizations put out, if you look at it carefully and you dissect it, it is wildly selfish. It is either a commercial in itself or its main objective is to get you to fill out your email…

The Value of Content and the Importance of Volume

I can sell to you instead of bring you value to build a brand. I wrote a book several years ago called jab, jab, jab, right hook, and the reason I wrote it was because I was watching people on social media really struggle with the idea of bringing value and I wanted to give them a scenario of understanding that if you’re trying to sell and throw a right hook all the time, eventually the other person knows how to duck everybody. How many people here have done email marketing in their life? Raise your hands. Great. So for everybody who just raised your hands, I was doing email marketing in 1997 1998 and I had 90% open rates on my email today. If you’re in the 30s you’re a hero means you have a tremendous list and you’re doing a great job. The reason those lists have gone from 90 to 30 is because I’m sure everybody here knows where I’m going. We’ve ruined email because we’re spamming and selling on it at all times. That’s what happens to every platform. That’s exactly what we’re doing on social media. Now, the reason social media is subtly declining and the reason the algorithms always have to change is people do not have the disciplined to not self promote. People do not have the discipline to not try to sell on every post. The other problem is when people try to make pretend they’re giving value in disguise underneath, they’re actually trying to sell my friends. What’s scary about the way I go about business and what I believe, I see what the businesses that are most winning in the world is. It’s super basic. Just nobody wants to do it. It almost be like if I was standing up here talking about health and wellness, my friends, if you want to get into better shape, here’s how you do it. Stop eating shit and workout every day. Thank you very much. See you later. Brazil. That would be the whole talk. That is no different than how I see business today. Obviously you have to have a product and service, but the reality is very simply the formula is as basic as it is in fitness. If you are not producing content, and when I say content, just to put this into context for everybody, next week is my birthday. I’ve had my team work for the last month. We’ve made a deck, a couple hundred pages deck. We’re going to give it away for free. It shows you how to make 60 something pieces of content in a day. The reality is the requirement of how much content that I’m looking for you to produce to achieve. You know about numbers that look like 30 40 50 60 pieces of content a day. Most of the businesses and people in here are putting out one piece of content a day on a good day, maybe three a week. We, if you’re a personal brand, you’re killing it and posting four things a day. There is nobody that is achieving the volume. If you want to write down one word and stick it in your mirror from this whole talk, the word is volume. This is a volume warfare. When people hear volume, they hear quantity. When they hear quantity, they don’t think that you could make quality. They think it’s a friction between quantity and quality. I believe that the world has grossly overvalued production quality and made that quality, not the story or the context of the message. And so as we have spent the last 30 to 50 years putting production value on a pedestal as quality, we have put ourselves in a position to not value context and the actual story and in that is the rub and the opportunity, the sheer size of this country, the sheer amount of spend, even in the separation of wealth. The uncanny amount of attention on YouTube and Instagram in this country leads this to be one of the most interesting places in the world, to be a marketer, to be a marketer, to be an influencer, to be a startup. However, when I spent, because I gave a speech in st pelo a couple of weeks ago, so about three months ago, I started really doing homework on what’s the sentiment? What are people saying in the comments? What’s the vibe? What’s remarkable in such a progressive and incredible country is how much similarities there are. Believe it or not, what the US which is with all that in place,

Cynicism and Pessimism

There is still so much cynicism and pessimism to actually achieve it. That is not a government issue with your new president or ours. That is not a problem that you don’t have Silicon Valley. That is a problem that people would rather complain than put in the fucking work. That is a human problem. That is a global human problem.

Empathy for the Past

If this was 1957 and it was my grandfather and all of your grandparents, I would have some empathy because it real money to actually do what I’m saying but in 2019 with this I struggle to deploy empathy for you not doing which is what led me to not making this a game about your wallet.

Business is Not a Game

Many people think business is a game of this business is not a game of this. This is right now is a game of this. This has come down to the simple deep warfare in one’s head. What? What is stopping people from actually making content and I believe that it comes down to one simple word judgment. I believe that judgment is crippling our society. I am fascinated and grateful. Grateful like you would not imagine for my mother building self-esteem in me without creating entitlement. My self-esteem allows when I leave here in a couple of hours and I read the comments and I control copy it and translate it from Portuguese to English where one of you say that I’m an asshole. I’m okay. I want to give the next talk. I want to make the next piece of content. My ability to deal with losing pushback. Negativity. No. Is my strength, my entire model of content production. My entire thesis for this talk only has one major flaw in that people are insecure.

Encouraging Honesty

I spend my life putting out content 50 70 80 pieces a day with the great hope to eliminate that insecurity, to challenge you and ask you what judgment, why? Why are you willing to live a life that ultimately ends with regret and resentment? Because everybody who’s 90 at a hundred years old talks about the things they wish they did, not the things they did. And so for me, Brazil, very simply, I’m trying to challenge this room to understand the simplicity of the framework and the massive difficulty in the head and really lead to a couple tactics.

Tactic: Sharing Secrets

For example, tactic number one, one of the biggest things that I have seen work in people starting the process to produce content is to make a single video and tell the world their secret that they’ve been holding onto. If you really think about what stopping people, it’s the darkness and shadows inside of them by putting it out and taking control of your secret, your dyslexia, your terrible issue as a child, your relationship with X, your drinking problem, whatever it might be by you taking control of it, by putting it out, no longer does anybody else have leveraged to expose it. It is a freedom play and I highly, and listen, if you really want to know, forget about the five people that post tomorrow. If I can get one person, one person in here to leave this conference tonight and make a video and tell the world the truth that they’ve been holding onto, this will be mission fucking accomplished. Thank you dad. [Crowd Clapping]

Emerging Opportunities

I want to go into questions in about five or 10 minutes, so let me speak. Let me see where the mikes are, but I’m going to line them up here and we’ll figure that out. But before I do, I want to spend a few more minutes on audio. For a lot of people here, they missed YouTube, they missed Instagram. I believe there’s two places where you have a chance over the next couple of years to not miss it.

Opportunity 1: TikTok

Number one, you have to watch TikTok very carefully. If TikTok takes off seriously in this market, there will be an enormous amount of opportunity because the global penetration in Asia, the U.S, Europe is exploding. What’s so amazing to live in a country of this size and this much opportunity and you guys know this, is you can see these platforms exploding somewhere else and you can get a head start and play it here outside of Orchid, which became the player here. Every other platform eventually makes its way here and becomes the dominant player. Please, please do not underestimate what is happening on TikTok globally and where the potential sits in this market. You should absolutely. If you’re at this conference, if you’re smart enough to be at this conference, you should be smart enough to go home and execute around the thesis around the opportunities around the knowledge.

Opportunity 2: Audio

One is TikTok, number two is voice. We are becoming much more of an audio consumption world by show of hands. How many people here now listen to a podcast? Raise your hands, raise it high. I want everybody to look around. Look at this. Put it down for a second. Those same people. How many of you were listening to a podcast five years ago? Raise your hand. Look around. Look at that growth. Look at that growth. How many people here now when they watch YouTube videos sometimes just put the phone down and listen to it and don’t even watch the video. Raise your hands. Look at us. Look at us. D rock spends all this time making it look pretty new. Fuckers. Just listened to it. Audio is becoming the growing usage because we’re busy and we want to do two things at once. Three things at once, four things at once. One of the biggest opportunities in this room is understanding how big audio is and producing audio content. Everybody wants to be a marketer, but most people in this room are salespeople. It’s why they like Google. Google’s easy. It’s intent. Somebody types something in, you know they want it. So you buy the ads and you convert. That’s sales. I’m here to talk about branding and marketing. The way real things are built, the way the biggest companies in the world are built. The biggest personalities, celebrities, brands, they’re built for branding and marketing, not sales. Audio is no question. The fastest-growing opportunity to build a brand.

Encouraging Action

that most people are not doing. Please be the person in this room that goes back and actually starts a podcast. Please be the person here who actually starts recording their thoughts and just posting the video. I mean you could literally take your phone, hit memo record, put the phone down, it’s just a black screen and you can post a black screen with your words. You can, most of you won’t because you don’t think that’s quality. This subjective point of view around quality is stopping the world from making. We must flip that on its head. Please be the person in this room that leaves here and starts making. Thank you. [Crowd Clapping]

Q&A Session

• I left a lot of time for Q and A because I really, the theory is very simple. The details and the questions matter. So who’s got the mics? You’ve got the mics. – So you’ve got to run around. Who’s got a question? Raise your hands. Yup. I’m gonna translate to you.
• My daughter is 11 years old. So I ask him, “what do you want to say to your GaryVee?” He said, eh, say to him that I love him. Then he’s awesome. And I’m sorry and you are so fun. I read it off you. Thank you for that and bye. I’m shaking because as an immigrant, as you know I’m leaving Canada for 13 years now and I suffer a lot. It was terrible. Even for my children that was born there and if you’re there just to eat Brazilian food at the school was very scary. And my daughter was bullied because of that. So my question is, what can I as a mum do for my kids? – Sure. – Thank you. – You’re welcome. Thank you.
• Can I have a photo. Please.
• Yes, you can have a photo.

Advice for Parents

So I think business and parenting have a lot of similarities. So when I hear those kinds of stories, and I’m sure how many people here are parents, raise your hands. So for all the hands that just went up, you know how challenging it is? Like you can have common sense everywhere else, but when it’s your kids, it’s hard to maintain it. But I believe that self-esteem is the ultimate cure to everything. And I think most parents go on defense when their kids are hurting instead of off Bence. So when their kids are bullied, they want to go fight the school. They want to go fight the parent of the kid. It’s defense for me as somebody who was bullied because I was a Soviet immigrant in America and my childhood, when the Soviet union was the enemy, there was plenty of shit. I mean, if you can zoom in, I’ve got goosebumps. It was a very challenging time. but what my mom did was she went insular. It was authentic. It was me and her in my own head hearing nothing else. By the time I was in high school, I couldn’t hear anybody else. It didn’t matter by the way, both pro and con. So for me, I think the thing you can do is beat into their head about them, not about the people in Montreal or Toronto or Canada. It’s not about them. It’s about yourself inside your own head, your own self-worth and you have to pound it. A lot of parents who are like, Oh, so easy to say, but when their kids are making, you’re right, but it’s no different than working out and eating healthy. It’s no different than may content.

Cynicism and Pessimism

There is still so much cynicism and pessimism to actually achieve it. That is not a government issue with your new president or ours. That is not a problem that you don’t have Silicon Valley. That is a problem that people would rather complain than put in the fucking work. That is a human problem. That is a global human problem.

Empathy for the Past

If this was 1957 and it was my grandfather and all of your grandparents, I would have some empathy because it real money to actually do what I’m saying but in 2019 with this I struggle to deploy empathy for you not doing which is what led me to not making this a game about your wallet.

Business is Not a Game

Many people think business is a game of this business is not a game of this. This is right now is a game of this. This has come down to the simple deep warfare in one’s head. What? What is stopping people from actually making content and I believe that it comes down to one simple word judgment. I believe that judgment is crippling our society. I am fascinated and grateful. Grateful like you would not imagine for my mother building self-esteem in me without creating entitlement. My self-esteem allows when I leave here in a couple of hours and I read the comments and I control copy it and translate it from Portuguese to English where one of you say that I’m an asshole. I’m okay. I want to give the next talk. I want to make the next piece of content. My ability to deal with losing pushback. Negativity. No. Is my strength, my entire model of content production. My entire thesis for this talk only has one major flaw in that people are insecure.

Encouraging Honesty

I spend my life putting out content 50 70 80 pieces a day with the great hope to eliminate that insecurity, to challenge you and ask you what judgment, why? Why are you willing to live a life that ultimately ends with regret and resentment? Because everybody who’s 90 at a hundred years old talks about the things they wish they did, not the things they did. And so for me, Brazil, very simply, I’m trying to challenge this room to understand the simplicity of the framework and the massive difficulty in the head and really lead to a couple tactics.

Tactic: Sharing Secrets

For example, tactic number one, one of the biggest things that I have seen work in people starting the process to produce content is to make a single video and tell the world their secret that they’ve been holding onto. If you really think about what stopping people, it’s the darkness and shadows inside of them by putting it out and taking control of your secret, your dyslexia, your terrible issue as a child, your relationship with X, your drinking problem, whatever it might be by you taking control of it, by putting it out, no longer does anybody else have leveraged to expose it. It is a freedom play and I highly, and listen, if you really want to know, forget about the five people that post tomorrow. If I can get one person, one person in here to leave this conference tonight and make a video and tell the world the truth that they’ve been holding onto, this will be mission fucking accomplished. Thank you dad. [Crowd Clapping]

Emerging Opportunities

I want to go into questions in about five or 10 minutes, so let me speak. Let me see where the mikes are, but I’m going to line them up here and we’ll figure that out. But before I do, I want to spend a few more minutes on audio. For a lot of people here, they missed YouTube, they missed Instagram. I believe there’s two places where you have a chance over the next couple of years to not miss it.

Opportunity 1: TikTok

Number one, you have to watch TikTok very carefully. If TikTok takes off seriously in this market, there will be an enormous amount of opportunity because the global penetration in Asia, the U.S, Europe is exploding. What’s so amazing to live in a country of this size and this much opportunity and you guys know this, is you can see these platforms exploding somewhere else and you can get a head start and play it here outside of Orchid, which became the player here. Every other platform eventually makes its way here and becomes the dominant player. Please, please do not underestimate what is happening on TikTok globally and where the potential sits in this market. You should absolutely. If you’re at this conference, if you’re smart enough to be at this conference, you should be smart enough to go home and execute around the thesis around the opportunities around the knowledge.

Opportunity 2: Audio

One is TikTok, number two is voice. We are becoming much more of an audio consumption world by show of hands. How many people here now listen to a podcast? Raise your hands, raise it high. I want everybody to look around. Look at this. Put it down for a second. Those same people. How many of you were listening to a podcast five years ago? Raise your hand. Look around. Look at that growth. Look at that growth. How many people here now when they watch YouTube videos sometimes just put the phone down and listen to it and don’t even watch the video. Raise your hands. Look at us. Look at us. D rock spends all this time making it look pretty new. Fuckers. Just listened to it. Audio is becoming the growing usage because we’re busy and we want to do two things at once. Three things at once, four things at once. One of the biggest opportunities in this room is understanding how big audio is and producing audio content. Everybody wants to be a marketer, but most people in this room are salespeople. It’s why they like Google. Google’s easy. It’s intent. Somebody types something in, you know they want it. So you buy the ads and you convert. That’s sales. I’m here to talk about branding and marketing. The way real things are built, the way the biggest companies in the world are built. The biggest personalities, celebrities, brands, they’re built for branding and marketing, not sales. Audio is no question. The fastest-growing opportunity to build a brand.

Encouraging Action

that most people are not doing. Please be the person in this room that goes back and actually starts a podcast. Please be the person here who actually starts recording their thoughts and just posting the video. I mean you could literally take your phone, hit memo record, put the phone down, it’s just a black screen and you can post a black screen with your words. You can, most of you won’t because you don’t think that’s quality. This subjective point of view around quality is stopping the world from making. We must flip that on its head. Please be the person in this room that leaves here and starts making. Thank you. [Crowd Clapping]

Q&A Session

• I left a lot of time for Q and A because I really, the theory is very simple. The details and the questions matter. So who’s got the mics? You’ve got the mics. – So you’ve got to run around. Who’s got a question? Raise your hands. Yup. I’m gonna translate to you.
• Okay.
• Hi.
• Hi.
• I love you. Actually, my family, whole family loves you.
• Thank you.
• I just came from Canada. So I am an immigrant in Canada. I, Zillow and my son listened to your podcast every day. He’s nine years old.
• Sorry about him.
• My daughter is 11 years old. So I ask him, “what do you want to say to your GaryVee?” He said, eh, say to him that I love him. Then he’s awesome. And I’m sorry and you are so fun. I read it off you. Thank you for that and bye. I’m shaking because as an immigrant, as you know I’m leaving Canada for 13 years now and I suffer a lot. It was terrible. Even for my children that was born there and if you’re there just to eat Brazilian food at the school was very scary. And my daughter was bullied because of that. So my question is, what can I as a mum do for my kids? – Sure. – Thank you. – You’re welcome. Thank you.
• Can I have a photo. Please.
• Yes, you can have a photo.

Advice for Parents

So I think business and parenting have a lot of similarities. So when I hear those kinds of stories, and I’m sure how many people here are parents, raise your hands. So for all the hands that just went up, you know how challenging it is? Like you can have common sense everywhere else, but when it’s your kids, it’s hard to maintain it. But I believe that self-esteem is the ultimate cure to everything. And I think most parents go on defense when their kids are hurting instead of off Bence. So when their kids are bullied, they want to go fight the school. They want to go fight the parent of the kid. It’s defense for me as somebody who was bullied because I was a Soviet immigrant in America and my childhood, when the Soviet union was the enemy, there was plenty of shit. I mean, if you can zoom in, I’ve got goosebumps. It was a very challenging time. but what my mom did was she went insular. It was authentic. It was me and her in my own head hearing nothing else. By the time I was in high school, I couldn’t hear anybody else. It didn’t matter by the way, both pro and con. So for me, I think the thing you can do is beat into their head about them, not about the people in Montreal or Toronto or Canada. It’s not about them. It’s about yourself inside your own head, your own self-worth and you have to pound it. A lot of parents who are like, Oh, so easy to say, but when their kids are making, you’re right, but it’s no different than working out and eating healthy. It’s no different than may content.

Addressing Anxiety

• Hey Gary. – Hello. How are you? – First of all, you’re awesome. My name is Luca and I watch your content since I was 19, now I’m 22 so thank you for being part of that. – Thank you. – I want to ask you something that I believe is really important. You are the first guy to talk about making content, making really quality content. But I’m afraid that the internet is a place with very anxiety. I mean Instagram causes a lot of anxiety – Instagram doesn’t cause anything.