Prime Energy drink and poppy are a problem. I promise you Coca-Cola is debating change now. People ask me a lot, when is it gonna happen? And I always say the same thing, when they feel the pain. If you wanted to get into Walmart or Target or CVS, it was hard, you needed tens of millions of dollars.
And then to let people know, you needed tens of millions of dollars on television. So they had a moat. Now, one TikTok, one. can sell out an entire product and it could be on your Amazon 3PL or on your Shopify.
Nobody's safe. Technology doesn't give a shit about your feelings. To answer your question, when will it change? It only changes in paint.
A lot of that is on the horizon because the advancements of technology, that's what it does. Attention is the number one asset. Nicole Parlicano, the CMO at Tubi and I'm with Gary Vaynerchuk, the CEO of VaynerX. Best-selling author. What other credits do you have?
Multi-hyphenate? What are we adding these days? We're good with that.
I'm really excited to have a discussion about something we're calling 2.0 and how we use social in the entertainment landscape to drive viewership and affinity. And I'm going to start with a personal story. Nine years ago, I worked for Gary. Almost nine years.
June. And so we're for him for a few years. And the amazing thing about working for Gary is he was always pushing and trying and testing new things and always encouraging us to make ourselves uncomfortable. and try new products, try new platforms.
And I'll never forget the day that we got this Slack, and he said, this is going to be the next business thing. Download this app, make some content, get your clients on it. And I'm like, see this app musically.
And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if JPMorgan Chase is going to, what are they going to do with this? I just got them to use Snap Lenses last week.
I don't know what this lip-singing platform is yet. But he was like, was like this is gonna be the biggest biggest thing and we've got to be paying attention to this and so that is just one of many stories with Gary of and I've taken that throughout my whole career in CMO is this man makes a lot of bets and has a vision for where things are going before they actually start to happen and we are here to talk today about streaming and social and the convergence of those things so Gary you not only are in the social space you're also kind of in the entertainment space. Why don't you start with your thoughts and where we are?
So lovely to be with everybody. Hope everybody's having a good week. What Nicole's referencing, because I think this is probably not on the radar of most, but about 15 months ago I announced a new company not in the VaynerX world. It sits outside of it. It's called VaynerWatt.
It's a TV and film production company with my partner Eric Wattenberg. So we're really in it now and it's been fun learning how the TV landscape, the movie landscape. how it has its own obviously variables, similar to advertising when I came into it, you have assumptions or things you may know and then you get under the hood and you learn.
And so it is fun for me to have kind of a foot in both worlds. Obviously we're much further along in the advertising space. You know, I think when I think about it, I don't think anybody in this room is confused. The distribution of creative is changing. And this has always been the thing.
that I've been most fascinated by, which is why do we hold on to yesterday in the face of today's truth? You know, how could you possibly not understand the relationship between social and streaming? It's pretty obvious. We literally have shows that have been created from a Twitter stream, from a Twitter thread. We have unbelievable data that supports that when you market well in a social environment, it leads to tune in and really for the business people in the room it's very clear that the way we're going to advertise on streaming service looks a lot more like social than it looks like buying an up front and so the biddable and things of that nature and so as I look around the room especially what's enjoyable is there's so many young faces in here and obviously some OG's as well but pretty young faces they're not even going to know a different world and definitely and I think for everyone that's in the room, no matter which gen you're in, our behaviors of consumption have changed radically.
And so I think about it a lot. And this week always reminds me of how much opportunity there is because I do think that this festival is very, very good at yesterday. I think we are overly romantic about the things we give awards to this week. I don't think they're consumer centric. I think they're industry-centric, and the reason I say yes to a talk like this is I think this is the conversation that we need to be having as an industry, otherwise there's a lot of wasted money and a lot of disruption in our paths if we don't.
Yeah. I mean, we know, we released a stream report this spring, and it said that 45% of millennials and Gen Z, they find out what they want to watch on social. This is, to your point, this is why, like, all these reports make me laugh.
Like... It's gotta be like 90%. 45%, like how else are they, what is Us Weekly telling them what to watch?
Like it's fucking 2024. But nonetheless, like, but by the way, this is the other thing with generational. things that make me laugh. I just did an interview and they're like, what's an under, it was very nerdy deep social. They're like, what's the underrated platform?
Similar to like, I do have a good career of the Musical.ly's and all this other stuff. But I actually think, ironically, the underrated platform currently is Facebook proper. I don't think people realize how much attention sits on classic Facebook and how many upper millennials, boomers for sure, but here's. Here's one that would blow people away.
This is probably, just to take a quick step back, the lack of practitionership in the industry is the opportunity. For me, what's been remarkable is between Wine Library and Wine Text, my family's wine retail business, between my Gary Vee brand, between all the other things I do, Vee Friends and things of that nature, I have to stay being a practitioner. So I know, not by a report or by a boardroom meeting, I know that Facebook works and I know that we're converting Facebook users that are 25 to 35 from Facebook.
And I also know that had I not been a practitioner, I would never believe what I'm saying. Like if there was somebody sitting right now and be like, no way, there's nobody 25 to 35 on Facebook, I would understand that. I didn't realize that that was happening either until we started running very heavily last year on seeing that underpriced arbitrage.
So I think, you know. Organically, Facebook is one of our best platforms. Charlie.
knows that. It drives a ton of traffic. It's crazy. And the thing that was interesting is so not all of Tubi's content is original content. We don't have a lot of original content in IP.
And I will tell you, the things that pop on social, RV with Robin Williams, how old is that movie? Yep. Racks up millions and millions of views and then all of a sudden a title that had insignificant viewership rises to the top.
A title called Havoc with Anne Hathaway. Probably nobody knows it. It was in the early 2000s once straight to DVD and we cut it, clipped it, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bijou Phillips, like it's stacked and we put it on TikTok, racked up views, racked up views. People thought it was a new movie.
Like I think that what we're finding a lot of success is not overly favoring the things that we make and putting a lot more things out there because our library is so huge and it doesn't need to be new content to actually bring in viewership. It actually is new to a new audience. or new to someone that hasn't seen it before.
And everybody in this room knows that. Meaning this, it's highly likely that a lot of people in this room know that Friends on Netflix hit an entire Gen Z generation even looking at the head nods. That's known.
It's probably known by this audience that the viral Ocean Spray video on TikTok was playing Fleetwood Mac in the background and then Fleetwood Mac's song went number one on Spotify. Number one. So to your point, if I'm a distributor and there's an opportunity to buy IP at a low cost that sits with early work from famous people and then I can post-produce the creative and create reach, then this is probably a big point out, similar to what you're referring to, which happens on streaming and social as well.
For the first time ever, the creative is the variable of the reach. That has always happened in Hollywood. A good movie created reach.
a good show created reach. It was never real in advertising. In advertising, we made something and then we poured a ton of money to make people watch it in between what they wanted to watch. What social currently is doing is the creativist creating the reach, the TikTokification of all social. And that's a really important new twist on the last 15 years of social.
And I think it plays to, when I turn on Tubi, like the algo, like people talk about, about AI all week, which has been very humorous, listening to the marketing industry talk about advanced technology. But what's really funny about it is, while we're talking about AI all week, the most significant AIs in advertising sit currently in real life in streaming services of what they're putting in front of you and clearly social is very advanced on what it's putting in front of you in the for you pages. Kind of skipping a topic we we are Vayner is our agency and we gave them a social listening project last year to kind of understand some of the trends that some of the conversations that were being had and seeing if the there's anything that we could make from a content perspective.
Taking that, we believe culture is very bottoms up, and if you're gonna make culturally relevant content, it's coming from something on the Internet for sure. Very few cases like a salt burner or something. and have a moment and those are done in a very meticulous way to make sure they're built and custom for social but Gary's team came back with a great theme of a conversation that I think we all are really aware of in social which is the generational divide in the workplace and the conversations and you know you've got the Gen Z employee who like doesn't want to go to the office and is like smoking their vape you've got the millennial one that's kind of like processing the work, you know, trauma from the Gen X boomer boss that doesn't want to like upset the Gen Z-er. There's, I think you guys all have seen countless content and it, I think, honestly humanizes all the generations and gives us a little levity in our day. And Gary's team said there's something here and maybe be interesting to see like something called the Z-suite where the younger people take over the executive roles and see how, see how they fare in that job.
And so we are doing our first. project together where it's a series that Tubi will be releasing. We have Lauren Graham casted to be the head of the agency that it's portraying and we're really excited about this project and I think also what we get to do is kind of break the mold on how we're going to market this thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think, again, knowing there's a big mix of different individuals here, whether it is what obviously Nicole's talking about, I think this will make sense to people, especially people that are hardcore Reddit users here, like there's so much creativity on the internet that's just floating. There's so much creative talent in the world. I think one of the most challenging things for this industry right now is there's a lot of people that are here this week from the creative industry, but that's just because the serendipity of those humans deciding to go into this world. I think when you take a step back and look at creativity, it's being done at scale by all sorts of people that have nothing to do with.
our industry. That's just real life. And so I think our industries, both on the advertising side and on the original programming side, it seems insane to not take a cue from consumer truth.
This is obviously an example of something that I know everybody here can snicker and smile about. There's a stunning, just to go a step deeper, what we basically pay attention to is actual emotion. politics, sports, music, these things are grounded in actual emotion. I can promise you, I am not the best version of myself at a New York Jets game, right?
Because the emotion of it changes my behavior. So what's so interesting right now, I think everybody knows here, a lot of people in this room, just this little room, have a lot of emotion on how they feel about how certain sectors work in today's world. That is good proxy, that is good fodder for something that could work, right?
And so I think the same thing in advertising. For the advertisers in this room, it's crazy to be paying for the amount of monies and dollars we're putting into consumer insights that are just little focus groups when in reality social media has an incredible proxy to actual consumer truth. The single most... Interesting reason to do organic social media creative is to take advantage of the algorithms finding the audience and analyzing the qualitative data that can be used for advertising and it can be used for original programming.
I'm one of those CMOs that I fucking live in the commons. Like, I'm not that great as a practitioner myself, but I swear to God, everything we post, I will go deep. How do they think about this? What are they saying? And no sentiment tools are going to read that, you know?
Cringe is good in some contexts, isn't bad in fucking others. Is that positive or negative? Like, you have to get in there and you have to see what you're putting out in the world, what other people are putting out in the world, and how are people feeling about it? Is it making them feel any which way? And then the debates are in the comments.
And I think that's where I, like, I kind of anchor, if I'm not, like, if I'm not a subject matter expert, how I think things might land. And, like, when we are doing things, you know, sometimes half of what I've... What we do is not going to be loved by everybody and that's okay.
Well, it can't be. It can't be. I would actually argue that that's the thing everyone should most understand, which is if you're putting out creative, whether it's a show or advertising, I think what's really been to the detriment of our industry in the last 20 years is because we come from a television mindset and a brand positioning mindset, we make vanilla. Everything's vanilla. If you go look at the Fortune 500 tagline, Toyota's brand positioning is let's go places.
That is built because places can be literal or you're literally creating, every single brand creates vanilla. And so the point of where we're at now with distribution is relevance at scale. Relevance at scale. I mean, I just look at the faces in this room. I'm gonna have a, if I wanted to sell this glass of water, it's inconceivable that I have one pitch to maximize my conversion.
I'm going to need different rationales. And so gender, race, income level, interests. And so I think what you're seeing in your environment, you know, many of us that are like, there's people in this room that grew up where there was 13 channels, pre-cable, 13. I'm looking around.
I don't think anyone's in the three to four channel range, but like, you know, 13 in America. as recent as like 1980, right? And so then cable came, and for the youngsters in here, original cable got you to somewhere about 36, right?
And then we got into satellite television, and then the internet came and it was... So the fragmentation of attention now is at scale. Trying to force vanilla down this fragmentation is the great waste of money, both in original programming and in marketing.
And so this... This whole world of entertainment and advertising needs to understand that the days of one vanilla boulder being forced down everyone's throat is a high risk, high reward game. In entertainment, it works once in a while when you spend $100 million making something.
In advertising, it has no precedent in the last five years of working when you spend millions of dollars. Meanwhile, many pebbles of different flavors building up create. the boulder that brands and entertainment entities are looking to create.
And so, I mean, either people live in the world we're now living in or they hold yesterday on a pedestal. And I think that's how you will see the separation of who wins and loses. I'll give you some flowers. I think people know this.
I don't know how many people here are internal to be or have been watching from afar, but this streaming war thing is hard. I don't know if you're paying attention. It's not going to be easy. There's gonna be plenty of consolidation. And when I think about Where Tubi, like Tubi can only even be at this event with really strong execution over the last three or four or five years because it's competing with so many other things.
There's a lot of mid-tier streaming companies that have completely disappeared off the face of the earth. And so I think it requires marketing that gets tuned in. I think it requires a smart strategy of original but buying other content.
And I think they're very simpatico of how to do original programming and how to do marketing. And I think most people are struggling with it because it's been a hard left turn. It's a really hard left turn.
I mean, we punch way above our weight. Way. We are tied with Disney in terms of total streaming minutes. It's insane. 1.8.
We're tied with Disney. I have a funny feeling they spent more money trying to make that happen. I got a team of 30 people and I do not have budgets like that.
So it just shows like, you know, how scarcity can make you really punch above your weight. I apologize though. I want to jump in.
I want everyone to hear this because it's going to, you know, I have no clue what everyone does and what they're trying to achieve, but there is a major story in this. Budget has no proxy to success. That's true. It really, this is like really important, right? I don't understand how people don't understand.
The more budget most people, most companies have, the more likely it is they're gonna waste it. It's like rich kid shit, right? Like, like, like, I don't, and what's, and so, and then the other thing is, is this industry also measures incorrectly. The corporate America runs on reports and bullshit awards.
And, and that. is the punchline of opportunity. If you actually know what you're doing, you can make a dollar go very far and you can make, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can burn a hundred dollar bill in a second. And that is a big deal.
And I think that that's the story of this. And by the way, forget about all the marketing dollars that Disney's deploying. Let's be very, with all due respect to how smart Tubi has been doing their content.
What about the- Content Disney has, right? Even if they didn't spend a dollar, they should be so far ahead because of the historic, the IP's absurd. You've got literally Marvel, Lucas, and Disney itself. So I just think there's a real lesson in it. And I do think we're in a really inflection point where people can feel it.
They just don't know exactly what to do with it. And I think that's gonna be the fun to see who figures it out in the next five years and who doesn't. So a little pivot because we were talking about what TV used to be like in the 1980s and it was a very advertising friendly environment and advertisers and television companies, they co-produce things.
They did things together. And then probably around the Netflix era, we decided advertising was bad and in certain entertainment spaces didn't want to allow advertising in. Three years ago now we're advertising friendly again, or some spaces are.
We've always been ad supported. What do you think the role of the Like, okay, brands are spending millions of dollars on a 30 second ad. They could spend less than that on a fully produced movie or a longer piece of content. I don't want to call it branded content, but storytelling.
Do you think there's an opportunity for brands to play a role there? How do you see it evolving? And branded content's kind of in a weird place because a lot of the publishers that were doing it, the digital publishers, were kind of, you know, no longer, right?
I think this is going to make sense to everybody. There's enough faces in this room. sitting in different sectors that I recognize, so I think this is gonna really land. This is the same way I think about long and short form content.
It's the same way I'm thinking about what you're saying. Whether you're doing an ad in social or you're making a movie, let's just use the two extremes and everything in between. Branded content, TV shows, commercials, banner ads, just the whole, all of it could work and all of it cannot work, right?
People would always, I'm sure this will land for everyone, everybody in the last five years is like, Gary. It all has to be short form video, right? Like, we don't have good attention spans anymore.
I'm like, that's not true. Like, you look at social media ads, you can make a shitty six second video that people leave after one second. And, I don't know about y'all, but what streaming reminded everyone is people will binge watch a show if you get hooked on a rainy Saturday. You're watching nine straight hours of content.
This was always my argument that movies could be much longer. I always believed years ago that movies could be like five hours. I just did.
I would always be mad when you, I think this is going to land also. You know when you watch a movie and be like, fuck. You could feel that they cut it short because they wanted to fit in the time. And if they just gave it 30 more minutes, but they didn't want to go over three hours because that was the rule. That's how I think about 30 second spots.
So the answer to the question is, do I think that companies should do original shows? Of course I do. Do I also know that 99% of them will fail? I do. So that's why people are scared.
It's like a Super Bowl spot, right? Super Bowl, just for all the advertisers here, is the best ad buy. It is impossible if you are perfect at day trading attention, pun intended. If you are perfect at buying media in today's media landscape, you cannot get 110 million people to watch a 30 second video for $8 million.
You can't get it done, promise. The report can tell you you did, but that's potential reach, not actualized. Super Bowl does that for you.
The problem is, if the Super Bowl ad itself is bad, you just wasted $30 million, right? So the creative is the variable. So Carla's here and I love her so much.
Do I think that Chase should contemplate doing an original show that is basically like The Office or like Wahlburgers about Chase? Yes, I do. I think if they did a show that's based on a bank, and bank tellers that we all thought were funny. And it was Chase, not a made up name. And we all thought it was awesome and it was Seinfeld or fucking, you know, How I Met Your Mother or whatever it is.
Like The Office, would that be good for Chase? It would be remarkable for Chase. Okay, there you go, Carla.
Now go make a hit show. Like that's hard. That's hard.
And so is that in the best interest of Chase to take a 20, 15, $30 million swing? Shit, that's hard. On the flip side, do Fortune 50 and 100. Fortune 500 companies waste $20 million on media or creative a year all day long. All day long. And so, you know, whether it is as extreme as a show like that or what I think is going to happen, I think TV streaming, what we now call TV, TV 3.0, this is one of the main reasons I started a TV production company.
Now, I believe that what TV really was in the 50s and 60s, and even into the 70s. I mean, in the 1970s, if you watch the Today Show, Alpo, Dog Food, which was the leader at the time, their commercial was a dog coming on set in the middle of the show eating the dog food. It was... Fully integrated.
I don't have to tell anybody here if you're a historian of marketing, Procter & Gamble creating the soap opera and just like full integration. I think product integration. Back to a less risky move for Chase if I'm just using Carla, like going and looking at the slate, you know the upfronts? Instead of looking at the upfronts of what to buy commercials on, if they could get a year ahead of that and get into the slate of what's been bought and is gonna be made and then she and her team can say, you know what? I think this show, this Growing Pains or Wonder Years or whatever, you know, I think this show is going to do well.
And can we talk to the production company and the distributor and write in the main cast going to a Chase Bank multiple times over a season? And that's a hard one as a bank. Obviously, product placement, soda and wine and sneakers.
And I think you're going to see a substantial integration of brands back into. Content, and we've all seen versions of it, but I think we're gonna be forced into it because this has always been my thing that has always made me laugh, Nicole. People are like, Gary, you hate TV commercials. People watch TV.
I'm like, no shit. People watch TV. That's not a TV commercial. People watch TV.
And people are like, Gary, live sports still works. I'm like, I know. I'm one of the people that consumes it.
I go, you have a problem, though. The number one spike. In Twitter activity, consistently, in the world, is doing commercial breaks of sports. You watch it, and then you go to your Twitter when the commercials are on, and you don't pay attention to the commercial, and you're tweeting, fucking Aaron Rodgers, why'd you throw that interception? I'm not watching the commercial.
in there and so attention, actual attention, this goes back to the creator economy. That's where the attention is and so these creators are not only going to be creating content, but look at King Bach. He won on Vine.
He's a meaningful TV star now. This is all happening and it's happening in front of our eyes and the question becomes to everyone, this is ultimately the funniest thing here. This whole week, everyone's talking about creativity.
This is one big corporate animal. Our industry is corporate. The creative industry that I am in is all owned by banks.
It's all holding companies. This is P&L life. This isn't creative life. And that's the opportunity.
Awesome. I think we can take a question. Also, I've ran 18 minute pre-roll under your watch.
Yeah. And we got, I think it was... was for AT&T on Father's Day. We didn't make a commercial, we made something amazing that people watched through.
And I remember being like, we're really gonna run an 18 minute pre-roll? He's like, rip it, let's go, let's see how it does. It's because people will watch it if it's good, but you can't make a video that. that looks anything like a commercial. Nothing like a commercial.
Nobody wants a commercial. Not one human being wants a fucking commercial. But people will consume a video that they want, and if you're clever and get your message across with that, you will win, and that is going to be the future of, it has to be.
The data's too clear. First of all, thank you so much for the insight. My name is Flavilla Funganga, and I love what you said because everything that I've done, I've always done it with my money and creativity, and I always say that sometimes you breathe creativity from the lack of.
100% and this is what I've done and now I'm in the process of creating my first global social media platform literally bringing the entire black ecosystem together so I'm so excited about that yeah so the question of what you're saying and I feel like we are in this constant circle right we're talking we know what we need to do but we're not doing it and again putting the community at the center point innovation delight surprise is the key for success but at the same time as you say people play it safe I feel that it's not so much of a question more of a statement, and I wanna know how you feel about it, it's more of a, is the problem is the company creativity culture that is too, as I say, ingrained to change. Now we're being almost delusional that the dinosaurs gonna die and let the new brands take over. Because at some point, how many times am I gonna talk about the same thing?
And you've been saying that for so long. And you stay here, frustrated, hear the same thing about the same giant doing the same things. I think it's right, and honestly, internally, at Vayner, and you've probably heard this, Charlie, maybe you've heard this when you're, like, people ask me a lot, like, when are they gonna change?
When is it gonna happen? And I always say the same thing. When they feel the pain. Like, I promise you Coca-Cola is debating change now because Prime Energy drink and poppy are a problem.
Right? Like, you know, so the yellow pages, they decided to change once Yahoo and Google started killing them, but then it was too late. And people, listen, communication and marketing is just one part of the equation.
So, you know, I actually would argue that Apple... is not very good at marketing from one man's subjective point of view of what I look for, but their product is so advanced that nobody gives a crap. So I think, you know, there's a lot of businesses that can do everything wrong from what we may care about as marketers, and it's not going to matter.
Their product is superior. However, what is clearly happening right now is the pain is starting to accelerate because distribution has changed. TV has changed, right? And...
shopping has changed. Literally 15 years ago, if you sold, let's use deodorant. A, to get into, I'll use the US, but Tesco, Sainsbury's, if you want to go UK, all over the world. If you wanted to get into Walmart or Target, or CVS, it was hard. You needed tens of millions of dollars.
And then, to let people know, you needed tens of millions of dollars on television. So, they had a moat. Now, one TikTok.
One. can sell out an entire product and it can be on your Amazon 3PL or on your Shopify. Both of the moats that Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola had have gone away.
That's why you're going to see the first area in our faces in this town really disrupted is CPG. That's different for banking, but they have different things. Crypto and blockchain and all that. And that's different for airlines.
Like, that's hard. It's not like if all the airlines do bad advertising, we don't have another option. It's not like, you know, so where I think people, you know, what will happen is industries that can be disrupted will.
Think about bookstores. It's 1991, you have 30 bookstores, and you're loving life. You're a mogul. And then, unfortunately, Jeff Bezos chose you first.
And the bookstores got disrupted first. Right? I remember when Uber came out. Anybody who owned medallions, if you were a guy or a gal or a family that owned 30 medallions because your grandpa bought it in 1940, you were a trust fund baby in 1995 chilling.
It's free money. But unfortunately, Travis and Garrett decided to make Uber and it was your turn. What people don't understand is it's eventually gonna be all of your turns.
VaynerMedia. We've come and disrupted the industry heavily. Well guess what?
Because we make more quality creative at scale for social. I don't know if you heard but AI creative is a problem for me. Like nobody's safe.
Technology doesn't give a shit about your feelings. and so I think, to answer your question, when will it change? It only changes in pain.
It only changes in pain, and I think a lot of that is on the horizon because the advancements of technology, that's what it does, so I think for all of you, especially for your own career, you need to think about what's the commoditization of you. For example, AI. AI will create many more jobs than it will kill. However, if you're a designer and that's all you do and you just live in Adobe and you make some shit and you don't even think, somebody just tells you what to make, bad news, you're in deep shit.
And so that's what we have to look out for. So anyway, I hope everybody has a great week.