Fr 6/2 - Gary Vaynerchuk Joins Spanky To Talk About Branding, Advertising, and Marketing

He had a seven lemonade stand business at the age of six raked in one to 2000 a week flipping baseball cards. It's well exploded his family's $3 million liquor business into a $60 million brand. He's my friend Gary Vaynerchuk. And it's time to nerd out.

The ad nerds podcast delivers ad industry news weekdays were the go to source for people who spend money on advertising, covering Big brands, small businesses, and of course the latest marketing trends.

It's me Spanky Moskowitz, the show's host and nearly 40 year bet of the ad industry. I've made ads for Budweiser m&ms Frito Lay the NFL NBA I've built created over 100,000 ads in my career generating hundreds of billions in client revenue. If you're in or interested in the world of advertising and want to stay up to date with the latest news, the ad nerds podcast is the perfect place to start. And starting today, I am so excited Gary Vee, finally, welcome to the ad nerds podcast, my friend.

It's so good to be here.

I am so grateful to you. First of all, I've been sharing this this conversation with my audience both on on social media and throughout the podcast about the colorectal cancer diagnosis. I appreciate you moving this up in your busy schedule to accommodate all the stuff that's going on with me. I can't tell you how much that man that means to me.

I'm happy to do it, brother. Really nice to be with you.

Thank you. So let's dive right in. Gary. If you're talking to a small business owner today, what are three things that you would tell a small business owner right now that they should be doing in their marketing,

organic social content, specifically on tick tock LinkedIn, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels, really thinking about starting to learn how to use AI? You know, really prompt engineering, which means what do you enter into the all these AI apps to get good output. So starting the journey, like don't be crippled by what I just said, I know that sounds complicated. But this would be like, I would it would be like me saying get on the internet or start a Twitter account in 2006 for Twitter, or 1999 87. For the internet, like, I don't need you to be an AI expert. But I definitely don't need you to put your head in the sand and not have ever touched an AI tool, like maturity or even being has a really easy plugin to make creative from it. So that's number two. And then number three, doing what you're doing right now, every business needs to have a core platform, you know, a show, a podcast, a go to social media series, like everyone now is in the business of being a media company. And then they happen to do something, they happen to be an agency, they happen to sell flowers, they happen to, you know, mow lawns, but like, the quicker every small business understands that without them making creative acting like a publisher acting like a media company. They're leaving growth. And more importantly, they're creating the opportunity for a competitor to do it. And you know, Google ads are not going to last forever, just like the Yellow Pages didn't last forever. Your sales team, your reputation. People always, you know, the amount of real estate agents that have hit me up in the last 10 years because I used to always do this at conferences and be like, Hey, I know you've been the queen of the town for 30 years. But if you take this Facebook and Twitter and YouTube thing, not seriously, someone's gonna come along and take your business. The amount of people that have emailed me in the last 345 years in the real estate sector saying you were right. Like I didn't take it serious. I saw you at the Eman. I saw you at the Tom Ferry thing I saw you on the internet, you said that I laughed at you because I 22 years of market dominance. But now this kid out of nowhere, just by making tic TOCs and YouTube videos has taken a lot of my business. What do I do? How do I close the gap? And I'm like, well, now you're playing catch up. And so those are the three things social media content, like getting great at it. Number two, tasting AI. Number three, starting a show. Like whether it's a radio show, like you had a video show or even like a written show, even if you're writing articles on LinkedIn, now you're acting like a newspaper, which is a media company, and that's fine, too. Sure.

Over the years, you know, you and I have talked about my passionate dislike for programmatic ad buying. And but some small business owners have this belief that they think it's the cheapest way to build their brand. What are your thoughts on this?

You know, I think a lot of the programmatic stuff. inventory itself shows up very poorly as a banner ad or a pre roll and isn't actually being consumed. So I love the concept of programmatic like I love using technology. But my question always to a lot of my friends who have big companies that buy programmatic is where is it showing up and is it a good ad? Did it work? Like, I just, you know, I can, you know, it's very nice to have $3 CPMs. But if that's on the bottom of lawn mowers, daily.com, and it's like a banner ad at the bottom or a video that you made one video to work across the whole internet, like, you kind of get what you pay for sometimes in life. And like, if the impressions are cheap, there's probably a reality and like, a lot of people aren't actually consuming it, let alone no matter what the, the the data shows. And so the reason I've always struggled with a lot of the programmatic inventory is it's bad inventory. You know, you can pay $3 a square foot for retail location, I have a good feeling that's a really bad retail location.

Yeah, the price should say at all. And plus, you know, the integrity of your brand is at play too. Because you could be put on a site that you don't want to be put on, like, a porn site or

something like that. Yeah, I'll be honest with you. I'm not overly worried about that. I think fear positioning isn't real. Like, I'm less worried about showing up on a porn site. Like, if someone's like, you're on a porn site. I'm like, Well, why are you on the porn site? Like, you know, that's not super hard. Like, I'm not overly worried about that. I'm more worried about did you spend money to make what you want it to happen happen? For example, you know, Spike, I often when I do things for whining text.com Everyone should sign up, or be friends, I'm usually buying things that are more expensive CPMs because the premium nature of the cost indicates sometimes not. But when I do my process of common sense looking at data, it often indicates high value awareness, like actually consumed information. The only reason I love social media is because the ads are kind of integrated into the flow of consumption. Half the ads I'm consuming on social today. I don't even realize it as an ad in the first 10 seconds because people are getting better at creative. Every ad I see on traditional internet. And every ad I see on television I know is that

right? The minute you see it you're like they're trying to get screwed the last like this weekend

I like watched full fledge thinking it was just regular content. But wait a minute, they're selling the spaghetti strainer. Wait a minute, this is a ketchup like people are like people are starting to catch on to like what I believe and that's exciting to see because ship that's the way I'd rather buy stuff. I'd rather buy it by being entertained or educated by the creative.

So you know, one of the things that I like to talk about are branding, advertising and marketing. I like to call it BAM. Thank Emeril Lagasse for that. But it's like the trifecta of growth for businesses. Does one have more long term value than the other in your eyes?

Of course brand. Okay, tell me why? Well, because I don't even know why I bought these sneakers for probably $1,000 Like that swoosh made me do it and Virgil Abloh and off white made me do it. It wasn't an ad I didn't see an ad wasn't. You know, marketing definitely wasn't sales. It will