The Internet Changed… And Most People Missed It

@GaryVeeTheGarageSaler, @GaryVeeWine, @GaryVeeJetsFan, Because we live in interest media, not social media, you do not need followers to get views.

This is a profound shift of the last 36 months.

The only way to grow a business 2026 is to win on relevance with as many different consumer segmentations as you possibly can.

And the only way to do that is to drive down the creative process that actually measures creative and stop wasting working media dollars on dumb shit.

The thing that really drives me, um, in these last 15 years of running this agency and working with such substantial companies is the stunning lack of common sense

that— and I mean this— the stunning lack of common sense that comes into the boardroom that I thought about 15 years ago.

I remember my first couple meetings when I started the company, I called my mom.

I'm like, "Mom, I'm a genius."

And then I realized about 6 months in, I wasn't a genius, that employees of large corporations had to abide by scoring systems that oftentimes were not correlated to the truth of what

was happening in the market.

I stand here today, warm welcome, the good vibes you're all giving me, on the back of having the great luxury of the last, really, even though I'm 50, I've kind of been in business

for 40 years of my life, 'cause I was a kid that did sports card shows in the malls of New Jersey, worked in a retail liquor store when I was 14, 15 years old.

I've never had any North Star that looked like a brand lift study or an MMM or a can lion or reports or worst of all, the subjective opinion of my boss.

This is gonna be a good session.

I've always had the luxury of the way my life played out that there was only one judge and jury, which was the consumer.

So we've built a very large agency over the last 14 years, and it's because when we're fortunate enough to work with someone like yourselves, I do not think of you as the customer.

I think of your customer as the customer, and I'm willing to lose you as a customer than to compromise on some corporate bullcrap to justify us sticking around.

I have no interest in wining and dining and playing on politics or relationships or fake proxies or AdAge saying that the video was good or a can lion.

I am a businessman who happens to love marketing because marketing is the offense of a business, right?

Now, marketing is the offense of a business, yet there are businesses, much like many that are represented here, where you're really a sales organization, not a marketing organization.

and that's cool, I love B2B.

In fact, it's really cool to be here.

Me and my agency have disproportionately been the loudest advocate publicly over the last 7 or 8 years of how remarkable LinkedIn is as a marketing platform.

It scares me to my bone

how much opportunity there is for many of the business units here that do B2B work on LinkedIn.

You own LinkedIn.

And you don't do it.

So,

yeah, I guess that's it.

See you later.

Let's talk about a lot of different things that are kind of framed up in that opening.

One, our industry is riddled from a marketing standpoint with spending an extraordinary amount of money on guessing an idea and then spending even more money distributing it into the

world in places where people don't see it.

Right, our currency, the way I'm sure, and I have not looked under the hood, but I've been around long enough, the way your media infrastructure in this company is structured, you are

buying potential reach, not actualized reach.

We must talk about this.

So many of the metrics that you are scored on, GRPs, impressions, my opening line, Your common sense as human beings, you all know it's not actually being seen.

But our reporting is structured that way, and so you're stuck in acting that way.

And this is something that keeps me up at night, which is, at what point is our industry, Fortune 500 land, gonna get to a place where, as a corporation, there's a staggering amount

of talent that I am looking at right now that isn't able to actually bring their talents to the table

'cause you're reverse engineering into the reports that are fake

versus using your actual human strategy that you know is true.

Yeah!

You feeling it?

You feeling this?

You know what the best part is?

And I love you for that, that felt very good.

I feel like a reverend.

Can I get a hallelujah?

Hallelujah!

Again, back to that joke I made about the phone call I made to my mom, which I made, and you all know it.

So where, what, how?

Like, we must get out of this rhythm.

And here, I'm gonna go very human with you real quick.

Here's my biggest concern, 'cause

the company's the company, and this is a remarkable company.

You know, I'm 50 and grew up in a tech kind of way.

You can imagine how I feel about this company.

It's very legendary to me, and I really am very proud of the company.

I think the last decade has been really fruitful, and leadership has done a really good job.

It's been very impressive on so many fronts, but I'm actually more worried about the human beings that are sitting in this room.

We are going through one of the most substantial revolutions in technology history.

You all know that, right?

You're at the forefront with 7 or 8 other superscalers of creating this technology, but you are the humans within it that might be affected by the thing you're making, right?

What I'm concerned about is not even the intensity of what AI means.

I'm just worried about that the gig is starting to be up in marketing, meaning I spend so much of my time with the biggest private equity firms in the world and board members of companies

that look like this, and their temperament towards CMOs and marketers is not in a good place.

I probably spend more than 5 hours a week between 2 and 7 meetings a week at this point in my career where board members, CEOs, CFOs, activist investors, Private equity firms just rail

on their complete shock at how bad marketing is, and they don't understand a word that's coming out of the CMO's mouth.

That day of reckoning is coming.

I've been talking about this for 20 years publicly.

I've only been talking to the real decision makers about this in the last 12 to 18 months.

I know the walls are closing in.

My concern is that many of you know actually what's going on, what to actually do, but you're keeping your mouths shut because you're in a corporate environment, and my point of view

on life is it's so much more fun to die on your own sword

than to die on someone else's, and I believe we're going into the half decade.

How many people in here are marketers?

Raise your hands.

Like in the market, raise it high, please don't be sad, I'm a marketer.

Everybody who just raised their hands, I think we're going into the 5-year window where there's gonna be substantial change, and I don't want anyone who just raised their hands to be

penalized to being on the wrong side of history, because that's how you show up on your Microsoft Teams or in the office, but not what you actually think, and I came here

in a very real way with the hopes that one of you is hearing me and you have the courage.

I'm lucky.

I own my own company.

I do not have a board.

I have no interest in selling my company.

It's not public.

So when I do things and it doesn't work out, I just yell at myself in the mirror.

You, I have empathy for it.

I am able to be aggressive in boardrooms and in meetings.

But you can respectfully and calmly, without undermining your boss or hurting feelings, communicate why you don't think buying programmatic banner ads is gonna move the business.

Or why you think buying a television commercial for the kind of money it is is asinine when you're trying to reach a B2B audience, and I know you paid a big fee for some sort of thing

for the 30-second thing, but no one on earth gives a crap about it.

So I think you need to start doing that, because what's happening in the next 5 years in our industry is going to address that.

So now that we've laid that foundation down, let me tell you what I think.

Let me tell you what I think is the biggest opportunity for the room.

I'll start with B2B 'cause it represents so much.

There is something that I believe has formed in the last 3 to 4 years called the mid-funnel.

The mid-funnel that I and our organization defines is organic social media creative.

Organic.

Creative that is posted and does not have media support tied to it upfront.

In this room, it is shocking how important LinkedIn, Twitter X, Substack, and Beehive are.

The opportunity is extraordinary.

Given the size and scale of a B2B conversion, it only takes one remarkable piece of creative to really change the calculus and make it ROI positive.

The key, though, is most organizations, 'cause we come from a television history, and honestly every other medium, outdoor, direct mail, we come from a place where we think in working

media terms along with the creative.

I would argue that for the last 70, 80 years in marketing, that working media dollars

have been used to hide bad creative.

And I believe we are going into the era, we are in it now, and I'd like to get you fully in it as quickly as possible 'cause it will be good for your business, of the era where working

media will be used to amplify good creative.

Good creative is is no longer gonna be judged by the most senior people in this room, by a fake focus group, by some bullcrap technology that measures creative.

It is being decided by the views achieved when you post it in social.

Here's why.

Somewhere about 4 to 5 years ago, we left social media.

I would argue that social media itself is dead as we all grew up and knew it.

I believe we are now in interest media.

As all of you know,

when you open your app of choice in this room and you go on social, you are now currently seeing content that is relevant to you of what you're into right now, right?

You're no longer getting your weird cousin's post,

not your friend from high school, not somebody or account that you used to be into.

You're getting content that is mapping to what you're currently paying attention to, right?

I know you all have political points of view on all of this.

I'm gonna put that on the shelf for a second.

This is very important.

Here's why.

That algorithm from LinkedIn to Snapchat Spotlight to Twitter X to Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and YouTube Shorts, all of them over the last 4 years, those algos have

been written more and more and more towards relevance.

If you're a marketer in here, and many things have changed, but what has not changed is that relevance leads to consideration leads to purchase.

For the first time in the history of marketing, the platforms that we are marketing on are aligned in our interest.

In 1992, if Microsoft made a bad television commercial creative-wise, CBS and ABC and ESPN could give a crap.

So would the Wall Street Journal.

So would Bloomberg Magazine.

So would Westwood One Radio.

So is the United States Postal Service.

They could care less what the creative was.

They wanted your money.

The platforms that we love to razz, because you know in society we've gotten very good at blaming everybody but ourselves,

those platforms for us in business are actually fully aligned with our business objectives.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack want to keep all of us on their platform for as long as humanly possible.

They are writing to keep us on.

They will show people more and more, and this will continue over the next 3, 4 years, more and more they will show you what you want to see with the hopes that you stay on.

When we make creative that is relevant to that developer, that CIO, the CTO, procurement, CFO, CEO, when we make content creative that is actually relevant and conducive to the platform

we're creating on, contextually in format, and maybe even in texture of culture, that creative has a high propensity to reach that audience.

For the first time ever in marketing, creative is creating the reach.

This is incredibly important and has never existed before.

The first time I saw it actually was in 2010.

I was an early investor in Tumblr.

You guys remember Tumblr?

In fact, if I was making videos back then, it'd be one of my worst videos.

I called my brother after I invested in it, I said, "Bro, I just invested in a company that's gonna be bigger than Facebook and Twitter combined."

And the reason I was so excited about Tumblr was it was the first time I saw a platform that was based on interest, not on social.

And I was in a really funny age when the social media exploded.

I was in my early 30s, I had already just lived through the high school-college transition where you knew by your late 20s, 30s, your social graph was changing.

And so the theory of followers, and I just also, you know, back to my backstory, I grew up on email marketing.

So social made sense to me very quickly, 'cause it was a different version of email marketing.

How many people here have done email marketing in their career?

Raise your hands.

Just raise it high, I just wanna see.

There's some youngsters in here, let me, watch this.

In 1997,

in '97, I had 100,000 people on a wine email newsletter, and had 92% open rates.

And I bring that up because I'm gonna tie that together.

It wasn't 'cause I was a genius, it was— How many people over 48 in this room?

Raise your hands.

Friends, can you tell the neighbor next to you,

us 48 and older, back in the late '90s, we read every single email word for word.

We still thought it was the post office.

Us marketers hadn't ruined email yet.

It's what we do.

We ruin everything.

I'm proud of it.

So the reason I bring that up is I was affected.

I built my dad's liquor store with no money in 5 minutes from $3 to $65 million in revenue on email.

And Google AdWords.

The day Google AdWords came out, I bought every wine term you could ever imagine, including the word wine, all the way down to Leonetti Cabernet 1997 at the time, for 5 cents a click.

There is always an underpriced arbitrage in marketing.

Procter Gamble today, in 2026, is still one of, if not the biggest consumer packaged goods company, And they outspent everyone in the early '60s on television when television was underpriced

and the OGs still believed in radio and print.

Amazon, your neighbor,

was the leading advertiser on Google AdWords in the first 5 years by 5x.

Number 2 was eBay.

They're still here today.

There's always an underpriced marketing behavior, especially when big corporations spend all their money on yesterday's reports.

Today's disproportionate opportunity and underpriced marketing behavior, the ones that build consumer brands like Liquid Death and Poppi and all the things you know, is happening in

organic social first as the starting point to the marketing mix.

The starting point.

Any business unit, if I sat down with you right now, tell me what you're trying to accomplish, create 20 to 30 consumer segmentations based on that, gender, race, income level, I'm

talking about the B2B people, who they are as humans, interests, create those segmentations and literally go directly into creative production and start making pictures, videos, written

word to try to win on relevance with them.

Post it across the 7 to 10 platforms for consumer, Xbox, others, B2B, 3, 4, 5, little different, but you can still play a little bit, and then watch if the creative was actually relevant

on quant and qual to who you're trying to reach,

and then when there's been true validation of creative, The creative has earned the right to get working media dollars.

This is the underpriced behavior of today.

This is called common sense if you have a half a brain.

This is what zero corporations in the Fortune 500 set are doing today.

And so that is the opportunity, that's what excites me at the end of the day.

Now, there's levels to the game.

For example, one thing that really excites me, which is on the complete opposite side of modern AI technology, all the way over here,

is Analog Experiential Marketing.

Now let me tell you why.

I am obsessed with this company's ability to scale, but tweak strategically, It's experiential marketing.

Experiential is interesting to me because I no longer view any experiential event, a B2B conference like CES, all the way to sponsoring a Seahawks thing that you do outside, none of

them, to me, is now an experiential event.

It is a production day for social creative that happens to be an experiential event.

When we do it at our agency, and we take it over from an experiential agency, even the creative of the event is with the thought of what it's going to look like in social.

How do we make it dynamic?

Let's build a 10-story Xbox, 'cause that will be insane.

Obviously we could do that in AI for like a dollar, but we'll talk about that later.

And then how do we treat that day?

You know, you're doing this, I heard over dinner, you're doing this AI tour around the world.

Every minute should be filmed.

Everything should be post-produced.

Now the key is post-producing that content, whether it's experiential or it's us working together

on net new assets, putting executives out in front, which we need to get into on X or on podcasts, The key to the game today, the ultimate skill in the modern underpriced marketing

game is what is called a VEDiter, a views editor.

This is a human

that has the ability to understand what the difference is between LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts, two unbelievably important platforms for all of you.

YouTube Shorts, because it is feeding Gemini's LLM, and will show up in AEO and GEO for every business unit here.

And no one is lost on what the consumer behavior is going to be with Agentic AI.

And obviously you've got Copilot and your own thing, but Gemini will have plenty of market share and they will wall garden it, meaning they will take their content from YouTube and

Shorts as much as possible to sucker us all into making content there.

The key is a views editor because this is a human being that understands at all times what the algorithms are favoring.

We call this internally PAC, Platforms, Algorithms, and Culture.

Does LinkedIn, I'll give you LinkedIn.

LinkedIn right now is favoring images over video by comparison to just 3 months ago.

6 months ago, you could put up a crappy video on LinkedIn and it would get views 'cause they were favoring video 'cause they wanted to stand it up and learn the data.

And then over time, once the platforms are shifting to what they need to do, then the merit of the creative really takes over.

But in moments, at all moments, there's opportunity to figure out, is it this long, is it that long, is it a carousel ad?

If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see that I'm doing picture then video second.

Often.

I'm not doing that for fun.

This company has to become remarkable at understanding what content on what platform in what way post-production to maximize organic views is religion.

And it is a real skill.

We have 100 employees at my cockamanian small agency who spend their entire life understanding what 9 platforms' algorithms are doing.

How many does Microsoft have doing that?

These are the questions that keep me up at night and excite me.

This mid-funnel is extraordinary.

It's important.

And if you really get into the philosophy, you'll understand why CFOs love our model more than CMOs.

The amount of money that is saved when you stop spending working media dollars against creative that no one cares about is extraordinary.

In fact, this universe is going to change the marketing mix.

The working/nonworking dollars are gonna shift because of that.

Our most progressive clients have literally gone from 85/15, 80/20 working/nonworking to, like, two of our most progressive clients who've been on a 3-year journey are getting dangerously

close to 50/50.

Because what you start working on, friends, I don't know who here pays attention to this part of the marketing procurement, or I don't know exactly who's watching at home,

we start working on effectiveness, not efficiency.

We stop rewarding our media agencies for cheaper CPMs,

for efficiency.

I don't know if you know this, when you, in real life, when you go outside, when you pay less for stuff, it's usually crappier.

Yet, we've become obsessed in marketing to pay less for our CPMs.

Do you have any idea what media you're buying?

The black box of these things showing up at 3:43 in the morning on the Oxygen Network.

But you're pumped at home.

Because your CPM's hit and you're bonusing and incentivizing your media agency on efficiency, which is slang term for really, really, really crappy media.

And so that's the stuff I'm thinking about.

Let me tell you how the mid-funnel works.

Let's just go very, very

example-oriented.

We're trying to reach a developer to use our cloud computing or some other product or an enterprise to switch to Outlook or something of that nature or our suites.

You put out the content.

We normally, because of what we do in a B2B environment, we normally get 500 views on our videos.

Just who we are.

We're not Alex Earle or MrBeast.

We normally get 500 views.

This piece of content, because we keep looking at the qual and quant of the content we make every day and the machine gets smarter, you know, you start posting 12, 13, 14 pieces of

content a day,

you start getting really interesting data, you start getting smarter.

Makes sense, right?

The more you put out, the more context, the more quant, the more qual, your next piece of content can get better.

Now you put out something that got 47,000 views.

When you take that piece of creative and you send it from the mid-funnel to the lower funnel, and you take that creative that got 47,000 views, you add a slight tweak of performance

to it, we call it brandformance, right?

You're putting brand content in the mid-funnel, but it did well, you're taking it lower, you're giving it a call to action, a phone number, an email to a salesperson, whatever call

to action you want, and you run media against that.

When that out CACs and out LTV and ROASes your best A/B practices, the entire organization starts to change its tone and tenor, and that is exactly what's happening at Scale.

When you also take that video and you take it up to brand, whether you use that video as the brief to a campaign or that video itself becomes the campaign versus guessing on a big campaign.

You can see why the mid-funnel's flexibility really changes the calculus.

A couple other little things I'll talk about before we do a little Q&A or whatever we're gonna do here.

One, podcasts, Twitter X, LinkedIn, Beehive, Substack, these are the weapons of choice for the executives in this room.

The firepower of the engineers, of the product people, like just the sheer brilliance of humanity on these products that sits in this organization.

That has not been utilized is a humongous miss.

Now, I get it.

There's corporate comms, there's fear, I get all that stuff.

And let's call a spade a spade, some of these engineers should not be on video.

But what's funny is I said that for a reason.

In fact, that reaction is why they should.

It's almost like the weirdness of it all is like epic.

You know, like the more they don't look at the camera, the more I'm into it.

You know?

We must start to activate some of the talents here.

Again, we don't decide if that engineer is good or not or on brand.

We make the content and we get it into the world.

Here's how we get it into the world, friends.

We must adapt the P&H process.

Let me explain what the P&H process is to all of you, 'cause this is about to liberate a lot of you.

P&H stands for platforms and handles.

One of the biggest issues this company faces to do what I wanna do, so for example, somebody ask me how many pieces of GaryVee content will come out tomorrow.

How many?

412.

Tomorrow, my personal brand will post 412 social media posts.

1,000 social media posts across 10 platforms and 81 different handles.

@GaryVeeTheGarageSaler, @GaryVeeWine, @GaryVeeJetsFan.

By the way, I'm very upset with the Seahawks and you guys right now.

This Sam Darnold thing, he's a great friend, but really pisses me off as a Jets fan.

Anyway, sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

I'm actually excited.

You know what's so sad?

I'm excited about it.

It's the best quarterback player we're gonna have in the last decade.

Anyway, sorry.

@OutlookToday, @Excel, you know, @Accelerating,

@MicrosoftToday,

Because we live in interest media, not social media, you do not need followers to get views.

This is a profound shift of the last 36 months.

As you all know, comms, product, marketing, everyone's fighting to get into it.

And then, even worse, everyone's treating the Instagram grid like it's a Super Bowl spot.

We're so precious if it's on brand, as if you're the god or the queen of brand and your subjective opinion is right.

We are getting destroyed by our lack of humility, lack of curiosity, lack of consumer-centricality, and by thinking that we should be marketing based on a book written in 1991 on how

brands grow that was written before the internet, and your founder of this company said the internet was a fad.

And this book was written 4 years before that.

And that is your marketing principles.

The only way to grow a business in 2026 is to win on relevance with as many different consumer segmentations as you possibly can.

And the only way to do that is to drive down the cost of creative.

Create a process that actually measures creative.

And stop wasting working media dollars on dumb shit.

When you create a framework for every business unit here that has 7, 10 handles across maybe 5 or 6, 7 platforms, you're now playing with 80 places for content to go.

This leads to a framework where we don't waste time in meetings debating content.

We realize that us debating a piece of content in a boardroom is more expensive than us posting it.

It's also less strategic.

We are pontificating or being political

versus actually getting quant and qual feedback from the end consumer.

With an algorithm, that is written for relevance.

That's it.

That is what we need to stand up.

That needs to become our religion.

And the growth behind it is extraordinary.

When you realize that all of these pieces of content are feeding the LLM models,

you start to really understand how important this moment is.

The fact that you doing proper marketing in 2026 that the byproduct of that is enabling the GEO and AEO battle of 2029 becomes incredibly intoxicating.

When you realize you're just tired of sitting in a room and debating the color of blue that you're gonna use in a commercial that no one's gonna watch.

When you realize that someone's subjective opinion or politicking because they're trying to suppress you because they're worried you're more talented than them, when you realize all

these things,

and you realize there's this opportunity to actually be consumer-centric regardless of who your consumer is.

And when you realize that the algorithms are getting so strong that when you're making the nerdiest of nerdy piece of content that is fully made for only the Fortune 50 CIOs,

and that when you post it, it has the ability to find those people, and then even if it doesn't find those exact people, you get enough quantum qual feedback that you feel confident

running the media on LinkedIn against those people?

Because to remind you, they probably didn't tell you, LinkedIn still has like pre-Cambridge Analytica-like targeting.

I can literally target the CIOs of companies directly.

It is literally the best ad product, and if you don't know, the word on the Madison Avenue ad world is LinkedIn ads are expensive because they have a high floor and not the same bidability.

'Cause it should, 'cause the customers on it are more valuable.

So that's all I got.

Thank you.