How To Successfully Run An Advertising Agency Business

it's better off to make 90 000 or 70 000 a year and be ecstatic than make 165 or 219 and be [ __ ] miserable and until we redefine success based on being at peace and smiling when you wake the [ __ ] up we will continue to be confused and that's why i'm all in because i'm going to be dead forever let's talk about how you especially since thinking back to when you founded vaynermedia how you built a team that you could make sure was not just a bunch of people who looked like you thought like you uh how did you bring that intention to how you built the interview uh by being a dictator on the issue right like to me it was funny you said that when you were talking i was listening when you set up the question you said the let's talk about the let's mention the difficult questions or the difficult things and in my brain i laughed i'm like it's actually incredibly easy i just tell rob our chief creative officer that he can't hire a this or that like it's no different than the cfo says you can't spend more money than you have or you'll go out of business i just tell him and i just tell everybody like you know i think you know people get very spooked by quotas or bad or this and that like intent is everything and so for me i was very fortunate i grew up my entire life where my mom was my hero i grew up in incredibly diverse realities and i didn't you know i didn't come from corporate so when i started vayner we had crazy all over i mean the first 39 people that worked in the agency didn't have a day of agency experience they came from all over the place and you know i think it's it's really not hard i i'm always fascinated when people come up with excuses of like we can't find this or this and that i'm like like it's just not true and you know i really am happy that it's such a conversation at such a high level because it's changing behavior and that's how comms work and that makes me happy but to be very transparent it's just because i want it to be that way like everything that is wrong at vaynermedia is 100 my fault like not 99 it's just the way it's the truth right like i hire the chief strategy officer and wanda like may make a hire but i'm the one who hired her and i trust my people thus i don't know 99 of what's actually going on every second but in the macro it's me and thus if i want something to be a certain way that's on me whether it's the work whether it's the way we staff the way we pay where we are in the world and so i take on that accountability that's the price of entry to be a ceo we are here obviously to talk today about disrupting uh marketing destruction in this industry uh i feel like youtuber are great examples in the sense that gary disrupted uh this industry from coming in from outside right you've disrupted it from the inside um especially coming in from a major holding company agency and starting new um first tell me when you had this opportunity to start mischief what did you want to fix about the experience you had at agencies and what you felt that being able to build it from the ground up that you would be able to fix that had always bugged you about this place well there's one moment i remember when i was trying to figure out what i wanted to do and you know where i wanted to work i really couldn't find the one place i was super excited about going to and i thought that was sad this industry should have a place that people aspire to work to and when i was researching looking around what agencies were doing what i found no fixed address which is our sister agency and then a line on their website which really changed everything for me now mine was simply what would you do if you weren't afraid and that was so liberating i was like that is what i want to build an agency around is this idea what would you do if you weren't afraid that's like giving people the freedom to do what's right and not have to worry about you know people coming down on them if um if it doesn't turn out or you know if the consequences are misread whatever that is it's like let's just do it and have fun be smart about it and see how great we can be when no one's in our way gary uh you mentioned often that certain things just made no sense to you when you came into this industry because uh you know you were able to come in from the outside and say why do you do this you talked a lot obviously about the split between media and creative that happened in the 80s which a lot of advertising professionals have grown to regret over the years and that you've been working to address what else did you notice coming into your like that makes no sense i'm going to not do that and do you feel the vaynermedia has been able to follow through on being

different i mean i definitely feel like we're different um as to answer that part in the front part i mean 2009's a trillion years ago right when i came in i didn't understand why pepsi wasn't on twitter and so everything for me early on was why do the fortune 500 companies not understand the level of actualized consumption on these social media platforms why do they not understand that facebook fan pages and twitter are a really big deal and this thing tumblr's coming and seemingly could be a big deal and youtube's a really big deal and why do they accept these reports that say this is how many people consumed it when these reports are clearly flawed if you really break them down and why do we justify all of it on internal mmms that are flawed and why do we justify based on headlines and awards this is subjective creativity which is amazing creative is the variable of success but the process of getting there it's similar it was very similar to me uh in the way that i saw education there is nothing more important in the world than education it's how we move the needle if you really think about it the way we have packaged and sold education in today's world isn't grounded in common sense to the world we live in that was my observation in the creative industry there's nothing more important than the creative because it's the variable of why someone decides they like something or not the way we made it the costs associated with it and the way we distribute it didn't make sense for me in 2009 what's scary for me is in 2022 the world that i saw coming is very clear to everybody it's here in a lot of ways right and yet a lot of it is still being done in similar ways so most of it um didn't make sense and um and that's why we've gone about it differently greg what did you have been able to recruit some really stellar talents and veteran talents and rising talent when they when you first reached out to them when they first found you uh because you did not just hire all your old friends right you easily could have if it starts an agency they got a great network you could pack it with all these folks you worked with the family and everybody you did not do that what did you hear from that time you're welcome to mention anyone by name if you want to shout them out but uh what did you hear from them about why they were excited about coming to mischief no i think from day one we created this chip as a place where people can come and do the best works of their lives and we'll get out of the way we'll just create this atmosphere that just emanates you know freedom and people just picked up on that they thought that was interesting i think you know when we first started we didn't have a staff and it was me and um young and kevin were two people i had worked with we just focused on work let's put some work out in the world that says this is what mischief is and we never wavered from that so you know i think our best new business best recruiting tool has always been the work we do for our clients so getting that out there and then having people like ollie you know push our message in such fun interesting ways that um i think people were just kind of naturally drawn to it felt kind of like a breath of fresh air i think in the world where everything has been kind of over thought and sanitized and you know i just felt like a lot of agency communications had gone through the whole system by the time you're sitting today so like it kind of like gave ollie the freedom goat don't ask for permission you know just just pretend like you would you're you know you would do what you would do if uh if you're a person on an agency and that's kind of you know made a big difference for us it's shaped our brand anyway uh quick note that we will have time for q a um to at least take a few questions uh so be thinking about them i'm sure you've got several uh gary i do want to talk about uh the way that you have built vaynermedia it's you and i uh spoke on a podcast once about uh when you were doing just so many super bowl ads and i felt like that was the year where a lot of people like oh gary's doing some fun stuff with social media they get it's a social agency they do tweets and then all of a sudden you're doing uh how many is like four in one year maybe more super bowl we've done eight in three years eight super lives in three years and uh and that was like the moment that i felt like a lot of agencies were like oh [ __ ] they're real uh what did you feel like going in terms of disruption of moving into this space that we're gonna do really big really bold work that's gonna redefine social that's going to also just get into these very traditional spaces what did you want to do to make sure you didn't just keep making more of the kind of work that's already been out there i didn't think of it that way i thought

of it as when a client pays you should do the thing that they are hoping will happen that's the only way i've ever thought about it i'll ever think about it thus make work that is actually consumed and inspires consideration to do the thing whether that's raise cap raise charity whether it's sell peanuts whatever it is do that super bowl is the most underpriced media in the world 60 to 100 million people will actually watch that thing that is profound social tick tock linkedin on the organic side facebook right now on the media side because of some of the changes with ios 145 we will always follow the actual consumption of the consumer and we will then try to make creative that is contextual to the distribution in that arena and we will try to make as much of it as possible so that we can actually be relevant to the many different psychographic cohorts that exist in society and that's all i ever think about there is nothing else it's it was never like we need to become like this or that uh and it goes in both directions you know the agencies right now are like especially with how i've been playing out in nft land a lot of people come up to me like gary we're building a metaverse for our brand i'm like there's nobody there not yet meta's on its way oculus is really further along in some ways but at the scale of the cost of building in decentraland or sandbox like to us it's only about attention engineering attention and then making things that people actually want to consume not things that we want to make and that level of humility is really needed in this industry greg i don't know how often you or if really you've talked about the experience of your transition i'll let you uh decide how personal you want to get about this but i do think you have a fascinating example i i've been in this situation i'm sure many people in this audience have been in the situation of losing your job which is gutting in a way that if you've not experienced it um it's very hard to describe um but then you really just rose from the ashes in this really amazing way but you were at a really difficult point in your career where you could have just walked away uh but you decided to do something different tell us a little bit about where your head was at in that moment and what advice you would give to anyone who ends up in a situation like that yeah it's never easy i've said that but you know if you think back to march 2020 everyone was in the state of shock everyone we were experiencing something that no one had ever experienced a massive pandemic with lockdowns and financial crisis that we had no precedent before so it wasn't like it was just me right so when it happened i kind of like took a step back and go okay the world has shifted i can feel it so the next thing i do i want to be in the part of the world the way it's going versus trying to retrofit something that has been you know rooted in the past and trying to keep up so i almost saw this a lot of this is liberating you know there's a moment of like oh [ __ ] now what am i gonna do and um is this it for me and then that didn't last for less than a day i was just otherwise i was like okay i have this blank slate in front of me and no one has built anything based on what's happening today because we're still in it so what if i could be the one that built something that would felt like it was of the moment for tomorrow and just the way we work agencies felt i felt that clients wanted that too immediately when we started meeting with clients it just got the sense that they felt we were somewhat refreshing because we didn't approach meetings the same way we're just you know we're all just even clients i think we're feeling like we just need to be human at this moment we don't need to be corporate robots and i think that of of the times i think everything kind of came together to form mischief in the way it did and um you know we still continue to do that just let's never we try to eliminate the phrase that's how we always did it you know as soon as you get free yourself from that and just go okay maybe we did it that way but today's a different day you know so just keep it going uh we are about to get to q a uh if you don't have any questions we're just gonna spend 15 minutes talking about baby nut and puppy monkey baby so um i encourage you to have some uh but before we get to that gary i did want to ask about comfort zones i know you're not a person who's always been held back by such things but a lot of people in this industry do feel like they're constantly having to press themselves out of a comfort zone of a business that you could have stayed in the businesses you launched at the beginning you could have sold them and just gone to mayorka or whatever but you kept launching new

businesses vayner nft is that do you find yourself in pushing yourself to always try something that's going to be a little different a little harder than the last thing you built and what would you tell people who maybe feel like they're not pushing themselves hard i don't oh i don't think about it thanks brother as um thank you uh pushing myself at all i think about it from the standpoint of i want to be happy and so you know when i was seven and everybody went outside it was fun for me to make a lemonade stand that was my dna some people like to sing some like golf some like cooking some love music you know i just really think it's cool to play business i genuinely enjoy it and so it's not like i want to like push myself to win you know like i love competition and all those things and business but it's genuinely fun i'm curious i'm like i wonder if we can do this i'm curious if this would work but what does drive me in the decisions of the new companies we start in the holding company is this is something that we can do better at a better price which is valuable for what the ecosystem wants um this is something that i think consumers are going to do at scale um so i reverse engineer from like what makes me happy and is uh trying new things you know to me my creativity comes in operations and starting new stuff and trying to operate into success um so many of my successful friends are like man if you ever just focused on one thing you would [ __ ] and i'm like i don't want to focus on one thing i'd rather fail or do less success than than not do my art and my art is trying to stand up different businesses try different things i really enjoy it so you asked me what makes gary interesting i think we learned a lot about that today but um i would say you know haven't thought about it it's like gary is 100 in everything he does you never see him going through the motions man you're just like fully committed even in every conversation so you know that's not right you know what it is back to like everybody like on some real human [ __ ] with each other like you're gonna be dead forever right when you die it will be dead forever you have not been alive for a very long time like before you were born earth was really [ __ ] happening for a long ass time we are here for a [ __ ] nanosecond unfortunately that will be and you may be surprised me saying this because for me i'm gonna do me regardless unfortunately the world even in france unfortunately the world works a lot we work a lot if you eliminate sleep out of your life cycle and think about how much of your entire life will be work it's a high percentage stay-at-home mom and dad did it work right to not fight for that to be at least good [ __ ] solid and what are you thinking about if you dislike it like if you are genuinely not happy waking up doing what you're doing you literally need to stand up right now call your boss and quit i'll lend you some money you'll pay me back and so to that point i'm all in because i'm incredibly logical about this it's a nanosecond to compromise just peace of mind and this is why we need multiple different conversations you know any people could start great companies as well if they just lived within their means greg may have the capacity with his co-founders to build a very big agency that may create a certain level of finance right but it blows my mind that people don't realize they could start something that may not pay you millions but it might pay you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and if like how i just don't understand how people don't understand that it's better off to make 90 000 or 70 000 a year and be ecstatic than make 165 or 219 and be [ __ ] miserable and until we redefine success based on being at peace and smiling when you wake the [ __ ] up we will continue to be confused and that's why i'm all in because i'm going to be dead forever and this is why it's going to do a panel of dairy bankers it's just true i'm going to take a break from moderating to have a little existential spiral and

some questions starting with one of my favorite people on earth when you get the mic just introduce yourself and then tell us your question uh nate nichols founder creative director of pallet group and co-founder of allyship and action and i love this panel because i'm motivated and inspired to be on it next year my man and so i've been running the shop for 10 years and i'm clearly not a white dude and i have non-traditional backgrounds so garyvee i'm looking at you yes sir and i'm just wondering because i have made millions in my tenure as an agency operator but there's still this gap right from going to the six figure budgets to the half million to the million dollar budgets right and since i've been on this battle for like 10 years how do you go and transition from you know these quarter million dollar budgets to like getting to the half a million to eight super bowls in a year because i got in this game like you gonna do super bowl ads so where do we go from here i think there's so many variables to that right one there's the external and keep the mic just because we make you know first of all on the record 13 years i've been in this business some of the most fun satisfying conversations i've had on whatsapp by the way i'm always like where the [ __ ] are you in the world that we have to be on what's that um but i really enjoy your thoughtfulness the answer is uh it comes in the form of sales and sales marketing and so i think for you personally if we were just chopping solo which is how i'm gonna answer it i always want you to make more content personally that's how i feel you get there i think you need to do more back to i'm looking at you garyvee when i watch when you do put out stuff and obviously you put out stuff to get us to think socially and things that nature but i just want to see more what if campaign content from you on linkedin like yo you see what prox is doing if uggs did this would happen i think a lot more people who've got ideas should put them out for free which oh every time i tell agency owners this they get mad at me like i get paid for this [ __ ] i'm like cool keep doing what you're doing then i for you i think it's a content play i think you're incredibly articulate you've got charisma i mean you're pretty [ __ ] good looking which never hurts and but what what's most interesting to me is you've got good ideas and i've watched how you've navigated when you do conferences and things that nature i think you need to put out more content about marketing and creative ideas because the serendipity of those ideas will find people and it will give you more at-bats the world is about needs to do its part to give more at-bats we all can sense that combo but we have to go also into here and say i've got to create more app ads i believe content specifically on tick tock and linkedin for you around your ideas will be a lead gen to new business ones that lead to seven minutes thank you for that thank you buddy uh if you meet one person at this festival meet nate nicholas i agree what an amazing guy thank you all right who else has questions for gregor gary grayson will bring you hi i'm mark i work here at whaler um i could have started two part questions so you mentioned the metaverse and like no one's there so you don't go there what's that balance of innovation like when you're thinking with clients who are like i know no one's there but i want to try and learn what's that what's the balance between that for clients it's different than for uh for each for ourselves right i was watching crypto kitties in 2017 and saying okay holy [ __ ] that's exactly what i thought ethereum could do when i bought in 15 but i had to wait until 21 to get loud because there was enough scale starting to happen and my intuition was like it's about to really happen right tik tok there's unlimited content from me on musically i was watching it so i think i always remind my team our responsibility is to make it be meaningful for the client if you're doing a metaverse again in vr metaverse activation for a b2b activation at the world cup for your vip clients if you're a brand i can wrap my head around that they're going to go to qatar they're going to put out that's a b to b activation if you're going to say hey we're going to sell millions of this or everyone's going to know it's up to us to respect how much consumption is actually happening so i think the balance is internally we have to stay curious test learn understand but if we're going to ask a client to spend lots of money on something we need to make sure that there's actual consumption and that is by the way it's so fascinating when i come to this town and talk about television commercials

because i've been very firm on where i sit on this it's it's nothing other than actual consumption for me and the cost associated with the consumption that's it it's a very binary game i just want people to actually see it that's a very important part that this industry needs to talk more about i think agencies have to be ready before their audiences are because we have to be there when they come and networks only work if there's other people involved and so right now this is the learning process and i will say this in maybe seven years more people will be on the metaverse than they're on uh internet facebook or whatever that they were doing 10 years ago because i have a 12 year old daughter and she was born and raised in another version like roblox and every one of her kids are proficient at and demand first so i'm learning from them but they will grow up as a second nature that's just the other place they play the place they live and see concerts and things like that so i think the people in this conference are doing due diligence by learning how to fight because we'll be ready when it's ready and i think that that's the time to bring it home and the industries struggle in my one person's point of view of the last 20 years is the context of the distribution of the creative right like to me the better verse will come at some point and then my intuition is that this industry will not be great at it because they're going to try to force feed what they want in it instead of reversing the behavior out of it is stunning to me the only word i can use is stunning to me how little creative work is being judged or talked about here that was done on tick tock when it's the most consumed platform in the world it is a [ __ ] joke one thing i've admired about this is that when you put stuff in a certain platform it is so inbred in that platform it felt like it was done by people who were enjoying that platform i think early in uh like tic toc and some of these other emerging platforms had been back the days of twitter friends were coming in and doing what they did everywhere else and just retrofitting into that environment and i think what gary has managed to do and i think that's one reason why he's got that yoga up there is because he can organically live in that environment and it doesn't feel like advertising it feels like content you just have to stumble and to me to really wrap this in for all of us when i look at nadia who just joined vader or rob or mike p greg like what when i look at them this is what my brain does the first five years of youtube fortune 5000 companies put on their youtube channel their [ __ ] television commercial it's youtube when i look at them and i say to myself the talent of storytelling these people have in their soul what they could do if they made an actual youtube video that people actually wanted to watch that would inspire that person to actually buy something versus they've been conformed to 30 seconds it's the distribution of television sucked out the creativity here came the internet gave us youtube tick tock facebook ig gave us all these things and for some reason the subconscious of the industry doesn't want to take advantage of it and continues to put on a pedestal the work in the form of a 30-second video distributed on network television in a world where people only watch streaming and their phone it is bananas