The Most Effective Way to Market Your Business With No Budget

two things happened i was faster and it cost me less i was faster because when opus one or chateau lafitte or don perrione's new vintage came out i would email it the day it came in and i would get the sale a month later those individuals would get the catalog from my competitors saying the new don perry owns here so i was winning on speed but also cost and then finally the tipping point was google adwords i was smart enough to realize google was a big platform they launched the adwords product and literally on the day i started buying wine terms at first wine bordeaux merlot champagne later i had to pick you know you have to get smarter because people started figuring it out but i had about a year there where i was paying 5 cents and then it became 10 cents for every wine term you can imagine and acquiring customers for nothing sometimes 20 30 cents to get customers active customers which is insane so that became about a couple years ago i realized what i've been talking about was underpriced attention meaning the reason i'm so passionate about linkedin now but didn't say a word about it six years ago is the organic reach on a linkedin post for a business right now is meaningful because linkedin has so much attention on it yet not as much content and ads on it yet this is what always happens you're able to get some organic reach when you post to me that is the holy grail of marketing when you're getting people to know about your business or you and it costs you less aka either zero on organic reach or why facebook became so big when you can spend 50 dollars and get people to see it you got your perspective i just want to be happy don't you

hi everyone thanks for joining us this afternoon uh we're delighted to be hosting gary vaynerchuk for the next hour we will be having q a at the end so please make sure you get your questions in the right hand corner so we can get to them um so this guy needs no introduction uh gary is the chairman of vaynerx uh the active ceo of vaynermedia ceo of vaynersports serial entrepreneur uh prolific angel investor and five times new york bestseller so welcome gary thank you so much emma how are you i'm good how are you keeping i'm keeping uh it's gonna i think all of us will very much struggle to ever forget 2020 uh and i um and i'm really excited to be here i just want to say hello to everybody uh on the linkedin side uh a platform i'm extremely fond of and i've had the luxury of doing events in america and other parts and big special shout out to niall uh who uh worked with me at vayner for many many years who i know is having a fantastic career in linkedin and i've not been doing a whole lot of these because i've been really in operations mode but when he asked i knew i had to say yes so i'm really glad to be here with you oh it's great thanks so much and i know

we've loaded the linkedin attendees who are so excited to get your insight and perspective on the industry so um we'll get we'll dive in with some questions but the first thing i have to ask you in through linkedin style and it wouldn't be a linkedin event without it is can you tell us what's not on your linkedin profile what's not on my linkedin so you know when you're a prolific entrepreneur you end up forgetting some of the things you're even doing so i've had for example what's not on my linkedin profile in the last 36 months i've had two companies that i've co-founded or founded empathy wines which was a direct to consumer wine brand and resi which was a restaurant app pos system for restaurants and on the consumer side demand side have substantial exits rezzy sold for hefty nine figures to amex and empathy i just sold about a month and a half ago to consolation brands the biggest wine company in the world for almost 100 million dollar exit and neither of those two substantial business wins are on my linkedin profile though i would say probably you know a lot of times when people see me they think of me as a motivational speaker as a content creator and a lot of times if i'm being very transparent you know a part of me is upset by that because i have so much pride in the fact that you know between building my dad's business building vayner rezzy empathy uh my angel investments i have a substantial actual career that's overshadowed by my prolific content creation and sometimes that's my own fault in doing because here i have these big business wins and i'm not even listing them on my linkedin account so i'm as soon as i'm hanging up here i'm going to get to work and make sure it gets up

you should they're amazing achievements and you talk about that your personal brand i mean there's no doubt about it you've been a pioneer in the practice of building a personal brand how do you feel it's contributed to your success you know when you put yourself out there as a human being your there's no question to me that there's an incredible amount of benefits you know i started an agency an advertising agency 11 years ago and really nine years ago because the first two years i was quite passive my younger brother really held it down because i was still running my dad's business and it was actually what really threw me off was i wrote my first book crush it and that became a new york times bestseller and a big one and that kind of got me you know pulled into speaking and other things and i wanted to take advantage of that so but i started this business coming from being a wine merchant in new jersey so it was really my personal brand the book the speeches the content that even gave us a chance to have those first conversations with a pepsi with a campbell's with a ge and it was built on that back because otherwise there was no knowledge there was no rationale for the biggest companies in the world to take a meeting with us started by a wine merchant and a kid that came out of college so it's contributed in the start of vayner for sure media it's contributed in the fact that mark zuckerberg allowed me to invest in his company because of my personal brand you know not because of anything else i was just again a wine merchant and now twitter and facebook and tumblr david carp you know blaine cook at twitter these humans were interested in me because of the content i was putting out on the internet and it became the gateway the ticket to let me into different places in my life so it's been a huge door opener people you're on the in when you put out content to the world what happens next is people reach out to you so you know whether it's dwayne the rock johnson or whether it's johnson and johnson i have had people reach out to me instead of me having to reach out to them because i've created brand and that's been incredibly powerful to my career the downside is you have to live and die by your personality so i am a scrappy immigrant kid that grew up in middle class new jersey and so that has meant that my content has cursing in it which you know so i've just told you some nice things i know for fact that we were on the verge of getting a multi-million dollar contract from a fortune 50 company and a board member saw linked linkedin actually this is funny to tell you guys saw a linkedin video where i was crass in my language not in what i was talking about and literally sent an email to the ceo which the ceo then division leader that basically eliminated our agency from being able to do work because she was unhappy with that and and i'm competitive and i'm um an over-the-top personality so there's definitely been um there's definitely been some losses along the way but you kind of live your life in knowing that there's some pluses and minuses to it you know when you put yourself out there you've allowed people to make judgment of you and though 98 of the comments on every linkedin post that i put out are incredibly positive there's no question that there's two percent of well this guy's a charlatan he actually doesn't know anything um and you know when you're a human being no matter how thick your skin is no matter how much success you have it never feels nice to have somebody call you names or degrade you and so you know it's a process that is not for everyone but i do believe net-net has more positive than negative impacts yeah that's really interesting it's you know the reason it's interesting and i appreciate you kind of the way that processed for you and i hope for the people that are watching is it's the reason most people don't do it emma put out content like to me again um i you know what's fun about living my life i put out all my content uh all the time so i think everybody here knows that i'm not pandering to the linkedin audience right now i have been an incredibly big advocate about linkedin content for the last five years it's a game changer for people's professional careers linkedin's organic reach is remarkable best in the world along with tick tock meaning anybody here gavin you uh jennifer shaw sweet christopher glenn anybody here tomorrow can make their first video on their linkedin account about something maybe different and start the process of having more people know about them but the reason most people don't is they can't deal with the negative pushback and that is um unfortunate and that's why i've spent a lot of time with my content talking about self-esteem and self-worth and self-love and patience and all the things that are needed and required to actually have a chance to be successful at content creation it's much more of a of a mental game than it is a creative what do i post it's can i deal with the ramifications of posting of course yeah you talk about how you're

using linkedin now like how have you seen linkedin evolve as a platform and how are you using it now versus say a couple of years ago and potentially how are your teams using it as well for business development you know i don't know i would argue and i give facebook an incredible amount of credit for their evolution over the last 15 years but i would still say that out of all the platforms in the world the one that has gone through the most significant transformation is linkedin here's why it started off truly as a utility it there was no part of linkedin seven years ago that made people think content creation social i mean people refer to linkedin as a social network now in certain pockets of the industry so um you know six years ago i could go an entire year without going to my linkedin because i was an entrepreneur i wasn't looking for jobs and you know the end pretty much now i would argue that when i have a business objective it's the first place i think about um and so you know it's also evolved into vaynermedia we um produce an enormous amount of broad content with other cmos not even our own clients we do we're doing something called marketing for the now right now which is a two hour free seminar once every 10 days where we interview a bunch of the thought leaders in the business world and i would argue that 50 of the reason we do it is just to give us post-production creative for our vaynermedia linkedin because that brings awareness from other marketers about our agency and so it has become a massive force and is also a big part of our playbook as an agency provider we have become very aggressive going after b2b clients because we think instead of doing print ads in the b2b magazine or buying million dollar booths at conferences that linkedin content strategy is the single best strategy for every b2b marketer and now even scarier last night i was talking to a food cpg company and during the meeting i said look i think linkedin is something you need to think about i think linkedin is acting like facebook did seven years ago and i know how you're thinking about it senior marketer who's not in the trenches but i would tell you that if you put out recipe content on linkedin right now it will do extremely well and um and you should be looking at this platform a different way and so i think i think people are starting to kind of quote unquote get it that there's something really going on here you talk about this

marketing for now initiative that you're running how do you see like with everything that's happened this year and a pandemic how do you see recovery taking shape for marketeers how do you see them coming out of this what's your perspective on it my perspective is that the global economy is in much worse shape than anyone's really talking about because everyone's printed money you know we've got a lot of conflict you've got nuances of nationalism sprinting everywhere around the world led by america and china and i think you know i would argue that first of all i have no clue because we're not out of it right you know what's really difficult about that question uh and when i'm asked it is look first you know geopolitical and global economic variables have to play out and that's a little bit above my pay grade you know i haven't done that homework but what i can tell you is it's very clear to me that the common sense fundamentals are in a very vulnerable spot and you have a major election in the u. s and you have some pretty aggressive things going around the world you have conflict in my former you know birthplace of belarus where they're trying to overthrow a dictator you've got real stuff going on and so i think that people are a little naive in thinking well i think the world has had a very good run because you know if you think about it economically outside of the recession the global recession of 2008 the reality is that the world has had a fairly good run economically over the last 40 years and i think that has made us very soft and very naive to what could happen now i'm not predicting doomsday or depressions or great recessions but i will say that um we are so far away from understanding recovery because recovery is a fascinating thing this is not like a war or a recession where you've already understood the dynamics one could argue that you will never see human beings again at an airport not wearing a mask let's just say that's true emma if that's true just on that just on everything went back to normal except when every human travels they wear mess just that heavily impacts a lot of businesses gravel the food and beverage businesses that rely on you know the ecosystems of global airports you know there's just a call duty-free shot like there's just that look and by the way all of us know that that's not the case there'll be many more ramifications of this so not to mention something that i don't think people remember about you know in america i talked to a lot of executives about remember 911 it was devastating and then for the next five years any time anything happened with a plane or this you were gun shy i mean i expect every human being for the next five years to overreact to another human being sneezing in any situation what does that mean just think about that does that mean that events and restaurants have a three percent decline let's just say three percent emma you know restaurants work on such low margin that if they just lose three to five percent of their business because the most extreme of us are scared post corona and really kind of just don't leave the house anymore period or far less often if you were somebody who went out to eat 28 times a year you're down to three if that's the case for some businesses they can't recover with that five percent loss that was all their profit and so i think the ramifications are substantial on the flip side there's a lot of businesses that will explode every direct to consumer business on the internet is going to grow with that transition so i think there's still a lot unknown um as a matter of fact this morning back to you know uh the uk market you know this morning i woke up to boris johnson saying that they're gonna take the groups that gatherings down from 30 to six that's a step backwards to recovery right that doesn't mean you know and i think that this is going to go on for a little while and i don't think people are really i don't think most people realize that it's going to be next summer if everything goes remarkably well to where you kind of might start seeing the first toe in the water back to normalcy that's a long time that's not i remember when this all happened i thought oh my god we're gonna close the offices for two weeks that's crazy it's gonna end up being closer to two years than two weeks so i think that i think it's unprecedented times and i think it's way early to figure out what happens but what i can tell you is for me and this is just i would call this luck for me the fact that everything in my mind has been about video streaming and the cell phone and you know lack of friction internet only the real world is secondary nice important but it's secondary to this world you know that has put me in a position as a communicator and as a business operator in a better spot than some businesses because i bet on the internet and the internet is the real winner of this you know of this reality i mean i would very likely be doing this in person with you emma the next time i was in the region now i'll be able to do it three times with you and i'm sitting in my apartment right now and so you know i mean i can tell you right now i think it takes generations for the airline and travel industry to recover from this because even when everybody in five years is back to normal i'm still gonna debate do i need to go to san francisco today for this meeting or can i do this on zoom or hangouts or blue jeans and the answer six out of ten times is i can do it on blue jeans

i mean it's the it's the changes that are going to happen for all these industries your name so some are going to explode and be devastated for years to come i guess it's you know a sales people ourselves what kind of advice would you have for us approaching these marketeers these cmos or ceos whether they're of advertising agencies like yourselves or if they're direct with clients what advice would you give us let me go very narrow with this answer let's make pretend the pandemic didn't even happen i would tell everybody here to have more pride in the product you're selling you know i have the unfortunate thing where i get to do fireside chats with companies that i think are going through challenges and because i'm you know this is being recorded i want to be historically correct so i'm a nice person but i don't want to say something i don't believe so sometimes when that question is asked i get into hey can i speak to the engineers and the product people because your product's not very good right now and who cares if you're a good salesman you're not going to have good lifetime value i think i have the great fortune to have the reverse conversation right now with everybody on this call i would tell you the number one thing that i would tell everybody here is to have way more pride in what you're selling i know because i'm very close to the world that most brands b2b included have not accepted the incredible power that linkedin is as a content and marketing engine it is everyone's job on this call to actually break through to agencies and to brands and i think that most of you will be too passive i think you need to go in with way more conviction way more audacity because you actually do have one of the best tools in marketing at your fingertips and i know the world doesn't know it so you need to cross all your t's and eyes with the examples but most of all you need to go into those rooms on the borderline of audacious because you're selling one of the best products and i know that's not the tone and tenor because what happens is when something's not accepted by the world most sales people come in too passive and my career has been when i know i have the right thing when it's right for the customer then if i'm going to somebody in between the humans that use it and the cost and like if there's a decision maker aka the ceo of wyden and kennedy or or the cmo of cadbury if that person's in between that company doing it with linkedin and the people that actually consume it the actual people in the feed of linkedin well and i know linkedin is right well i'm being very aggressive in my conviction i'm very convicted and i think and i think clients and agencies need to hear that from a salesperson because if they're skeptical and you come in too passive you're too far away now to move them and so as a salesperson i've only sold things i believe in because i don't know how to be a salesperson when i don't because it requires too much conviction to get somebody on board listen this is a real pleasure and joy for me i hope everybody on this call really realizes how strong the product is right now the organic reach is remarkable and the targeting is remarkable because it's not replicated anywhere else in the world i cannot get to that many business decision makers all with the same title on their job description anywhere else in the world that is the ultimate weapon and the same way that it took facebook a half a decade to get its feet under them to really go out there and get the dollars i think that we're i'm hoping for your sake i mean to me in a weird way to me the longer people don't know that linkedin is this strong is better for vayner and me because i'm picking up more organic reach but for the context of what i was invited to speak here this is a rare opportunity for me to flex on your behalf this is a very great era for linkedin marketing and um and i hope that you're communicating that to your clients

clients thank you for that feedback um we were talking there about organic reach and you talk quite a bit about underpriced attention can you talk to me a little bit what you mean by underpriced attention and how can linkedin lean into that oh underpriced attention i've come to realize is really my religion you know i built my dad's business from a 3. 8 million dollar business to a 65 million business in seven years and i had no money and the reason i was able to do that was three things one i realized that having a website was going to be important so i built a website and that alone was a big deal this is 1996. number two a couple a year later i realized email was a big deal and this was the great gift of my career email ended up being a killer app for selling stuff and it was free so my competitors were printing catalogs with wine in it and shipping it which cost them a lot of money to make the catalog and in postage i was gathering people's emails every time they came into the store i literally emma would not let somebody leave my dad's store without giving me their email and i think you can tell my tenacity and i was a youngster i was real hungry then so you know and through that two things happened i was faster and it cost me less i was faster because when opus one or chateau lafitte or dom perry owns new vintage came out i would email it the day it came in and i would get the sale a month later those individuals would get the catalog from my competitors saying the new don perry owns here so i was winning on speed but also cost and then finally the tipping point was google adwords i was smart enough to realize google was a big platform they launched the adwords product and literally on the day i started buying wine terms at first wine bordeaux merlot champagne later i had to pick you know you have to get smarter because people started figuring it out but i had about a year there where i was paying five cents and then it became 10 cents for every wine term you can imagine and acquiring customers for nothing sometimes 20 30 cents to get customers active customers which is insane so that became about a couple years ago i realized what i've been talking about was underpriced attention meaning the reason i'm so passionate about linkedin now but didn't say a word about it six years ago is the organic reach on a linkedin post for a business right now is meaningful because linkedin has so much attention on it yet not as much content and ads on it yet this is what always happens you're able to get some organic reach when you post to me that is the holy grail of marketing when you're getting people to know about your business or you and it costs you less aka either zero on organic reach or why facebook became so big when you can spend fifty dollars and get people to see it one of my issues with linkedin has been that there's a floor on the cpm on the cost there's a two dollar floor not a five cent floor so i want to take advantage of you know the long tail of targeting so every time i see my linkedin counterparts in the us working with my media it's funny it's like an ongoing joke because i'm i think you can tell by the tone i've had here i'm such a fan of linkedin but in one very specific place and i understand why you do it because it's a lack of inventory so it allows you to create a floor i understand but i still like to razz and every time i walk by a meeting with my media team and the linkedin team i pop my head in them like have you lowered the floor and it's become almost this like little mean joke but um that's how i see it which is for certain things i do not believe to paying two dollars per cpm is the right thing and that's why we are very tactical on linkedin in other arenas paying 70 cpms is the right thing and we're only paying 13 because there's not that much spend against that narrow thing and that's that would be an example of me saying wow linkedin's remarkable i'm only paying 13 cpms here to reach this executive class that's an incredible deal for this company i'd have to pay and then when you amortize conversion i might be paying 13 cpms but it might cost me a thousand dollars to get a customer whereas it will cost me way more on facebook or twitter or youtube to get that same customer because linkedin has so much data around people and their professional career that's why linkedin is an underpriced medium for me it's media product it's ad product has the capabilities of being better than anything else in the world on very specific planning and then on top of that it also has organic reach that i don't see from anywhere besides tick tock right now and obviously very two very different audiences so underpriced attention to me is things like the super bowl in america cost six million dollars and i think it's unbelievably underpriced because a hundred million people will watch your commercial meanwhile i think a regular commercial on the telly is overpriced because there's assumptions about grps and nielsen ratings that i just know are not true in common sense facebook organic used to be the greatest thing in the world it doesn't even exist anymore it's an ad product running the ads on facebook as we do and we took tune of hundreds of millions of dollars there's a lot of ways to make it underpriced it's by doing contextual creative at scale and doing 80 different media spends instead of one there's ways to make it overpriced on linkedin youtube facebook where you just do one video and you just try to reach everybody 18 to 55. so i spend my life being religious around where's the nook and cranny that allows me to pay five cents that is really worth 20 cents on business in a minefield where there's a lot of places you can spend 20 cents and only get five cents value that's what i mean by underpriced attention

i can't hear you emma oh sorry can you hear me now you got better i can't yes it is um no i just say that was great thank you so i mean you obviously you've you know over the years you've seen how all the different social platforms have evolved you've definitely been at the cutting edge what do you believe is the next big thing for social or what's coming down the track what do you think is the next big thing you know it's funny i uh i don't um i don't predict what i'm really great at emma is being the fastest mover when it's become obvious so you know what i've had a great career on is when linkedin made that switch i was there right away you know i was one of those first hundred influencers of that first hundred influencers i produced the most content you know and so uh when musically the predecessor to tock had some momentum even though it looked like it was just 12 year old girls i was in there making content so you know i don't know what the next tick tock or facebook or linkedin you know linkedin and tick tock are a lot of fun for me because they're the two leaders of organic which is always the thing i talk about because a lot of people follow me have no money and so when you have no money you need organic what's fun about tick tock and linkedin is tick tock is the newest of a line of snapchat facebook twitter a true social network for the youth that's growing linkedin's a great one for my thesis of not predicting i would have never predicted linkedin as the next content place linkedin is a story of a pivot or not a pivot a very smart addition to a ongoing platform what that means is one could argue that youtube tomorrow can say wait a minute why don't we just add a stream of content that doesn't have to be video and they might become a more meaningful social network you could you would probably more logically argue that would be a distraction and that's why they haven't done it right now there's two you know incredible you know 16 year olds in scotland who might be making the next great app that's not something i could know about i'm not nostradamus but i can promise you that if that app gets traction sustained traction because you do see a lot of apps have a good week or a good month or a good day uh and there's an unbelievable amount of names peach and and vine even had a very nice run until it was bought social cam clerk friendster myspace you've got these things that have one week even sometimes three year runs i'm not a predictor but i'm a practitioner of the moment of the apps that are winning

brilliant i mean we look at you know you look at social as a whole and if we pivot now more to vayner x you know it's an absolute juggernaut how did you navigate the landscape a landscape dominated by global holding company patience you know it's we're 10 years in we're still a 200 million dollar revenue holding bow which is peanuts compared to the publicists and omnicoms and things that nature but we're emerging and we're emerging because of underpriced attention what i mean by that is in the same way that i do underpriced attention as a businessman i look for opportunities that people don't see and we became the best in the world no question and i'm proud to say this and i know it sounds audacious but it is very clear to me that there is no agency in the world that is better at understanding how to make content and run media across the 15 apps that dominate the mobile phone linkedin youtube facebook twitter and i think people are starting to realize wait a minute that is where brand is being built that is not where you're just doing lower funnel conversion that's actually where brand is being built and brand is the game and as the biggest companies in the world say oh my god i don't want a tv first approach i want a social burst approach that makes me find what i should put on tv we become you know we've got a loud leader who's got a decade of being historically correct on the content that he's put out which gives enormous amount of confidence to these decision makers and not to mention the other thing that i didn't think of because you don't think about being old when you're young but you know in a decade or two here the majority of cmos that are going to be making the decisions grew up on my content and my books and so just you know from a brand standpoint and we're starting to feel it you know there's been a couple of moments here in the last year i'm like wait a minute this is cool the person that actually made that decision they decided this was right in university when they were reading my book in class like we don't like that was a weird pitch they were saying my words to me we didn't even have to convince them so as the decision maker evolves um you know what we have the benefit of is that what we've been focused on actually became true most of the marketing world dismissed and continues to be frank dismisses social media or content on these platforms as a nice to have i view it as the singular source of oxygen for businesses going forward you know just it's it you know you can't worry about anything at you have to start with being an incredible content producer to the relevant cohorts and segments in these channels and then you can worry about putting your logo on a football you know jersey for the premier league or running an ad on telly or doing outdoor billboards in the subway systems and because you've already figured out the right answer in these channels at very low cost uh so we'll see but i i've navigated it by being more right about where the world was going and it's not because i'm smarter it's because the holding companies are attached to where the money is right now they're not gonna they're gonna sell commercials and because that's where the money is now because they're publicly traded and they have to make revenue every quarter i'm building something in perpetuity which has allowed me to play a different game and we're starting to feel the benefits of that

i'm just gonna pivot slightly just i'm conscious of time and there's just one kind of area i'd love to get your perspective obviously talk about the year we've had i'd love to hear how you have managed your physical and mental well-being during the pandemic you know we were only looking at two weeks of offices being closed down and we ended up going into weeks and then months so i'd love to get how you manage your physical and mental well-being and how can we kind of create a culture of getting people to prioritize this for themselves you know for me um it's been about choices it's recognizing early on that this was not going to be a one day thing and being self-aware this is a self-awareness game right to me i know that i do my best when i am optimistic and when my perspective is proper so i went into a tunnel vision of hey this is a bummer but in the 1940s people were running very successful companies and then the nazis invaded so you know this stinks but in the history of time there's been tougher times and for me that always works for me to lean into gratitude and into worst case scenario that works for my psyche uh i also uh have had enough success in my career that six years ago i was able to afford a full-time trainer just for me and that is how i got my health into a much better place and so i knew that by not him babysitting me that i was vulnerable so i had a very quick call with him early on and said hey we're going to train virtually on zoom you're going to watch me go on the scale every day so i don't lose my way um and so i kind of attacked a strategy early on from a physical and mental place and i think everybody here needs to do the same if you know that you binge eat when you're stressed and you don't want to put on 30 pounds during covid you need to first acknowledge that truth and then try to find a system that works for you whether that's asking your spouse to hold you accountable whether that's creating a facebook group whether that's putting out content and holding yourself accountable whether that's throwing out all the food that's you know my mom and i are very similar we'll eat literally anything in front of us so if it's a candy bar or if it's green beans it's all the same we're just we call ourselves lawnmowers i have successfully taken all bad food out of my house my mom continues to not and thus he's had a different experience in covid than i have had you know i think it's self-awareness and but then also not over judging yourself emma i think the reason people struggle is they beat themselves up and uh and i'd like everybody to have a little more compassion and sympathy for themselves during this time aka if you did gain 15 pounds in this year it's okay when we get back to normal and you can go and do what works for you in the next year you'll lose that and so enjoy the crack you know the candy while you can so i think it's a balance of strategy and self-love

really great advice there as well i think it's it's been a tough year for people so that's really great to hear yeah it's been a very challenging year and i think a couple things one why should we as humans live lives during all easy times when our grandparents great great grandparents didn't so i think one the first thing everyone has to do is get off get over their own audacity and entitlement to like this great you know it's not the way it actually works you have both sides of the coin i think once you get over that if you don't beat yourself up or not you know a lot of people are beating themselves up because they didn't save money even though they knew it was the right thing to do they didn't because they wanted to live a certain lifestyle and now they are in a pickle what many will do in that scenario is start to really be upset with themselves you should have a self reflection moment but you can't go into a time machine and change the fact that you went on vacations you couldn't afford and buy clothes you couldn't afford so you're not gonna be able to do that what you can do is make a commitment to yourself to going forward acting in a different way and i think you know i hope that people learn about themselves during this time

hey we're nearly ready for q a but i just wanted to ask you just one question well what is the question that you're never asked in these discussions that you wish you were asked you know i think this is a very interesting answer i when i sign up for these i'm 100 focused on bringing value to the audience so i don't have any wishes on questions i the only question i'm i wish people ask is if they actually have a question but they're scared to ask it because they think it would offend me or i wouldn't know the answer who knows what would be the rationale i'm here to service in this setting so i don't have any real feelings towards a question i want to be asked i just want to answer the question that everybody wants to be asked

to be honest look with that what we'll do is we're actually going to bring niall back on screen because he thought it'd be great to have him involved and he's been moderating the q a so now i'm going to let you take over the questions thank you hi hey gary hey again to see your friend it's always great it's been a while listen we've got some awesome questions through for you across a few different channels um so we should be able to get through them in about 13 minutes oh and i'll just get started here um the first question comes in from um someone on my team aaron mciver uh and it's about sports cards i think you might end about um it's around really about the with the rise of online platforms do you uh such as panini blockchain um do you see that the sports card industry will become predominantly a virtual offering in the future and if so how will this impact trading value of existing physical cards i don't think so at least in let's say the next half century um do i think something can lose its value as a physical item in all shapes and form of course i do i just think it's too early for like blockchain is an unbelievable technology and i think we'll have incredible ramifications on society over the next century but do i think that everything gets tokenized as quickly as a lot of blockchain enthusiasts think the answer is no and i and the reason i say that is look how far along we are in the last half decade i mean blockchain has been very uh prominent for the last half decade and we still don't have anywhere close to the amount of innovation on it that i think many of us thought could be the case five years ago and so i think that the tokenization of sports cards and art and many other things will happen i think that there'll be some moments of things popping um kind of similar to the way that augmented reality technology is incredibly strong right now in the world yet we've only had pokemon go be a real phenomenon in the ar world so do i think now that something can come along and get tokenized and do really well um yes but you know for example when you know this about me now i don't talk about or do things that i don't believe in if i thought that trading cards and football stickers which would be more european would lose its value i wouldn't be buying moombape you know rookie cards for five thousand dollars a piece why to watch it go down in value so i don't think in the short term there's going to be that level of traction i think people underestimate human behavior here's what i mean by that online dating in the mid 90s i told all my friends that all of them would be doing online dating if they didn't get married before online dating and when i tell you everybody made fun of me for saying that they because at the time in 1996 online dating was very creepy and was really when you thought about online dating the image you thought about was a 600 pound guy in his mom's basement well now as we all know online dating is foundational to all youth all everyone for that matter i feel the same way about physical things i think that people think everything's going to go on blockchain and it will but even though online dating is massive across the world there is a stunning amount of people who do not do it and still go to the pub or get introduced to their sister and i think niall that's what will happen in 40 years with sports cards and other tangible goods i think there'll be a absolute world of tokenization and blockchain but i don't think that will take away from people and i would argue that it might even enhance the value of the most rare physical items you know it's what we see now we've already seen in our young lives everybody here the growth and creation of social networks the slow but steady curve of people spending time on it and now the apex moments of it so much so that kids predominantly in their teens are taking week or month breaks from it because they're the counter culture to it much like the rise of blockchain will actually create tokenization of items and then you'll see people want to own the physical card because everything went digital no different than hipsters in brooklyn wanting to own pagers and flip phones instead of the iphone the human race likes to swing pendulums and over the next century will swing to the digitalization of physical goods only to then be countered with people going backwards into physical goods just like what's happening with food habits i hope everybody understands in the world people are starting to eat clean the way that people ate 150 years ago we then had the rise of modern food and business and technology create all the things we known and now people are trying to go back to just ingredients and clean eating so that's just how humans work

awesome thanks gary um next question uh for anyone i'm going through the q a in liked first um you mentioned the key to success is not really caring too much about what other people think how do you get yourself into the mindset to be able to kick through any doors um or people who have said you can't do something this is from steve o'brien you know steve i think for me it was a journey of losing a lot as a child you know i was an immigrant i didn't speak the language so it was hard for me to you know make friends when i first got to america then i was a bad student so all my teachers said no you're a failure bad push against i wasn't you know after about third or fourth grade i it was clear to me that i was not remarkable at sports so there wasn't that thing that a lot of kids rely on so i basically lived the life with a lot of adversity and a lot of know you know my parents didn't buy me things mom i want nintendo no you know like my life was about no and so it was very easy once i became an adult to be comfortable in no for a lot of you my children included know was you were in the business of yes you know and in that became the vulnerability because no seems scary foreign so i think the biggest way for you or anybody else at a more advanced stage of not being a child anymore is getting into the practice of losing and doing knows trying things that are hard for you doing things that require no you people need to have a relationship with no and that is only something that either you are serendipitously growing up with and or something that you manufacture for yourself when you get older by putting yourself in uncomfortable positions so that you become more comfortable with rejection it's ironic you ask that question literally my instagram post that i snuck in while i was doing the interview with emma as i multitask you might have saw me looking down at some point literally this post that i just posted is that people are too addicted to positive reinforcement you're smart you're pretty that's awesome once you believe that you become susceptible to negative reinforcement so niall the reason i'm able to deal with pushback and no is actually when emma introduces me and says all those nice things i don't believe them i don't know how to say it when i hear that i'm a five-time new york times bestseller that's funny to me because i failed all my english and writing classes when i hear you know when emma says something like you've actually made a dent in this global advertise you know 10 you know the style you were with us very early on that's funny we were like a ragtag group of 50 people that just were sitting in an office right you know this so for me i don't get high on my accomplishments which allows me to not get low on when i'm dealing with negativity i just keep it very zen very in the middle like i'm aware of what i've got going on and where it's going and i'm also aware that i'm 44 years old which means i have a lot of time to build on this and it can end up being in a very crazy place not financially on impact i'm well known at this point and i'm just starting so i know that kind of god willing with health and all that you know my destiny at some level is for some pretty big bridges but that will never make me think that i'm better than somebody or i'm greater than which allows me to then deal with the negativity that comes along with that much notoriety and uh and i like that i don't get too high and low awesome great answer um all right next question shifting gears ever so slightly um this is well now real quick because i think you'll understand this it also lends itself because it's important because it's meta it also lends itself to humility you know the reason i don't struggle with other people's feedback is because i'm actually humble enough that when a former employee like yourself reaches out to me and says this is important to me that even though i do not have time i have negative time i right this minute can live the rest of my 50 years and not accomplish everything that is in front of me right now yet i have the humility and the empathy compassion and love to say yes to you because i'm hoping it helps you right so if you can have humility and generosity it actually makes you less susceptible to negativity

that's awesome and i can attest to that anytime i've emailed you you're back within the hour it's um it's really impressive it's incredible linkedin is huge uh it's a very important platform for me but there is 0. 0 chance i'm doing this talk without you and i think that being in that place as a human um basically what i'm telling everybody is no matter what level of success you have please remember that you're insignificant that may sound harsh it's actually an incredibly liberating exciting experience i'm doing a lot out here and i know that if i die tomorrow i'll have a couple of hours on social networks where i get a lot of love where people maybe will share their favorite story of me or you'll write nile on your linkedin he was always there for me and replied in an hour or somebody will share their favorite clip but in truth in 72 hours everybody has to go back to their normal lives and outside of a group of 25 to 50 people that's it and i think if you can live in that humility it allows you to deal with the ability it gets very hard if you believe what i just said to get two down when anonymous anonymous leaves a comment on your linkedin post that you suck it's hard to like let that carry too much weight when you understand what i just said

let's sneak in two more before i get out of here all right next question another one that would be great so next question is if you could add one thing to linkedin streaming what would it be and why and this is coming from gavin roberts it's a little tweak on what you have now right now live streaming from a mobile device is too clunky with third-party providers i think linkedin is built for more live experiences but right now the creator side on the app side is not strong and if that can be fixed i think you'll have even more engagement and more incredible content linkedin is the place for meaningful conversations for ted talk like conversations in live format but it's just not there yet as a product awesome and my teams my child is blowing up right now from the team saying that we are invader for us so uh you've you've gotten their attention um okay last question um before we wrap this up and i let's say we'll leave it a good question the what's the most impressive brand you've worked with and why i would say currently it's procter gamble's olay in the u. s and ironically sk2 procter gamble in singapore office um and because they've given us the freedom to find the creative right instead of being right so 99 of marketing behavior today is a strategist and a creative on an agency side come up with a hypothesis try to sell it into a client and then the client spends all its money hoping that messaging was right which is asinine what we've been able to do on olay in the us and sk2 in asia is produce an enormous amount of content across 50 different hypotheses see what actually is resonating with computers and then ladder up the creative i believe that will be the creative format of the next century and i believe that there are very few people that have the humility and the lack of fear to go with that model in corporate life and i think it's the courage of the leaders on those pieces of businesses that have created that opportunity great and should we wrap it up there and emma take it away thanks great to see you there okay thanks so much for your time today it was really great we really appreciate we know how busy you are and so we really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today and hopefully we'll get to talk to you again soon bye everyone i'm very available on linkedin to say hello so if you had a good time send me a message i'd love to say hi to some of you take care bye hey everybody on youtube first of all thank you so much so humbled for your time i don't want to watch but time is the biggest asset so thank you for watching that video if uh if you got some value out of that there's plenty more where that came from feel free to check it out