Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome back to Simple Wins. I’m your host, Adam, and today’s episode is a bit of a deep dive into my own marketing brain. I recently spent some time watching a video that, frankly, reframed a lot of what I thought I knew about the digital landscape. The video featured an extended conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk, and let me tell you, it was like a incredible at cutting through the absolute nonsense that clutters our industry.
So, I’m not just going to summarize the video. Instead, I want to walk you through what *I* learned. The key takeaways that have been rattling around in my head for days now. This is about what Gary Vee’s perspective is forcing me to reconsider in my own work and thinking. And I’ll be grounding all of this in his actual words from the transcript, because you can’t really talk about Gary without quoting the man directly.
The biggest, most foundational lesson for me was about a distinction I thought I understood, but apparently, I only understood on a surface level. It’s the difference between sales and marketing. We use these terms interchangeably all the time, but Gary draws a line in the sand that is so clear, it’s almost painful in its accuracy.
Here’s exactly how he put it. He said, and this is a quote: **“There's a big confusion in our industry about what is sales and what is marketing... Sales is what you do when you're not good at branding and marketing.”**
Let that sink in for a second. *Sales is what you do when you're not good at branding and marketing.*
He then elaborated with a perfect analogy. He said that email and Google AdWords are much closer to a sales DNA. They’re direct, they’re often interruptive, they’re asking for the order. But organic social content? That’s something else entirely. He said it’s **“much more similar to what worked on television. You had the attention of the consumer on a medium. You story told and it affected them.”**
This was a lightbulb moment for me. I’ve been in situations where a piece of content doesn’t immediately drive sales, and the instinct is to dismiss it. But Gary reframed that entirely. He used the example of Nike. He said, **“I did not buy in the 80s and 90s and 2000s all that Nike stuff because somebody last touch attributed me. Somebody cold called me. Nike sent me an email. I bought it because of brand.”**
That’s the power of brand marketing. It’s not about the last click before a purchase. It’s about the cumulative effect of storytelling that makes you *want* to be part of that brand’s world. The “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” model he’s famous for is exactly this. It’s giving, giving, giving value—that’s the branding—and then, and only then, asking for something. But he added a crucial nuance that I think a lot of people miss. He said, **“the entitlement of thinking just because you've given a bunch of good content that someone's going to buy your sneaker or your wine or your trading card or anything else that other people sell is audacious and manipulative.”**
The “jabs” aren’t a transaction. They’re not a quid pro quo. They are the brand building. You build the relationship so that when you *do* ask, a certain percentage of that audience is already predisposed to listen. They trust you. They like you. That’s the psychology of brand.
And this leads me to the second huge thing I learned, which is probably the single most practical and damning critique of common marketing practice I’ve heard. Gary called out what he termed **“the single stupidest thing in the world of marketing and business and pop culture.”**
What is it? Amplifying bad content with ad dollars.
He was reacting to a scenario where someone admitted to boosting social media posts that weren’t performing well organically, just to get more views. And Gary’s response was visceral. He said, **“you are literally taking money and throwing it into a garbage and then lighting a match and burning it to the ground. So yes, you are doing the single worst thing on earth.”**
His reasoning is flawless. If a piece of content fails organically, it’s because it didn’t resonate. It didn’t capture attention. It wasn’t relevant or interesting. So why on earth would you pay to put that same ineffective creative in front of *more* people? You’re just paying to amplify a failure. You’re trying to, in his words, **“hide this crappy creative.”** Instead, the smart move is to double down on what’s already working.
And he gave a brilliant piece of advice on how to do this. He called it “sampling your own hit.” If you have a piece of content—a “jab”—that organically did well, *that’s* what you should amplify. But you can DJ it. You can tweak it to turn it into a “right hook.”
He described a specific edit: take that winning video, and in post-production, add a picture-in-picture of yourself in the corner. As the video plays, you gesture to it, creating intrigue, and then you jump in and make your ask. **“You're going to take the original piece of content that did well organically, showed consumer relevance and interest. You're going to DJ it.”** The underlying creative has already been proven to work. You’re just adding a direct call-to-action on top of a proven winner. This is so much smarter than throwing money at a loser.
This whole conversation naturally led to the third major takeaway for me: the fallacy of attribution, particularly last-touch attribution. Gary called it **“total garbage.”** And he explained why with another great analogy. He said, **“for 20 years, Google got credit for things that other mediums were doing because Google became de facto place you would go... I would see a billboard in Manhattan... and then I would go to Google... and then back home at marketing land they're like, ‘Oh, Google worked.’ And the billboard doesn't. Yeah. It's total crap.”**
The measurable channels, the ones where we can track a click, get all the credit, while the brand-building activities—the billboards, the TV spots, the organic social content that builds affinity—get zero. This, he argues, has led to a massive over-investment in “math” and a dangerous neglect of “art.” He said, **“We've sucked out the creative and we've implanted the mathematicians.”**
But he’s not just an artist yelling at mathematicians. He’s a pragmatist. He admitted that this shift to math happened for a reason: **“the artists went too far and... everyone who wasn't good enough to be in Hollywood went to Madison Avenue and used their brands money to make the commercials that they wanted to make for themselves, not to sell soap.”** So, he understands the correction, but believes we’ve now over-corrected. The future, the winning formula, is purple—a blend of art and math.
And that brings us to the fourth and perhaps most exciting thing I learned: the concept of “Interest Media” versus “Social Media.” Gary believes that the era of caring about follower counts is rapidly diminishing. He said, **“follower account is only social proof... I do believe within a half decade the following count might not even be publicly seen.”**
Why? Because the algorithms on platforms like TikTok and YouTube have become so sophisticated that they can find an audience for you based purely on your content’s subject matter. He calls this the “AI interest media algorithm-led social media economy.” This is a game-changer. It means that if you are genuinely, authentically passionate about something—anything—you can build an audience around it now easier than ever before.
He put it like this: **“If you love Bon Jovi and you just go ham on Bon Jovi content, the fact that in for 15 years of social, you would have 80 followers after a year and now the fact that when I post my third Bon Jovi video, it will find people that have a propensity to give a about Bon Jovi... That is a level of opportunity for society, for happiness and commercial success.”**
The key, though, is authenticity. You can’t fake this. He warned, **“if you're chasing cuz that's where you think the money is versus quadruple downing on what gets you going, you will be vulnerable.”** This isn’t about finding a “best practice” and following it. In fact, Gary hates the term “best practices.” He said, **“by the time it becomes a best practice, it's an animated piece of crap.”**
Instead of best practices, he advocates for a framework he calls “P.A.C.K.” which stands for:
- **P**latforms: Knowing which platforms have the attention.
- **A**lgorithms: Understanding how the algorithms on those platforms work.
- **C**ulture: Being deeply tuned into pop culture and current trends.
- **K**now-how: The skill to execute within that framework.
This focus on culture is what he believes will separate the winners from the losers in the coming years. He even predicted that **“brand strategists are going to get replaced by pop culture strategists.”** You need to know what’s happening not just in marketing trade magazines, but in reality TV, in comedy, in fashion, in sports. You need to be a “human anthropologist.”
He gave an example that blew my mind: **“the concept of ‘comments as creative’—leaving comments as a brand... you make a joke that's an inside baseball Love Island joke.”** That level of cultural integration shows a brand is truly listening and participating, not just broadcasting. That’s how you build a real, modern brand.
He wrapped up this point with a perfect analogy for brands that are scared to jump on trends for fear they’ll fade too quickly. He said, **“How the are you gonna catch the big wave if you're not in the water trying to catch like waiting for it and catching all the little waves?”** The big, long-term cultural movements are born from the micro-trends. You have to be in the water to feel the shift.
So, what’s the through-line here? What did I really learn from watching this conversation?
I learned that for decades, we’ve been able to hide bad, ineffective creative behind massive media budgets on platforms like TV. But now, in the digital age, the results are visible. We can see what works and what doesn’t. And the biggest mistake we can make is to use new digital ad tools to repeat the old mistake: propping up bad creative. The winning strategy is to invest in building a real brand through storytelling and value-giving on organic social media, to be ruthlessly focused on amplifying what *already* works, to understand that true attribution is more complex than the last click, and to immerse yourself so deeply in culture that your marketing becomes a natural part of the conversation.
It’s about being a student of human behavior, not just a master of a platform’s ad-buying interface. As Gary so succinctly put it, summarizing the entire problem: **“The last 70 years of business in marketing land on Madison Avenue, we have used good working media dollars to disguise bad creative, but we couldn't see it because it was predominantly done on television and on billboards and in print. And now we live in an era where we can see it. And man, does that need an adjustment.”**
That adjustment is the single biggest opportunity for marketers today. And after watching this, I feel like I have a much clearer picture of what that adjustment needs to be.
Thank you for listening. I’m Adam OLeary, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
