A hundred years, this industry has used good working media dollars to the sky's bad creative. We are now going into the era where you can amplify, use good working media only to amplify good creative. Good is not judged by an award. The USA Today ad meter, me and Mark season veterans, it is done when organic content over indexes organically through the AI relevance algo and then you take it up for brand and down for performance.
My email at Wine Library is exploded because the mid funnel we define as organic social. This is the Gary V audio experience. Gary, good morning. Thank you for joining us.
It's great to see you. It's great to see you my friend. We have thousands of folks who have signed up to listen to your perspective on how these largest brains in the world can do better here in 2026 with AI, with engaging with customers and digital marketing, all the rest of it. I want to get right to it and maybe work to cover off three different areas today.
The first for us always is when we think about all of the different tools that a marketer has to go and try to reach an audience, that email is only one of those tools and to talk a little bit about during our conversation that the relevance we're not of email as a channel for the marketer. All of that by something that for us is near, dear to our heart, we call it ethical marketing. We try to do the right thing when it comes to campaigns. Finally, we've got a whole bunch of questions from our brands about AI and about thinking about gender AI in particular and the tools around that in 2026 and forward.
That's our agenda for the next little bit. That's pretty easy. That's pretty easy. Awesome.
Well, let me start with email. I've been getting everybody's courses a lot of time with some of the world's largest brands helping them with email and the delivery of their campaigns. We've heard over the years. Every time there's been more enthusiasm and virality around a new channel, the reports around this is the depth of the inbox, the emails going away, you know, give us your point of relevance.
Is email relevant still? Yes. Because if print and outdoor and radio have a seat at the table, how can't email? Even me and my younger days before these great hairs kicked in, brother, you know, I think and even like in my older age, you know, on the record, I think 50 is incredibly young.
I'm working until 99, so I'm only at halftime. Look friends, for everyone's watching, I think you all know this as marketers in your soul. Most thinking about there's the key here is, of course, it's relevant. But let me tell you my email story, brother.
I launched an email service in 1997 for my dad's liquor store. It was the foundational channel that changed the course of my family's life. I built a 60,000 person email list for wine buyers and by 1999, in 1998, we had 83% open rates. Mark, it was new, it was underpriced attention.
You know, when I get excited about live social shopping, like right I am right now, it's because it's grossly underpriced attention because it's a supply and demand game. When I fall in love with social media back in the day, it was that same reason. In fact, social media at first was email marketing, yet as many followers as possible post content that you hope they open and convert on. Email today with AI technology, as you know, and I'm sure you all are thinking about this, has to potentially get smarter and smarter, more and more targeted.
We can actually achieve 80% open rates again instead of 20s and 30s and teens if the email titles are so uncomfortably specific to me, you know, and look, I don't think we get to 80s. But do I think everyone can get a 20 to 40% bump on open rates with what I anticipate is the potential and best practice email marketing in a year or two? Email is a central hub of information and attention. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now.
Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast and make my mom super happy. At the brands that we work with about the foundational nature of emailing their programs and some of the fun conversations we end up having with a lot of the creative folks at these brands, when they think about their campaigns, to be across the channels, it's the difference between kind of reacting to a piece of content, maybe a video on social or TikTok or pick your favorite platform, that's, you know, grabs my attention, right?
And I want to go share that quickly with the network who shares with their network and we've asked we have this piece of content being exposed to and being reacted to by a huge audience and then on one side. And then on the other, that great subject line that was personal over personalized to you, right? They got you to open an email. Maybe there was an attention grabbing piece of content as well as some sort of video grab in that email.
But around that, there's text, right? There's words. That they, a requirement for the reader to actually go and process to engage with that content, you know, you kind of lean forward way a little more. And what I wonder about from your perspective is you think about the market are trying to go and, you know, bring a new offering to market or create a man for an existing product.
And there it is. How do you think about that different kind of lean back or lean forward dynamic about these different channels? I feel it is an and not war. I will tell you, and this is with all the respect, Mark, I know how nerdy I am about this.
I think the way you described social is a yesterday nuance. Let me explain what I mean by that. I don't know if you know this and every marketer should do this. You cannot get organic reach in social unless people lean in.
That is a huge misconception. So the number one engagement metric that actually leads to a million views versus 50 views is not like share a comment. It's actually lean in. Zoom in.
Stay on it. My best practice on social is writing five paragraphs to an organic social piece of content. So look, social is incredibly special. For now, you know, you can get both.
You can get, you know, when you have an email as you know, it's funny. I grew up in the era where people actually did forward their entire address book, an email that was by, remember, that was by, look, look, look, when you understand how to do email, this conversion capabilities are remarkable. Right? They're just remarkable.
SMS is similar now, as you know, we've started getting into that era. So I think it's incorrect that we're in the era of social where it's only snackable. There is a major lean in. Email is lean in.
You know, to me, and I get why because it's the darling now, it hasn't been. But social is the wrong place to look at for email if we want to grow emails, market share with marketers. It's kind of everything else. You know, to me, for example, television, programmatic banner ads, pre-rolls, outdoor, direct mail, these are all mediums of conversion hopes that email can destroy you.
When done, right? And again, let me throw a curve ball. I can tell, in fact, I'm going to tell all of you how to waste $5 million on social media right now. Make three pieces of content like you're doing television, post it, but post it with a million dollars in media to support it because you want it to do well, wasted money mark.
So all these mediums are about execution, but I think to your point, email, we've been conditioned to read it. I, some of my best conversion emails for wine text, in fact, I hope all of you sign up for winetext.com. There's a little right hook for me. What you'll see in the emails, we do text, but we also do email, you know, are very in depth, nerdy talk about red burgundy, things that are very hard to come across in a lot of other mediums, like how many acres, how the yields are done.
Like I tell a story about the dog running on the, on the yard, on the vineyard and eating the grapes. And this is the best peanut of the wire and you're going to, you're going to impress the boss or get the girl or, you know, get the promotion. Like this is, you know, in email, some of the other email is like, you better buy this right now or it's going to be sold out in four minutes. So email also has its flexibility for snackable, lean in and lean out.
In fact, one of the coolest things I do as an operator, I have 2,700 employees. When I email the entire company, it is often the entire message in just the headline. Yeah. Like nobody.
So again, I get excited about talking about email because I think anything can be great in marketing and anything can be horrible. There are many people watching right now that are massively wasting money, time and energy on email, but it's not email small. It's their fault market. So when we think about that, Gary, and those folks that are, that are looking not always fun.
We want to take that money and do good things with it. And they're, they've got, here's the world's largest brand. So there's global organizations. They've got teams dispersed across the globe trying to further a brand that they probably spent decades, you know, fostering and nurturing and using on the channel approaches to get this done.
They're making sure this campaign rocks, not just an email, but also an SMS and also on social. What's your view? Does there need to be great carbonization in every campaign across these different channels? Or is it totally cool to have email look this way and text a lot later?
I'm of the belief that both can and do work. Yeah. I'm a very and guy mark. I get passionate.
Listen, I've been branded very aggressively much because of my execution over the last 10 years around social because it's under price. I mean, I wish for this conversation, Mark, I was making videos in 1997 to 2000. And you saw 74,000 email videos about, you know, and then it would have been Google Search. And, you know, I think both work.
I know everyone who's watching was taught for cohesiveness, you know, matching luggage on brand. I believe that the data on growth in sales and long-term brand prove that fragmentation and cohesiveness both can work. Both don't work. I'll tell you what I'm passionate about.
I'm passionate about if everyone, here's my argument with everyone here that does matching luggage across the board. The guest mark. The guest on the tagline, the guest on the color, the guest mark. We guess.
And we have to own this marketers. We guess in boardrooms, focus groups, you mean the ones that are always wrong in politics? A, B, simple testing, not enough, bullshit metrics that SaaS companies have ripped off our clients with for creative ex-testing. This is my obsession about social mark, that when I post-organically and social, if it gets used, I've confirmed relevance and I can then understand the creative.
But the first time in creative marketing history, we can actually measure it by organic views achieved because of how powerful these AI algorithms are. So if everyone wants to go cohesive, I'm looking at your backdrop, right? And it all has to be this scheme and this font and all that. I'm not against it.
But I sure would have liked it to be validated by something that is true. And I have too many examples of things that have looked different and done well that are not as cohesive. And I know that it's based on academia, not on the streets, the hard streets of business world. And so that's where I sit on this issue.
I appreciate that. I think we tend to slant toward doing the right thing for the channel, you know, as we tend to offer most of our brands. If you have a rocket campaign in text that, you know, interacts a certain way with the audience, don't match the logic to email. If I may, I'm starting to rub and there's a nuance that's why I got inspired.
So I apologize, sir, but. And then you can keep trying to like if I could eradicate the word or in marketing, we would explode as an industry. Yeah. It's and brother.
How about, how about I got a campaign working in social, I want to take it to email. And the first time I go, I underperform my open rates and conversion. I don't think that means you should not try again. Yeah.
Like, you know what I mean? Like there's just more at bats at it. There's, I mean, there's social media posts that I posted four different times with a slightly different variation. And the first three got 70,000 views on average and the fourth one got 6.3 million.
We don't do enough post-production. We don't do enough nuance. We don't do enough context. We don't do enough third bite at the apples.
I'm telling you, Mark, I'm going to, this is on my children's health. The subconscious inertia of television first hurts our industry, brother. I want to come back to this concept of dynamic content, trying to try and personalization, particularly with AI in a minute, but can I, can I take this there through the conversation on ethical marketing? Please.
You know, this concept always does the right thing, period, like it's that simple, kind of at least I was raised, I think you were raised and like, you know, if you just do the right thing and you have your customers back, you don't spy on people in email, right? You don't go get a buy list, kind of glam out big content all out in the hope and spray and pray. Like do the right thing, right? Do the right thing all the way through.
I think about the long game, right? That marketers can go play here, right? That I think a lot of the world's leading brands get, they must, but that is always tempting. You get the hard sales folks in the room.
You get the CFO in the meeting room. They're like, man, we need more. Give us more pipe. Let's go.
Let's go. Let's blast out another four million emails, right? To a list. We just bought from somebody on the street.
Yeah. I mean, what's that? You know, what's your perspective here? Like, is this?
Go back to that CFO and back to that sales guy and be like, dude, off the gas, like, let us do what we do. We are cultivating a nurturing community of folks who want to engage with a brand, right, that we can go and build meaningful play program versus this just, you know, volume 11, blast out we go. First of all, I agree, comma. I'm thinking about starting a fashion brand for about two years now.
The brand is literally called Nice Guys Finish First. Love it. So I agree, comma, I would argue that all of the marketers, their Fortune 500, or how many Fortune 500 marketers do you think are on this call, Mark? Or your negative?
I would argue everything they do in campaign work, outdoor and television is spray and pray, yell, scream, guess, all the stuff you're rightfully arguing against, which is why I have been who I've been on this issue, other than Super Bowl, that's adding marketing. There's a lot there. First of all, one of the greatest services to our industry was that we call performance marketing not sales. If I became the king of marketing and everybody had to listen to me, and it's a monarchy, it's a monarchy of monarchies, and it's the marketing monarchy, and I got chosen to be the guy.
King Gary. King Gary. One of my top of my mountain is we must rebrand performance marketing to performance sales because we are confusing each other because it is not marketing, it is sales. And that's what you're alluding to, Mark, right?
Yeah, I mean, look, I believe in brand over everything, which confuses people because they hear me talking about certain aspects of execution of traditional marketing, and they think I don't like the principles. I only believe in relevance to consideration to purchase. I only think in lifetime value. When I was building my father's liquor store, I was building a brand called Wine Library, because I knew I was going to leave one day, and I didn't want my dad to screw it up, so I had to build a brand, not just sales, right?
So I believe in all of that stuff. I would say is, look, it's funny, Vayner, we've exploded because I think CFOs like us more than CMOs. I actually, I only like marketing because it's the offense of a business. So it's a couple things.
First, at our marketing worst, a lot of us push back against CFOs and business leaders and head of sales, because we're not accountable, and this is why CMOs are struggling. We're playing a bullshit game, too much MMA, too much MMA, too much CanLion, too much ad age said it was good. We friends, this is business. We need it to perform.
That being said, I can tell you, I learned my lesson on email. Let me tell you how Mark. Yeah. When Wine Library launched its email service back in 1997, you know what it was called?
I don't. It was called the Wine Library Weekly email newsletter, and I sent it once a week. And then one sunny day in 1998, I was like, wait a minute, what if I sent it twice? We'll sell more stuff.
And do you know what happened, Mark? Yeah, I was like, nope, not yet. I sent it, and motherfucker, we sold a ton more. Okay, I see what's going on.
I know you do. I'm helping you here. Look. Now I'm a shark with blood in the water.
I'm like, okay, immediately. On the second day, within a week, we're Monday, Wednesday, Friday, right? Within three months, we're on the weekdays, can't bother people on the weekends. Within six months, we're Monday through Sunday.
And Mark, we are cooking with gas, but all of a sudden, 80%, 70%, 60%, right? And now it's costing me more to replenish people in. And then you know what happened, Mark? I said, what if we email people twice a day?
And you know what happened? We made more sales. And then something happened 24 months later. We were in trouble.
Because 80 became 60, became 40, became 30. And I could end the caught. And I was, remember why I was winning because I was acquiring customers from now Google AdWords to the email. I was cooking.
This young kid was smarter than this old guy probably in some ways. I was cooking. But eventually, I started to understand my value, retention, how my people bringing people value. And I took the pedal off.
And the reason why text, the thing I mentioned earlier, which we're doing in SMS and email, has revolutionized my father's business, is I am not making the same mistake on SMS that I made on email. And so what do I say? I say, I'm empathetic. I'm a businessman.
If the team mark, it's all circumstantial, you know this. If the team is telling you to send more and more emails because we're going public next week or next year, I get it. That's right, brother. If I know we're trying to sell the company and want some more top line revenue, I get it.
But if you're like me and you're playing long and you're running a marathon, then I highly recommend you become disproportionately empathetic to the person on the other side of the email. Psycho about bringing her and him value. And I would argue that that's how I think about everything. And I would say that SMS, email and social, I'm specifically passionate about being great at that because you can be great at that.
They are in a way that's harder in outdoor, harder in television, harder in other places. I love that empathy piece that is, you know, we think about compassion empathy, trying to be in the spot that our customers, our marketers are in every day thinking about a lot of these folks who spent their career and their team spent their career fostering a brand in a world that was quite different, right? That what we find ourselves in today. Now here comes AI.
Right? Here comes we have this great opportunity. I think no place more so than in marketing, right? To go benefit from AI.
And at the same time, for sure, we part of our business areas, we work with the mailbox providers like Microsoft and others worldwide. Right? Can't help them figure out because your mail should go to the inbox or to go to the stand folder, right? And so part of that, what we hear from them is, yikes, you know, for the last couple of years, the amount of content now finding its way in exponentially larger, much of this really lousy content.
Right? Obviously terrible generator that I stand. Right? And so now the market is like, all right, yikes.
I've got to go figure out how to benefit from AI. I've got to go have my signal to noise ratio stay good, even though the amount of noise just went through the roof. What, you know, again, these are the world's largest plants, right? The folks that are working hard to try and keep pace right with the innovation and a lot of the upstarts.
How do we offer them some perspective on how to win with the internet, with the end of their gender and AI in digital marketing and even? Well, because this is a Fortune 500 crew and not startup, they get a very different answer. Let me explain. Yeah.
One, you know this and I can see by your reaction and probably know I'm going, if you're really sharp, you know that this is exactly what's happening. These next two to four years is challenging because the end consumer doesn't want AI right now because actually the reason they're pushing back against McDonald's AI ad is because they're scared to lose their job to AI. So the masses, gen pop, are asking you all who are watching right now to not do it, but the ankle biters and startups that we're competing with are going to do it and are going to outflank us. And then just like online dating, Mark, how old are you brother?
I'm 55. You look great. I'm 50. So you know that?
No, I don't know about that. But hear me out on this one because you definitely are going to agree with me. Remember match.com? Two, three, four?
Of course. Sure. If you had a buddy or you met someone on match.com and that person became your girlfriend or boyfriend, you told everyone, including your family, you met at a bar. Of course.
The stigma. The stigma was extraordinary. Right. I mean, not really, but you know what I mean.
The majority. The stigma of AI creative and gender AI will go away because society will always evolve. This is an incredibly profound strategic moment for everyone on this call. A, everybody on this call as a human needs to know Claude, Gemini, Chad GPT, perplexing.
You need to know it, friends. You need to touch it. Do not become your grandma that you made fun of for not having a smartphone. That's what this is.
I would say it's also a very interesting time. I've never seen this market. I've been in the game now for a little bit. You know, I was there early and invested in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, those are the stock certificates.
I've lived through the web.com, you know, again, email, websites, search engines, first day on Google AdWords, me, a liquor store boy in New Jersey, not in Silicon Valley, buying all the wine terms. I've watched it all. I've watched the August 2000 crash of pets.com, watched Amazon PayPal and eBay go from $100 a share to $3. The web is dead.
No. From Page of the Wall Street Journal. The internet was a fat. The web was a fat.
No. No. We got to the other side for watching the post. And FT is a blockchain.
I'm living through it on that front right now. It's very important. Everyone listens to me on this. You have to understand it.
There is stigma on the output. That doesn't need to be the front-facing thing to the consumer. But we must navigate. This is Fortune 500.
We need to understand it. But I'm not doing much because I've never seen in the 90s, mid-2000s, there's been three webs prior to this one, right? Web 1.0, late 90s, Web 2.0, 2005, 678, and Web 3.0, 15, 16, 17, 18, blockchain, or really more, 19, 20, 21. They say, I think Mark, I've never seen anything like this before.
Nano Banana makes something amazing. Three days later, these super scalers, Meta, Microsoft, Google, this is an arms race that makes Russia versus America in the 70s and 80s embarrassed on their technology. NASA, all those things, like the Soviets, this is happening on every day basis. So I think one thing is be careful what you commit to because there'll be better technology tomorrow, unheard of.
Imagine signing up for Salesforce back in the day and then a day later, there's a better Salesforce for half the price. This is literally what our customers are faced with. I know. They've been overwhelmed.
I think about this from the emphasis. You know, they're for three and a half years now, every one of their core vendors, Salesforce, a great partner, a large great company, Adobe, Oracle, SAP, all the big marketing labs have been promising. And maybe I can hold too much right here is the agentic solution coming for you. They're going to be awesome.
They're going to be awesome. They're going to be awesome. They're going to be awesome. They're just not awesome yet.
Right? Or they're awesome. I would say slightly different if I may. They're awesome.
Now, compared to what you're doing, they're just going to get outflanked the next week. And so what are you doing? You wait. You wait.
You wait. I mean, you know, I don't know why this analogy jumped in my head. You know, all the big cats in the jungle, the puma, the panther. Like how do they eat?
They're patient. Right? If you jump too fast, that elk and rabbit's going to get away. Right?
That's a good one, right? That's a good analogy? Well, what's great about it, too, is that it pairs nicely with the sea. Right?
Correct. That we're trying to go and provide for these marketers. Right? We're like, yeah.
But in this scenario, Mark, the CMO is the panther and the leopard. And our empathy is not for the rabbit or the elk. Our empathy is that the panther, if it doesn't eat, dies. Correct.
That makes a lot of sense. That's right. And so, you know, this is the hardest one I've seen. Like, and by the way, what I think is going to happen is great companies like yourself and others.
I think the incumbents are sitting in a nice spot. Right? They're intertwined. They're AI strategy and I giggle.
It's fun getting older. I didn't realize it would be. I was there when it was like, what's your computer? Literally, what's your computer strategy?
Like, does your company have computers? Why library? My first developer? I gave him a business card because everyone had a business card back then.
It literally said Eric Kasser, computer department. That's, you know, then it was what's your internet strategy. How many people say what's your internet? Then it was, where is it?
Then it was what's your mobile strategy? Then it's, you know, AI is oxygen. That would be like asking someone what their electricity strategy is. Right.
Like, this is omni. This is present in everyday life. Everything will be AI enabled and we need to think that way. I just tell everybody on this call, do not rush into contracts or if you do, have good outs.
Don't sign some, you know, these frickin' sass companies. You guys probably do it yourself. There's some poison pills in there. You got to be careful, everybody.
All joking aside, because I know you guys are trying to do the right thing, but I really am pushing. I'm sitting in a really cool part of my career mark. It's probably not lost on you. When I came out the gate in Fortune 500 land, most of the people were kind of like, who's this joker?
Because I've got a personality. I've got a funny communication style. I'm a Jersey boy with a lot of extravert energy. But now in this cool spot where my stripes were earned, not only by the success, but more importantly, this is why I wanted to do this, because I respect this so much about your company.
I'm a good dude. My mom, not because I did it. My mom is at all time. And so I have a lot of, and anyone here that wants to hit me up on LinkedIn, but there's no CB4 in my last name.
It's Gary Vaynerchuk with no CB4K. I'm having tons of conversations, Mark, with CMOs that are not my clients, that I'm just doing karma with. And this is the combos we're having. That, you know, that place so I can't believe it's just telling your own your name is thank you for touching me.
No, I'm having fun. I'm having fun. I actually want to make the highlights the, you know, when that... I have high five, right?
That I like that. How do you differentiate, like, you know, for us, we try to tell our folks in the store with torches, everybody has an AI thing. It's the differentiator that we believe is data, right? That we got behind our data.
I'm turning around. You can turn, we're just jamming. I think it's the set up. It's the jab.
I don't think it's the right hook. The data is the set up what you do with the data, right? Like, you know, right? Like I'll just use fighting because I guess it's gonna be nice.
If I watched so much film on you as a fighter, that when we thought that I saw you at a tell, that your shoulder moved, well now I have the data, but if I'm unable to land the right hook to your jaw, the execute got it. So I think people get caught up, in fact, I'm obsessed with data, comma. I actually often find that it's the commodity, now to your point, it's a commodity that a lot of people don't respect enough. Like to me, it's the one world, it's the essential.
But a lot of people come to my conferences, Mark, and I always razz them, I'm like, what are you doing here? I'm like, you know what I'm gonna say? You coming to this conference wasn't you doing anything. You doing what I'm saying when you leave this conference is you doing something.
Data's the setup, but what's the execution? That's right, that's awesome perspective. And everybody does think they have data, right? You're 100%.
By the way, everybody on this call does have data, brother. Or themselves. Correct. For their view.
So being able to go execute global data, that differentiator, I think. But the execution, that's what the value does it. That's the hook. That's right, that's the punchline, right?
That's the variable of success, the creative, and the execution, the message is the punchline. But if you know strategically that email, like I did in 97, had attention, that was under price, if I executed great creative in a catalog, which is what my competitors were doing, by the way, Mark. I don't know if you were drinking wine. Do you drink wine?
Oh, my life loves too, so that helps you too. So, right, you know what, happy wife, right? I was trying to compete with the biggest liquor stores in the country, Zachies and Scarsdale. You know, Sherry Lehman's in Manhattan, Sam's in Chicago, K and L and L.A., that's who I ended up becoming.
They were all doing catalogs, brother. I had the strategy, the data, the understanding that it was email, I still have a good wine offer, I still have a good headline, I still have a good copy. But if I had executed my creative in the wrong strategy, print, I wouldn't have grown, I would have been behind. So, all these things mesh, you know?
It makes perfect sense, it makes perfect sense. When you see people make mistakes, when you see some of these big companies, like just with, like one of those decks that were so avoidable that we can go and share with our audience. How much time do you have? Look friends, I say this with real sympathy.
I know how you are all being measured internally, right? I think the reporting has broken us. I think the CFOs and CEOs that yell at us as marketers are actually the problem, they have to change the scoring. But I think we as CMOs have to accept that and force the change, less miller brown lift studies and you know, the mistakes are rampant.
Let me just spray and pray that one of these helps someone. Big mistakes, personally, subjectively, but objectively, if you want to look at business health, having a creative AOR that just thinks and makes decks is killing everyone. Mark, we are in the production era. You can't, I think Droga 5 and Wine and Kenny are incredible companies in our industry.
But VaynerMedia, I don't even need to mention you most. When VaynerMedia is hired and asked to just be the creative AOR, I hem and haw and sometimes even say no, you must hire us to be who we are, which is a production company, that happens to do creative media and strategy. You can no longer pay an agency to come up with ideas and make decks to then later have someone else make it, the marketing, it's over, huge mistake. Measuring.
That's a good one. Thank you. It's a real market, it's a big one. It's the biggest one for everyone here.
It's the biggest one and it's tough because I'm really poking the bear. But like, I actually call a lot of these companies, I respect the creative agencies. They're my competitors and I'm calling the leaders because I like them as humans because you mean them as these things and I'm like, brother, sister, I'm telling you, you will not be able to survive. The gig is not like, I know, notice how you just reacted, I know everyone on the other side is like, because a lot of people when I'm talking about this, I have a feeling a lot of people are like, huh?
Two, measuring reach is destroying us, Mark. Potential reach versus actualized reach is killing everyone. The acceptance of GRPs, the acceptance of impressions digitally billboards, I mean, six times the amount of cars that go up. So potential reach versus actual levelized reach, huge disease.
Next, subjectiveness. We must address that all of this is subjective in the boardroom. It becomes objective when it goes into the social feeds and you can see how many views we're achieved. We are an industry that loves to think we know in a boardroom and we do not.
We don't know. We need much more, more at bats. This is not spray and pray. This is not throw against the wall and see what sticks.
This is not even test and learn. This is make creative in the channels that people live in. Email, include it, put it out. Watch how it does, build.
It's science now. It's science now. Panerating to awards, trying to be the most creative, covering in the world. The Oscars don't mean it's the best film.
Don't mean it's the highest grossing film. like the awards are destroying us. Fear, mark fear is killing us. You know, we have one example of Bud Light doing a social media campaign that really hurt its business.
Everything else was a 24 hour news cycle and then in fact the brand. Yet many people here don't post enough or do things that have teeth in them because of fear under estimating. We go back to the fear one for the character. This is one.
You know, we think of the intersection of AI and personalization in email, right? So trying to go and massively up the game in terms of dynamically putting the right content to the right created curated audience, right? But doing all that through automation and the energetic approach, we see lots of folks doing this is in the fear that comes from the brand is like, dude, I'm not in control of that. You might break my brain.
You might actually take me back. No, no, it's not. I'm going to help those folks. My show is shown in the truth mark.
They don't have the example. There's one. There's one. I'll tell you why.
This has been like such a meaningful combo. And I'm very much in my karma era. I have a ton of flights coming up and just messaging. Please, everyone connect on LinkedIn and say hello if you got value into this.
Keep going, brother. Let's sneak one more minute. I'm glad you did it, man. So the, I mean, that's it, right?
That's the hometown. Let me give you the last one. A big one, an atomic bomb to end it. What do you got here?
A hundred years this industry has used good working media dollars to the sky's bad creative. Oh, what a great quote. We are now going into the era where you can amplify, use good working media only to amplify good creative. Good is not judged by an award.
The USA Today Ad Meter, Me and Mark season veterans. It is done when organic content over indexes organically through the AI relevance algo. And then you take it up for brand and down for performance, including email. Our email is exploded.
Here's a, here's going tactic city USA. My email at Wine Library is exploded because the mid funnel we define as organic social. We post on Wine Library and WineText, Instagram and TikTok, YouTube Shorts. And by the way, all of this social is now feeding the LLMs.
So we're going into the AEO, GEO era, social content, more important than ever. But when something does well mark, we literally use the essence of that video to write the copy of the headline and the body of the email. And we've seen a 10% uptick, 10%, like meaning from, we've gone from 27 to 37% open rates. So not a 10%, excuse me, a 10%, that's exactly right brother.
Lift in the last six months when we've gone to this thesis. The mid funnel is the starting point of all marketing. You're super bulk commercial, your ad campaigns and all your performance ads down below. If you understand the volume of content, strategic content that you need to fund properly and structure to be able to affect all your stuff, that's the punchline.
Gary, that was an awesome way to read this group, who said it was a big virtual round of applause for Kevin and me, man, it took some time out to talk to all of us. You're living this live. Gary, thank you very, very much. Thank you.
Bye bye. Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention.
And thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.