#AskGaryVee

by Gary Vaynerchuk

  It’s the same argument we had over reality TV or daytime game shows. There’s a huge misunderstanding of how these things work.

  What do I think of listicles as a business? In October 2012, twenty-four months before this question was asked, I would have said it was a phenomenal opportunity. At the time I discussed this topic on the show, I thought it was superstrong. As I write this book, almost a year later, I think it’s a pretty good idea. In two years, I’d be careful. Listicles will follow the same path as all other media, in that the best opportunities arise when a platform is new, and it loses value as more and more people pile on.

  Email

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  Do you think email will be more or less relevant in the next five years?

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  I think it’s so important I’ve put it at the top of my marketing strategy. Email open rates may no longer be 80 percent like they were back when I was selling wine in 1997, but that doesn’t mean email is dead. See, people used to sign up for emails without thinking twice, the same way we used to click thousands of likes on Facebook. As time went on, we started being more selective. That means that if someone takes the time to sign up for your emails, you’d better deliver quality content. If you succeed and prove to people that they will like opening your emails, your email open rates will be high. You just have to deliver on your promise to provide amazing, exclusive, relevant content.

  The other advantage of emails? You own them. You’re in total control of the creative and the distribution, and you don’t have to worry that your platform is going to make a change that alters whether the consumer who opted in receives it.

  I think as long as people have email accounts email will be relevant. It won’t be as valuable as it once was, but it will still be a player.

  Reddit

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  What are your thoughts on Reddit? Is it even social? Is it useful?

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  Reddit’s big advantage is that it has a solid community, which means the brands and creative shops that can make their content natively “Reddity” should see excellent returns. But as with all platforms, if you barge in there without bothering to learn the language and fail to understand why people come to Reddit, you’ll get nowhere.

  Now, of course, once brands start having an impact on Reddit, the platform’s die-hard users will accuse it of selling out. They will threaten to leave. And then I think they’ll get over it.

  Google +

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  Why do you continue to use Google+?

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  Because it’s there. It’s definitely a failure, but there is still a niche of early adopters who use it. I have an audience there, so I give them content. Why wouldn’t I? How much effort does it take to post a video and check in with a few people who like my stuff? I respect that community and want to serve it.

  Can we please try to remember not to think about social networks as all or nothing? Invest in the hugely successful ones, of course, but don’t turn your nose up at the others. The members of those communities are consumers, too. Would you turn away their money if they wanted to give it to you?

  Yik Yak

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  What are your thoughts on the marketing opportunities in Yik Yak?

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  If you’re marketing to the 18–22-year-old college demo, you need to be there. The challenge is: How do you market yourself or your brand when it’s a place that values anonymity? You could use humor, like “I hear the chef at Burger World is hot . . . ha ha, it’s me.” The trick is to be authentic and not spammy. It’s a tough one.

  Meerkat

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  Which industries do you think will leverage Meerkat the best? Who is their target user?

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  Plenty will, but I think it will prove particularly useful to retail, entertainment, and sports. Can you imagine the QVC 2.0 opportunities? I could schedule a show from 6 to 9 P.M. where I sell and talk wine. Sponsors could jump on live sports events. Or you could charge money for special shows. I’d happily pay $2.99 to watch a live street-fighting match.

  Twitter’s acquisition of Periscope hurt Meerkat for sure, because it allowed for a seamless transition between the apps that Meerkat didn’t have. Twitter users can see embedded images and even the ability to watch live streams in feed; Meerkat pushes a tweet out on your behalf that is nothing but text and a short link. Obviously Periscope has the advantage (which sucks for me because I invested in Meerkat).

  Yo

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  What do you think of Yo’s new updates? Can businesses use them to communicate to customers?

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  At the end of the day, communicating with your audience is the number-one thing you should be doing at all times. If you think the Yo app allows you to do that, be there.

  Tech

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  How will the world change in 2018 once the Apple Watch has probably become a vital part of everybody’s lives?

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  If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that the phone will be trumped. And it doesn’t end with the Apple Watch. Smart tech is coming not only to our wrist, but to our collar, our sneakers, our hats, maybe into our actual bodies. And don’t be surprised if we return to our communication roots. Our main form of communicating across distances used to be letter writing, then it was the phone, and now it’s through our thumbs, but who knows, we might start talking again. I’m invested in a company called Cord Project that’s bringing voice messaging back into play. It could happen.

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  Disney’s MagicBand: How do you see this space evolving? What do you think about the necessity for these online/offline bridge technologies?

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  Smart, wearable technologies are going to eat up the world. Everything will be smart. All of it. Your shirt. Your pants. Your underwear. Your socks. As your coffee gets cold in the cup, it will tell you, “Drink fast! It’s getting cold!” Don’t believe me? For an actual present-day example, look no further than Amazon’s new Dash Button. It’s not on the level that we just discussed, but you have to agree it’s pretty damn close.

  All this is coming in the next ten to thirty years. Wearable tech allows things that are physical to go so much further in the digital world. We are always looking for ways to represent our physical experiences in a digital space: posting photos to Instagram. Tweeting about a concert. Facebook statuses. The next natural step is for the digital to enhance the physical experience. That’s where Disney’s MagicBand succeeds.

  The MagicBand is a wristband that allows you to do everything from open your hotel room to purchase a hot dog to enter the parks. It also gives Disney an extraordinary layer of data and ammo. It lets visitors recall steps during the day so they can create their own personal timeline. It pushes out content and unlocks new virtual features. In addition, it finally cracks open a path to efficiency, one of the biggest goals for every retailer.

  One of the biggest frustrations for any visitor to Disney is the long lines and how hard it can be to navigate from one end of the park to the other. The MagicBand fixes that. Disney can see where people are getting stuck and where there’s open space, and use technology to encourage people to head to the underused area, for example by relaying through the band that there’s a code they can unlock over at Splash Mountain that will give them a coupon for a free ice cream. The technology actually speeds up the flow throughout the park. Disney can directly affect purchasing behavior by giving people reasons for spending more time in a space, thus perhaps creating more occasions to shop, or exposing them to two or three additional hot dog stands until they finally realize they’re really hungry, and improving their mood because the lines aren’t ridiculously long.

  Wearable smart tech feels the same way social networks and the Internet felt to me in 2005–2007. It’s going to infiltrate everything we do. I’m telling you, the smart beard is coming soon.

  Traditional Media

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  What are your thoughts on Facebook advertising on television?

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  I’ve always said that social and traditional media should play Ping-Pong, working together to extend stories and pique people’s curiosity with fresh content. And I’ve also said that my beef with traditional media isn’t that it doesn’t serve a purpose, but that it’s overpriced for the limited audience it reaches.

  Except for when you’re actually trying to reach that limited audience.

  A small company probably shouldn’t spend a lot of money on TV because it can get far more reach by building stories that spread through word of mouth on social media. But today Facebook has 1.8 billion users—it already has everyone’s attention. The only people it can’t reach are the people who balk at using Facebook, namely the 13–15-year-olds, and the senior citizens. Like, the 70–90-year-olds. The kids don’t watch much TV, but the seniors are there. The TV ads are still overpriced, but you can absorb that cost when you have a market cap of $225 billion.

  Facebook isn’t the only one going old-school. Airbnb launched a print magazine. Warby Parker, the online prescription eyewear vendor, and Birch Box, a monthly cosmetics subscription service, both opened brick-and-mortar stores. Why? Because there was an audience there and they wanted to make sure to reach it.

  Don’t ever lock yourself into one strategy or platform. Use a healthy mix that optimizes your reach. And though everyone has to market in the year we live in, it is possible that your year still includes traditional print and TV.

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  I just bought an indoor billboard company. How do you feel about advertising in the bathroom?

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  An ad placed smack above a urinal or on the back of a bathroom door is a great investment—unless you’re doing it in a year when people read their phones when they pee and no longer look at the wall above the urinal or the back of the bathroom door. You’ve got to think about the attention graph. Where is people’s attention going? That’s where your marketing should go. It’s not that marketers shouldn’t put their ads in the bathroom; it’s just that the value of urinal and bathroom signs isn’t nearly as high as it was even three years ago.

  No matter what you’re selling, you’ve got to pay attention to the attention graph, not just how it looks now, but how it will look in the foreseeable future. Phone culture and wearable tech opens up tons of marketing opportunities, but it makes us vulnerable, too.

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  When will social marketing spending be bigger than television commercials?

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  Maybe in about two decades. These things take time. Let’s remember that the Web has been around since the mid-nineties offering banner ads and email and Google AdWords, and none of that made a dent in TV. I think television advertising today is in the same position as newspaper advertising a few years after Craigslist took off. The DVR and Netflix have chipped away at it, and social is going to bring it to its knees. Eventually ads won’t look like ads anymore; they will all be natively interwoven into the platforms, and we’ll consume them without even knowing it.

  SCOTT WYDEN

  @SCOTTWYDEN

  http://scottwyden.com

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  Do you have suggestions for me and other photographers about other ways to drive local print sales?

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  To me, physical goods don’t just disappear in a digital world. Obviously we’re living through a transition in all industries, but the fact of the matter remains that at the time I was writing this book the media was reporting that about a trillion photographs would be taken by the end of 2015. At the end of the day, every business needs to respect the supply-and-demand curve of what’s happening in the marketplace, and people are still going to go into physical stores, and hang physical pictures in their houses. Now, I’ll be totally honest, I’m kind of surprised we’re not further along with digital picture frames, but tomorrow Apple may decide that their next natural move is the iFrame, and then we’ll all have thirteen of them in our homes, and away we go. As someone who respects the market, if that happens, well then . . . tough luck.

  I think what you need to do is focus on capturing the great pictures. What doesn’t go away is the iconic shot. You need to focus on the product that can be delivered both physically and digitally.

  And finally . . .

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  If you created a social media platform, what would be the key feature and why?

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  I love restrictions. I think they force us to be efficient and creative. So my social network would only allow you to post one piece of content—blog post, video, audio, whatever you wish—every twenty-four hours. Imagine how that would keep the volume down and raise the quality bar. You’d have to think hard about what was truly important to your consumer, and at the same time your consumer would know what was truly important to you. I think it could be a billion-dollar idea. I’m not in a position to do it. Who else wants to try?

  CHAPTER 10

  FACEBOOK ADS

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  IN THIS CHAPTER I’LL TALK ABOUT TAKING ADVANTAGE OF OTHER PEOPLE’S EMOTIONS, HOW TO MARKET PRODUCTS PEOPLE ARE EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THEY USE, AND HOW PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.

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  As of the writing of this book in late summer 2015, Facebook ads, also known as Unpublished Page posts, are the single best advertising digital product for entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies that I’ve seen since buying the keyword wine through Google AdWords in 2004.

  I didn’t realize it at first. Facebook has been an evolving ad product for the last few years, starting off slow, with ads on the right side of the desktop like any other banner advertising. When I started to see ads in the newsfeed it made a lot of sense to me; it’s huge and in-your-face when you look at the screen on your phone. Still, I didn’t have a eureka moment until a few months later, into 2014. It was only when I looked at the data and the results of the early Facebook ad campaigns that I started getting bullish and recognized that this was going to be a game changer.

  So did a few others, but not everyone. In fact, a lot of people were hysterical in 2014–15 that Facebook would make changes that would compromise its organic outreach on fan pages in favor of ad pages. Journalists, pundits, and execs who had never run a Facebook ad were publishing articles about how all the young people were migrating to Snapchat and Instagram and threatening Facebook’s domination. People were so angry and emotional they resisted exploring Facebook’s capabilities and trying out the new ad product. But I and other real practitioners, the kind of people who spend lots of time in the dirt, recognized that this emotional narrative was creating an outstanding arbitrage opportunity, and we jumped in to take advantage of it.

  The more people bashed Facebook and swore its effectiveness was on the decline, the fewer people were trying out the new ad platform. And since Facebook is a supply-and-demand marketplace, the price only goes up as advertisers bid for audiences, just like Google AdWords. There was therefore an incredible golden era in 2014–15 where the intrepid marketers who weren’t wasting their breath complaining and were willing to experiment could get tremendous reach to the exact people they wanted with a bunch of different creatives, and see tangible results. That, my friends, reflects the difference between how practitioners and headline readers operate.

  We’ve never had an ad product with incredible accuracy, one that could target to age, sex, occupation, and on top of that, behaviors and interests. By partnering up with data mining companies, Facebook can now tell us not only the demographics of its users, but their buying histories, both online and off. You can literally target one ad to nineteen-year-old men with facial hair who live in Phoenix and drink Red Bull, and send another one to twenty-three-year-old women in Detroit who wear contact lenses and play golf. I’m a forty-year-old male who lives in Manhattan and loves the Jets and root beer. Imagine what a phenomenally cost-effective transaction you could instigate if you hit my emotional center b
y putting in my line of vision a root beer with green football thematics. The only challenge is figuring out the psychology of your audience and determining what story will most likely compel them to make a purchase. If you learn to interpret the available correctly and deploy it with creative calls to action against the right demo at the right time on the right platform, you’re golden. Theoretically, Facebook ads could allow you to create a unique, native, relevant ad to every user on Facebook. I’m convinced this period will be heralded as one of the great eras of advertising alongside early TV advertising, early direct mail advertising, and early Google AdWords.

  By the time you read this more people will be flooding this product. It’s possible that Facebook ads will no longer be as effective as they once were now that more people have caught on to their extraordinary capabilities. Slowly the supply and demand will force the ads to a more appropriate price. I’ll still be bullish about it and I believe it will be a monster platform in 2016–17, even becoming the bedrock of people’s advertising plans. And as always, even in the most saturated market, there is ROI in putting your content on anything that consumers pay attention to, so long as you know how to execute, preferably better than anyone else.