3 Truth Bombs from Gary Vaynerchuk
I stumbled upon a recent interview Gary did at a PR conference. The whole video is only ~30 minutes (embedded below), but there are 3 hard-to-face truths about the state of marketing that he unleashes on his audience that I just had to call out. Hold on tight.
1. Everybody’s quantifying the wrong $hit
Stop over-celebrating wins that don’t track to bottom-line results. “Yay, impressions! Ooh, we won another award! Doh, our revenue is down 40%!” Cast away all vanity metrics. Find your north star metric and let it guide your decisions.
2. You can reverse engineer a report to justify anything
Any marketer is capable of building a report that justifies spending money on anything. If you’ve ever dealt with a marketing agency, you probably know this. But are you actually doing anything about it? Or are you playing the game, too?
3. Advertising steals your audience’s time
Advertising as we know it is on a death march. Don’t pretend that people actually care about your ad. We’re pissed when we see ads now–we skip them, block them, curse them. Don’t steal your audience’s time with ads, use them to provide real value. And realize that people’s attention is disproportionately focused on their phones, not banner ads or highway billboards.
I’m sure Gary’s own digital agency could grow faster if they played the same games everyone else is: Buy the same old ad inventory because it’s easy. Celebrate vanity metrics because it feels good. Sell fudged results, because people will buy them.
So why doesn’t he do it? Because, when push comes to shove, and smart people start asking the right questions, those who can undeniably prove the value of their work are disproportionately rewarded. And guess what happens to the truckloads of cash that the pretenders were getting?
Watch the full video below. It’s a gem.